For me, that question arose when I looked at the shape taken on the page by Philip Roth's short story "Defender of the Faith." Because "Defender of the Faith" was published in 1959, when the post-World War II integration of Jews into American society was still a remarkable new phenomenon, Jewish reviewers were horror-struck when Roth made a present to America of a gallery of Jewish characters conforming to anti-Semitic stereotypes. And if you've read some Jewish-American literature of the 1950s, the horror is understandable.
"Defender of the Faith" takes place during World War II, and its narrator is a Jewish infantry sergeant who would have felt right at home in the narrative world of Leon Uris, specialist in bestsellers about tough, square-jawed Jewish heroes. The sergeant's world, however, isn't Uris country. It's a basic training facility in Missouri during the late spring and early summer of 1945, when the war against Hirohito was still on but the war against Hitler was over. Into this world comes another Jew -- a Jew who is much easier to visualize than the heroic Sergeant Nathan Marx. Scheming, whining, lying, sanctimonious, and cowardly, Private Sheldon Grossbart becomes Sergeant Marx's antagonist in a series of maudlin Jewish embarrassments whose detail creates before our horrified eyes a villain right out of Fagin's den. Furthermore and worse, this villain isn't even a criminal. He can't be sent away to prison and out of sight; he is a source of shanda in place. By shaming his fellow Jews, he endangers them -- all of them, including the reviewers observing him from their vantage points in an uncertain future.
In 1959 the reviewers encountered Private Grossbart in Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, among a whole rogue's gallery of other Jewish villains. But Private Grossbart's scandalous words actually weren't Jewish at all. They originated in the genteel vocabulary of the March 13, 1959, issue of The New Yorker, where "Defender of the Faith" was first published. Because I've been thinking about text in its visual surroundings, it occurred to me that a magazine famous for its fastidiously decorous prose and its unembarrassed advertisements for luxury might make Private Grossbart's language seem interestingly out of place.
But really, it didn't. In The New Yorker, "Defender of the Faith" was fig-leafed by advertising for consumer goods, as I'd expected, but the Adamic gesture was so frank and so tasteful that it left me without a single irony to wield. The advertising news from 1959 turned out to be only an enjoyably browsable archive of information about a once living, now dead world. Ah yes: there's the obsolete piece of office equipment, the dictaphone, and the once important but now vanished magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and the luxury shoe boutique in the once wealthy city of Detroit. A small puff of little do they know irony arose from the page as I looked and recalled, but it was gone in a moment. I had stalked "Defender of the Faith" carefully to its hiding place in an image surround, but all there was to see was a thoughtful demonstration that times change. To the visuals of irony, The New Yorker had nothing to contribute.
But 51 years later, look at the story's words!
Click to enlarge.
With its training completed, Sergeant Marx's company has received its orders. One soldier is to report to a safe assignment in New Jersey; all the others are to go straight into combat. Marx knows Grossbart's moves by now, and he knows too that the clerk who types the duty rosters is a Jew. In a flash of insight, he calls his counterpart in the headquarters company and explains that there's a Private Grossbart who is so deeply patriotic that he is pleading to be sent to the Pacific. Manipulative at last as Grossbart, Marx adds: "He's a Jewish kid, so I thought I could help him out" (78). The suspicion that prompted him to pick up the telephone turns out to be justified; Grossbart has indeed schemed his way into the New Jersey assignment. But Marx's counterscheme in defense of Jewish faith gets the roster changed, and Grossbart is on his way to the islands where men die.
If "Defender of the Faith" were a war story with an O. Henry plot twist, or a Conradian tale of conflict between a local loyalty and a universal ethical demand, Private Grossbart's exit would come on the last page. But "Defender of the Faith" is a New Yorker story, and New Yorker formula requires one more plot element here. Accordingly, a confrontation scene between Grossbart and Marx is written in. Then comes the ending.
On the text's right is the comfortably lightweight suit. Below the text is the amusing typo from the dear old Cape. In the middle is the concluding epiphany. The story's ostensible subjects are war and peace, life and death, Jews and Jews and Jews and Jews. But its words are New Yorker words only, as comfy and standardized as a nice old Brooks Brothers suit.
And we learn: sometimes the context of an author's words is only more words. The 1959 reviewers' horror wasn't required after all. As of 1959, Philip Roth wasn't yet an author; he was only a producer of New Yorker product. File that, please, on the dictabelt.
If "Defender of the Faith" were a war story with an O. Henry plot twist, or a Conradian tale of conflict between a local loyalty and a universal ethical demand, Private Grossbart's exit would come on the last page. But "Defender of the Faith" is a New Yorker story, and New Yorker formula requires one more plot element here. Accordingly, a confrontation scene between Grossbart and Marx is written in. Then comes the ending.
On the text's right is the comfortably lightweight suit. Below the text is the amusing typo from the dear old Cape. In the middle is the concluding epiphany. The story's ostensible subjects are war and peace, life and death, Jews and Jews and Jews and Jews. But its words are New Yorker words only, as comfy and standardized as a nice old Brooks Brothers suit.
And we learn: sometimes the context of an author's words is only more words. The 1959 reviewers' horror wasn't required after all. As of 1959, Philip Roth wasn't yet an author; he was only a producer of New Yorker product. File that, please, on the dictabelt.
