Identity Recruitment and the "American Writer": Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse, and Biographical Criticism

Placing an author into the category of "the American writer" is the kind of simple biographical criticism regularly practiced without much self-consciousness, not only by book prize committees and journalists, but equally by literary scholars as they construct syllabi, edit journals, and subtitle books. Other categorizations, especially when they associate a writer with a minority or historically disempowered group—for example, "African American writer," "Chicano writer," "Jewish writer"—can cause controversy and consternation when imposed by critics. It is telling about the relative appeal of such labels that authors regularly respond to what they perceive as constraining categorizations imposed by critics with the assertion of their place within what they understand to be the broader category of the American writer.

Famously, for example, in his 1959 essay "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," James Baldwin remarked that he "wanted to prevent [himself] from becoming . . . merely a Negro writer," preferring the taxonomic company of "American writers." When Victor Martinez won a National Book Award in 1996 for his debut novel, he noted that he "wanted to be an American writer, not just a Chicano writer" (qtd. in Sneider). Philip Roth has consistently rejected his categorization as a "Jewish writer." For example, in 2005, when a journalist asked him whether or not he accepted being labeled "an American-Jewish writer," he replied no, that he considers himself "an American. . . . America is first and foremost" (Roth, "It").

Why do these and other authors reject the categories of "Negro writer," "Chicano writer," and "Jewish writer" in the first place?¹ One answer can be found in Amy Hungerford's study of the relation between persons and texts in postwar American literature, The Holocaust of Texts. Hungerford contextualizes such minority categorizations, specifically the one rejected by Roth, within what she diagnoses as a pernicious tendency in "[p]ostwar criticism and literary theory . . . to imagine the literary text as if it bore significant characteristics of persons" (4) and, more specifically, to accept the notion of a "text that can bear cultural identity" (5). Hungerford objects to the idea of an identity-bearing text in part because she understands it as having the potential to make "the individual subordinate to . . . coercive group identities" (123). She reads Saul Bellow as struggling against the threat posed by the "forces of identity recruitment" (147)—those parochial literary critics eager to impose reified, "coercive" ethnic identities onto authors—by "publicly resist[ing] attempts to categorize him as a Jewish-American writer" (146). Similarly, Roth's most frequently quoted quip on the subject—"I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew" ("Jewish Intellectual" 35)—resonates with Hungerford's emphatic distinction between persons and texts, particularly her "vision of the writer distinct from the writing he or she produces" (150). Roth's statement, spoken at a symposium in Israel in 1963, presents his acknowledged ethnicity and his authorial vocation as distinct, independent nouns, not as an inexorably linked adjective and noun.

Critiquing oversimplified notions about the relations between authors and their texts, as Hungerford does, is certainly valuable. Common practice though it may be, to regard a text as ethnically or racially Jewish is self-evidently absurd, and the same can be said for parallel constructions that impute race, sexual orientation, gender, or other qualities of persons to pages full of words.² Moreover, as Hungerford notes, "two of the most powerful twentieth-century critical movements, New Criticism and deconstruction," have devoted considerable effort "to limit[ing] and critiqu[ing] the relationship between persons and texts" implied in such formulations (4). The most famous proclamations of such limits were W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author," though those essays were hardly unique in endeavoring to render "the question of meaning . . . rigorously divorced from questions of biography and intention," as Stanley Fish has phrased it (10).

It would be a mistake, however, to think that by agreeing not to discuss Baldwin, Martinez, Roth, Bellow, or any other novelist...