Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth

Claudia Franziska Brühwiler

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781628925357
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441135711
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth exemplifies how literature and, specifically, the work of Philip Roth can help readers understand the ways in which individuals develop their political identity, learn to comprehend political ideas, and define their role in society. Combining political science, literary theory, and anthropology, the book describes an individual's political coming of age as a political initiation story, which is crafted as much by the individual himself as by the circumstances influencing him, such as political events or the political attitude of the parents.

Philip Roth's characters constantly re-write their own stories and experiment with their identities. Accordingly, Philip Roth's works enable the reader to explore, for instance, how individuals construct their identity against the backdrop of political transformations or contested territories, and thereby become initiands-or fail to do so. Contrary to what one might expect, initiations are not only defining moments in childhood and early adulthood; instead, Roth shows how initiation processes recur throughout an individual's life.

Part One

The Framework

1

Beginnings and Transitions in Political Science and Literature

1. Introduction: Portnoy at the threshold

Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough! (Portnoy, 37)

If ever anyone turned adolescence into a phase of experimenting and testing the boundaries of social probity, it was Philip Roth’s protagonist of the 1969 literary scandal Portnoy’s Complaint. In a monologue, the addressee of which cannot be established unambiguously (is his psychiatrist already in the room? at its door? are we listening to soliloquy?), Alexander Portnoy lets us partake in his endless struggles on several fronts: on the one hand against family conventions and the pressures imposed by tradition; on the other hand against his own libidinal urges which practically enslave him, as he is in constant need of channeling his lusts.¹ He can neither endure his overbearing and overprotective mother Sophie, who leaves him hardly any room to explore his sexuality, nor can he witness any longer how,

in that ferocious and self-annihilating way in which so many Jewish men of his generation served their families, my father served my mother, my sister Hannah, but particularly me. Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream. Mine was its corollary: in my liberation would be his—from ignorance, from exploitation, from anonymity. (Portnoy, 8–9)

Alexander Portnoy seeks liberation, liberation from the haunting Jewish legacy, liberation from religious and traditional rules which are, in his eyes, only a means to chain people:

Why else, I ask you, but to remind us three times a day that life is boundaries and restrictions if it’s anything, hundreds of thousands of little rules laid down by none other than None Other, rules which either you obey without question, regardless of how idiotic they may appear (and thus remain, by obeying, in His good graces), or you transgress, most likely in the name of outraged common sense—which you transgress because even a child doesn’t like to go around feeling like an absolute moron and schmuck . . . . (Portnoy, 80)

Freed, he would be a man, a member of the human race—but never part of that America he hears of on the radio, the genteel world outside the confines of his Jewish heritage.² Yet if you cannot be part of something, you can at least exert power over it, which is exactly what Portnoy strives for in his sexual encounters with the WASP girls who surrender to his urges.³ Still, an erotically reckless life will not help him to find his true self, nor will it heighten his self-consciousness. A journey to Israel shall finally bring him closer to his own reality⁴—a hopeless quest.

Portnoy’s quest for independence sounds like the plot of a coming of age novel, though not a typical one, which eludes the category of the Bildungsroman in that it celebrates disobedience,⁵ but respects the rules of the twentieth century Entwicklungsroman in that it values experience more than innocence:⁶ these are but two genres which represent literature’s mode of dealing with the transition from childhood to adult life, yet not the frame in which American writers place their adolescent protagonists when they embark on their journeys of maturation. The American coming of age story typically tests the national consciousness, its values, and ideals by forcing its protagonist to contrast his or her reality with the American Dream.⁷ Allusively, one can witness this confrontation in Portnoy’s recognition of society’s latent anti-Semitism, which would always let him stand aside, and the impossibility of becoming part of the WASP ideal.

The American coming of age story focuses on processes of self-recognition rather than of a smooth development or the aspiration of an educational ideal, as demonstrated by Portnoy, who at least strives for this ultimate goal. Although the typical American coming of age story rarely covers collective rites of passage as conceived by anthropology, its essence is an initiation. In other words, it shows a

“young protagonist experiencing a significant change of knowledge about the world or himself, or a change of character, or of both, and this change must point or lead him towards an adult world.”⁸

Portnoy undergoes a process dominated by uncertainty, ambivalence, and a transitory experience. He thus shares the predicament of many Rothian protagonists, a situation which makes him a subject of anthropologist interest.

2. The anthropological concept of initiation: Society’s rules challenged

If the reasoning of the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep is applied, society’s rituals guide us through critical transitions:⁹ during our lifetime, van Gennep argues, we pass through a series of relatively static positions, termed statuses, such as birth, puberty, parenthood, and a rise in social classes or professional hierarchies. Given their inherent uncertainty and the energy needed to pass them, these transitions between statuses are potentially contentious.¹⁰ In order to contain these tensions, ritualistic frameworks have evolved within societies which guide the individual through these phases.

To illustrate the main intent of such ritualistic frameworks, van Gennep calls them rites of passage, which ideally follow three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation.¹¹ Yet although every rite of passage undergoes these stages, they will emphasize the phase which concerns their core characteristic. In this vein, one can say that “[f]unerals emphasize separation; births and weddings, incorporation; and initiations, transition.”¹² Thereof, initiation rites are the ones which guide an individual from his life as a child in the domestic domain to the position of an adult and full member of society.¹³ Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, describes initiation as an entirety of rites and oral instructions which aim to change the religious and/or social life of the one to be inaugurated. In becoming an adult, Eliade suggests, individuals reach the end of their lives as “natural human being[s]” and are introduced to culture.¹⁴

Initiation thus entails both the idea of end and beginning—the end of the old and the beginning of a new self, ideas which invoke the symbolism of death and rebirth. Yet common as this association is,¹⁵ it instills a new meaning to the process as it does not allude to a transition with its ambiguous moments when one cannot tell whether the old still prevails or the new has already begun. Instead, the image of death and rebirth conceives of initiation as a rupture, in which the old self ceases to exist so that a new one can take shape.¹⁶ This aspect is emphasized by initiatory rites in traditional, small-scale societies, which have often developed a series of tests for the initiand, during which he will have to prove his readiness to renounce his former way of life.¹⁷ Accordingly, these tests foresee the initiand’s ritual death, followed by his rebirth, wherein the initiation rite culminates: the initiatory death marks the end of the neophytes’ childhood, of both their ignorance and their innocence.

In outline, the sequence of the traditional initiation process has now become discernible and therewith the reasoning behind van Gennep’s tripartite scheme of “separation – transition – incorporation”: before initiands will be exposed to teachings or to an influential experience that shall prepare them for their new life, they are separated from their known environment, typically the family household. As a group of coeval youths, they are then put under the tutelage of elder mentors who will mark the transition phase by passing on the knowledge necessary for the new stage in life. During this time, the novices are not only spatially separated from their community, but they are also virtually outcasts who are, intermittently, not bound by society’s rules and who can even become a danger to communal stability.¹⁸ Only with their rebirth, their passing of the initiatory tests, will they return to the midst of society, which will incorporate them, yet not in their previous positions and roles, but in the realm of adults.

Although separation and incorporation are likewise integral parts of the whole initiation process, it is the phase of transition which is essential and makes mentors or instructors vital protagonists.¹⁹ They are the ones who empower the initiands to live up to their new roles; they become their first guides toward a new life. The relationship between initiand and mentor, however, is unambiguously defined by domination, as Victor Turner observes: “between instructors and neophytes there is often complete authority and complete submission; among neophytes there is often complete equality.”²⁰ Already the complete submission to the mentor reveals the coercive aspect of initiation, which is then supplemented by those forms of teaching which might not be sustainable were their contents open to questioning. In a nutshell, “initiation entails indoctrination.”²¹ Like indoctrination in general, initiatory instruction relies on imitation and nonevidentiary teaching whose only source of authority is the position of the mentor.²²

In the works of Philip Roth, the Jewish rites of initiation, namely the circumcision of the newly born and the Bar Mitzvah at the age of thirteen, are the only traditional rites that play a vital role. Circumcision is, however, more a rite of separation and incorporation than a classical birth ritual.²³ By circumcising the newborn boy within the first eight days of his life, his father fulfills the mitzvah, a commandment of God, and ensures that the child enters the Brit Milah, the covenant of the foreskin.²⁴ Should the father fail to circumcise his male offspring by himself or to assign a mohel, who is trained to perform circumcisions,²⁵ his son can still be circumcised before his Bar Mitzvah in order to avoid being “cut off from his kin”²⁶ for having broken the covenant. As the sanction already insinuates, circumcision is mainly an act of collective differentiation: the circumcised is visibly separated from the rest of the population and at the same time joins the ranks of his kin.²⁷ Alex Portnoy experiences his circumcision in this way, for although he has long felt that his “wang was all [he] had that [he] could call [his] own”, yet it had been eternally marked as “property of the Jews” (35). Portnoy might hardly agree, yet circumcision is supposed to loosen the bond with the mother, as Ronald L. Grimes points out. On the one hand, women do not bear a corresponding mark of the covenant, and, on the other hand, mothers are not allowed either to hold their son during the circumcision or to witness the act at all.²⁸

While circumcision only vaguely resembles an initiation rite, scholars often regard the Bar Mitzvah as a classic example, since it marks the end of childhood.²⁹ Yet it has increasingly been argued that the Bar Mitzvah only allows the adolescent to participate fully in religious life by studying the Torah, instead of permitting him to acquire the social status of an adult.³⁰ Thus, the alleged initiates do not undergo a true transformation and change in status. Anecdotes may hardly confirm this argument, nevertheless Roth’s memory of his own Bar Mitzvah training underlines how little effect it had on his coming of age:

Though I hadn’t been a total failure either, and had learned enough Hebrew to read at breakneck speed (if not with full comprehension) from the Torah at my bar mitzvah, the side of my Jewish education that had made that after-school hour, three days a week, at all endurable had largely to do with the hypnotic appeal, in those environs, of the unimpeachably profane. (Facts, 120)

Against the backdrop of his own experience, one is hardly surprised that Roth satirizes the Bar Mitzvah instruction in one of his earliest writings. In the short story “The Conversion of the Jews” (Goodbye, 1959), Ozzie Freedman cannot bear the rabbinic indoctrination which should prepare him for his Bar Mitzvah, yet fails to enlighten him and instead tries to extinguish his sense of critical thinking, for:

[w]hat Ozzie wanted to know was always different. The first time he had wanted to know how Rabbi Binder could call the Jews “The Chosen People” if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal. Rabbi Binder tried to distinguish for him between political equality and spiritual legitimacy, but what Ozzie wanted to know, he insisted vehemently, was different. That was the first time his mother had to come. (“The Conversion of the Jews,” 108–9)

In the hands of Rabbi Binder, the preparatory course has become a means of social control, against which the child thirsting for knowledge protests, or as Grimes holds with reference to the metaphorical names, “Ozzie Freedman wants to be ‘free’ of Rabbi Binder, who ‘binds’ him.”³¹

Ozzie’s refusal to accept the Rabbi’s teachings without further questioning conveys a general risk that initiation processes entail for society. For although the transitory phase is considered to be a stage of reflection forcing neophytes to think about their society and cosmos,³² the initiands are supposed to ultimately return to the midst of society and accept its norms.³³ They might be encouraged to break the rules of society during the initiation process, but upon t...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations of Philip Roth’s Works
• List of Abbreviations of Other Works of Fiction
• Prologue
• Part 1 Framework
• Part 2 Classical Initiation Stories
• Part 3 Initiation as Radical Self-Invention
• Part 4 De-Initiation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Sources
• Index