Rhetoric Study

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that– well, lucky you.” (p. 35)

In this, only the thirty-fifth page of a four-hundred-and-twenty-three-page book, Philip Roth begins what he will do for the rest of the book: he expounds on a universal human trait. However, it is not only that; he makes the trait personal for his reader, makes this common human theme uncomfortably relatable, by using humorous figurative language side-by-side with strong diction and complex syntax. The result is a tone that is somewhat ranting, but nonetheless wise in a dry, cynical sort of way; the result is a passage that teaches and explains not with gentleness, or care for self-esteem or sensibilities, but with strictness and brutal honesty. He is telling humans what we do not want to hear.

Figurative language is used well in this passage. The idea of approaching people without bias in an effort to understand them is contrasted with the tanklike “superficiality” and “shallowness” that humans usually show, a contrast put in place only to show that the effort is useless– a disheartening thing to hear about one’s people skills. “You might as well have the brain of a tank” is a rather strong statement, after all. And the simile of being solitary “like the lonely writers”, ignoring real people in place of people we can create and therefore understand, is just as striking. Humans are at such a loss to comprehend each other that the only thing we can do is either pretend or make up our own characters to know them well? That is a sad, painful, and very true image, and Roth uses this figurative language well to get the image across.

Roth then selects his words carefully to show just how useless it is– his repetition of “you get them wrong”, for example, instills in the brain a sense of personal failure because ‘you’ is a very accusatory pronoun, and its repetition adds to the sense of perpetual incorrectness, of lifelong failure, in the reader– not just in humanity in general. The business of trying to understand people, Roth writes, is a “dazzling illusion empty of all perception”– in fact, it is all “misperception”– strong diction that hints at confusion, a lack of authenticity, and an absence of comprehension… again in ‘you’, the reader, along with the rest of humankind. The people we meet “we mangle with our ignorance every day”, he says; and it is important to note that we do not just pain or irritate or even anger them– we mangle them, a word that brings to mind something torn and dirtied, something breathless and beaten and ill-treated.

Like the repetition of the pronouns “you” and “we”, Roth’s syntax is also a concentrated effort to make the passage personal. The rhetorical questions and long, rambling sentences– in conjunction with his almost abusive way of using figurative language and diction– make the entire paragraph seem like a scold, a diatribe directed at the reader, personally. The rhetorical questions express anger by being drawn out and then ending sharply: “…so ill-equipped are we to all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims?” And then, towards the end, his quick shift in tone from anger to dryness again gives the passage the feeling of a monologue; he says, “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway”, and then makes it personal again with “That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong”. As in a monologue, the next sentence is fragmented, speechlike, almost an addition: “Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.” A moral for the audience, and then again, a personal jab: “But if you can do that– luck you.”

Lucky you, he says– rather sharply, thanks to the dashes, the sarcastic “well”, and the lingering image of being a lonely writer or a vulnerable people person. In American Pastoral, Roth uses these kinds of devices– strong and repetitive diction, figurative language and imagery, and long, complex syntax– to make Swede Levov and Skip Zuckerman’s stories into brutal, true, and uncomfortably relatable stories about families, about America, and about humans as a species, as a group who spends too much time worrying about “this terribly significant business of other people“. He attacks the reader personally; and it works. As harsh as his rhetoric is, it is effective; the reader comes away from a passage like this with a vague and, thanks to his shifts in tone, rather unsettling hope.