Confronting Mortality：Disease, Disaster, and the Apocalyptic Imagination

Gender Trouble in Jewish Males: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife

Shuli Chang

“Diaspora experiences are always already gendered,” James Clifford so states in his seminal article, “Diaspora,” before delivering, in the same article, his sagacious advice that we should not overlook the gendered aspects of diasporic experiences (258). Clifford’s is a timely reminder, for, as he astutely points out, despite the critical attention paid to diaspora studies in the last few decades, it “has so far failed to scrutinize diaspora experience from women’s perspective” (258). However, even though it is indeed true that diaspora studies have so far mainly focused on men’s, rather than women’s, experiences, Clifford’s argument seems to have unwittingly equated “gender” with “sex”—the biological sexual differences between men and women, while rendering invisible other axes of difference that critically determine how diaspora is experienced and how it affects one’s sense of identity. Yet, to limit one’s analysis of the gendered dimension of diaspora experiences to relations between men and women is, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests in Between Men, to overlook the operation of other forms of domination in shaping our identities. In surveying the state of affairs of diaspora studies in the late 20th century, Clifford places due emphasis on how diaspora is experienced by men and women differently, but he ends up “gendering diaspora” as a heterosexual phenomenon, with men and women singing different tunes and playing different games as they find themselves in the midst of either forced or willed transmigration. Since diaspora studies, as Clifford points out, tend to privilege men’s experience over women’s, it is time that remedial action be taken by scholars conducting diaspora studies to supplement the predominantly men’s perspectives with those of women. Even though in his subsequent discussion, Clifford proffers an oblique answer to the question he himself posed, when he proclaimed that diaspora experiences are both empowering and disabling to women, contingent upon when and where diasporic women gain an awareness of their entanglement in the maelstrom of displacement and dislocation, he did not run the full gamut of his far-reaching argument.

However, diaspora experiences may not only affect men and women differently, they may also work obliquely to reconfigure one’s understanding of manhood and womanhood, and, more importantly, how that understanding is to be performed, inscribed on one’s body, represented in discourses, and shaped by words; that is, diaspora affects the way the diasporic subject is to live out his/her life. While it is important to examine diaspora experiences from a woman’s perspective, it is also important to recognize that a woman’s perspective is also framed, constrained, and inflected by a man’s perspective, and, to understand how women experience diaspora, we may have to take a detour to analyze and comprehend the layered configuration of masculine subjectivity and to determine to what degree masculine subjectivity may be caught in an ongoing crisis when a man in diaspora finds himself in a marginal, and, thereby, feminine or even feminizing position. Does a man in diaspora feel ashamed of his social and political marginality? Does he equate this marginality with feminization? How does he react to this imposed feminization? Does he find this “transvestism” liberating, or does this enforced “transvestism” generate in him a paranoia which in its turn activates a psychic mechanism of displacement, projection, and even disavowal? What rhetoric does he utilize to justify his sense of failure and to veil this failure to achieve manhood both from others and from himself? If diaspora may be taken as both the cause and consequence of the failure of a diasporic man to be a “man,” what literal or symbolic symptom does this failure register in his body and in his psyche? What desperate efforts does it take for a diasporic man to disavow and forget his failure to achieve manhood?

In Power of Diaspora, Daniel Boyarin, while echoing and supplementing Clifford’s proposition for a “gender turn” in diaspora studies, nevertheless opts to use the experiences of Jews as an example, for, so he argues, Jewish diaspora offers us arguably “the most precise or concentrated diasporic experience” (Power 11). Diaspora is a gendered experience not only for Jewish women but also for Jewish men because Jewish men often find themselves enmeshed in an undesirable social position that has been historically allocated only to women. Boyarin even goes so far as to boldly argue that diaspora studies should see “the diaspora people as a woman” (37). Here, Boyarin is fully aware that, by drawing this analogy, he is not speaking on behalf of women, nor is he focusing on women’s experiences. Yet, Boyarin does bring to our attention the “gender trouble” of diaspora men, when they have to appropriate “the tactics of survival that belong ‘by nature’ to women” (37), thereby symbolically aligning themselves with women who are, in the words of Amy-Jill Levine “in effect, in a perpetual diaspora” (qtd in Boyarin Power 39), or, as I would like to put it, in exile from God’s kingdom because of their sex.

Taking a cue both from James Clifford’s suggestion that diaspora experiences are always gendered and from Daniel Boyarin’s analogy between diaspora people and women, I thus propose to examine, in this paper, the correlation between diaspora, masculinity, and Jewishness. I hope to, on the one hand, respond to Clifford’s observation that diaspora is gendered, and, on the other hand, examine the gender trouble or difficulties in Jewish males. To anchor my discussion, I will examine Roth’s The Counterlife to determine in what ways Roth problematizes the Manichean move within the Jewish community either to equate Jewishness with tough and virile masculinity, or to associate it with gentle and compliant femininity.

Philip Roth, who has made consistent inquiries in his novels into the ambivalence the Jewish male feels about his manhood, appropriates in The Counterlife the stereotype of the Jewish male who is never at home with his masculinity so as to “engender” the diaspora experience; that is to say, to expose the Jewish question as a question of race as well as gender. To be authentically Jewish, Roth cynically remarks, a Jewish male has to choose between two diametrically opposed options: either to be a rebellious “Jewboy,” thereby risking ostracism, or to become a respected “nice Jewish boy,” thus repressing his natural instinct for fun (qtd in Shostak, “Roth” 113). Even though the very definition of what constitutes a “nice Jewish boy” changes over the course of time, Roth’s very use of the term “boy” to refer to a Jewish male betrays Roth’s masculinist understanding of Jewishness as an Oedipal struggle waged between the father and the son. Whether the Jewish boy chooses to be a nice or a rebellious son, he is nevertheless a boy, not a man. Moreover, the false choice of being either the nice Jewish boy or the bad Jewboy aggravates an internal tension within the Jewish male, splitting the Jewish self into a non-representable and disavowed “being” and its many reiterated and performative “others.” Here is the scenario in which the stigma of Jewishness—Jewishness as feminine capriciousness— may be both foreclosed and acted out, foreclosed in the sense that a Jewish male develops a defense mechanism of self-doubling to, on the one hand, act out the stereotype of Jewishness as femininity and deception, and, on the other hand, to rebel against and disavow this racial stigma. A psychic distancing is thereby activated with the Jewish male imagining a perverted other, within himself, against whom he defines himself. This perverted other, it goes without saying, turns out to be the spectral other of the Jewish male himself. The encounter with the otherness of the Jewish other is, in this sense, strictly speaking, also an encounter with himself, with the otherness within himself. A Jewish “family romance” of oedipal conflicts is thus put into place with the repeated enactment of this internal conflict both within the Jewish male and among the Jewry, as the good Jew fights with the bad Jew, and the tough Jew engages in a battle with the soft Jew, and all other possibilities are barred and excluded. In underscoring and problematizing these competing notions of Jewishness, Roth seems to suggest, through his use of a dialogic mode of narration that folds back to itself, that “gender trouble” is at the core of Jewish subjectivity. The famous capriciousness or cunningness of Jewish men that Roth represents and makes fun of in his novel is, I would venture to speculate, first and foremost, an oblique expression of their displaced ambivalence towards the stigma of their Jewishness and their dis-comfort with their circumcised masculinity. More importantly, their “gender trouble” is also a symptom of a home/landlessness of a different kind.

In using a contrapuntal style that folds back onto itself, a narration that is split from within, and a plot that follows the dual trajectories of oedipal conflicts and sibling rivalry, Roth demonstrates the significance of Jewish males critically and dialogically engaging with their problematic Jewishness rather than simply rejecting it as a symptom of pathology or idealizing it as a mark of tradition. Even though the Jewish deployment of the “feminine” arts of survival has been historically necessary, as Daniel Boyarin has demonstrated, the very deployment of such strategies of deception, either in their everyday life or in their exegesis of the sacred scriptures, has brought dire consequences both to the cohesion of the Jewish community, introducing antagonistic differences within the Jewry, and to Jewish males’ sense of manhood, intensifying their anxiety with the lack of “phallic” recognition of their worth. Not only has a Jew projected his anxieties onto other less fortunate Jews, but he has also produced a confusion, if not a conflation, within himself between the other and the self, the tough Jew and the weak Jew, the bad Jewboy and the nice Jewish boy, the fighter and the loser. Roth, while offering biting critiques of such simplistic dichotomies, chooses to portray, dialogically as well as ironically, the stigma of Jewishness as circumcised masculinity in The Counterlife. A careful scrutiny of The Counterlife, I thus argue, reveals Roth’s shrewd observation of how Jewish males have negotiated their gender troubles, and how these gender troubles are still troubling them, albeit in ways that are both provocative and productive.

Postmodern Indeterminacy or Diasporic Irony: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife

Many American Jewish writers engage with and explore the Jewish question, trying to articulate the conundrum they have felt about being a Jewish male in a changing and changed world. Philip Roth is probably the most notorious writer of them all, for he has not only repeatedly engaged with the problem of Jewish masculinity on a thematic level, but has also rendered this reiterated performativity of Jewish masculinity as a structural principle in his novels. It is almost as if he were compelled by the imperative of circumcised masculinity to signify the Jewish male’s status to be that of a man who is never quite at home in hegemonic masculinity.

Debra Shostak in “Roth and Gender” identifies the “myth of male inviolability, of male dominance and potency” as the one myth that “propels many of Roth’s plots” (“Roth” 111). Not only is Roth preoccupied with “the circus of being a man,” Shostak asserts, but Roth also perceives “the devastations of masculinism through a Jewish lens” (“Roth” 111, 113). On the one hand, Roth’s male characters, who are excessively concerned with their sexual potency, radically depart from stereotypical images of Jewish manhood, but, on the other hand, they also conform to and consolidate the most fixed stereotype of Jews as verbally smart and quick, self-mocking, cunning, ironical, and split between pride and shame, confidence and diffidence. Shostak further explains that given that in Roth’s work, he frequently contrasts the Jewish ideals of manhood as gentle and temperate with the dominant myth of manhood as aggressive and assertive, he has offered a critique of masculinism. Having perceptively aligned Roth’s critique of the myth of masculinism with the Jewish notion of manhood, whose endorsement of a gentle manhood reflects the wisdom that Jews have acquired in their long history of home/landlessness, Shostak nevertheless goes on to claim that the shifting of identities and the presence of counter lives in Roth’s writing yields undeniable evidence of Roth’s “engage[ment with] the postmodern possibilities for indeterminate, linguistically constructed selfhood” (“Roth” 119). While Shostak intimates that Roth is so influenced by postmodernism that he engages with postmodernist narrative strategies to deconstruct the opposition between the essence and performance of identity , I would argue that Roth’s style, rather than reflecting his postmodernist penchant, registers his ambivalence towards the gender trouble of Jewish males. That is to say, the kind of rhetorical playfulness that eventually becomes the stylistic signature of Roth’s writing is not necessarily motivated by postmodernism alone, a branch of the aesthetic movement Roth is quite familiar with; rather, it is at least partially initiated and sustained by his ambivalent identification with the Jewish diaspora and is also evidence of his continuous engagement with the Jewish question as well as his inflection of this question through a distinctively gendered lens. The argument that I wish to make here is that the image of Jewish masculinity as feminine, unfixed, fickle, or fluid, is, first and foremost, a particular cultural effect of the condition of Jewish men in diaspora. Although I agree with Shostak that in The Counterlife, Roth explores this issue with the use of a “contrapuntal” narrative strategy, a narrative structure that both Shostak and Elaine Safer have characterized as “postmodernist,” I nevertheless believe that, in terms of Roth’s use of these “postmodern” techniques, his main objective is still to provoke the re-thinking of the Jewish question from a gendered perspective. Precisely because Roth’s engagement with the Jewish question is, rather ironically, consistently ambivalent, one could even say his writing both enacts and questions the political usefulness of the notion that identity is a site of reiterated performativity. Not only is a nice Jewish boy contrasted with a bad Jewboy, and, a book-writing diaspora man pitted against a pistol-wearing Zionist fighter, but the nice Jewish boy may end up becoming a bad Jewboy, and the diaspora man may wake up one day to experience a dramatic switch in loyalty. An uncanny logic of spectral doubling seems to loom large in his writing, and, by so activating this logic, Roth is able to raise some poignant questions about diaspora Jews’ simultaneous defense of and disgust with the stigma of Jewishness qua femininity qua duplicity.

Roth’s 1985 fictional work, The Counterlife, is especially significant in the sense that it is his first work of fiction that is geographically set both in the US and in Israel and in which diaspora is employed as a derogatory generic term by Israelis to refer to those Jews who live outside of Israel. The novel, which is divided into five chapters, with each, except the third chapter, bearing the name of a geographical site as its title , charts how two brothers, facing a mid-life crisis consisting of sexual impotence, resort to drastic measures both to restore their manhood and to find, and found, their Jewish identity through various routes such as oedipal revolt, Zionist patriotism, inter-racial marriage, and a return to family. Roth himself describes this novel as “five mutually entangled, somewhat contradictory narratives that sometimes appear to be joined and then are not, and then there’s outright contradiction” (qtd in Gentry 519). Self-doubling in its style, The Counterlife has at least four different plot lines, each of which is governed by a “what if.” The first narrative strand, enigmatically entitled as “Basel,” relates how the younger brother, Henry Zuckerman, an American Jewish dentist who has had a happy family with a supportive Jewish wife and three well-behaved children, dies in heart surgery, which he risks to rid himself of the medication that has unfortunately sexually crippled him. In the next chapter, “Judea,” a different narrative, possibility confronts the reader when we find that Henry is not dead but survives the open heart surgery. This “born again” experience, however, throws Henry into a state of profound post-operative depression that he cannot overcome until he experiences a religious-political epiphany in a tour to Israel and decides thereafter to stay in his homeland, Israel, specifically in “Judea,” or the West Bank, both to find his roots and to fight for the survival of his fellow Jews in their promised land.

At the time Henry’s life reaches a fork that branches off into two different paths, with each mapping out a different definition of Jewishness, Nathan has to deal with his own crisis. Unlike Henry who, after having spent all his life leading an exemplary life, decides to risk breaking up his family in pursuit of sexual bliss first with his patient, Maria, who later becomes his first mistress, and then with his nurse, Wendy, who later becomes his second mistress, Nathan Zuckerman, the rebel in the family, spent the first forty years of his life taking the wrong road, that is, living a non-Jewish and therefore “faulty” life. After four failed marriages, Nathan finds himself plagued with a heart condition that renders him sexually disabled. Ironically, it is at this moment when all tides are turned against him that Nathan finds himself in love with Maria, a young Englishwoman married to an English diplomat who complains bitterly of her suffocating marriage. To create a sexually satisfying life with Maria, as well as to have the child that his four marriages have failed to produce, Nathan also opts for surgery, though with a different objective from what his brother has in mind. Two different possibilities befall him to give his “life-writing” two different twists. In one plot, which is developed in Chapter four, bearing the title, “Gloucestershire,” which is Maria’s hometown in South Wales, England, Nathan has bypass surgery but dies on the operation table. Henry comes to the funeral, sneaks into Nathan’s apartment, and is totally outraged when he finds an unfinished manuscript in which Henry figures as the prominent object of Nathan’s ridicule and sibling condescension. In another plot developed in Chapter five, “Christendom,” Nathan survives the surgery only to confront the dire consequence of his inter-racial marriage. Informed by his sister-in-law of his mother-in-law’s long-held anti-Semitic sentiments, he becomes racially sensitive and suspects hearing anti-Semitic expressions articulated by an old woman while he has dinner with his wife at a fancy restaurant. He confronts the old woman, hysterically accuses her of making anti-Semitic utterances, and embarrasses his wife in public. A heated argument ensues between Maria and Nathan until it reaches a deadly stasis when the issue of whether to circumcise their unborn child is raised. Maria, who wants to baptize the baby, threatens to leave Nathan, who insists on circumcising it, and, in the remaining segment of chapter five, Maria sends Nathan a letter to express her impatience and discontent with his penchant for always putting the blame on non-Jewish others. She insists that, by reading too much into what other people have or have not said about him, Nathan has revealed “there was something deeply twisted in him that he couldn’t help,” and, in this regard, she concludes, “that he was my sister” (243) . By ending this novel with Nathan’s defense of his “circumscribed” Jewishness, Roth, it seems to me, allows Nathan to respond to Maria’s accusation that Nathan is her hysterical sister, and, by implication, Nathan is feminized and hysterical. Interestingly, at the end, Nathan, who has otherwise worked so hard to neutralize his racial markings, proves himself more Jewish than he has ever imagined himself to be, as he admits that “England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks” (324). The repressed, in other words, has once again returned.

Henry and Nathan are, in this sense, counterparts to each other, for both are in “perpetual exile” from who they are and from the overarching presence of a powerful paternal figure, the Jewish tradition, whose hold on the two brothers is invisible, but present. This paternal figure, rather paradoxically, is both too strong for them to resist and too weak for them to wage a war. As such, their feelings towards this simultaneously too strong and too weak a paternal figure is so fraught with ambivalence that eventually they become, in the words of Maria, “hysteric” whenever it comes to anything Jewish. The paradoxical result of their ambivalence towards their Jewishness is thus that Henry and Nathan both spend their lives struggling to wrestle with a counter-life that may come out from the depth of their unconscious to confront them with their fears and anxieties. First of all, Roth’s representation of Henry’s and Nathan’s counterlife is organized around a form of split narration in which the seeming rationality of the first-person narration is disrupted by the emergence of the cacophony of voices from various gendered, racialized, and nationalized others. Characters are transformed into their doubles, and life stories spin off into their sequels or re-makes. Secondly, regardless of whether the narration focuses on the life, or counterlife, of the characters, its narrative is emplotted as an oedipal drama centering on the confrontation with, and attempted resolution of, a crisis of masculinity. Finally, circumcised as they already are, they suffer a second circumcision when they experience sexual impotence, which literalizes the sense of incompetence and outsiderness they have always felt as circumcised Jews. At the end, they seem to come to a realization that the others they are fighting against are none other than the counter selves that they have unsuccessfully disavowed. In fighting with their counter selves, they are fighting with themselves. In fighting with themselves, they exhibit the psychic symptom of having internalized the paternal authorities within themselves and thus making themselves both the rebelling subject/son and the corruptive object/father. The problem is, other than the oedipal trajectory, is there any other plot a Jewish male can write to express his life and manhood?

Gender Trouble in Jewish Males: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife

Shuli Chang

“Diaspora experiences are always already gendered,” James Clifford so states in his seminal article, “Diaspora,” before delivering, in the same article, his sagacious advice that we should not overlook the gendered aspects of diasporic experiences (258). Clifford’s is a timely reminder, for, as he astutely points out, despite the critical attention paid to diaspora studies in the last few decades, it “has so far ...

Introduction

As one purpose of literature is to explore the human condition, mortality emerges as a significant theme across times and cultures. The inevitability of our end as individuals or as civilizations casts a shadow on our perceptions of the meaning of our lives. Not just death, but the events or experiences that remind us of our mortality often provide inspiration and insight to artists and writers.

The response to this confrontation with mortality is as varied as humanity itself. Some seek hope or renewal; some seek oblivion, forgetfulness, or despair; some welcome the end and some deny its reality. A type of apocalyptic imagination reveals itself in these responses. As an opening remark to his classic study of the apocalyptic (as) fiction, The Sense of an End, Frank Kermode asserts “a need to speak humanly of a life’s importance to [time]—a need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end.” Humanity often seems preoccupied with its own possible end, which it usually considers not only immanent to its historical scheme but also imminent at its current moment of existence. The apocalyptic imagination displays a paradox, a double-edged momentum: on the one hand, the apocalypse means an abrupt collapse of everything as we know it; cataclysmic changes, either natural or man-made (or combined in character), must precede it, and the End should be fearfully prepared against, if not simply avoided. On the other hand, the apocalypse promises a chance to (re-) construct a fresher, better world than the one just destroyed. From this contradiction springs both the questions and the answers that literature considers.

Developing from a Ministry of Science and Technology-sponsored project to build a collection of books in the National Cheng Kung University Library centered on the theme of Disease, Disaster, and the Apocalyptic Imagination, these essays showcase the scholarship that has emerged from the acquisition of those texts. One goal of the project is to address the multifarious manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination and their historical, social, cultural, and political significances for civilization from the High Middle Ages to the present time. Another goal is to explore the means by which humans confront the disruptions of violence, disability, illness, aging, catastrophe, and social upheaval. The ten articles collected in this book engage with the ongoing scholarly discourse concerning the human response to disease, disaster, and mortality.

Written by scholars from the United States and Taiwan, covering literature from Europe, North America, and Asia, examining issues of aging, disease, and disability, and investigating philosophical, religious, and imaginative responses to disruption, these essays demonstrate the varied fruits of our research. Covering a range of texts, genres, and methodologies, this book considers how the apocalyptic imagination, of society or the individual, deconstructs and reconstructs the consequences of confronting mortality.

Introduction

As one purpose of literature is to explore the human condition, mortality emerges as a significant theme across times and cultures. The inevitability of our end as individuals or as civilizations casts a shadow on our perceptions of the meaning of our lives. Not just death, but the events or experiences that remind us of our mortality often provide inspiration and insight to artists and writers.

The response to this confrontation with mortality is as varied as humanity itself. Som...

Introduction
Carolyn F. Scott and Min-Tser Lin
Gender Trouble in Jewish Males: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife
Shuli Chang
Life Review Weathers All? A Gerontological Approach to “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”
Chao-Fang Chen
“Healthy” Food, Sick Bodies, and Transnational Abjects in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Shu-Ching Chen
California Apocalypse and the Memory of Genocide
Jeff Johnson
Confronting Death: On Heidegger and Levinas
Chung-Hsiung Lai
Murder in the Name of Honor?: Honor Crimes, Economics, and Ghosts in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers
Pei-chen Liao
(Re-)Vamping After the Apocalypse: Conflicting Visions of Social Reconstruction in Two Vampire Apocalypse Narratives
Min-Tser Lin
“The tour upon the toft:” The Quest for Truth in Piers Plowman
Carolyn F. Scott
Travel as a Means to Forgetfulness: Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain
Pei-Ju Wu
Representing Self and Disabled Body: The Life Narratives of Disabled Women in Taiwan
Su-Lin Yu

Introduction
Carolyn F. Scott and Min-Tser Lin
Gender Trouble in Jewish Males: Philip Roth’s The Counterlife
Shuli Chang
Life Review Weathers All? A Gerontological Approach to “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”
Chao-Fang Chen
“Healthy” Food, Sick Bodies, and Transnational Abjects in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Shu-Ching Chen
California Apocalypse and the Memory of Genocide
Jeff Johnson
Confronting Death: On Heidegger and Levinas
Chung-Hsiung Lai
Murder in the Name of Hono...