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Notes
1. As Harsin notes, Post-truth has been used in academic and public discourse since the early 1990s, though its use has been much more common in 2015–2016 (5). See also Brahms (1).
2. See also Scruton (“Post-Truth, Pure Nonsense”). Academics who argue so include, for example, Salgado (329); Calcutt (“The Surprising Origins of ‘Post-Truth’”). Several scholars, however, question the argument that post-truth descends from postmodern philosophy. See, for example, Coxon (110).
3. See Calcutt (“The Surprising Origins of ‘Post-Truth’–and How it was Spawned by the Liberal Left”).
4. Other scholars, who wrote about the difference between the two, include, for example, Prado (5–7); Angermuller (1–8); Vogelmann (27–34); Fuller (220–21).
5. As Shostak remarks, from the late 1970s, Roth “has been aided by poststructuralist epistemologies” (Countertexts 172).
6. The line between fact and fiction has also been blurred in journalism, through the “move in journalism toward infotainment,” as “[p]rime time magazines” feature “soap opera stories or heroic rescue videos” that resemble “reality entertainment shows” (Rosenstiel, qtd. in Clark 5).
7. My analysis is in line with Kelly’s, who argues that in THS, Roth “seeks truth while demonstrating a very contemporary awareness of how truth is inscribed within ‘powerful, larger, more stratified contexts’” (51).
8. One exception I found is Faisst, who mentions this idea, claiming that in THS ”[b]eing American […] means the creation of a set of fictions about his black, white, and Jewish protagonist, and the hipster figure is only one of them” and that “Roth’s specific use of humor undermines the fictions he sets up—which in many ways are America’s racial fictions—from within his own fiction about America” (122).
9. For further discussion on the analogy between fiction and passing, see Reznick (“Between Fiction and Reality” 191–220).
10. Similarly, regarding gender passing, Halberstam claims, “Eccentric, double, duplicitous, deceptive, odd, self-hating: all of these judgments swirl around the passing woman, the cross-dresser […] as if other lives—gender normative lives—were not odd, not duplicitous, not doubled and contradictory in every turn” (57–58).
11. See McDonald and Roden (71); Charis-Carlson (114).
12. See, for example, Basu (120).
13. For a further discussion of Lewinsky’s Jewishness in THS, see Franco (90).
14. Sexual intercourse between a male and a female is often depicted in Roth’s novels as the male’s conquest over the female, from the male’s perspective. See, for example, Shostak (“Roth and Gender” 117); Cooper (104).
15. See also Reznick (269–82).
16. For further discussion on the representation of the in-between status of Jews in passing novels, see Harrison-Kahan (35).
17. In fact, Les is not only anti-Semitic but also xenophobic. Probably as a consequence of the posttraumatic incidents in Vietnam, he refers to Vietnamese as “Gooks.” His prejudice (or post-trauma) includes all Asians without differentiating among them; when he used to go with Faunia to a Chinese restaurant, “If he went inside, he’d want to kill the gooks as soon as he saw them. ‘But they’re Chinese,’ Faunia told him, ‘not Vietnamese.’ ‘Asshole! I don’t care what the fuck they are! They count as gooks! A gook is a gook!’” (215).
18. Even though Brodkin has influentially argued in her 1998 novel that after WWII Jewish Americans “became white folks,” in December 2016 she published a follow-up to her book with an article in The Forward entitled “How Jews Became White Folks—and May Become Nonwhite Under Trump.” In this article, Brodkin argues that although Ashkenazi Jews became White in the 1950s, the “prevalent deployment of swastikas can organize a mix of bigots into an atavistic movement that claims to be a master race of white Christians, with a God-given or genetically-given right to rule. If it claims whiteness and Christianity for itself, there’s not much room for Jews” (“How Jews Became White Folks”).
19. While Godfrey maintains that Coleman “experiences none of the guilt, little anxiety, and no real regret,” it seems that he does suffer from these (240). After his older brother tells him not to visit his mother, he does not do so because he runs the house, but “when he reached north Jersey, his having had this son required him to take the Newark exit and head toward East Orange [i.e. his mother’s house]. There was yet another impulse to be suppressed: the impulse he felt to see his mother, to tell her what had happened and to bring her the boy. The impulse, two years after jettisoning her, and despite Walter’s warning, to show himself to his mother. No. Absolutely not. And instead he continued straight on home to his white wife and his white child” (180).
20. As Jacobson asserts regarding Jewishness, “[r]ace is social value become perception”– sociopolitical meanings attached to a certain ethnic group renders that group “discernible as a particular pattern of physical traits.” Then, the “visible markers” are understood as signifying a distinct group, which, in turn, attest to the meaning attached in the first place (173). Similarly, Zuckerman uses visible markers to justify his understanding of Faunia’s character.
21. Fiction, in the form of Hollywood movies, is presented here as counterfactual. Ironically, THS was adapted into a Hollywood movie, with the help of Philip Roth. See Bailey (782).
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Ohad Reznick
Ohad Reznick is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he teaches Hebrew and Hebrew fiction. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and MELUS.