Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas

In Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997), when Seymour "The Swede" Levov moves from the Weequahic section of Newark to Old Rimrock (a town as close to the countryside as is possible in Northern New Jersey), he is met immediately with resolute resistance from his father: "I come from the city […] You know what? You're dreaming. I wonder if you even know where this is. Let's be candid with each other about this—this is a narrow, bigoted area" (309). In the mind of the Swede's father, the city is privileged as the place of Jewish American belonging, identity, and, not to be glossed over, cultural tolerance. Therefore, the city and the countryside can only exist in binary opposition. Here, the Swede's drive to assimilate is thrown in direct opposition to his Jewish identity. There is a void here: that of the Jewish American tradition of the city in conflict with the American tradition of a desire for space.

Similarly, in Second Arrivals, Sarah Philips Casteel finds a void in the field of diaspora studies: "The two poles of contemporary diasporic discourse—movement and sedentarism, or the global and the local—find their special counterparts in the customary opposition between the city and the country" (4). Further, much like the sentiment of the Swede's father, Casteel argues that "[t]he city has been widely perceived as the space of diversity and movement, while the country is negatively associated with homogeneity and containment […] repressive nationalisms and fascist movements, as well as racisms such as that of the U.S. rural South" (4). Such city-centric bias, she claims, have permeated studies of the diaspora, so that "the city becomes the focus of intense scrutiny, while landscape depictions of nature seldom figure into such discussions" (4).

Accordingly, Second Arrivals is designed not to fill that void, but to open up the conversation about diasporic ideas (e.g., ideas of belonging, displacement, emplacement, and space) with regard to writing and visual art concerning landscape and the pastoral, and perhaps to introduce a sub-field of diaspora studies—pastoral and landscape diasporism. In doing so, Casteel examines everything from the contemporary Jewish American writer's idea of displacement when thrust into the pastoral (with special attention paid to Philip Roth's American Pastoral and The Counterlife [1987], and Bernard Malamud's A New Life [1961]) to the diasporic tensions evident in the landscape photography of Jin-me Yoon. Thus, Second Arrivals might be viewed as an attempt to reconcile the accepted norms of pastoral and diasporic art—two concepts she sees in binary opposition in the current critical conversation.

Despite the critical bias towards the city, Jewish American writers have not shied away from the pastoral while dealing with diasporic narratives of identity and belonging. Rather, Casteel argues, "The pastoral mode has considerable appeal for diasporic writers in the Americas because of its unique capacity to register simultaneously the attachment to place and the anguish of dispossession" (109). In chapter two, "The Myth of the West in Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth," Casteel focuses largely on the understudied "second arrival" of immigrant groups, specifically Jewish American protagonists moving from the city (the first arrival) to the country, where a new settlement occurs, and the pastoral myth of the American West is examined.

Casteel's main claim in this chapter deals with a drive toward assimilation, both for the Jewish American protagonists and the authors themselves: "This attraction to the pastoral works on two levels: on the one hand it bespeaks a desire to gain access to the 'true' America, which is envisioned as pastoral in keeping with leading national myths, and on the other it signals the Jewish American author's ambition to claim a space in the U.S. literary canon, which has tended to privilege nature writing" (56). It could certainly be argued that Roth, one of only three authors whose works have been published by the Library of America while the author was still alive—the others being Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow—is firmly entrenched in the canon. However, Casteel's examination of Roth's attention to landscape, and the effect of landscape on his protagonist, is quite interesting.

The protagonists in question—Roth's Seymour "the Swede" Levov and Malamud's Seymour Levin—display similarities beyond the surface resemblances of their names, as both seek a deeper level of rootedness in America. Levin embarks on a Manifest Destiny-esque journey to the Pacific Northwest, and though the Swede remains in New Jersey, his drive toward Manifest Destiny manifests in the purchase of a one hundred acre farm in Western New Jersey. In contrast to Levin—the dark bearded other—Levov "is a poster boy for assimilation: as close to the Gentiles as a Jew can get" (Casteel 67).

In examining the Swede's drive for assimilation, Casteel provides ample evidence of not just Levov's entrance into the pastoral, but, more importantly, of Roth's careful description of the Swede as a man who "wears his Jewishness lightly" (67). The Swede, as Zuckerman tells us, is an all-American boy who has no physical traits that, like Malamud's Levin, would preclude him from an easy assimilation. He's a blonde, blue-eyed high school star athlete who marries a beauty queen—all of which prompts Zuckerman to ask, "Where was the Jew in him?" (Pastoral 20). However, Casteel's attention to the physical as that which molds Levov's identity neglects the multiplicity of experiences that may have led to Levov's seamless assimilation into the predominant social norms of his new pastoral society, and therefore, the study is incomplete. An examination of the act of naming, or labeling, in the form of the nickname "the Swede," as an external force which shapes his identity would yield greater insight into the concepts of belonging and assimilation in rural areas, as well as a deeper understanding of the factors that produce a specific identity.

In Part II of the book Casteel shifts the study from the pastoral to other "landscape ideas—including the marvelous, sublime, and the gothic—that have influenced the meaning of place in the Americas" (109). Further, the project shifts its focus from the pastoral poetics and prose of Jewish American, Japanese Canadian, and Caribbean writers, to non-fiction and visual media dealing with landscape and issues of diasporic identity and belonging—specifically the garden writing of Jamaica Kincaid and Michael Pollan, and the photography of Isaac Julien and Jin-me Yoon.

In essence, Second Arrivals is a compelling thought project which looks to expand studies of the diaspora with a call to include landscape and the pastoral in the critical conversation. This critic, for one, hopes the call is heeded.