Search citation statements
Paper Sections
Citation Types
Year Published
Publication Types
Relationship
Authors
Journals
What pertinence might the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre hold for Philip Roth’s brief but provocative contribution to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary collection, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium” (1961), and for Roth’s attitude to Judaism and ethnic bias generally? The article suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his symposium essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith. The association of Sartrean ideas — the distinction, in Being and Nothingness (1943), between Being in-itself and Being for-itself and Sartre’s views on anti-Semitism — figures in Roth’s comments on twentieth-century Jewish outlook and in his formulation of “Grossbartism.” This existential mix may owe something, as well, to the Heideggerian state of being “thrown” — insofar as Sartre appropriates the concept to discuss the prospect of being thrown into a trans-cultural state of tolerance, a state that Roth seems to desire for Jew and gentile alike.
What pertinence might the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre hold for Philip Roth’s brief but provocative contribution to Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary collection, “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium” (1961), and for Roth’s attitude to Judaism and ethnic bias generally? The article suggests that ideas advanced in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) helped Roth shape his symposium essay and, more importantly, his early skepticism about religious affiliation grounded in hatred and chauvinism rather than in living, generative faith. The association of Sartrean ideas — the distinction, in Being and Nothingness (1943), between Being in-itself and Being for-itself and Sartre’s views on anti-Semitism — figures in Roth’s comments on twentieth-century Jewish outlook and in his formulation of “Grossbartism.” This existential mix may owe something, as well, to the Heideggerian state of being “thrown” — insofar as Sartre appropriates the concept to discuss the prospect of being thrown into a trans-cultural state of tolerance, a state that Roth seems to desire for Jew and gentile alike.
Eight years following the publication of The Breast (1972), Philip Roth created a revised edition, the emendations only recently receiving scholarly attention. 1 This study suggests that key changes enhance what I have elsewhere (Duban 2017) identified as Sartrian resonance in Roth's 1972 account of David Kepesh's transformation into a breast. That outlook invites the suggestion that first-person narration in the earlier edition relates to the tenet, in Being and Nothingness (L'être et le néant, 1943), that consciousness arises as an upsurge of nothingness amid the dross of non-reflective Being. Unlike the stasis of mundane matter, the nothingness at the core of self-reflection features existential potential and 1 The 1980 edition is publicized as "newly revised" on the paperback cover of A Philip Roth Reader (1980), though that collection's scholarly introduction (Green) does not discuss the revisions to The Breast. With the incorporation of the 1980 version of The Breast into the 2005 Library of America edition of Roth's works (Miller 656), the 1972 edition stands to fade from citation and eventually from popular and scholarly regard. The present article's variorum emphasis takes into account Mike Witcombe's Library of Congress, archive-based analysis of Roth's unfinished manuscript sequels to The Breast and an apparently private 1989 edition that contains illustrations by Philip Guston -though Witcombe notes that Roth did not publish a further revision of The Breast after 1980 (55). The Guston sketches, along with Roth's introduction to the 1989 illustrated narrative, reappear (Witcombe 62n6) as Roth's chapter "Pictures by Guston" in Shop Talk (see also Posnock 246). Witcombe offers several observations about differences between the 1972 and 1980 editions of The Breast, though in isolation from existential concerns. An existential reading challenges the claim that Roth's "changes are best summarized as subtle modifications to the narrative style that alter the portrayal of some of the novella's main characters" (Witcombe 53). Fascinating, nonetheless, is the prospect, in Roth's abandoned sequels, of Kepesh's becoming an "author-God" (Witcombe 49) and of his effecting a possible "body swap" (51). In view of the unfinished sequels, Witcombe's attention to Kepesh's evasion of a "fixed text" (47) finds an analogue in my emphasis on Roth's existential co-option of narrative consciousness in the 1980 printing. I agree that the 1980 text makes Kepesh "more articulate and its narrator less frantic" (53); imbues Kepesh with more "control," non-sexual "reason," and "more eloquence" (55); and that, overall, Roth's ongoing revisions reduce the value of Freudian psychoanalysis (58-61), a topic that I prefer to discuss in the context of existential psychoanalysis. As argued elsewhere (Duban 2017), moreover, I am inclined to appreciate the development of the Kepesh trilogy within an existential framework.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.