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Against France: An American Novelistic Fantasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Jeffrey Mehlman
Jeffrey Mehlman*
Affiliation:
Boston University

Abstract

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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

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