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PHILIP ROTH
to challenge the mythic sense of itself the country continued to have
when the decade opened with General Eisenhower, our greatest
World War II hero, still presiding - it was these social phenomena
that furnished me with a handle by which to take hold of baseball,
of all things, and place it at the center of a novel.
It
was not a matter
of demythologizing baseball- there was nothing in that to get fired
up about - but of discovering in baseball the means to dramatize
the struggle
between the benign national myth of itself that a great
power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly
demonic reality (like the kind we had known in the sixties) that sim–
ply will not give an inch in behalf of that idealized mythology.
Now the discovery of thematic reverberations, of depth, of over–
tone, finally of meaning, gradual and tenuous as it was, would seem
to contradict what I have said about wanting fundamentally to be
unserious; and it does. It seems to me that out of this opposition, or
rather out of the attempt to maintain these contradictory impulses
in
a state of contentious equilibrium, the book evolved. Sustaining this
sort of opposition is not simply a mechanical means of creating literary
energy, either; hopefully, it is expressive of one's deepest doubts and
beliefs. It is not a matter, in a novel like this, of hiding or burying
meaning through allegorical or metaphorical techniques, but of being
as skeptical of the "truth" turned up by your imagination as of the
actuality that may have served as inspiration or model. A full-scale
farce is rarely directed outward only, but takes its own measure as
well; much of its inventiveness goes into calling itself into question
as a "statement," satiric, or humane, or what have you. In this sense,
the genre is the message, and the message is agnostic: "I tell you,
(and I tell you and I tell you), I don't know."
An early reader of my book, meaning to offer praise, told me
"This is what America is really like." I would have been happier if
he said, "This is what a farce written in America is really like." Now
that
is praise. I don't
claim
to know what America is "really like." In
fact,
not
knowing, or no longer knowing for sure, is just what per–
plexes many of the people who live and work here and consider this
country home. That, if I may say so, is precisely why I invented that
paranoid fantasist Word Smith - the narrator who calls himself
Smitty - to be (purportedly) the author of
The Great American
Novel.
What he describes is what America is really like to one like
him.
Now I do not mean by this to disown the novel, or to pretend,
