American Pastoral and the Logic of the Small Room

I've written about how both DeLillo's Libra and Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker establish and reinforce the cultural logic of the conspirator's "small room," as site where masculine identity is solidified against masculinity's others and sutured to a national (paranoid) identity. The men in these rooms take refuge from a continually destabilizing world; the room delimits boundaries for male identity, and offers a reassuring meaning and structure. The room at home maps onto a hidden room of power located in a national site. Both DeLillo's Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee's Henry Park feel outside of America, primarily for reasons of class and ethnicity. Both feel, somehow, that they are less than fully men, and both turn to conspiratorial small rooms as a means of both connecting themselves to a national imaginary and reinforcing their sense of what it means to be a man. With no women or real other men in the room, the room serves as a blank space onto which ideas of connectedness and meaning can be imposed.

I'll now turn to a text by another well-known postwar writer often compared to DeLillo, whose concerns, in some ways, bridge those of DeLillo and Lee. Philip Roth's American Pastoral, similarly engages issues of masculine identity in relation to national imaginaries, but essentially effects a reversal. Like many of Roth's works, American Pastoral focuses on his native Newark, but, as its title indicates, invokes a wider American historical experience, spanning the mid-forties to the mid-90s. Narrated by novelist (and recurring Roth character) Nathan Zuckerman, the novel focuses on the life of Zuckerman's boyhood hero, the star athlete Seymour "Swede" Levov, who shines brightly in the Jewish neighborhood in which both Zuckerman and Levov grow up, and who becomes head of the successful Newark Maid glove company.

Levov's story takes place against a national history that serves to shape--though not determine--his family's relationships. Roth pegs Levov's identity to a national imaginary almost immediately: Levov emerges as a sports star amidst the end of World War II, and victory in the war is bound to Levov's victory on the field. Newark Glove experiences a familiar trajectory in American manufacturing, becoming implicated in the uprisings of the late 60s (with Amiri Baraka at its helm, Newark was at the forefront of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, and experienced six days of riots in July of 1967), outsourcing (Newark Maid moves its manufacturing to Puerto Rico once labor becomes too expensive) and white flight (Newark Maid is one of the last productive companies in Newark).

As his nickname indicates, Levov enjoys, at least initially, the full privileges of being white and male in the United States. Indeed, Levov is the American male ideal: successful at sports, wealthy, well liked--he is even married to Miss New Jersey. The "pastoral" of Roth's title refers to the good life that Levov aquires for himself and his wife, the big farmhouse in an WASP enclave called Old Rimrock to which the Levovs move from Newark (located in historically affluent Morris County. In many ways, then, Levov is the opposite of Oswald and Park: his identity, at the beginning of the book, is secure and connected. So Levov has no need for the supplement provided by the small room: his identity is complete unto itself. Nevertheless, Roth finds another set of small rooms operating, these by his politically active daughter Merry, who seeks her own connection with a national imaginary by the (admittedly unlikely) act of blowing up the local post office. Roth depicts Merry's political life as a search for meaning; she is forced into a series of small rooms when she becomes a fugitive from the FBI. Roth describes Merry's friends, from Levov's point of view, as uncontrollable and feminine, "girls who become just as militant as the boys," and whose logic Levov (and perhaps Roth) finds inscrutable.

In place of the network of male-occupied small rooms that appears in Libra and Native Son, then, we see in American Pastoral the small room functioning as a site of unknowable femininity, something both more and less than feminism. Merry's actions are tied to the anti-Oedipal impulses of the late 60s. While to be sure, the counterculture contained its own masculinity-reinforcing structures, the movement nevertheless served for many Americans as a site of strange semiotic energies, where gender identities and national coherence broke down. Merry, and the Vietnam War itself, function as anti-Oedipal forces--what Roth calls the American berserk--to the Oedipal identifications that circulate around Swede Levov.