The transcendental Swede

Criticism begins in this simple act: copying a passage, going over the words lovingly as one types it into a computer, where it hums in the virtual unconsciouss, haunting the writing that encloses, interprets, reinforces it. In copying a passage, I seek recognition, alienation, resonance, dissonance with my ideas, a process that works especially well with idea-packed texts like American Pastoral. As in this captivating series of sentences about the book's seemingly intrepid protagonist Swede Levov:

The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us too--in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection. Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him: the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns (20).

Roth continues, but that's enough: here are rich ideas, finely described, which sparkle and entice and inspire. First, the way Roth frames Levov's body as the site of Jewish desires--he'll note soon that Levov's subjectivity seems absent, that Levov functions more as embodied symbol than a human being embedded in the social, with all its swirling antagonisms. Like all such points de capiton, Levov must be more or less empty in order to function as such a transcendental signifier, and yet unlike freedom or Coca-Cola, he lives and breaths, and the purpose of the book's narrative is to draw out the messiness obscured by his canonization.