American anti-pastoral: incontinence and impurity in 'American Pastoral' and 'The Human Stain'

Philip Roth's fiction has always been characterized by tension between desire to exert control, impose order, explain, and impulse to break free from all constraints; to revel in anarchy, chaos, and disorder; to celebrate indeterminate, unknowable, inexplicable. Nowhere are these tensions more clearly articulated than in his recent trilogy of novels American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).1 Embedded in rich, dense, allusive language of these novels particularly first and third of trilogy is a dialectic between what Roth in an earlier novel, The Counterlife (1997), calls the pastoral [. . .] womb-dream of life in beautiful state of innocent prehistory (323) and what, in American Pastoral, he describes as the fury, violence, and desperation of counter-pastoral (86). I prefer term anti-pastoral, partly because I used it before appearance of Roth's novel to define a certain trend in postwar Jewish fiction, and partly because I believe it describes more accurately what is not simply a reaction or response to pastoral mode but an antithetically opposed philosophy.2 In Roth's fiction pastoral and anti-pastoral represent not simply alternative modes of fiction, but two worldviews that are irreconcilable and inimical to each other. In pastoral realm, man lives in harmony with nature, his fellow man (and woman), and himself; in antipastoral, man is in conflict with nature, with his fellow man (and woman), and with himself. It is ultimately unbridgeable gulf between these two realms that tears apart protagonists of American Pastoral and The Human Stain Seymour Levov and Coleman Silk who try to straddle them. A number of critics and reviewers have commented on similarities be-