Fact and fiction: Billy Flesch on ‘The Plot Against America'
August 25, 2020
by Marjorie Roemer
What do Amelia Earhart’s underwear, a “sick burn,” and Walter Benn Michaels have in common? Well, of course, they show up within a few minutes of one another in Billy Flesch’s seminar on Roth’s The Plot Against America and the ensuing video series.
In these seminars one can expect elucidation of the text and so much more. With an encyclopedic store of knowledge and a remarkable memory, Professor Flesch can take us through paths unimagined.
Here’s an example: in the novel there are many moments that resonate with fairy tale incidents, from Rumpelstiltskin to Cinderella, but we focused particularly on a reference to Hansel and Gretel, only to be led to Thomas Pynchon’s related reference in Gravity’s Rainbow, and beyond that to the preceding reference in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Everything is a palimpsest, one writing resting on another, maybe most especially appropriate when talking about Roth and particularly this novel that rests somewhere between a factual world and a counterfactual, imaginary one.
It was, then, significant that we started our discussion with the paratext, as Billy explained, the part you don’t read: the list of Roth’s books, the dedication, the surround of the story. But soon we ventured into a much larger surround: the way the text places itself within Tolstoy’s oft-quoted line at the opening of Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion,” and Melville’s story of another orphan (Ishmael) as well as his detailed study of whaling and focus on research, information, and expertise that Roth shares. (We were assured that the baseball references were real and accurate, as was so much else in this realistic/unreal world.)
The novel takes place in the 1940s, but was published in 2004. Its unmentioned but actual context is the years of the George W. Bush administration. The video, filmed fifteen years later, has as its unacknowledged frame the years of the Trump presidency. These differences figure in the changes from one to the other, as well as the requirements of different genres. Watching clips of the series, we were able to note changes and evaluate their effect on us.
One of the significant points that shaped our reading was the presence of four Philip Roths: the actual child and the fictional child, the actual author and the fictional author. We moved from the view of the mystified and frightened child, observing everything but not always understanding it, to the perspective of the older Roth in the novel, and then necessarily to the actual Roth whose family in Weequahic in the 40s is here so lovingly remembered and recreated.
The opening line of the novel is “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” So, we trace the development of the young Philip through wide-eyed innocence to a grappling with life as it really is. And, in turn, to an America trying to equate its aspirational self with its actual self. The novel’s ending brings us back to the world of ordinary life with its “people in trouble,” the subject matter that Roth explicitly claims as the center of his work.
As in all of Billy’s classes, he builds his comments on the comments that class participants offer. Despite the constraints of Zoom, this was a particularly active and knowledgeable group. The exchanges were rich and challenging and Billy’s pyrotechnics on full and exhilarating display. Sigmund Freud, Dr. Johnson, Philip Larkin, James Merrill, and so many more were with us. It was an amazing week and being simultaneous with the Democratic convention made it even more intense, at least for this participant.