Philip Roth’s American Pastoral takes American radicalism and terrorism as one of its main topics. Zuckerman, the narrator, explores the life of “the Swede” (or “Swede”) whose daughter, Merry, becomes a radical and ends up blowing up a few buildings and killing a few people in the process. In flight from her first terrorist act, she leaves home and her father. In despair, Swede imagines that if he becomes radicalized (or shows himself to her as radicalized) she will come home. Parodying his attempts to understand and become radical, Zuckerman imagines Swede as having a fantasy that Angela Davis appears in his house. I have dedicated two blogs to Zuckerman’s portrayal of Angela Davis (“Saint Angela”) which, to be sure, has its comic elements. As I noted in my entries, Zuckerman shows how Swede wants his daughter back so bad that he does all he can to “hide” some of his differences with Davis regarding her radicalism.

Zuckerman, at many different points in the novel, mocks radicalism and associates it with a kind of fanatical, religious form of worship. (I have pointed this out in his reflections on Angela Davis and Swede’s emulations of her as a “saint” who he prays to for help.) Later in the novel, Zuckerman recounts how Merry, in flight from the FBI, becomes paranoid. She recalls this moment to her father when, towards the end of the novel, the two come back together:

Merry told her father, she noticed a youngish black bum, new to the park (where she was hiding out in Miami), watching her tutoring boys (English). She knew immediately what that meant. A thousand times before she’d thought it was the FBI and a thousand times she’d been wrong – in Oregon, in Idaho, in Kentucky, in Maryland, the FBI watching her at stores where she clerked; watching in the diners and the cafeterias where she washed dishes; watching on the shabby streets where she lived; watching in the libraries where she hid out to read the newspapers and study the revolutionary thinkers (260)

Zuckerman tells us that in these libraries she would read so as to “master” the work of “Marx, Marcuse, Malcom X, and Franz Fanon”(261). Of the three thinkers, Zuckerman gives the most space to Franz Fanon. Writing on him, Zuckerman notes that Fanon was a “French theorist whose sentences” were “litanized” by Merry “at bedtime like a supplication”(261). He goes on to note that for Merry, Fanon’s work had “sustained her in much the same way as a ritual sacrament”(261). To bring out the ritualistic nature of the text, so to speak, Zuckerman quotes him at length:

It must constantly be borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as “a woman alone in the street” and her revolutionary mission instinctively. The Algerian woman is not a secret agent. It is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag. She does not have the sensation of playing a role. There is no character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises directly to the level of tragedy. (261)

Immediately after this passage, Zuckerman takes us into Swede’s mind. What does Swede think about this passage from Fanon which his daughter recites as if it were a holy text?

Thinking: And the New Jersey girl descends to the level of idiocy. The New Jersey girl we sent to Montessori school because she was so bright, the New Jersey girl who at Morristown High got only A’s and B’s – the New Jersey girl rises directly to the level of disgraceful playacting. The New Jersey Girl rises to the level of psychosis. (261)

As one can see, he thinks of this text and its recitation as evincing a “level of disgraceful playacting” and the “level of psychosis.” In his mind, this text affirms the unthinkable. These words evince the anti-American pastoral.

Edward Said, however, doesn’t deem this psychotic or playacting. He takes it seriously and argues that violence makes perfect sense. In his book Culture and Imperialism, Said turns to Fanon’s work as a move toward post-nationalism (which, in effect, is the anti-American pastoral). Said notes that Fanon turned to violence as a way of going beyond nationalism:

If I have so often cited Fanon, it is because more dramatically and decisively than anyone, I believe, he expresses the immense cultural shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation. (268)

But, to be sure, one doesn’t arrive at the “theoretical domain of liberation” without violence. In fact, Said says it is necessary for the transformation of the national into a “trans-personal” and “trans-national force”(269). Fanon’s “entire work” is “set into motion, so to speak, by the native’s violence, a force intended to bridge the gap between white and non-white”(270). Violence (and not peace) is the great uniter of humankind. Said calls it a new kind of “humanism” and calls violence (drawing on a Hegalian language used by Fanon) a “synthesis”:

For Fanon violence…is the synthesis that overcomes the reification of white man as subject, Black man as object. (270).

To add academic legitimacy (or is it, rather, the “legitimacy effect”?) to this, Said cites the respected Marxist thinker Georg Lukacs who, he claims, Fanon was reading while he wrote these words about violence as “synthesis.”

My conjecture is that while he was writing the work Fanon read Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, which had just appeared in Paris in French translation in 1960. Lukacs shows that the effects of capitalism are fragmentation and reification: in such a dispensation, every human being becomes an object, or commodity, the product of human work is alienated from its maker, the image of whole or community disappears entirely. (270)

Although Lukacs doesn’t call for violence, Said paraphrases him to say that he calls for an “act of mental will, by which the lonely mind could join another by imagining the common bond between them, breaking the enforced rigidity that kept human beings as slaves to tyrannical outside forces. Hence reconciliation and synthesis between subject and object”(270). In other words, Said interprets “act of mental will” as violence. But in the following paragraph he calls it an “act of the will.” There is, of course, a difference between a mental and a physical “act of the will,” but Said elides the difference in one fell swoop of the pen.

Regardless, Said’s reflections of Fanon – by way of Lukacs – have one goal; namely, the legitimacy of violence. Said goes on to call violence, citing Fanon, a “cleansing force”(271), cites another passage where Fanon says that the “native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler,” and also a passage where Fanon states that, for the native, “life can only spring up from the rotting corpse of the settler”(271).

What is astonishing is the fact that all of this passes through the gates of reason and that Edward Said makes us think that violence makes perfect sense; in fact, for Said (and for Merry of American Pastoral) it makes the most sense. What would Zuckerman or Swede think of this legitimization of violence by Fanon and Said? Given what we have seen above, we can see that they think that Merry is psychotic and childish to repeat Fanon in a religious manner. But what happens when Fanon’s advocation of violence-as-an-answer is articulated by an academic and granted legitimacy? Should we also call him psychotic and childish or something else?

If Said and Fanon make sense, then post-nationalism, the kind arrived at through violence (real and mental), also makes sense.   And this should give us pause….This is no laughing matter….