Discuss the proposition that the Swede’s pursuit of his version of the American Dream in

American Pastoral is founded entirely on a ‘form of utopian thinking’.

Right from the very opening of the novel it would seem that Seymour Swede Levov (The

Swede) never had much choice but to be the very embodiment himself of utopian thinking.

As Philip Roth, or his writer alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman describes him in the opening

paragraph, “The name was magical; so was the face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish

students in our preponderantly Jewish public high-school, none possessed anything

remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blonde born into our

tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.” (American Pastoral, p.3) Zuckerman goes on to outline how

the Swede was the All-American football and basketball hero, adored and worshipped by

everyone, high-school students and their parents alike. Straightway, too, Zuckerman

suggests that idolisation of the Swede enabled everyone, especially the Jewish community

in Weequahic to forget World War II and look forward to the future. The Swede was their

“Apollo.” (AP, p.4) Girls adored the Swede and even the young Nathan Zuckerman was in

awe of him and virtually played with the Swede’s younger brother just to be able to be in

the same space as the Swede. Representing all of this, it was little wonder that the Swede

too would, or even more than anyone else, pursue a life that would be the fulfilment of the

American Dream.

The title of the book also gives us the idea that this is going to be about the American Dream

one way or another. Since a pastoral means a perfect country or rural scene then we expect

the novel to look at this too and that the phrase American pastoral is synonymous with

though not identical to American dream.

However, to suggest that the Swede’s pursuit of the American is dream is entirely, that is,

totally and completely, based upon utopian thinking is to ignore, first of all, his Jewishness,

which arguably, adds extra pressure on the Swede to fit in and conform and be more

American than any other American. Furthermore, once the Swede discovers that his only

daughter Merry blows up the local post office, killing a doctor, and later on, that as a fugitive

on the run she kills three more people in her status as conscientious objector to the

Vietnam war, the Swede doesn’t give up on the American Dream and outwardly, at least,

still presents himself as the personification of this dream, he still presents himself as

someone who believes in the dream and is living it. At this stage, his utopian thinking

doesn’t make him continue believing in the perfect life because he knows that this utopia no

longer exists. Utopian thinking also implies that a perfect community or society is imagined

but the Swede lives such an individual life. In this sense, we will see that the American

Dream is a particular form of utopian thinking because it imagines the perfect society of

one.

Of course, utopian thinking still plays a part in the Swede’s reluctance to give up on the

American Dream but this essay argues that the Swede’s pretence that the Dream is real is

tied into a much more pragmatic world view that is more really American, a world view

associated with materialism, property, control and domination and a desire to conform than

merely an idealised and unrealistic belief in some kind of utopia. It’s true to say, too, that in

the novel the Swede isn’t merely an individual or human being but is used by Roth to

symbolise the thinking and behaviour of a whole nation. As such, the Swede comes to stand

for the deliberate perpetuation of the lie of the American Dream. Roth/Zuckerman alludes

to the Swede’s status as a historical symbol and an ideological veil when he tells us, “He was

fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have

been if he’d broken the Weequahic basketball record…on a day other than the sad, sad day

of 1943 when fifty-eight Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes…”

(AP, p.5)

So, it is impossible in one way to separate the Swede’s personal history from that of his

country, the USA, even if at the same time we should also see the Swede as a human being

and not merely a symbol. However, having already spoken about the Swede’s close

connection with, and incarnation of, history , a distinction between two kinds of history

suggested by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley in her excellent essay, Mourning the “Greatest

Generation”: Myth and History in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is very helpful and I want

to use it here. She suggests that there is such a thing as mythic history, which as one might

guess because it contains the word myth in it is a kind of larger-than-life and not totally

factual type of history: this is the kind of history the Swede epitomises. Merry, the Swede’s

daughter represents the less romantic, embellished real kind of history; Merry is temporal

and “social history” as Kumamoto Stanley refers to her, “Did social history stutter its way

into their lives – from Merry’s first viewing of the Vietnamese monk’s televised self-

immolation to her own clumsy attempts to rectify global injustice by local means?” (p.11

Mourning, etc) Prior to this, Kumamoto Stanley also neatly outlines both the idea of what

kind of history the Swede is as well as drawing attention to his flawed utopian thinking, “His

vision of history contained within the narrative of his mythic ideal…proves illusory, for

history reveals itself as a complex network of economic, social and political factors, a

“mystery full of “human confusion” and “stuttering.” (p.12 Mourning etc) Or as the Swede’s

brother Jerry puts it, “My brother thought he could take his family out of human confusion

and into Old Rimrock and she put them right back in…Good-bye Americana, hello real time.”

(AP, pp.68-69)

While much has been made of Swede Levov’s Jewishness this essay takes the perspective

that Roth intended the character of the Swede to transcend his ethnicity and come to

symbolise all America. As Aimee Pozorski points out in her essay, American Pastoral and the

Traumatic Ideals of Democracy, “While the critical readings that bring the perspective of

ethnic identity to light in American Pastoral are rather effective for underscoring Levov’s

wholehearted assimilation in America, they fail to consider Roth’s larger critique of the

American Dream itself – a myth that leads to the desire to assimilate in the first place.” (p.3

TID)

The Swede’s life was one success after another until Merry blew up the local post office.

From being the all-American sports hero he goes to fight in the Second World War and

becomes a hero there too, fighting for his country with a zeal that annoyed even his own

father albeit that the Swede had an easy enough time of it once his squadron commander

realised what a great sportsman he was. Nevertheless, and for the most part the Swede

connected with everyone across racial barriers and divides and this was what America was

about for the Swede – the land of the free with equal opportunity for everyone. Following

in his father’s footsteps into the Newark Maid glove factory the Swede also captures for a

wife, Miss New Jersey, Dawn, the beauty queen. They move to Old Rimrock and thus

introduce the pastoral aspect of this American dream. A pastoral being an idyllic country

scene, Dawn becomes a farmer and Swede likes to walk into the nearest town and imagine

himself as Johnny Appleseed, a romanticised individual who according to his myth went

around creating apple orchards but in reality he was distilling alcohol and getting very rich

into the bargain. The Swede and Dawn are the ideal couple, they live in a beautiful house in

the countryside in a mainly Protestant area and so again fulfilling the Swede’s ideal of

American life since they can reside there as Americans and not as a Jew or a Catholic

(Dawn). They are living the American Dream. Until, that is, Merry decides to rebel in grave

fashion. Roth/Zuckerman puts it like this, “And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth

American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of

himself as he had been the perfected image of his father, and his father the perfected image

of his father’s father…the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter who…transports him out

of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy,

into the fury, the violence and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the indigenous

American berserk.” (AP p.86)

Perhaps, blindness and an inability to see alternatives and flaws in one’s reality are a

symptom or a characteristic of utopian thinking though surely it is the opposite – when one

sees the ugliness of one’s world one desires to create a better one. It is more likely that the

Swede’s reaction to Merry is more a symptom of the insular, self-obsessed nature of a

particular American mind and mentality, one that thinks the American way is the best and

only way and is incapable of imagining another. At a symbolic level, Roth wants the reader

to see that the Swede’s closed mind is a reflection of the closed mind of the United States.

The Swede also represents a type of mind and national character that is often ascribed to

Americans who are not self-critical and self-examining or at the level of the symbolism of

the novel, a country that does not reflect self-critically upon itself or didn’t it would appear

until the 1960s and Vietnam. Of course, the type of person who sometimes doesn’t reflect

self-critically is one who has no need to because life is so good to him or her. In the words of

Zuckerman, “Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, “Why are things the way they

are?” Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect. Why are things

the way they are? The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so

blessed he didn’t even know the question existed.” (AP, p 87)

The Swede fails to understand that Merry acted the way she did because she saw the

injustice in American society and in the Vietnam War and wanted to bring that back home

to people in the U.S. Merry actually becomes the antithesis of all that her parents are. She

has a surfeit of everything from her parents safe and comfortable, unthinking middle-class

lifestyle right down to food itself as Merry as a teenager grows extra-large. If Merry criticises

the Swede for being a factory owner and exploiting people his answer is that, on the

contrary, he is supplying people with work and helping them to make a living. The Swede is

so unable to think in anything but a pro-American way that he even gets to believing that an

incident when Merry was 12, when he kissed her passionately at her request to kiss her like

he kissed her mother, is the cause of her dissatisfaction.

The Swede may have fallen for the blind faith in America and in the American dream that

appeared to be very rosy after the Second World War but as the conversation Zuckerman

has at his old high-school reunion with a childhood and school sweetheart, Joy, life in

America was never idyllic and people like Joy and Zuckerman knew it back then, too. Life

was sweet for the Swede because he lived a charmed, privileged life. A true utopian

mentality, however, wants to redress inequality and not view it as natural. There is

something almost feudal and pre-Capitalistic about the Swede’s paternal view of his

workers. He is their benefactor more than their employer.

It might well be that the particular form of utopian thinking that is connected to the

American Dream entails turning a blind eye to all that is problematic. The Swede deals with

Merry’s stutter by pretending it doesn’t exist or that other factors are to blame. He

dismisses one psychologist’s theory that Merry’s stutter is a reaction against her parents’

perfection. He tries to bury the fact that Merry has killed people. When he meets her in a

run-down part of the city, Merry’s Jainism and poverty and stink causes the Swede to throw

up on his own daughter as if the very trauma of having to confront what his American

Dream has done to her is too much for him, too traumatic and causes a physical response

such as vomiting. The swede turns another blind eye when he discovers that his wife has a

lover. There is a suggestion from the Swede’s philandering ‘bad’ brother Jerry that the

Swede is a good person. This judgement is based upon the idea that he was honourable,

“trying always to do the right thing.” But Jerry is mistaken because this is only true again

from a peculiarly American point of view, one that has built into it the idea that social

inequality is just and winning is the only right.

In the end, it’s only in America that a utopia could be built upon the idea that an individual

who has achieved his or her ultimate happiness and fulfilled their dream (which in America

is always about owning property and the bigger the better) has achieved utopia without

regard to the community or society. In spite of that, there are no utopias which state that it

is correct to maintain a façade. Yet this is precisely what the Swede does when he meets

Zuckerman for dinner one night some time before the reunion and pretends all night long

that everything in his life is fine just as he did publicly from the moment Merry planted the

bomb. Maybe the Swede thought Zuckerman knew all about Merry. Whatever the case,

Swede Levov’s life was really the stuff of nightmares. His pursuit of the American Dream was

more about following a tradition, being American and holding on to power and authority

without any critical examination. If this is a form of utopian thinking then it is very

particular, indeed. It is utopian thinking for a society of one and a type of thinking

maintained by a deliberate lie.