The Jewish American Novel (review)

146 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009 Philippe Codde. The Jewish American Novel. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2007. ix + 279 pp. $34.95. In his provocative book, The Jewish American Novel, Philippe Codde argues that the postwar (1944-1969) Jewish American novel needs to be read through the lens of French existentialism. He attributes the influence of French existentialism on the Jewish American novel to three factors: the Holocaust, radical theology (“death of God”), and the popularity of French existentialism in the US. Although Codde readily admits that this paradigm is merely “one possible—but far from exclusive” approach, and although he only turns to the topic indicated by the title halfway through the book, he does provide a unique perspective on the cultural phenomena affecting Jewish American writing at that time (1). The book is divided in two parts. The first half is entirely devoted to a setting up of terms and to French existentialist writing. The terms he sets up primarily derive from Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, although Pierre Zima’s text-sociological framework is also important to his methodology. JeanPaul Sartre and Albert Camus are the two writers he focuses on, and he offers analyses of their philosophical tracts (Being and Nothingness and Anti-Semite and Jew for the former, and The Myth of Sisyphus for the latter) as well as the fictional texts that rehearse their philosophy. He defines French existentialism as a philosophy that puts existence before essence; in other words, it is a philosophy that judges on the actions of a person rather than innate qualities. But Codde pushes the standard idea of existentialism further by defining it in terms of both its prewar and postwar manifestations. He notes prewar texts, such as Camus’s The Stranger, for their “indifference”—to ideology, to good and evil, to love and hate, and other such binaries, all of which are neutralized by their irrelevance. Texts written after the knowledge of the Holocaust, however, reflect a responsibility to humankind, and this version of existentialism is not typically recognized. Yet, in Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, Codde writes, Sartre “presented existentialism as a literature and philosophy of optimism,” and, despite its bleakness, Sartre’s postwar fiction “always serves to exhort his readers to an awakening to authenticity and commitment” (117, 118). This distinction is important when it comes to Jewish American novels, because some, like Saul Bellow’s The Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), and Isaac Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home (1946), are novels of “negativity ” (akin to prewar French existentialism), and some, like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959), Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant (1957) and The Fixer (1966), and Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961), are novels of “affirmation” (akin to postwar French existentialism). In the second half of the book, Codde offers a series of close readings of the “Jewish American novel.” This term is revealed to be problematic, despite the fact that Codde pays close attention to it, concerned that the placement of the words “Jewish” and “American” are crucial since “one inevitably privileges one Reviews Philip Roth Studies 147 meaning over the other” (6). On a grammatical level, of course, putting “Jewish ” as the modifier of “American” rather than “American” as the modifier of “Jewish” actually foregrounds the Americanness rather than the Jewishness— so that his terminology can be said to do the opposite of what he intends. But the more significant problem appears in his choice of authors. Confronted with the fact that the “Jewish American Novel” can be said to include works written by Jews in America, by Jews about America, by non-Jewish Americans about Jews, by Jewish Americans about Jewish Americans, and so on, Codde concocts a category of the “Jewish American novel” that limits the possibilities of texts and authors for his study: he will take into account “the work of novelists born in the United States only” (my emphasis), written in English, concerning Jews (7). But why, then, would he choose Saul Bellow, who was born in Canada? He attributes Bellow’s early engagement in existentialism to his familiarity with French since many of the seminal existentialist texts had not been...