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Journalism of Courage
To the Jew there is a marvellous continuity between knowledge and action; to the Greek an ironic abyss.
The Death of Tragedy,George Steiner
Philip Roths Nemesis offers a Greek perspective on a Hebraic or biblical context: the Jewish Weequahic section of Newark in 1944. It is an examination of misplaced and excessive guilt as an agent of destruction and the externality of chance as the engine of life. While the title evokes the Greek goddess who redistributes fortune,Roth has bunched this book with Everyman 2006,Indignation 2008 and The Humbling 2009 in a new cluster called Nemeses: Short Novels. An otherwise disparate lot,they are bound by the theme of cataclysm,which,apart from the inevitability of reversal,is about the proximity to death. Behind each protagonist thus vanquished,stands an ageing and ascetic Roth,calmly keeping his eye on the turning wheel and the ticking clock. But how capricious and malevolent is the universe? How pivotal is individual hubris?
In the summer of 1944,a polio epidemic ravages Newark,crippling and killing its children. Its the biggest outbreak since 1916,when 27,000 cases were reported in the US,with 6,000 deaths. Unlike 1916,there was no real epidemic in 1944; but the danger of polio loomed over every Newark summer of Roths childhood. Here he creates another alternative history as he did in The Plot Against America 2004 to study human behaviour and belief systems in the face of a nameable but inscrutable catastrophe. Nemesis pursues an ordinary characters tragic engagement with polio-ravaged Newark,while his buddies fight in war-torn Europe.
Athletic Bucky Cantor,a skilled diver and javelin thrower of 23,is playground director at a Weequahic public school. Not one of Roths intellectual heroes,Bucky lost his mother at birth; his grandparents rescued the boy from his fraudster father and raised him. His poor eyesight,moreover,prevents him from seeing action in World War II while this shame is Buckys original guilt,his upright morals come from his dead grandfather. As the boys in his care begin falling sick and even dying,Bucky stands firm amidst the panic. He persists with summertime sports against parental fears,providing the continuity and stability the still-healthy children need.
The apocalyptic breakdown of social decency any epidemic causes leads to a general fear of public spaces. Bucky is calm against the sirens of unreason: If they were right,breathing in the breath of life was a dangerous activity in Newark take a deep breath and you could die. Indifferent to religion,his scepticism about the goodness of god now turns into rage. Bucky cannot evade the tragic irony of fate,or Roth his savage humour: 8230;Alans life,while Alan lived it,had seemed to the boy to be endless,but invariably he Bucky wound up instead imagining Alan roasting like a piece of meat in the box.
Buckys girlfriend,Marcia Steinberg her fathers nose is Roths little Jewish joke,is a 22-year-old teacher,away at a summer camp in the Pocono Mountains. Its Marcia who helps unveil the plots secret: Roths cruel twist. Fearing for Buckys health,Marcia insists he join her. Bucky refuses at first,remembering his buddies at war and his grandfather. A day later,he succumbs to the promise of escape and agrees to abandon his charge. As he hangs up,he wonders: How could he have done what hed just done? Irony: the playgrounds are soon closed. A few more days,and he neednt have felt like a coward.
The Jewish city boy arrives in the Pennsylvania hills,described tritely as wide open spaces,perhaps evoking Buckys verbal limitations with the unfamiliar. Soon,polio follows him. His romantic and sexual escapade with Marcia is ruptured by the test that confirms Buckys suspicions and dramatises the O. Henry-esque twist Bucky is a carrier of the polio virus. He might have been infecting the children all along. He didnt know his blight,but hell not pardon himself. Physically crippled now,Bucky rejects Marcias offer to still marry him,and casts himself out of social life. Its this old wreck that Arnie Mesnikoff a boy struck by polio in 1944 and narrator who introduces himself on page 108 runs into in 1972.
Discarding types,we can name the archetype. And the most immediate literary archetype for Bucky is none other than the distant Oedipus. Fates blind,lifes nothing but pure chance. Bucky,like the Theban king,hasnt committed a witting crime. Even if he erred in running away,the furies would have pursued him wherever he went. So he must punish himself far in excess of his guilt. He chooses to exile himself and suffer in perpetuity. Marcias dad had warned him: You have a conscience,and a conscience is a valuable attribute,but not if it begins to make you think youre to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility. Call that hubris,or stupidity,thats what Bucky believes. Shorn of physical dignity,this is his only hope of moral redemption.
Roths sustained prose and legendary dictional precision,devoid of extravagances shunned by the Nemeses quartet in keeping with the intimations of mortality,mask the authors meticulous research: javelin and polio. He fails with women again Marcia is a narrative tool,not really a character. Death from polio,even before the vaccine,was very rare. But Nemesis is,as said earlier,what could have happened. The novel may soon be dead. But this thin sample is a success Roth may not choose to equal again,even if he could.
