428 / 142
428
E
UR
A
MERICA
exceptionalism is organized. By filtering his counterfactual novel
through the innocent eyes of a child narrator, Roth’s novel invites
its readers to think differently about what has actually happened,
and what might have happened, in the past. Roth’s child narrator
does not have the intellectual acuity and self-reflexivity of Landsman,
a professional detective, to see the solution to Lindbergh’s “plot
against America”
—
his mysterious disappearance
—
as a letdown. By
concluding his novel with such a forced
deus ex machine,
Roth
translates his counterfactual novel into a cautionary tale that warns
Americans about the perpetual presence of domestic terrorism.
In contrast to the easy optimism that makes Roth conclude his
novel with the hint of Jews’ “perpetual fear” of the unforeseen,
Chabon’s counterfactual novel takes up and actualizes Roth’s hint
by having Christian fundamentalists team up with Zionist
fundamentalists to bomb up the Dome of the Rock. Focusing on this
apocalyptic scenario through a weary but inquisitive police detective,
Chabon is able to register Landsman’s shock at the conspiracies that
he unwittingly uncovers, while translating Landsman’s shock into a
condition for ethical reflection. In the diasporic scenario in which
Landsman finds himself, he is drawn to investigate a murder case
but, in the process, experiences a revelation, or a moment of
redemption, that allows him to experience a shift in his perspective
on his stateless and dispossessed life. Rather than detaching himself
from the political events of his time and refusing to walk into a risky,
uncertain, but potentially wounding future, Landsman learns to see
his being caught in between the tension of the many discourses of
exceptionalism as a potentially dialogical event that may lead to his
bonding with others, less on the basis of identity, ethnic, national,
or religious, than on the ground of the self’s non-identification with
itself, or the “excess” that is immanent in the very constitution of
his subjectivity. Rather than mustering all his energies to defend
against the risk and contingency that accompany one’s encounter
with the other, Landsman learns at the end that the efforts he makes
to secure a seemingly eventless life
—
such as aborting his unborn son,