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Magazine
PAST & PRESENT
Roth’s America, and ours
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
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It is unlikely that America will be number one forever. For, chance and contingency are as much a part of history as of human life.
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Apart from my own land, the United States of America is the country I know best. I have spent three of the last 20 years there, spread out over some 10 different visits. Like so many other Indians, I have profoundly ambivalent feelings about America.
I admire the spirit of democracy within, the absence of class and hierarchy, the lack of a division between mental and manual labour. And I deplore the spirit of imperialism without, the arrogant disregard of the sentiments of other peoples, the invasions and disruptions of countries as far afield as Latin America and Asia.
Sustaining myth
The myth that founded and has sustained America is that it is the best place on earth to be human. It may not be perfect, but it is certainly perfectible. It is the city on the hill, or on the plain, or in a desert, but always a city, shining bright, the very summation of civilisation. The micro understanding of this macro myth is that one who is privileged to be born American thinks that he must and will do better than his father. That every generation will be superior to the next is part of the warf and the woof of the pioneer ethic as well as the immigrant sensibility. This “superiority’ is denoted in mostly material terms. To exceed your father thus means to have gone to a Ivy League school rather than a community college, to drive a bigger car than he did, to own a bigger house (or preferably two), and to live longer.
The myth of American perfectibility is at the heart of a marvellous novel by one of America’s greatest writers. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral follows the fortunes of successive generations of a family of Jewish entrepreneurs in the town of Newark, New Jersey. The second generation does better than the first, the third better than the second. But then a member of the fourth generation blights the family’s name by committing an act of murder. The hero of the book is the father of the murderer. Into his mind Roth puts these thoughts:
“All that normalcy interrupted by murder. All the small problems any family expects to encounter exaggerated by something so impossible ever to reconcile. The disruption of the anticipated American future that was simply to have rolled out of the solid American past, out of each generation’s getting smarter — smarter for knowing the inadequacies and limitations of the generations before — out of each new generation’s breaking away from the parochialism a little further, out of the desire to go the limit in America with your rights, forming yourself as an ideal person who gets rid of the traditional Jewish habits and attitudes, who frees himself of the pre-American insecurities and the old, constraining obsessions so as to live unapologetically as an equal among equals”.
The murderer was a girl, who fled into hiding rather than give herself up to the police. Roth has the father reflecting on “the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he has been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image of his father’s father…” Then, a single act committed in haste “blast[ed] to smithereens his particular act of utopian thinking… The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its anthithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral — into the indigenous American berserk”. Roth is writing in fictional form about one family, but something similar may be happening to the whole of America — in fact. I do not mean to say that the country as a whole is going to collapse into “fury and violence”; simply that it is unlikely that America will be number one forever. For, chance and contingency are as much a part of history as of human life. The happiness of an individual may be temporary; so also the success of the nation to which she and he belong.
A certainty
I cannot say how long it will take for the United States to slip from its position of pre-eminence; but that it will slip we can be reasonably certain. America is still the strongest nation on earth; while its military dominance will continue for some time, its cultural influence is on the decline. So too, and more meaningfully, is its economic power. In his novel (which was written more than a decade ago), Roth has a tellingly prescient passage about the phenomenon later named “outsourcing”. Once, the best gloves in the world were made in Newark (by the factory established by the hero’s father), but in “five more years and outside of government contracts there won’t be a pair of gloves made in America. Not in Puerto Rico either. They’re already in the Philippines, the big boys. It will be India, it’ll be Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh — you’ll see, every place around the world making gloves except here”.
ramguha@vsnl.com
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