Roth, Media, and Time

 

Following my last post discussing Philip Roth’s works, Goodbye, Columbus and Indignation as they relate to readings of infrastructure, this post is interested in Roth and his writings related to time, temporality, and timelines. As an author who creates fictional re-imaginings of crucial moments in American culture through the second half of the twentieth century, Roth is well-posed for examining the use of time, archives, and timelines. Yuk Hiu’s questions on the necessity of “authenticity and authority” offer a refreshing take through which to read Roth, while Lisa Gitelman’s account of media and history also suggest new readings of Roth.

In this post, the works I hope to examine are Portnoy’s Complaint, Indignation, and American Pastoral. All three serve as examples of works where a chronology, past events, and crucial cultural moments are focal. However, all three do so in varying ways. Portnoy’s Complaint is narrated from an imagined conversation with a psychiatrist; Indignation is from a dead soldier recalling the final years of his life in America (specifically, Ohio); and American Pastoral, recalled through Roth’s Zuckerman narrator, but dealing with a specific family in 1960s New Jersey. In some ways, all function as types of archives, with narrative timelines offering instances in which the progression of time and how that progression is perceived are explored. All three novels are highly political, which leads to using Hiu’s Archivist Manifesto as a tool for reading Roth.

Hiu asks, “What are we archiving and for what are we archiving? What does it mean to be an archivist?” In turn, these are questions to ask about the nature of the fictionalized archive in Roth’s work. What is the purpose of he, as author, preserving the moments of the collective American cultural fabric that he chooses to emphasize? On the one hand, the novels are fiction; American Pastoral blurs the fictional and the real, moving around historical events to suit the narrative more conveniently. However, the novel also uses a fictional narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, to frame the story of a man and his family during the tumultuous political climate of the 1960s. By doing so, the timeline is warped, with chronology falling entirely by the wayside in favor of focusing on key politicized moments of cultural importance. This contrasts the other novels. Indignation is told by a dying young man and Portnoy’s Complaint is entirely in the narrator’s head. However, taken collectively, Roth emerges as carrying many of the same traits of Hiu’s archivist – that is, an archivist interested in archiving cultural moments of personal importance to him. By fictionalizing and vividly recreating some of the turning points of the twentieth century, especially in post-World War II America, Roth archives the male Jewish experience most familiar with him.

The novels I chose offer a glance into an oeuvre that spans many major movements from 1960 to present, much as a timeline would. This timeline includes multiple presidential administrations, and highly dramatized re-imaginings of them, as well as insights into other facets of American culture during the shift from hippies to yuppies to the near-present.

Gitelman is interested in the medium and how changes from older media to new media have an effect on our relationship with history. By examining how Roth’s writing has changed, from publishing Portnoy’s Complaint in the late 1960s to American Pastoral in the early 1990s to his publishing Indignation in 2008, we can see that he has been impacted by shifts in popular consumable media and that his representations of media have changed.

Portnoy’s Complaint presents media as focal to the novel, especially through use of telephones and letters. However, popular culture during the late 1960s was increasingly prescient and permeated the American sociocultural climate like wildfire. As the novel progresses into Portnoy’s own head, we observe his shift along with culture, from a child seemingly both sex-obsessed and self-loathing, into an adult acting out pornography and engaging in self-described subversive behaviors with women. By using Portnoy as an extreme case, Roth may be suggesting that an unintended consequence of the free-love movement may have been sexual insecurity and neuroticism about it to boot. Portnoy moves from being aroused by an article of clothing to increasingly unexpected sexual behavior as his narration moves through his life. Consistently, he seems to seek more visceral, more tangible ways to find sexual gratification, while never finding a sense of fulfillment. In part, this is due to his own character, as both an upstanding civil rights lawyer and a seeming deviant. However, that he never stops seeking more visceral, physical manifestations of his lust is telling. He is not satisfied with common pornography or traditional sexual habits. Rather, as society moves toward an increasingly larger sense of the country as a whole, and popular culture becomes truly popular with the advent of the television and telephone (among other technological advances), so, too does Portnoy’s inability to be satisfied. This parallel raises some questions. Is Portnoy’s deviance a reflection of the skyrocket growth popular culture experienced during the period it takes place in? Is television and the nation-wide embrace of new media forms partially to blame for Portnoy’s dissatisfaction?

In American Pastoral, Roth is still interested in the 1960s, albeit from the lens of the early 1990s. Again, television plays a prominent role, particularly in the novel’s ending. While the novel ends, the Watergate scandal and a pornographic film are juxtaposed, in a moment emphasizing the shift of American narrative consciousness from the written to the visual. This occurs as the novel’s hero, ‘The Swede,’ realizes all the stability he thought existed in his life is collapsing. This complex moment is underscored by the shift from old media to new forms of media inherent in the highly televised moments discussed at the novel’s end. This frames the collapse of the prototypical happy American family by inserting the televised moment itself into a social situation and overtaking it altogether, which also mimics the thematic moment of ‘The Swede’ learning his wife is having an affair (in spite of his own earlier affair). This is a conclusion wholly shaped by the visual medium changing the American cultural fabric that existed in the novel’s beginnings in late-1940s New Jersey. The relationship between the humans present during the dinner party at the novel’s end and the medium through which they learned of Watergate, as well as the medium which is used when presenting the pornagraphic  film being discussed, is shifted radically as a result of society’s move toward new media.

Ultimately, looking at the use of temporality and media in Roth’s work raises a multitude of questions. As an author keenly interested in American society and its culture, as well as highly political and occasionally bordering on radical, Roth presents alternative timelines for historical periods. However, these fictionalizations encourage a reading of the American relationship to the things around us, and how that shapes the political and cultural climate of society. The role of new media through the 1960s is repeatedly brought to light by Roth’s own characterization of the impact it has had on individuals and on the collective culture. Furthermore, it raises a final question: are the media shifts of the mid-twentieth century in part to blame for the trope of a crumbling American identity and sociocultural fabric during that time?

Reading American Infrastructure in Philip Roth

In reading novels and other works by American author Philip Roth, it is easily recognizable the extent to which he is interested in structures: archives, institutions of power, locations, and structures which serve purpose both on a functional, practical level as well as being representative of larger issues. This lends itself to an examination of his works’ representations of infrastructure, and how this can tie in to Digital Humanities use of infrastructure as a lens through which one can approach literary study. I posit that Roth’s examinations of the impacts of changes in infrastructure, as well as the material instability of infrastructures when examined over time, warrant examining as a predictor of current drastic shifts occurring in society’s use of and relationship with infrastructures.

A form of infrastructure that immediately sticks out when reading Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus is that of the library. This aligns neatly with Shannon Mattern’s article examining the library as a form of infrastructure. In Goodbye, Columbus, narrator Neil Klugman is a low-wage employee of the Newark Public Library, in urban New Jersey. The backdrop serves as a character contrast in the novella: Klugman is the classic working-class figure of ambition and hidden intellect, stuck in his circumstances; in contrast, his romantic interest, Brenda Patimkin, is Jewish assimilation into country club American life. Throughout the novella, the library serves as Klugman’s callback to his working-class, urban background. The library’s location echoes the fading importance of the library to the general public. This brings to mind Mattern’s question regarding the institution’s ability to “fulfill its obligations as a social infrastructure serving the disenfranchised?” While the novella illustrates the library as a safe haven for young Klugman, it also starkly contrasts this particular infrastructure with the crumbling infrastructure of downtown Newark. Roth illustrates the battered roads and gritty, industrialized surroundings, taking great attention to focus on the development of a cultural locus centered around producing consumable commodities in line with American cultural focus on the assembly line and reproducible and automatable manufacturing. Additionally thought provoking, is that the very physical manifestation of the archival infrastructure in Roth is a large factor in the character’s persona: he has a safe haven in which to feel empowered via knowledge, but in contemporary reimaginings of the library infrastructure, this space shrinks drastically – from a solemn hall lined with titles to a room that occupies a fraction of the same space and is instead lined with computer stations. Examining the fictional creation of an infrastructure with contemporary shifts in how designers and administrators guide their vision of the library gives way to questions about the impact on the humans using such infrastructure. What is the impact on shrinking the sheer space itself in which knowledge is to be explored? How does optimizing for efficiency impinge on the necessary browsing and skimming practiced by patrons? And, how does centering this infrastructure on recalling knowledge from digital platforms rather than physical platforms discourage patronage and use? This echoes Matten’s referencing, “Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, offered an equally eloquent plea for the library as a space of exception: ‘Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity. If anything, they should slow people down and seduce them with the unexpected, the irrelevant, the odd and the unexplainable. Productivity is a destructive way to justify the individual’s value in a system that is naturally communal, not an individualistic or entrepreneurial zero-sum game to be won by the most industrious.’” The obsession with productivity in American culture that results in Newark losing its cultural infrastructure in exchange for industrial infrastructure, and parallels Fister’s reading of libraries shirking the cultural move to embrace productivity as the sole metric by which to weigh value. Juxtaposing the two similar musings about the library as infrastructure and its relationship to the external pressures society exerts that it act in a different role offers the opportunity to examine larger questions of American culture and infrastructures. Why does a library survive the assembly line-ification of the early twentieth century, but not the latter half of the twentieth century, after which there are efforts to force libraries into serving a purely functional purpose? Matten’s worries of the dangers to be had in assuming “”making new stuff” = “producing knowledge”” parallels Newark’s cultural descent in Klugman’s eyes. In the same vein, Matten’s question of the library’s ability to “fulfill its obligations as a social infrastructure serving the disenfranchised” makes me pause, as that is its primary role in Goodbye, Columbus. Much in the same way Roth and Matten can be read alongside one another, so, too, can the role of infrastructure detailed by Matten be applied to readings of Roth.

In Roth’s short novel, Indignation, published in 2008, infrastructure plays a similar role. Notable in this is that roughly fifty years span between Goodbye, Columbus and Indignation. Bookmarking both ends of Roth’s writing career in such a way, it does not take a large logical leap to find a connection in the two works in the form of examining the infrastructures and their uses in both instances.

In Indignation, the university takes the role of infrastructure: it is often nameless or faceless, outside of a few particular instances, and shapes protagonist Marcus Messner’s life and death. The university serves as a clear example of the defining characteristics of infrastructure: it operates with the purpose of the extraction, storage, transformation, and exchange (of knowledge). Furthermore, antagonist Dean Caudwell acts as the functional face of this infrastructure. This oppositional relationship between individual and infrastructure in some ways mimics that of Goodbye, Columbus; yet, in other ways, it contrasts that of Goodbye, Columbus altogether. Goodbye, Columbus offers an imagining of the library as an infrastructure that brings comfort to Klugman: namely, through intellectualism and the opportunity to engage in what he perceives as a higher cultural pursuit. However, Indignation suggests Roth may be subverting his earlier ideas of what infrastructure actually does in the twenty-first century. Here, we see the infrastructure suffocating Messner, first as he transfers colleges entirely in an effort to regain his freedom, and again when he encounters a university administration bent on stifling his views. That both novels take place in the 1950s is juxtaposed with the unerasable publication dates of the respective works. By placing a contemporary novel roughly fifty years in the past, Roth recalls his older works while simultaneously raising questions about how we perceive moments in history when looking back. The respective protagonists’ perceptions of the institutions governing their very lives changes drastically between the two works, when the reality is that Roth as an author ruminating on these governing forces has changed as well.

Ultimately, using infrastructure as a lens through which to look at Roth’s works brings to light a sharp examination of perceptions of infrastructure over the latter half of the twentieth century. The support systems keeping society functional play contrasting roles in the two works examined above: one of opportunity and intellectual comfort, and one of infringement upon free thought. When taken in conjunction with Mattern’s objections to the library infrastructure taking on more role of technological importance as opposed to knowledge itself, this reading of Roth further illustrates a decay of sociocultural infrastructure in American culture. Mattern’s eagerness for “a narrative that explains how the library promotes learning and stewards knowledge” mirrors Klugman’s ideal of the library; however, this neglects that infrastructure is constantly attempting to be updated, or upgraded, or retrofitted. Further, Mattern discusses the library and its relationship to community – again, infrastructure which should engage those surrounding it and help them engage with one another. However, in Goodbye, Columbus, it really doesn’t help Klugman engage anyone but his own self-serving youthful ‘intellectualism.’

 

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