“They been full (w)roth(e) al day, as men may see”; or, Contiguous Roth

In a sharp e-mail about this roundtable, my colleague Dean Franco encouraged all of us panelists “to push past what might be easy (and fun, frankly), namely the mirthful anecdotes we surely all have about introducing Roth to our students,” in the service of considering “broader issues about the challenges and opportunities of reading and teaching Roth—his place on multiethnic literature syllabi, for example, in relation to the ethical turn in literary criticism, or to comparative work on ideas of race and nation.” Fortuitously, each of those openings turns out to be a base covered in my own pedagogy, and I want this small presentation to situate itself eventually against that backdrop. But I confess that I cannot resist the lure of an anecdote or two—especially since Dean baited the trap, although I confess that my anecdotes will probably not conform to ones he may have had in mind when he urged us to think about what the “discomfiture and productive embarrassment provoked by such anecdotes can show us about Roth’s work, and perhaps literature itself.” (And speaking anecdotally and just to anticipate the relevance of institutionally convened symposia, we might just recall the small detail that the Newark hotel in which we find ourselves at this very moment, the Robert Treat, is the one in which Roth houses the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the beginning of I Married a Communist.)

So, let me begin again, in the spirit of a speculative experiment. For a New Republic piece from 2000 entitled “The Cost of Clarity,” critic James Wood, in censorious and perhaps even high-church goyish mood, supplies an amusing parody of Roth’s verbal histrionics, whose effect, Wood writes, “is that of a novel without internal borders; everyone partakes of everyone else’s reality.” Depending on any given day (and a rather far piece from the fictional colleges where Coleman Silk and David Kepesh teach), Yeshiva University, the institution at which I currently teach, can also sometimes seem like a novel without internal borders, where the institutional ecology could be said to betray a certain resemblance to the staging of talk in Philip Roth’s fiction that Wood critiques: a penchant for “boiling monologue, whether speaking aloud or internally . . . beseeching italics . . . dunning repetitions” of one sort or another. Whether that’s just academia, with a distinctively Jewish inflection, or maybe that’s just life in a parochially Jewish institution, the permeability of internal boundaries as a defining feature of YU’s institutional culture is perhaps better accounted for, I think, as the still-pressing need to think the space of conjunction and contiguity—to which, it should be said, YU at its best continues to strive. I’d like us to hold on to this term contiguity, while I illustrate the quasi-Rothian tableaux I have in mind.

Just before I arrived on scene in 2007, the then–dean of the college joined one of the heads of the theological seminary for a give-and-take (who was giving and who was taking remains unclear) about undergraduate education at the men’s college. This ritualized ceremony of speech went something like this:

Rabbi:

We should notify the teachers that this is a Jewish institution and they therefore have to be careful not to teach literature which is inappropriate or avodah zara [the Biblical term for idolatry]. I was once asked how we should teach literature and I said, “It’s not easy. You have to pick out the things that are Kosher.”

Dean:

How do you teach Chaucer?

Rabbi:

I don’t know if you have to teach Chaucer.

Dean:

Chaucer . . . is part of the canon of a liberal arts education. . . . I would imagine that there is very little that cannot be taught if it is taught in the right way.

Rabbi:

Chaucer is part of the canon of world literature [though the Dean said, “the canon of a liberal arts education”], but that canon is so vast. You are not going to be able to study every...