Reading Myself and Others (Vintage International) - Softcover

Roth, Philip

 
9780679749073: Reading Myself and Others (Vintage International)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0679749071 ISBN 13: 9780679749073
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Fascinating interviews, essays, and articles spanning a quarter century on writing, baseball, American fiction, and American Jews—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

"An illuminating...glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction." —Chicago Daily News

Here is Philip Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's engendered. Here too are Roth's writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed, and so much more. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his famed long interview with the Paris Review.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter century of Philip Roth's distinguished career and "reveal [a] preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world." Here is Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's engendered. Here too are Roth's writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed; and on baseball, American fiction, and American Jews. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his long interview with the "Paris Review.

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One

Writing and the Powers That Be

Tell us first of all about your adolescence-its relationship with the type of American society you have represented in Goodbye, Columbus; your rapport with your family; and if and how you felt the weight of paternal power.

An interview conducted by the Italian critic Walter Mauro, for his collection of interviews with writers on the subject of power. (1974)

Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. After the victories of an exuberant and spirited childhood-lived out against the dramatic background of America's participation in World War II-I was to cool down considerably until I went off to college in 1950. There, in a respectable Christian atmosphere hardly less constraining than my own particular Jewish upbringing, but whose strictures I could ignore or oppose without feeling bedeviled by long-standing loyalties, I was able to reactivate a taste for inquiry and speculation that had been all but immobilized during my high school years. From age twelve, when I entered high school, to age sixteen, when I graduated, I was by and large a good, responsible, well-behaved boy, controlled (rather willingly) by the social regulations of the self-conscious and orderly lower-middle-class neighborhood where I had been raised, and mildly constrained still by the taboos that had filtered down to me, in attenuated form, from the religious orthodoxy of my immigrant grandparents. I was probably a "good" adolescent partly because I understood that in our Jewish section of Newark there was nothing much else to be, unless I wanted to steal cars or flunk courses, both of which proved to be beyond me. Rather than becoming a sullen malcontent or a screaming rebel-or flowering, as I had in the prelapsarian days at elementary school-I obediently served my time in what was, after all, only a minimum-security institution, and enjoyed the latitude and privileges awarded to the inmates who make no trouble for their guards.

The best of adolescence was the intense male friendships-not only because of the cozy feelings of camaraderie they afforded boys coming unstuck from their close-knit families, but because of the opportunity they provided for uncensored talk. These marathon conversations, characterized often by raucous discussions of hoped-for sexual adventure and by all sorts of anarchic joking, were typically conducted, however, in the confines of a parked car-two, three, four, or five of us in a single steel enclosure just about the size and shape of a prison cell, and similarly set apart from ordinary human society.

Still, the greatest freedom and pleasure I knew in those years may have derived from what we said to one another for hours on end in those automobiles. And how we said it. My closest adolescent companions-clever, respectful Jewish boys like myself, all four of whom have gone on to be successful doctors-may not look back in the same way on those bull sessions, but for my part I associate that amalgam of mimicry, reporting, kibbitzing, disputation, satire, and legendizing from which we drew so much sustenance with the work I now do, and I consider what we came up with to amuse one another in those cars to have been something like the folk narrative of a tribe passing from one stage of human development to the next. Also, those millions of words were the means by which we either took vengeance on or tried to hold at bay the cultural forces that were shaping us. Instead of stealing cars from strangers, we sat in the cars we had borrowed from our fathers and said the wildest things imaginable, at least in our neighborhood. Which is where we were parked.

"The weight of paternal power," in its traditional oppressive or restraining guises, was something I had hardly to contend with in adolescence. My father had little aside from peccadilloes to quarrel with me about, and if anything weighed upon me, it was not dogmatism, unswervingness, or the like, but his limitless pride in me. When I tried not to disappoint him, or my mother, it was never out of fear of the mailed fist or the punitive decree, but of the broken heart; even in post-adolescence, when I began to find reasons to oppose them, it never occurred to me that as a consequence I might lose their love.

What may have encouraged my cooling down in adolescence was the grave financial setback my father suffered at about the time I was entering high school. The struggle back to solvency was arduous, and the stubborn determination and reserves of strength that it called forth from him in his mid-forties made him all at once a figure of considerable pathos and heroism in my eyes, a cross of a kind between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman. Half-consciously I wondered if he might not collapse, carrying us under with him-instead he proved to be undiscourageable, if not something of a stone wall. But as the outcome was in doubt precisely during my early adolescence, it could be that my way in those years of being neither much more nor much less than "good" had to do with contributing what I could to family order and stability. To allow paternal power to weigh what it should, I would postpone until a later date the resumption of my career as classroom conquistador, and suppress for the duration all rebellious and heretical inclinations . . . This is largely a matter of psychological conjecture, of course, certainly so by this late date-but the fact remains that I did little in adolescence to upset whatever balance of power had enabled our family to come as far as it had and to work as well as it did.

Sex as an instrument of power and subjection. You develop this theme in Portnoy's Complaint and achieve a desecration of pornography, at the same time recognizing the obsessive character of sexual concerns and their enormous conditioning power. Tell us in what real experience this dramatic fable originated or from what adventure of the mind or the imagination.

Do I "achieve a desecration of pornography"? I never thought of it that way before, since generally pornography is itself considered a verbal desecration of the acts by which men and women are imagined to consecrate their profound attachment to one another. Actually I think of pornography more as the projection of an altogether human preoccupation with the genitalia in and of them-

selves-a preoccupation excluding all emotions other than those elemental feelings that the contemplation of genital functions arouses. Pornography is to the whole domain of sexual relations what a building manual is to hearth and home. Or so it would be, if carpentry were surrounded with the exciting aura of magic, mystery, and breachable taboo that adheres at this moment to the range of sex acts.

I don't think that I "desecrated" pornography but, rather, excised its central obsession with the body as an erotic contraption or plaything-with orifices, secretions, tumescence, friction, discharge, and all the abstruse intricacies of sex-tectonics-and then placed that obsession back into an utterly mundane family setting, where issues of power and subjection, among other things, can be seen in their broad everyday aspect rather than through the narrowing lens of pornography. Now, perhaps it is just in this sense that I could be charged with having desecrated, or profaned, what pornography, by its exclusiveness and obsessiveness, does actually elevate into a kind of sacred, all-encompassing religion, whose solemn rites it ritualistically enacts: the religion of Fuckism (or, in a movie like Deep Throat, Suckism). As in any religion these devotions are a matter of the utmost seriousness, and there is...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679749071
ISBN 13 
9780679749073
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland

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