When, a few months ago, the novelist Aleksandar Hemon slurred Philip Roth in The New York Times — “Roth’s steadfast commitment to the many privileges of male whiteness reliably repels me” — his dismissive righteousness already seemed dated, an artifact of a politicized program of interpretation readers were largely coming to doubt. The rapturous reception of Garth Greenwell’s recent celebration of Roth in The Yale Review, “A Moral Education: In Praise of Filth,” which it seemed like everyone who cares about literature was reading last week, might be taken, then, as an announcement that serious readers have finally soured on Hemon’s style of identitarian moralism.
But Greenwell’s essay does not treat the defeat of such moralism as a fait accompli. Quite the contrary. “Within the small world of people who care about literature and art,” he writes, “the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulnerable.” In a bravura reading of Roth’s scabrous 1995 masterpiece Sabbath’s Theater (“a novel about a rancidly obscene, sexually voracious, inveterately grieving puppeteer”), Greenwell dismantles the premises of the new moralism and insists that “representation has a fundamentally different moral and existential status from that of reality.”
That insistence applies urgently to the college classroom. “When I work with students now,” Greenwell writes, “their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic.” (Anyone doubting the puritanical certainty with which students sometimes make such judgments should read University of Michigan professor Phoebe Gloeckner’s Review essay about trying to teach the comic artist Robert Crumb.)
