Thursday 6 July 2017

ON READING PHILIP ROTH’S ‘I HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH AMERICAN NAMES’



The guarded affirmation of a national voice speaking through Philip Roth’s writing eludes me.

I baulk at his end-line:
the rich native tongue of which I am possessed
Writers in Ireland, including mono-linguists, live in proximity to a language – Irish, Gaelic, Erse, Celtic – often controversially described as a ‘language of the dispossessed’, which complicates the voice of the writer so that the strength of assertion that Philip Roth can muster is elusive.
Certainly a great slew of magnificent Hiberno-English writings, from voices across social, geographical and religious locales, have been heard from Ireland.
Would Louis MacNeice, Thomas McCarthy, Maeve Binchy and Eavan Boland, all writing in English in the 20th century, each hold to an assertion of being an Irish writer in the manner in which Philip Roth asserts he is, above all other divisors of ethnicity, social class, religion and parish, an American writer?
Perhaps a nation requires American gigantism; perhaps it needs to occupy a high position in the pyramid of national measures, from a base of ‘occupied’ to an apex of ‘free’, in order for its writers to hold such a view of themselves.
Held up to closer inspection, perhaps it is possible to ring-fence the multiplicity of voices writing in America into one great corral that is that federation of states which were welded together by a model of economic development so intense it took the furnace of an horrific internal war to re-define a brutal form of enslavement and to open the way for increasing waves of European immigrants to industrialise the plains and cities of the mid- and far west.
That certain writers’ voices, and Philip Roth’s is one of them, can soar above their own particularity and glide upon the rising thermals of a national voice, is no doubt possible. Jose Saramago is a Portuguese writer? Yes? Nadine Gordimer is a South African writer? Yes? James Joyce is an Irish writer? Or is he?
He wrote marvellously in the ‘rich native tongue’ of which he was possessed, as dynamically and creatively as Philip Roth, ironically for both of them and for us, their readers, in a close cousin of each others English which superseded and fully absorbed the indigenous languages it encountered.
Would Philip Roth say he was an American writer if he wrote in Yiddish? Or Hebrew? Or in Lenape, a language of the swamps and coastal plains along the Delaware River basin, around which the industrialised urban sprawl of New Jersey grew?
If James Joyce wrote in Irish any question as to his being an Irish writer would be superfluous. But would he be read? And so lauded?
A conjecture then, on languages and contingency in Ireland and America:
Demographic changes consistent with Philip Roth’s description of the American Dream as ‘radical impermanence’ indicate that, in the future, writers in America may possess American-Spanish as their ‘rich native tongue'. Historically, a 16th century war between Spain and England ended in Ireland in 1588 with an armada of Spanish warships floundering on the western coasts of the island, where sailors and soldiers scrambled ashore to survival with or slaughter by the locals.
The conjecture suggests that had the armada succeeded, James Joyce would have written his great works in Spanish, as an Irish writer.
We write in the languages we grow up in. Philip Roth says as much. I write in English because I grew up in it. I write in Irish because I possess it (and it possesses me) as a post-historical contingency. I grew up in English because the Spanish armada sank and English became the language that supplanted Irish and many other languages across the world. As did Spanish.
Readers are fortunate to have the works of Philip Roth in American-English. We would be equally fortunate to have his work were he writing in American-Spanish, but that’s for a future time, perhaps, for a post-Roth time, indeed for a time that may never come to pass.
And we are fortunate to have James Joyce, Jennifer Johnston, Roddy Doyle, Polly Devlin, Patrick MacGill, John Hewitt, Emma Donoghue – readers can make their own lists – who are Irish writers, however fragile and contested such a declaration and a designation may be.
Or are we to speak as poet Michael Hartnett did, bi-lingual and restive – what writer isn’t? - who asserted that English was ‘the perfect language to sell pigs in’ when he proclaimed his Farewell to English?
Wrestling with the contingencies of our time and place determines us as writers and designates the assertions we make about our voices, our sense of where our expressive acts sit and the national and other carapaces under which they shelter.






Ronda, 7.6.2017






www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter



No comments:

Post a Comment