Browsing articles posted in Arts & Letters Daily, an online list compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I provide as a link on this blog, I came across one that caught my eye and caused my pulse to quicken as I was reading it. In an essay, "Memory Unbound" in The Threepenny Review, Morris Dickstein discusses the enigmatic Henry Roth (1906-1995), an American writer, whose first novel, Call it Sleep, published in 1934, and republished with acclaim in the 1960s, but for some reason the career of Roth as a writer faltered, and he never lived up to the promise shown in his first novel. What happened to Roth? What prevented him from continuing to write and publish works like his promising first novel again?In a word, stigma, the shame of adolescent sexual gone awry, incest. Dickstein explains:
In Shifting Landscape, a collection of essays, stories, and interviews that came out the same year, Roth contemplated the mystery of his aborted career but left out the root cause that most obsessed him. This changed in 1995, when his younger sister, missing from both Call It Sleep and the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, suddenly appeared in his work. He wrote about years of incest with her and a cousin, beginning when both were in their early teens. Though his sister was still living and in her late eighties, he rejected her heartfelt plea that he not shame them by raking up horrors from the distant past. Roth continued to resist any single explanation for his catastrophic writer's block, but it became evident that it was the incest, and the self-loathing that accompanied it, that threw the biggest roadblock across his path. As an autobiographical writer whose work depended on emotional honesty for its devastating power, he found he could not go on in fiction past the ghetto childhood brilliantly evoked in Call It Sleep. In Mercy he at last confronted the dark transgressions he could not face in the years following his first novel.
In his essay Dickstein goes on to make an appeal, arguing that there are strengths in Roth's late and multi-volume autobiographical work of strictly factual reminiscence from the 1990s. According to Dickstein, Roth in a Proustian-inspired manner comes to terms with his long suppressed dark past that clearly haunted him and stifled his writing career; paradoxically Roth does so by using modernist and postmodernist literary devices in a work that is ostensibly factual.
For anyone who has had the misfortune of bearing a stigma from childhood into adulthood, this is a bracing and moving story. Personally, I have a strong connection to this story, because I have struggled with the stigma and shame of my transgender identity in adolescence and young adulthood. But living in a much more tolerant time, the 1990s, I have found validation and solace in being able to write personal essays about my experiences, and my self-imposed prison sentence of guilt-induced silence was thankfully not as long as Roth's near life-sentence.
Stigma is the nemesis of personal growth. If ever there was something we could call a curse in our enlightened age when we regard a curse as a vestige of a supernatural world we no longer believe in, it is the silence of an adult about his or her own stigma. An adult who remains silent about their own stigmatized sexual activity (abuse, incest) or sexual identity (trans or homo or bisexuality) in adolescence is compelled to put a hold on his or her personal life and happiness.
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/dickstein_su07.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Roth
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