Fictions Public and Private: On Philip Roth

[T]he fact remains that in our family the collective memory doesn't go back to the golden calf and the burning bush, but to "Duffy's Tavern" and "Can You Top This?" Maybe the Jews begin with Judea, but Henry doesn't and he never will. He begins with WJZ and WOR, with double features at the Roosevelt on Saturday afternoons and Sunday doubleheaders at Ruppert Stadium watching the Newark Bears. Not nearly as epical, but there you are.

Nathan Zuckerman, in The Counterlife

[I]n trusting we are always giving up security to get greater security, exposing our throats so that others become accustomed to not biting.

Annette Baier, Moral Prejudices

Critics have long been absorbed with the place and function of allusion in literary texts, especially ones written in the twentieth century, when the borrowing and echoing of the illustrious dead became commonplace. Thus every student of T. S. Eliot must, at some point, confront the poet's learned references to Aeschylus, Dante, and John Webster, and some familiarity with Poe, Dostoyevsky, and Joyce is usually considered prerequisite to a full appreciation of Vladimir Nabokov. On the whole, however, critics have had far less to say about the more prosaic, harder-to-miss phenomenon of quotation, the kind of thing that marks the following passage:

"Maybe they came after me because I never behaved the way a teacher was supposed to behave. Maybe they would have come after me even without Ira. I started out as a firebrand, Nathan. I burned with zeal to establish the dignity of my profession. [. . .]

"I testified for five minutes. 'Have you now or have you ever been . . . ?' I refused to answer. Well, why won't you? they said. You got nothing to hide. [. . .] And so forth. But as I understood the Bill of Rights, my political beliefs were none of their business, and that's what I told them— 'It's none of your business.'"

The speaker here is Murray Ringold, of Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (1998; 5–6), and I have quoted him at some length to suggest the kind of elbow room given to his voice over the course of the narrative. As in so much of Roth's work, the main narrator of the text is Nathan Zuckerman. The story begins with a chance encounter between Zuckerman and Murray, his old high school English teacher and the brother of Ira Ringold, a well-known radio actor and political activist who took the teenage Zuckerman under his wing in the 1950s; it ends with Zuckerman ruminating on Murray's death in far-off Arizona, and on the still farther off stars above his Berkshire home. But Zuckerman deserves to be regarded as the "main" narrator of I Married a Communist only in the sense that his words are not buttressed by quotation marks. In total, Murray's words account for close to half of the book. Entire chapters are spoken with barely a peep from Zuckerman, a man who, as we know from the rest of Roth's oeuvre, is not usually reticent about expressing his opinion or telling a tale. The speech I have quoted here, for example—which begins Murray's first extended piece of narration in the text—goes on for well over eight pages. Twenty-five paragraphs pass before Zuckerman interrupts his old teacher with a brief question, which in turn launches the ninety-year-old Ringold on another two pages' worth of opinions and memories.

What is the justification for such an aesthetic? Why would one write a book in which, for pages upon pages at a time, one character records his conversations with another, quoting his interlocutor verbatim, with only occasional pause for rejoinder or digression? Roth is not the first author to have pursued such a narrative strategy; the technique can be understood as part of his inheritance from Dostoyevsky and Saul Bellow. But in the context of a novel about political power and personal betrayal, such an aesthetic points the reader toward a distinctive set of questions. I want to argue here...