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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 401
rather than celebrating an exceptional, preordained destiny of an
individual or a people, accommodates chance and contingency while
embracing life as it is, with its messiness, randomness, and
singularity. Contingency spells, in this case, freedom, difficult and
unpredictable as it is.
For Chabon, the detour into a counterfactual “then”
—
Israel’s
defeat and the US’s decision to offer a portion of Alaska as an interim
haven for Jews
—
does not end up putting either the US or the Jews
back at the center stage of international politics. Rather, Chabon
brings to the fore how this collective desire to be exceptional, and
the strong will of a people to master its fate, can end in the
perpetuation of violence and war, especially the kind of violence and
war wielded in the name of justice or in the preemption of injustice.
Roth ends
The Plot Against America
with Roosevelt’s being elected
as President and the entry of the US into World War II, as if the
course of History can be set right again once the US repents its
isolationist policy and does the right thing: acting to defend the
world against the evil of fascism. However, Chabon’s counterfactual
imagination seems uninterested in either celebrating the global
sovereignty of the US or defending the Zionist right of Return and
the Jewish vision of redemption, whether personal or communal.
Roth, despite his love affair with the “what-if,” and despite his
strident critique of the implicit racism of American society, ends up
reaffirming a fundamental American fantasy of exceptionalism.
4Chabon’s use of the “what-if,” however, is not an attempt to
reinforce existing values and ideologies of the nation-state. Rather,
he opens up the past to challenge two statist fantasies, the Zionist
narrative of return, on the one hand, and the fantasy of American
exceptionalism on the other. Moreover, in Chabon’s novel, even
though everything is bound within the framework of grand
4
Paul K. Saint-Amour (2011) criticizes Roth, via citing Judith Butler, of creating in
his
The Plot Against America
“a paralegal universe that goes by the name of law,”
while privileging the supremacist role of the US in the making and defending of
world order.