Henry Roth's National and Personal Narratives of Captivity

Henry Roth, who died in 1995 at age 89, was author of Call It Sleep (1934), Shifting Landscape (1987), and a multi-volume novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream, published between 1994 and 1998. Most of significant questions concerning Roth's artistic career are suggested by what Roth himself called longest writer's block in history, and it is important to consider reason for this blockage and fact of Roth's recovery from it during last two decades of his life. Roth's hiatus from writing-a remarkable period of silence for an enormously gifted writer who was widely praised for his first novel-should, I believe, be understood as symptomatic of a condition of subservience to an adopted national culture, a captivity from which Roth never freed himself as conflicting ideals of pride in his immigrant history and drive toward assimilation left him no alternative but silence. The searing humiliation of Roth's childhood, beginning in lower East Side slums, resulted in an habitual identification with privilege and hegemony, an identification that Roth questioned only in retrospect. Even then, in revisionary settling of accounts of Mercy of a Rude Stream, Roth anxiously adopted new sources of authority, even as he freed himself of earlier captivity. Both Roth's career, and critical reception and promotion of his writing, must be positioned in relation to control of hegemonic culture. The force of national culture is everywhere evident in critical reception of his work, from ambivalence of contemporary reviewers of Call It Sleep (impressed by Roth's artistry but uncomfortable with his political tentativeness) through novel's rediscovery after its reissue in 1964. Roth's work continued to attract critical attention notably in Alfred Kazin's influential New York Review of Books essay on Call It Sleep (1990). With publication of first volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream, beginning in 1994, even greater interest in Roth's work emerged as evidenced by such influential essays as Irving Howe's New York Times Book Review front-page review. The critical perception of Henry Roth's work, however, has remained consistent since 1930s and was itself, as Kazin points out, a critical production of intellectual culture of late-modernist period. As Kazin writes: We can see now that [Call It Sleep] belongs to side of 1930s that still believed in sacredness of literature, whether or not it presumed to change world (x). This interpretation, in which Roth is figured as a heroic sufferer in cause of revolutionary art, continued to be echoed, even in more poststructuralist criticism, such as an article on Roth's textuality by Wayne Lesser.1 A third generation of critics, including Thomas J. Ferraro and Hannah-Wirth Nesher, has positioned Roth in relation to new interests in immigrant and multiethnic literary studies. All of these readings, however, obscure destructive force of hegemony as represented not by Roth but in Roth's career. By enshrining Roth as a modernist, or poststructuralist, or postcolonial martyr, a Promethean figure by virtue of his ambitious first novel and subsequent silencing, critical figuration of Roth's fiction has never confronted destructive force of hegemonic culture in his case, and thus has failed to comprehend its actual significance as a record of hegemonic power. Perhaps greatest injustice of critical reception of Roth's works has been inability of criticism to recognize conflict of subaltern and hegemonic culture in Roth's writing as represented primarily by conflict of Jewish immigrant and middle-class American culture. However ingenious, Wayne Lesser's response to this conflict-the central thematic and emotional tension of Roth's work-finally results in undermining of its significance, since, as Lesser admits, in this reading David's search for meaning within the religious, familial, and social systems most commonly assumed to possess such universal value . …