Counterpastoral

This essay argues that “counterpastoral,” a word used only once in Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), signifies a problem that cannot be resolved by causal explanations. The guiding conviction here is that the critical attempt to locate a “cause of the disaster” ends up as a rehearsal of the Swede’s own inquiry into the past. The aim of the essay is to restore something of the urgency to the Swede’s “self-examination” and to the indeterminacy of his own answers.