The End of the Jew as Metaphor

For some twenty-five or thirty years — between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s — a single explosive development in our literature made the experience of being Jewish-in-America a metaphor that attracted major talents, changed the language, and galvanized imaginative writing throughout a Western world badly in need of a charge. Its two pathbreaking stars — one at the start, the other at the end — were Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, a pair of writers who strong-armed the culture into accommodating the experience. Not another writer after Roth could lay claim to the metaphor with the demanding savvy that he and Bellow had brought to the enterprise.
In its glory days, Jewish-American writing was an indicator of a cultural shift that a couple of million Americans had thought they’d never live to see: a shift that ushered in a final phase of assimilation for Jews at levels of American life previously unavailable to them (very much like the shift that has occurred over the past few decades for blacks, women, and gays). This shift was welcomed half a century ago with a violent rush of words that announced the arrival of a narrating voice whose signature traits were a compulsive brilliance, an exuberant nastiness, and a take-no-prisoners humour edged in self-laceration. These traits never deserted the work of those years; rather, they were integral to the entire undertaking.
An angry fever inhabited these writers of the 1950s and 1960s, one that burned with a strength that routinely threatened either to purge or to consume the body upon which it fed. Conventional English could not address the condition. It required a syntax and a sentence structure that could fan the fever, spread the infection, stimulate a nervous system clearly in distress. The American language was ready to accommodate. Virginia Woolf had once complained that she couldn’t find the words to make an English sentence that would describe what illness felt like to her, because as an Englishwoman she was constrained from taking liberties with the language. This is exactly what outsider literature does in this country: fashions the language anew, precisely so that it can express what it feels like to be ill. That, essentially, is what Jewish-American writing at its best has done. In my view, it would never be about anything else. In the hands of a Saul Bellow or a Philip Roth, such expressiveness could — did — set off a literary charge of epic power.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.