Revisiting Philip Roth: "Eli, the Fanatic" and His Other

As Rachel Ertel observes, “it is rare for an author’s first [books] not to draw on autobiographical materials, and in this respect [in Philip Roth] the evocation of Jewish milieus became almost inevitable”¹; that said, in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) the elements most readily traceable to the writer’s lived experience are enriched by the presence of episodes often at a remove from what Roth might have witnessed firsthand — in other words, situations that, although described as “in direct contact,” manifestly exceed the experiential frame of the subject who is the source of their fictional transfiguration. There is nothing surprising in personal memories merging with stories invented from whole cloth; and at the same time, what is striking in these stories is bound up not only with the stakes — as “sensitive” as they are fundamental — that they convey, but also and above all with the modalities by which they tend to interact with an individuality constantly destabilized by the surrounding reality. Indeed, the tension between the vicissitudes of the secondary characters and the introspective dimension of the principal protagonists — frequently developed from certain aspects of Roth’s own character — is revealing of the place these latter occupy within a society where the most striking tragedies of the first half of the twentieth century have a perceptibly different impact from the one they have in the European societies of the second postwar period, but within which the ever-arduous cohabitation with others — whatever the otherness they embody — takes on the value of a paradigm, anything but free of recent History. This is what emerges from the altercations that punctuate certain stories; it is also what the identity confrontations ostensibly thematized in the more dramatically charged narratives reveal.

Among the texts that might be defined as such, there is at least one on which Rachel Ertel dwells, in the course of an analysis whose most important passages we take the liberty of taking up again:

In “Eli, the Fanatic,” the prosperous, acculturated life of the “golden ghetto” of Woodenton is troubled one day by the arrival of a group of Jews, survivors of Eastern Europe, escaped from a hell that is not described but present in filigree. They establish a yeshiva and disrupt the Judeo-American idyll of that pastoral which is Woodenton. The two worlds that thus live side by side, within one and the same geographical perimeter, are irreconcilable; yet both lay claim to the same faith.²

Significantly placed at the end of the collection, the story in question sets a young and brilliant lawyer against a handful of “survivors” whose arrival alters the peaceful but rather insipid everyday life of a wealthy neighborhood, somewhat apart from the large neighboring cities. The survivors haunt the main streets. Even more than their presence, the opening of their religious school disturbs the equilibrium of the place; the lawyer, for his part, studies them, follows them with the aim of better understanding them and of beginning a productive exchange with them. Charged by the representatives of the local Jewish community with obtaining the departure of these “intruders,” his goal is in fact to ensure that things are done “gently,” but as promptly and efficiently as possible. To be sure, the inhabitants of Woodenton and the newcomers “lay claim to the same faith”; however, if the former live in denial of what might have happened to them not long before, on another continent, the latter (just like the migrants of a significant number of Appelfeld’s stories and novels, or the partisans who reach Milan in the conclusion of Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When? (1982)) exhibit the marks of sociocultural belonging to a world that was nearly eradicated by the Nazi fury, and almost amid the indifference of the civil societies they try to reintegrate.

The principal character of the story, Eli, […] becomes the tragicomic messenger between these two universes and finally obtains that one of these strange beings — bearded, clad in caftans and fur hats, who [move through] the antiseptic suburb of Woodenton like ghosts — trade his clothes for a tweed suit offered to him by the lawyer. But he cannot bear the image of himself that the stranger reflects back to him, this döppelganger arisen perhaps from his earlier lives: the two men exchange their identities. Eli puts on the cast-off garb left at his door by the refugee, and walks the streets of Woodenton, a man possessed, a revenant in his turn.³

If the attempt to set up a fruitful communication fails, this can be explained for two reasons in particular: on the one hand, the curiosity and fascination aroused in the protagonist by the encounter with the hassidim, whose existence is obviously surrounded by an aura of mystery, get the better of the objectives of his “mission” — described by Philip Roth by borrowing the methods and register of the detective genre; on the other hand, in keeping with what is (fore)told in the epigraph of Goodbye, Columbus — a Yiddish proverb rendered in English by the formula the heart is half a prophet — his emotions prevail over the detached rationality of those around him and end by imposing on him behaviors he would never have thought he could adopt consciously. As Rachel Ertel intimates, his function as intermediary plays a fundamental role in this reversal of perspectives: the young lawyer, supposed to make the link between universes at first sight totally incompatible, finds himself pulled into an in-between that, by its very nature, can only draw him progressively closer to his interlocutors, themselves likewise arrested upon a threshold.

In this sense, and far from signifying a sudden revelation, the scene of the exchange of clothes intervenes rather to underscore the accomplishment of a journey, of a transformation; initially reversible, this latter takes shape, as one advances through the text, as a “point of no return” whose ironic character the narrator is quick to bring out, among other things. If the image of the young lawyer who wanders through the town, dressed like the ghosts he was supposed to chase away, is striking in this respect, the one that freezes, in a snapshot, the promise Eli makes to his newborn son is all the more so. Of course, the tone of this commitment toward posterity is ridiculously solemn; nevertheless, it lets show through a range of interpretive possibilities that it would undoubtedly be regrettable not to take into account. In the original version of the text, when the protagonist warns his son that, whatever happens, he will keep this garb toward which all eyes are turned, his words resound almost like a threat; with the exception of the last sentence, the rendering of the French edition leans rather toward a desperate vow, whose free indirect discourse seeks to restore the obstinacy: “[n]o, even Eckman would not make him take it off! No! He would wear it, if he so decided. He would have his child wear it! Certainly! He would have it shortened at the proper time. A fine inheritance, whether the kid likes it or not!”⁴ Whether it be a way of mourning, an exorcism against forgetting — “that act of death”⁵ — a gesture of reparation addressed to a collectivity whose endured suffering Eli ends by assimilating and sharing — and which “his own” take good care not to confront — in truth the consequences of this choice could not be more immediate:

The men in white take him away, catalogued as mad. And here he is, in his turn, caught in the trap of confinement for having chosen the Jewish mode of being of those who have just escaped the concentration camps. He had striven to throw a bridge across the abyss that separated them. [This act] was perceived by those around him, and by all the “normal” Woodentons that dot America, as an act of madness. But it is possible to consider it as [an initiative] that is symbolic, […] the only one capable of preserving mental equilibrium by creating the rite, capable of linking the present to the past, without which every man remains a dangling man (un homme suspendu).⁶

At bottom, here as elsewhere, if even the gravest facts are presented to us under the angle of satire, this depends not so much on a poorly concealed attempt to sugarcoat the message they imply, but more probably on the author’s requirement to arbitrate the confrontation of two possibly antinomic perceptions of the world: “[t]he disillusioned perception of man as he really is and the ideal perception of man as he ought to be.”⁷ In the early Roth, this division becomes structuring; it makes it possible to organize the system of characters according to their respective propensities to opt for one of these possibilities. Moreover, it makes it possible to distinguish all those who, for the most varied motives, manage to sublimate such a dichotomy to the point of assimilating its terms, heedless of the possible consequences. This last case is that of Eli, whose excesses the author accentuates, but also his acquisition of a kind of moral integrity, caricatured to be sure, and yet in some way “necessary”: on the strictly diegetic plane it provokes a turning point in the absence of which the narrative would lose much of its dynamism, as well as its verve; as for its capacity to raise reflections whose reach exceeds the narrative frame properly speaking, on closer inspection Roth would manifestly have noted its efficacy only through a theoretical contribution dating from 1961.

Indeed, in an intervention published at the close of the collective discussion “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals”⁸ — solicited by Norman Podhoretz and constituting a major event on the Anglo-American Jewish intellectual scene, marked by the succession of Kennedy to Eisenhower — the author returns to the nature of the bonds that can be woven between human beings on account of their modalities of interaction, of their feeling of belonging to a people, of their involvement in the political life of a country, or again — in a more philosophical perspective — of the various means at their disposal to “master” their finitude. “How are you bound to me as no other man is?”⁹ is the question Roth poses and openly addresses to those who, because they recognize themselves as integral parts of one and the same whole, would be supposed to refer to the same values and adopt the same codes. Perhaps influenced by certain of the arguments advanced by Sartre in Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew)¹⁰, Roth assumes a point of view as “objectifying” as possible, while defending the individual’s right to recognize, in situations apparently very distant from himself — and from those ordinarily associated with him as “brothers” — something that speaks to him, a detail liable to recall, if only by metonymy, the hazards of his own experience. Moreover — and this is what interests us most particularly — one senses him admiring when this occurs, in spite of, or precisely by virtue of, the rupture that such an attitude can provoke in the surrounding social fabric.

Far from praising a posture that, in other contexts, could arouse a certain complacency in the one who assumes the choice of it, Roth limits himself to enunciating its pertinence; this is all the more affirmed in a world where, since the end of the 1950s, local realities are more and more interconnected. Without this process of globalization — which today reaches its highest point — entailing for all that the automatic assumption of significant responsibilities toward third parties who are, it is fair to say, “extra-communitarian.” In this respect, Eli is a precursor character; moreover, the analyses he formulates on the subject of his own condition offer us the possibility of glimpsing, behind the various masks one makes him don throughout the narrative, the “true” face¹¹ of a man whose conduct the author holds up to derision in order, paradoxically, to show its grandeur:

What gave Eli the awful moment was that he turned away. He knew exactly what he could do but he chose not to. To go inside would be to go halfway. There was more… So he turned and walked towards the hospital and all the time he quaked an eighth of an inch beneath his skin to think that perhaps he’d chosen the crazy way. To think that he’d chosen to be crazy! But if you chose to be crazy, then you weren’t crazy. It’s when you didn’t choose. No, he wasn’t flipping. He had a child to see.¹²

“It was in walking away that Eli felt that awful sensation,” the narrator specifies, as if to suggest that any true coming-to-awareness can occur only by “retracing one’s steps,” in other words by reconsidering one’s own received ideas; to which he adds, in a progressively familiar style and, once again, by way of free indirect discourse — which draws as near as it sets at a distance: “He knew exactly what he could do, but he did otherwise; to go in would mean stopping halfway.” Eli trembles at the thought that he might have chosen madness, but he realizes at once that the mere formulation of this hypothesis proves his sound mental health, called into question by the people around him because of the transfer he effects and which his physical metamorphosis seems constantly to impose on their eyes. “If one has chosen to be mad, then one is not,” he concludes at the end of a soliloquy that already prefigures the monologues of the most famous Rothian “types”; this “no, he wasn’t flipping”¹³ can be read at once as a resolution and as an ethical imperative, especially if one is lucid about what madness refers to in an environment where there is only one thing truly unreasonable: that Eli is terribly isolated in his enterprise.

Among the “syntheses” that this character sets to work, we recall the one he effects between his wife’s expectations — desirous of belonging to “a family like the others”¹⁴ — and his own expectations — revolutionized by his proximity to the hassidim — as well as the one between a conception of the world that is, at bottom, “of compromise” — dictated by a submission to norms that often implies no form of disproportion — and the Weltanschauung acquired the moment a far vaster horizon comes to be superimposed upon the geography of Woodenton.¹⁵ Analogously to what happens in Appelfeld when he describes the installation of former detainees of the Nazi concentration camps in Mandatory Palestine, the shock Eli undergoes takes on an exemplary importance: it functions as an entrée en matière both for the narrator and for Philip Roth himself, at the moment when, in the last section of Goodbye, Columbus, he uses the book’s conclusions more to broaden out to other perspectives the treatment of the collection’s themes as a whole — and of “Eli, the Fanatic” in particular — than to finalize the completion of a story that, retrospectively, appears clearly consubstantial with the narratives it served to scaffold.¹⁶

To be sure, the tragic past of the Jews of Eastern Europe who landed in the United States at the time of the new quota laws on DPs (Displaced Persons) is not without recalling that of Roth’s grandparents fleeing the pogroms; that said, if it relates, though in a very roundabout way, to an element belonging to the author’s personal history, it also touches, and more broadly, on a painful and “raw” chapter of Western History. Roth bends to it with caution and with zest, his writing is relaxed but always suited to the matter; he bends to it in the way that David Kepesh — “professor of desire,” but also of a desire for knowledge — will encourage his audience to do¹⁷:

Why come to the battered heart of Europe if not to examine just this? Why come into the world at all? “Students of literature, you must conquer your squeamishness once and for all! You must face the unseemly thing itself! You must come off your high horse! There, there is your final exam.”¹⁸

What good is it to seek to acculturate oneself, why take an interest in the “battered heart” of a continent ravaged by antagonisms and their most atrocious consequences, to what end “come into the world,” exist, strive to give meaning to every instant, if the ultimate finality is not to “conquer one’s own capacity for discernment,” in the broadest and most inclusive acceptation that can be attributed to such a syntagm? What good is it to take the floor in public, to write “within oneself and before others, for oneself and for others”¹⁹, if the objective is not to stand up to any “incongruous thing whatever” (unseemly thing), however indecent it may be? It may seem shaky, this being said there is only one great exam to pass in the last instance: in Roth, if one must prepare for it resolutely, it is not because one will have accounts to render to God — although, in a vaguely Pascalian way, certain of his most endearing characters act as if it were so — but to our fellows, for every fantasy around this Judgment — perhaps universal, but not in the biblical sense — contains the idea of a mutual distribution of the responsibilities to be assumed.

It is not erroneous to see in what Kepesh theorizes that for which Eli decides to prepare himself; as for Roth, “[i]t is in the name of a personal moral code, but one sufficiently widespread to be perceived by his reader, that he chastises in order to reform.” As Rachel Ertel very rightly underscores, “[t]his presupposes that the society in which he moves and the public he addresses [first and foremost] partake of what English calls a shame culture, in which moral norms are internalized to the point that satire becomes a sanction for the one who is its object”; however — as we have suggested in saying that the choice to make Eli ridiculous ends by “saving” him, at least in our eyes — “this also implies that the author be so intensely concerned that he finds himself torn between the need to destroy and that to amend; that the only outlet for his aggressiveness and his ambivalence be the grating laugh.”²⁰

If in the fictional space of the stories and novels the characters are formed through an education whose “sentimental” and “political” components go hand in hand — “the history of a life is inscribed in the body as much as in the brain,” said Edna O’Brien in an adage that was used by way of an opening to The Dying Animal (2001)²¹ — in Roth the search for an equilibrium seems to take shape analogously, with this difference: it is unthinkable independently of the “chosen interlocutors” the author addresses and whose exchanges — oral, epistolary, electronic — consequently nourish his life and his work.

It is true that in his books Roth resuscitates, as needed, the interlocutors he would wish “real” and who are no more — Anne Frank, Kafka, Bruno Schulz… — ; flesh-and-blood individuals, for their part, intervene in his works in three distinct manners: by way of a network of intertextual allusions; through the insertion of heterogeneous materials, drawn from correspondences or conversations supposed to have taken place; through characters modeled on their real persons. Their presence feeds many a line of reasoning developed in depth elsewhere — not necessarily by means of a reorganization of data such as the one that operates in writing; each of them resembles, at one moment or another, the addressee of a long missive whose contents, though confidential, are intelligible enough that their being made available proves beneficial. All contribute to the constitution of a diversity, less out of a concern for exhaustiveness than out of the necessity of diffracting the ins and outs of a discourse differently exposed according to the texts, but conceived in the continuity of a work that was envisaged from the outset “over the very long term.” This holds most particularly for the Jews, which — contrary to what one might believe — did not help the author to rid himself of those “who accused him of being a traitor to the tribe and denounced ‘self-hatred […]’”²², imputing to him thereby antisemitic tendencies.

As André Bleikasten points out, “Jewish, this grandson of Galician immigrants (on his father’s side) is so in his obstinate fidelity to his rather happy childhood in Weequahic, the Jewish quarter of Newark, New Jersey”; Jewish, Bleikasten insists, he is so “by his acute consciousness of the [specificity] of being Jewish, today as yesterday, in America as in Europe or in Israel”; Jewish “by heritage,” he continues, “by what falls to him of the culture and history of a persecuted people, Jewish by his uncertainties, his questionings, his anguishes and his angers, […] Jewish as a writer, in the urgency of his voice, in the imperious desire to make himself heard [if necessary], [the vehemence] of his rhetoric and the stridencies of his irony.” Jewish, certainly, “but a Jew of the diaspora, a third-generation American Jew”²³: this manifold identity, “Roth claims it fully in its duality for himself as for his characters,” he explores it by trying to understand how it can be managed by men and women “in quest of an improbable unity” and whose process of singularization remains — as for him — “always to be (re)defined.” Would there be, for these men and these women, the trait of a self-recognition so to speak “incontrovertible”?²⁴

Toward the end of The Counterlife (1986), Zuckerman writes to his mistress: “[i]f there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is fairly small, I think, and it may well be the basis of all incarnation: the natural being may well be that very capacity, the innate faculty beings have to incarnate themselves [;] in the absence of a self, one incarnates a multiplicity of selves, and, after a certain time, the self one incarnates best is the one in which one accomplishes oneself best.”²⁵

To continue with Bleikasten, according to Zuckerman/Roth “‘the irreducible self,’ supposing it exists, [would be] at most an aptitude for slipping into borrowed identities”; the theory of the subject set out in the few lines quoted above could not be more minimalist, which amounts to advancing that “[i]dentity is defined therein no more as a timeless essence than as a pure socio-historical determination, and inasmuch as its enactment [implies] a doubling of a theatrical order, it could not be a happy coincidence with oneself.”²⁶

Obviously, this conception of identity “always off-balance,²⁷ vacillating and contradictory, condemned perpetually to turn back on itself, to deny itself and to recreate itself”²⁸, this idea of a shifting subjectivity, of a singularity hard to grasp, “overflows and foils the identifiable and controllable identity that the collective order demands.”²⁹ Now, “like every true writer, [Roth] defines himself not by his belongings, but rather against them”³⁰; it is in adopting one and the same schema that he defines, for his part, the people and the characters who interest him, whom he inspires and by whom he is inspired, book after book, over the years.³¹

Notes