摘 要

菲利普·罗斯的小说《反美阴谋》描述了美国犹太人1940年到1942年间遭遇的一段不同的历史。本小说通过展现主人公家庭的创伤经历揭露美国社会发生的巨变。在文学批评下的创伤理论研究领域中，凯西·卡鲁思和一些学者创立的传统创伤模式引起了其他学者对创伤研究的极大兴趣。米歇尔·巴勒夫在其专著《美国创伤小说的实质》中提出了一种有别于传统创伤研究模式的新兴多元创伤模式。该模型关注的焦点是塑造创伤价值的背景因素。根据巴勒夫的理论，本文从地点、任务个性、创伤意象等背景因素分析小说中的创伤。同时，本文从个人、种族、国家三个层面分型小说的创伤主题。本文是新兴创伤理论应用的一次实践，旨在为理解创伤提供新的视角。

关键词：《反美阴谋》；创伤；多元模式；背景因素

Abstract

Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America depicts an alternate history of American Jews from 1940 to 1942. This novel reveals radical changes of American society by exhibiting traumatic experience of the protagonist’s family. In the field of trauma theory in literary criticism, the popular traditional trauma model established by Cathy Caruth and some other scholars has raised great interest in the topic of trauma. Michelle Balaev suggests a new pluralist model differing from the traditional one in his The Nature of Trauma in American Novels. The focolization of her model falls on contextual factors shaping the value of traumatic experience. According to Balaev’s theory, this paper aims to analyze trauma with examples in the novel The Plot against America from the perspective of contextual factors such as places, personal characters and traumatic images. The paper is a practice of utilizing new trauma theory, to provide a new perspective of understanding traumatic novels.

Key words: The Plot against America; Trauma; Pluralistic Model; Contextual Factors

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Philip Roth and His Major Works 1

1.2 The Plot against America 2

1.3 The Trauma Theory 2

2 Highlights of Michelle Balaev’s New Trauma Theory 4

2.1 Pluralistic Trauma Model 4

2.2 Contextual Factors Shaping the Value of Traumatic Experiences 5

3 Contextual Factors in The Plot against America 7

3.1 Places 7

3.1.1 The Ghetto in Newark 7

3.1.2 The Hotel in Washington, D.C 9

3.2 Personal Characters 10

3.3 Traumatic Images 12

3.3.1 Ghosts and Corpse in the Cellar 12

3.3.2 Stump 12

4 Traumatic Themes in The Plot against America 14

4.1 Individual Trauma—Philip’s Fear 14

4.2 Racial trauma—the Loss of Identity of Jewish American 14

4.3 National Trauma—Social Riots 15

5. Conclusion 16

References 17

Acknowledgements 18

Analysis of the Novel The Plot against America from the Perspective of New Trauma Theory

1 Introduction

1.1 Philip Roth and His Major Works

Philip Roth was born in a middle-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He received a master’s degree in English Literature from Bucknell University in 1954. His first collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959, won him the National Book Award for Fiction. In 1962, his first novel Letting Go was published, from which Roth had been a prolific author. In 1969, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, gave Roth widespread commercial and critical success. Later, the famous “American Trilogy” (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain) came out.

In his later years, he was still active in writing and published several novels such as The Human Stain (2000), The Dying Animal (2001), The Plot against America (2004), Everyman (2006), Exit Ghost (2007), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and the Nemesis (2010). By his retirement in 2012, Roth had published at least 30 works, including the 3 major novel series (Zuckerman, Kepesh and Roth).

As the living literary legend in American Literature, Roth has nearly won all the major literature prizes in America, including three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman), two National Book Awards for Fiction (Goodbye, Columbus and Sabbath's Theater), two National Book Critics Circle Awards (The Counterlife and Patrimony), and the Pulitzer Prize (American Pastoral).

1.2 The Plot against America

The Plot against America was published in 2004, when the presidential election was in full swing. Unlike dystopian fictions like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Roth shows readers an alternate fate of American Jews from 1940 to 1942. Here，"alternate" does not mean simply "unreal" or "counterfactual" but connotes "virtual", "probable", and even "real". The narrator’s name of the novel is Philip Roth, the real name of the author. This novel integrates perfectly memory, history and imagination. In this novel, the author’s and his families’ names and ages are real names in reality, adding to the immersion and "realism" of the novel.
In The Plot against America, American international aviation hero, Lindbergh, beat Franklin Roosevelt in presidential election and was elected as the 33^rd president of the United States. As an isolationist and Nazi sympathizer, Lindbergh in the novel was a supporter of anti-Semitism, conforming to political claims of Lindbergh in history. When he came to power, he introduced several policies to disperse, assimilate and persecute Jews at the same time entered into alliance with Nazi Germany. Lindbergh’s retrograde policies finally led to political turmoil and social riots. In the end, he fled from America, and Roosevelt came to power again. Roth associates his family’s experience with America’s history and depicts the sufferings of Jews in the eyes of a 7-year-old child, making it clear that a leader’s fault can easily lead the country to degeneration. Being an autobiographical work, the novel’s focalization is not what Lindbergh has done during his presidency but the impacts Roth and his families suffer and traumatic memory during that period.

1.3 The Trauma Theory

The trauma theory that contemporary literary critics usually utilize originates from the psychological theory established by Sigmund Freud. Freud’s analysis of trauma is mainly recorded in two scholarly works, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism, from which later scholars get theoretical sources. However, Freud’s trauma theory didn’t receive much attention at his time. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud differentiates fear, fright and apprehension and finds their relationship with "danger". He draws a conclusion that apprehension will not cause neuroses. (Freud, 1955) In Moses and Monotheism, Freud points out after experiencing mechanical severe shocks, train crashes and other fatal accidents, people will catch what is called traumatic neurosis.(Freud, 1990) The state above is later acknowledged and defined as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) by American Psychiatric Association (APA), indicating the formal approval of Freud’s opinion. Freud’s theory that trauma occurs because of a rupture are regard as the foundational basis of traditional trauma theory. (Balaev, 2014)

The greatest contribution Freud has made to the research of trauma is studying trauma from the perspective of psychology. In 1990s, Cathy Caruth from Yale University promoted the formation of classic trauma by introducing the concept of trauma to the field of social science. Cathy Caruth acknowledged Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of "afterwardness". Freud wrote in his unpublished work, "a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event." (Wikipedia, 2016) Thus, Caruth believes that "the afterwardness of trauma constructs special time structure of survivor’s traumatic experience because of the belatedness of the awareness of the traumatic events." (胡程智, 2014) Caruth suggests in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History that "trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past." (Caruth, 1996, p4) Besides inability of locatable, she views trauma as deferred and recurrent wounding.

2 Highlights of Michelle Balaev’s New Trauma Theory

Reviewing the development of trauma theory, Michelle Balaev puts forward new literary trauma theory in his book The Nature of Trauma in American Novels published by Northwestern University Press. "This book examines literary trauma theory from its foundations to its implementations and new possibilities." (Balaev, 2012, xi) As Balaev points out, the book doesn’t aim to abandon classic trauma theory, but to "allow greater interpretive avenues to explore the nature of trauma in literature." (Balaev, 2012, xviii) There are two highlights in Michelle Balaev’s new trauma theory, pluralistic trauma model and contextual factors shaping the value of traumatic experiences.

2.1 Pluralistic Trauma Model

Cathy Caruth suggests in his book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History that trauma is an "unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language". (Balaev, 2014, p.1) According to Caruth’s approach of conceptualizing trauma, trauma is a recurring sense of absence that the survivor has difficulty in understanding extreme experiences, thus preventing linguistic value. This model suggests that traumatic experience is not stored in memory so it will never emerge as part of consciousness, thus producing a pathological memory. Therefore the survivor is only able to feel the traumatic experience by recollection instead of direct reaction to the event itself. Balaev calls the model Caruth and some other scholars established classic or traditional model. In Balaev’s opinion, one psychological theory of trauma upon which contemporary researchers depend is discursive, thus she suggests a pluralist model based on plurality of psychological theories.

Balaev’s pluralistic model utilizes both pathological theories by Freud, Janet and Charcot, which are the psychological basis of classic model, and theories of other psychologists and psychiatrists. Unlike the classic model, the pluralistic model claims that trauma originates from multiple rather than one sole source and the inaccessibility and unrepresentability of trauma are not indispensable. In the pluralistic model, conceptualization of trauma can’t be separated from the acknowledgement of pathological responses, at the same time needs the engagement of other responses. "Psychological research indicates that amnesia, dissociation or repression may be responses to trauma but they are not exclusive responses." (Balaev, 2014, p.6) More importantly, a pluralistic model shows functions and effects of traumatic experience precisely, extending the notions such as experience, identity and memory proposed by the classic model.

A problem of the classic model is defining trauma as deferred and recurrent wounding because this formulation excludes the value from traumatic experience. In the classic model, the survivor’s participant in traumatic experience is ignored due to the abundance of the survivor’s knowledge of the experience, thus the variability of trauma and its value is denied. To refute this, Balaev points out that "the pluralistic model entertains a view of remembering as a fluid and selective process of interpretation, rather than only as a literal, veridical recall." (Balaev, 2014, p.3) In consequence, memory can be influenced by various internal and external factors. According to the viewpoint above, an individual’s memory is apt to be revised from time to time, thus the remembering process is possibly changing over time. Consequently in the pluralistic model, the meaning of traumatic experience determined can be alterable. Thus the variability of trauma in its definition and representations is likely to be acknowledged, and even the active potential meaning of harm is able to be emphasized. Because of the involvement of specific internal and external factors (collectively referred as contextual factors) such as cultural background and historical era, trauma is viewed by Balaev as mutable and transitional, instead of "an inherently wordless event that creates an unknowable memory or mental illness." (Balaev, 2012, xiv) Holding this point of view, the author of the paper is able to find multiple meanings of trauma, rather than to regard the experience of trauma as a wordless ghost.

2.2 Contextual Factors Shaping the Value of Traumatic Experiences

The establishment of Balaev’s pluralistic model profits from her proposal of attaching importance to the utilization of contextual factors. Contextual factors include personality traits, family history, culture, geographic location, place, and historical period (杨晓,2013) "Utilizing a pluralistic model for the practice of literary trauma theory allows for a closer examination if the ways that contextual factors such as place and society inform the experience, remembrance, and retelling of a traumatic experience in a novel." (Balaev, 2012, xv) Balaev claims that contextual factors help to specify the value of traumatic experience. Since trauma is influenced by contextual factors, the idea that trauma has only the dissociative trait needs to be reconsidered. Having accepted Balaev’s pluralistic model, the author of this paper will analyze the novel The Plot against America by emphasizing contextual factors.

3 Contextual Factors in The Plot against America

3.1 Places

A place is a special visible factor, serving not only as the site of events, but also as the source of individual and memory. The term "place" is a physical site where people live or an environment people imagine. "Place is not only a location of experience, but also an entity that organize memories, feelings and the meaning for the individual and for groups." (Balaev, 2012, xv) Among those contextual factors, Balaev particularly emphasizes the significance of place in her pluralistic model because place can show the value of trauma from different dimensions. The place where traumatic experience takes place and the time of history are significant indicators in describing trauma’s value since they show the blueprint of a specific period. Drawing upon this opinion, the author chooses two typical places in The Plot against America to analyze how they influence the formulation of trauma and to find out the value of the event.

3.1.1 The Ghetto in Newark

In the first chapter of the novel, the protagonist Philip first introduces precisely his family members. "My father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent… My mother… was thirty-six…My brother, Sandy…was twelve and I…was seven." (Roth, 2004, p.3) Roth’s father Herman, mother Bess and brother Sandy are just like who they are in their real life. Next, Roth informs that Philip’s family lived in a ghetto in Newark. "A block to the north was the working class…was predominantly Gentile." "All was Jews." (Roth, 2004, p.3) After several catastrophes in the history, due to the particular traits of Jewish people, Jews always live together. Traditional Jewish neighborhood is called ghetto, originating from the term to describe an area of the city where Jews were restricted to live (张淑清, 2002). Jewish ghetto has two features: relatively complete and open in space (曲佩慧, 2013). The ghetto as a cultural fence, on the one hand, prevents Jewish national character from assimilation and protects Jewish tradition. On the other hand, it reinforces the introverted character and exclusiveness of Jewish people. Philip Roth, being the second generation of Jewish immigrants to America, perceives the changes of lifestyle in Jewish ghetto. Although Jewish tradition held a dominant position among Jews, American lifestyle gradually influences Jewish daily life. Jews listen to radio, admire film stars and change dressing style—American culture has inevitably become part of Jewish (黄铁池, 2013).