December 5, 2004

In 2001, while reading the historian Arthur Schlesinger’s autobiography, Philip Roth came across a single sentence stating that in 1940 some Republicans wanted to nominate the famous aviator Charles Lindberghh to run against Franklin Roosevelt for president. In the margin, Roth wrote, “What if that had happened?”

Three years later Philip Roth, has answered his own question with a freaky yet plausible phantasmagoric political novel The Plot Against America. Roth’s alternative history — call it fictional history if you like — begins in 1940 with the election of Charles Lindbergh, a friend of Hitler’s, as president of the USA. With that election, America goes fascist and mass hatred runs wild against the Jews. The novel tells the frightening story of a lower middle class Jewish neighbourhood in Newark, New Jersey. It zeroes in on the anxieties of a little seven-year-old boy, Philip, who tries to make sense of an America gone mad.

Says the father of the boy: “Every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”

This is Philip Roth’s 24th book. He is the author of such classic novels as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Our Gang (1971) and The Human Stain (2000). Portnoy’s Complaint was a sexual comedy, Our Gang was a farce about the Nixon administration and The Human Stain was a tirade against “the crushing smallness of people” who launched a “piety binge” against Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

So what is The Plot against America about? There are numerous similarities between the fictional events of 1942 in the novel with what is actually going on today in America. Compare government programmes like “Just Folks” and “Homestead 42” in the novel with today’s “Homeland Security” and “Patriot Act”. When the fictional Lindbergh flies all over the country “to meet with America people face-to-face and reassure them that every decision he made was designed solely to increase their security” the post 9/11 rhetoric comes to mind. So does the image of President Bush landing on the aircraft carrier when Roth writes about “the young president (Lindbergh) landing his plane in his famous aviator’s windbreaker”.

Is this novel of America under fascist rule then a roman à clef? No, definitely not, says Philip Roth in a recent interview. “That would be a mistake I am not pretending to be interested in the years 1940 to 1942. I am interested in those two years.” He added that his novel is not really about what President Lindbergh did. It was about the nightmare a particular Jewish family underwent in Newark, New Jersey.

I agree with Roth that this novel reminds us of the present-day America only in a marginal, superficial way. The novel is not as some critics have labeled it to be “a parable of the Bush administration’s flirtation with fascism.” In my opinion, it is about a dystopia like George Orwell’s 1984, although dystopias are usually set in the future. The main theme of the novel is history and the nightmare it can sometimes be.

The overriding message is that history books are a faint version of the real thing. Real history is the unpredictable, the relentless unforeseen. “The terror of the unforeseen,” writes Roth, “is what the science of history hides.”

As the young boy in the novel tries to run away from the nightmare that is history (“I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan” ) he learns a truth. And that truth about history is what Aristotle called the poetic truth, the sort of truth that has the power to condense reality.

One is reminded here of a character by the name of Oskar Matzerath in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Oskar like Philip wants nothing to do with history. However, he wants to enjoy his childhood not by running away from history, which perhaps is sometimes not possible, but by refusing to grow up. In Oscar’s case, the nightmare of the Third Reich actually did happen. However, in Philip’s case the scars of history are only imaginary since there was no President Lindbergh in America. The fantasy of a Lindbergh presidency thus speaks to a certain inherent poetic truth about American political life. President Lindbergh was a fantasy but his anti-semitism was not.

Here are three quotations from the novel to explain what is meant by poetic truth:

“Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, ..sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it — while my father, of course, was only a Jew.”

When the boy’s mother urges her husband to flee with family to Canada from New Jersey, the proud American Jew shouts back: “I am not running away!... This is our country!” The mother replies: “No, not anymore. It’s their’s.”

Finally, in a climactic scene of the novel, referring to the persecution of the Jews by American Nazis, Mayor La Guardia remarks: “It can’t happen here? My friends, it is happening here.”

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)