by Philip Roth
Well, that’s over. The pastoral stops here and it stops with circumcision. That delicate surgery should be performed upon the penis of a brand-new boy seems to you the very cornerstone of human irrationality, and maybe it is. And that the custom should be unbreakable even by the author of my somewhat skeptical books proves to you just how much my skepticism is worth up against a tribal taboo. But why not look at it another way? I know that touting circumcision is entirely anti-Lamaze and the thinking these days that wants to debrutalize birth and culminates in delivering the child in water in order not even to startle him. Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that’s what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in—also that you’re mine and not theirs. There is no way around it: you enter history through my history and me. Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strifeless unity. Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living “naturally,” unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own. Inasmuch as one invents one’s meanings, along with impersonating one’s selves, this is the meaning I propose for that rite. I’m not one of those Jews who want to hook themselves up to the patriarchs or even to the modern state; the relationship of my Jewish “I” to their Jewish “we” is nothing like so direct and unstrained as Henry now wishes his to be, nor is it my intention to simplify that connection by flying the flag of our child’s foreskin. Only a few hours ago, I went so far as to tell Shuki Elchanan that the custom of circumcision was probably irrelevant to my “I.” Well, it turns out to be easier to take that line on Dizengoff Street than sitting here beside the Thames. A Jew among Gentiles and a Gentile among Jews. Here it turns out, by my emotional logic, to be the number-one priority. Aided by your sister, your mother, and even by you, I find myself in a situation that has reactivated the strong sense of difference that had all but atrophied in New York, and, what’s more, that has drained the domestic idyll of its few remaining drops of fantasy. Circumcision confirms that there is an us, and an us that isn’t solely him and me. England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
I think in the context of our adventures—and Henry’s—that it’s fitting to conclude with my erection, the circumcised erection of the Jewish father, reminding you of what you said when you first had occasion to hold it. I wasn’t so chagrined by your virginal diffidence as by the amusement that came in its wake. Uncertainly I asked, “Isn’t it to your liking?” “Oh, yes, it’s fine,” you said, delicately weighing it in the scale of your hand, “but it’s the phenomenon itself: it just seems a rather rapid transition.” I’d like those words to stand as the coda to that book you so foolishly tell me you wish to escape. To escape into what, Marietta? It may be as you say that this is no life, but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come.
BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH
Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
Letting Go (1962)
When She Was Good (1967)
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Our Gang (1971)
The Breast (1972)
The Great American Novel (1973)
My Life as a Man (1974)
Reading Myself and Others (1975)
The Professor of Desire (1977)
The Ghost Writer (1979)
A Philip Roth Reader (1980)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
Zuckerman Bound (1985)
The Counterlife (1987)
Copyright © 1986 by Philip Roth
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roth, Philip.
The counterlife.
I. Title.
PS3568.O855C6 1987 813'.54 86–18296
The selection here is reprinted with permission from Fodor’s Switzerland 1986, copyright © 1985 by Fodor’s Travel Guides. Published by Fodor’s Travel Guides. Lyrics from “Lay, Lady, Lay” by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1969 by Big Sky Music. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The selection here from The Short Novels of Tolstoy, selected, with an introduction by Philip Rahv, translated by Aylmer Maude, Dial Press, 1946.
eISBN 9781466846418
First eBook edition: May 2013
