In honor of Lena Dunham and "Girls" (and Philip Roth)

Philip Roth lurks through the underbrush of "Girls" like a lumbering, erect Sasquatch.

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Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, is The One Book We’re Talking About In A Moment In Which Americans Are Too Distressed To Talk About Books. The buzz is leading many to revisit her legendary HBO series Girls. I was a fan of that show and became even more of a fan when I realized that Dunham was influenced by Philip Roth, an author whose work I study.

A few weeks back I showed my graduate seminar on Roth an episode of Girls in which Dunham “intertexts” rather ostentatiously with the great novelist. Her engagement with him, as I argue below, is quite sophisticated. Dunham does more than give Roth a shout out. Rather, she deploys some of the metafictional techniques for which he is justifiably revered.

My Gen Z grad students really liked the episode—Phew! Given that the course is about metafiction, and given that they’re really smart, they instantly identified the metafictional flourishes which pervaded each scene.

I wrote the article below for the publisher Melville House about 8 years ago. For some reason it disappeared from the web. I resurrect it below with a few small edits. The observation about Woody Allen, however, is new and was bought to my attention by one of the aforementioned students, Ellie Yaeger.

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Where Does Fiction Come From?: Lena Dunham, Girls, and Philip Roth

Look carefully through the narrative forestry in HBO’s Girls, and you’ll see Philip Roth lurking through the underbrush, like a lumbering, erect Sasquatch.

Our first sighting occurred in Season 5 when our heroine Hannah Horvath assigned “Goodbye Columbus” to her eighth-graders. Pressed by her boss to explain what middle-schoolers stood to gain from Roth’s 1959 novella about lust, Hannah reasons thusly:

I think they’re going to gain a unique understanding of how Jewish men particularly in their twenties are just this very specific mix of sexual bravado and extreme self-hatred and it can be really destructive to the girls they choose to fuck.

In another episode, Adam (Hannah’s former boyfriend) and Jessa (Hannah’s former best friend) want to make a movie about their love triangle with Hannah. In Adam’s words: “It’s a film about the complex dynamic the three of us have been fostering for years.” They wish, then, to create a cinematic fiction about a relationship that we have already observed within the fiction of Girls. And that, my friends, is metafiction in a nutshell.

Dunham is mimicking Roth’s metafictional signature move. From his experimental novel My Life as a Man (1974), to American Pastoral (1997) and beyond, Roth has crafted stories that reflect upon how the authors in his stories fabricate the very stories that we are reading. His works ask: how did the fiction which you are reading, and I am writing, come to be a fiction?

Are you thinking about that line and getting dizzy? A little confused? Good! Welcome to the vertiginous world of metafiction.

We hit the Rothian motherlode in Season 6 Episode 3’s “American Bitch.” The scenario: Literary icon Chuck Palmer has invited Hannah to his home, assumedly to lodge a protest. In her “niche-feminist blog,” Hannah has chronicled Chuck’s propensity to engage in consensual (?) sexual relations with college-age women he meets on book tours.

The writers rehearse their arguments like the tired ambassadors of two nations that have warred over sexual politics for a millennium. Hannah speaks of the power differential between famous, older males and young women starved for recognition of their talents. Chuck demurs: maybe women just dig literary genius? They come to him for the thrill. They come to him for an experience and the fiction it might ignite within them. They stay for the sex—which Chuck is happy to provide.

There is so much Rothian intertexting in “American Bitch” that one hardly knows where to begin. The premise of a young writer being invited to the home of his literary idol--and getting an eyeful--was canvassed in Roth’s 1979 The Ghost Writer, when Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, visits the farmhouse of the reclusive novelist E.I. Lonoff.

Domestic complications ensue (including the possibility that Anne Frank is alive and having an affair with Lonoff). In the final scene, the legend tells the dazed Zuckerman where to find paper for “his feverish notes.” I’ll be curious to see,” says the mentor, “how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story.” The story we just read in The Ghost Writer is the story Nathan is about to write. Metafiction!

That Chuck Palmer wants to trigger Hannah’s interesting story—and just plain trigger Hannah—is insinuated throughout the episode. Hannah herself comments on how Chuck has let her overhear an incredibly personal conversation about his thirteen-year old daughter’s mental health. Chuck’s apartment is seeded with photos, degrees, citations, and other monuments to his greatness/coolness. Let Hannah ponder that!

Upon closer inspection, I realized the paintings on Chuck’s walls were of rooms in the apartment in which this story takes place. That’s so meta! Way off in the background is another canvas. In this one, Woody Allen is holding a gun to his head and lit up by his own halo (for an image, see this scene by scene reading of the episode).

When they retire to Chuck’s bedroom/bookroom, a disarmed Hannah exclaims:

I can’t believe you have a signed copy of When She Was Good. God, everyone acts like this book is Philip Roth being the worst but it’s actually him being the best. And I know I’m not supposed to like him because he’s like a misogynist and he demeans women but I can’t help it, I fucking love his writing.

I fucking love his—and Dunham’s-- writing too! But let me caution that you can’t read either without encountering misdirection and mindfuckery aplenty. Yes, Chuck Palmer gave Hannah a signed first edition of a Roth novel. I must point out, however, that he gave her a signed first copy of arguably the worst Roth novel ever written. Let us also recall that Palmer has gifted Hannah with a text that features an insufferable female protagonist who dies exposed to the elements in the midst of a psychotic bender.

Maybe that’s why it feels so good when Hannah hurls When She Was Good against a wall. This occurs after her host lures her to his bed and places his erect penis on her thigh. Chuck (played by Matthew Rhys) has earlier referred to himself as a “witch,” and after this May Pole incident he looks positively demented. It’s as if Chuck’s spider is mouthing to Hannah’s fly, “I have not only just given you a ‘fiction’ to write about, I have taught you whence fiction comes! You’re welcome, sweetie.” Fiction comes from (terrible) experiences: no lesson could be more Rothian than that.

Her escape foiled by the arrival of Chuck’s daughter, Hannah is forced to listen to the kid perform a flute solo. Who knew Rihanna’s Desperado could so resemble the soundtrack of Rosemary’s Baby? Hannah exits in disgust. But at least she has an interesting story.

As she departs, a coven of women file into Chuck’s building. Mesmerized by the siren call of the nymph’s flute, they too are about to learn whence fiction comes.