Philip Roth’s
revealing lights
in American Pastoral
I
La prima edizione americana di Pastorale
americana e un edizione tascabile Einaudi /
The first American edition of American Pastoral
and a paperback edition by Einaudi
16
LUCE 326 / EPIFANIE DI LUCE
n American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Newark,
New Jersey, 1933 – New York, 2018), the novel
which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
in 1998, in the beginning, light is absent.
In the first part, in the Paradise Remembered
of “the Swede” – a rich and successful
American called Seymour Irving Levov,
husband to Dawn, Miss New Jersey,
and parent to the adored daughter Merry –,
no light is noted.
Light appears in the second part, in the
Chapter The fall, after Merry, influenced by the
contradictions of the Vietnam war, brings the
war home, and becomes “the terrorist of
Rimrock” who is constantly escaping. Initially
her friends hide her, then she hides in the
hinterland of Newark, where there are the
factories of the American Civil War, the
foundries and workshops, which “were
windowless now, the sunlight sealed out with
brick and mortar, their exits and entrances
plugged with cinderblock,” as the author
of the novel describes. When light makes
its entrance in the novel, it is not allowed
to illuminate or to describe the state of
abandonment of the factories. However, when
the Swede finds Merry, in a very small room,
“where they now sat no more than an arm’s
length from each other,” in that dump, the
light, even though dim, reappears in the
novel, and the author reveals that “there was
no light other than what fell through the dirty
transom.” Radiant vitality bursts into the
novel in the dramatic dialogue between father
and daughter. But Merry refuses it, and also
refuses to use electric light: “she renounced
the vice of electricity too,” Roth points out.
The author notes that Merry “lived without
light. Why?” The question remains
unanswered. Roth is aware of the
indispensable presence of light in human
existence; however, coherently with his
descriptive conception of the novel, he only
records the voluntary and totalizing
renunciations of the Swede’s daughter,
without any explanation: “She lived without
light, she lived without everything. This was
how their life had worked out: she lived in
Newark with nothing, he lived in Old Rimrock
with everything except her, Roth masterfully
concludes.
Merry has become unrecognisable, anorexic,
crouched on the floor of that room, and little
like the child who some time before had
played on the swing which hung from one
of the maples that protected the stone walls
of the Levov old house from the sun. Trees that
the Swede loved so much that “It was more
astonishing to him that he owned trees
than that he owned factories,” as the author
specifies in the third part of American Pastoral
that he calls Paradise Lost.
How could the Swede renounce the trees
of his garden to satisfy Dawn’s desire to build
a new house to try to forget Merry’s absence?
How could he appreciate the designs and
the layout set out by architect Orcutt, “charting
how sunlight would angle into the windows
on the first day of each month of the year.
‘A flood of sunlight,’ said Dawn. ‘Light!’
she exclaimed. ‘Light!”
By excessively exalting the light of the future
home, Dawn once again condemns the old
stone house, where the light that entered
was shaded by the trees that the Swede loved
so much.
Also Merry “turned out to love the trees
no more than Dawn had loved the house,”
the old house where the light that flowed
in through the windows, veiled by the trees,
was only appreciated by the Swede, and only
by him. The different reactions to light, exalted
by Dawn, and searched for by Orcutt, indirectly
reveal to the Swede, the love affair between
his wife and the architect: “I get the idea
now about the light. I get the idea of the
light washing over those walls. That’s going
to be something to see. I think you’re going to
be very happy in it,” he says distractedly while
speaking to Orcutt. During the conversation
with the architect, from his thoughts, words
that reveal his voluntary renunciation to live
in the new house where there are no trees
and too much light, escapes. A decision that
provokes a simple and conclusive question,
to which, to paraphrase the last lines of his
masterpiece, Roth could answer saying: what
could be so reprehensible in the Swede’s love
for the veiled light of the trees in his garden,
present in an old stone house?
7 – To be continued. For “Epiphanies of light”, to
date, the following short stories by Empio Malara
have been published in LUCE: “Alessandro
Manzoni, a creator of light” (n. 317, September
2016); “Herman Melville. Light that invites us on a
journey” (n. 321, September 2017);
“Light and dark in the portrait of James Joyce as
a youngt man” (n. 322, December 2017); “Flashes
and lights in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms”
(n. 323, March 2018); “The artificial sun in the
novel The magic mountain by Thomas Mann”
(n. 324, June 2018); “The irreverent and irrational
light in some texts by Carlo Emilio Gadda”
(n. 325, September 2018).