Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T18:29:34.520Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Against France: An American Novelistic Fantasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jeffrey Mehlman
Jeffrey Mehlman*
Affiliation:
Boston University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Several years before the recent French-American diplomatic squabble, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, arguably America's two greatest novelists, wrote major works of a markedly anti-French tenor. Indeed, both Ravelstein and The Human Stain, with their disparate griefs against the French, share a remarkably similar plot: against a backdrop of Gallic treachery, a courageously conservative academic, condemned to death by his sexual excesses, asks, before dying, a novelist friend to write the story of his life. Framed by a consideration of an idiosyncratic work of American sculpture that appears to depict the sexual servicing of Abraham Lincoln and an evocation of the career of William Bullitt, Freud's collaborator on a study of Woodrow Wilson and America's ambassador to Paris during the fall of France, this essay offers a reading of both novels and raises the question of American sanctimony and the price France may be expected to pay for it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2004 , pp. 121 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

References

Bellow, Saul (1994) It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Bellow, Saul (2000) Ravelstein. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Bullitt, Orville, ed. (1972) For the President: Personal and Secret: Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques (1967) De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund and Bullitt, William (1966) Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study. New York: Avon.Google Scholar
Gellman, Irwin (1995) Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hitchens, Christopher (2000) Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra (2002) Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco. L’oubli du fascisme. Paris: PUF.Google Scholar
Laplanche, Jean (1970) Vie et mort en psychanalyse. Paris: Flammarion.Google Scholar
Mehlman, Jeffrey (1975) ‘How to Read Freud on Jokes: The Critic as Schadchen’, New Literary History, 6 (winter).Google Scholar
Phillips, Adam (2002) Equals I. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Roth, Philip (2000) The Human Stain. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Roth, Philip (2001) Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve (1990) The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: SAGE Publications.Google Scholar