The vivid expression “earworm” suggests a voice, perhaps a song, or some phrase or fragment, that plays unwanted in a continuous mental loop. Subliminal sometimes it may be, but persistent, even distracting, as we might wish to concentrate all our attention on a problem or text. I think that times of stress brings the voice on. I have heard inside my head my voice audibly repeating the short prayers that the nuns in grade school would unselfconsciously tell us were "ejaculations." Those moments when anxiety threatens to screech its nails down fearful chalk boards – then I am likely to repeat as litany Domine adjuvanda me festina.

I have lately been reading through three of Philip Roth’s novels from the eighties and nineties, The Counterlife, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist. Each has its striking virtuosity of voice and of perception. The energy of the prose and dynamism of the plotting and the voices (heteroglossia of the first order) can sweep a reader along. I had to stop, however, over a passage near the conclusion of I Married a Communist. The chief narrator Murray records  experiencing an ear-worm like obsession in a moment of great anxiety. Murray has just left his brother Ira in his rustic shack in Pennsylvania. Ira is despondent, angry, homicidal. Murray knows how violent Ira can be, and he fears that his brother will soon attempt to kill his estranged wife. On the drive back to his home, unconvinced that he has dissuaded his brother despite taking his knives and pistol, Murray recounts his inner turmoil. He maintains his stability, more or less, by repeating a quotation from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. They are Feste’s words at the conclusion of the play: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Now you must know that Murray is an English teacher and an acutely sensitive reader. He is relating this experience to Nathan Zuckerman, his former student and now an accomplished novelist. Murray considers what his mind was doing with Feste’s words.

I couldn’t get that line out of my head. Those  cryptogrammic g’s, the subtlety of their deintensification – those hard g’s in ‘whirligig’ followed by the nasalized g of ‘brings’ followed by the soft g of ‘revenges.’ Those terminal s’s ‘thus brings his revenges.’ The hissing surprise of the plural noun ‘revenges.’ Guhh. Juhh. Zuhh. Consonants sticking into me like needles. And the pulsating vowels, the rising tide of their pitch – engulfed by that. The low-pitched vowels giving way to the high-pitched vowels. The bass and tenor vowels giving way to the alto vowels. The assertive lengthening of the vowel i just before the rhythm shift from iambic to trochaic and the prose pounds round the turn for the stretch. Short i, short i, long i. Short i, short i, short i, boom! Revenges. Brings in his revenges. His revenges. Sibilated. Hizzzzzuh! Driving back to Newark with Ira’s weapons in my car, Those ten words, the phonetic webbing, the blanket omniscience . . . I felt I was being asphyxiated inside Shakespeare.
The “earworm’s” linguistic form by way of Murray’s analysis seem to absorb his critical faculties. He explains brilliantly the phonetic features that drive an emotional effect. The subject of the line is, of course, revenge, the very motivation that impels Ira. The displacement is clear. Language can’t make things happen but the critic can do things with language, as he cannot with his brother. Roth’s bravado in this section risks a great deal. Yet I find he carries me without hesitation into Murray’s predicament just as he wows me with his analysis. To be “asphyxiated inside Shakespeare” by a play of comic humiliation of a mistaken lover adds a consummate irony to this section, just as it proves ineffectual in Murray’s attempt to rescue his brother from himself. And Murray recognizes that somehow Shakespeare's "omniscience" has foreseen his predicament.

Of course, this is but one moment in a novel that offers a wealth of such surprises and pleasures. The scene is simply a reading pleasure that I want to share. Try reading it out loud.