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Ghost-Writing: Philip Roth's Portrait of the Artist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
Extract
In writing a trilogy of novels on the life and times of Nathan Zuckerman, American Jewish Writer, Philip Roth has waded manfully into a tradition even more thickly and brilliantly populated than the one he selected as literary background for The Breast. If the grotesque metamorphosis of David Kepesh into a six–foot, one–hundred–and–fifty–pound female breast compels us to compare Roths novel with some of the great texts of Kafka and Gogol, in Zuckerman Bound Roth invokes the more formidable context of James, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, and Gide (to mention only a few), several of whose artist–portraits are identified in the trilogy and all implied. Roth has said in an interview that the novelty of this particular portrait is that it describes the comedy that an artistic vocation can turn out to be in the U.S.A.1 The comedy pertains not only to the career of Zuckerman himself, a series of zany encounters with writers, readers, and critics, whose responses to one Zuckerman fiction become the action of the next, but also to Roths typical strategy of challenging and recreating any prior tradition or convention, however sacrosanct. The crux of Rothian comedy is to expose, embarrass, and ridicule, to break bonds and boundaries, pieties and platitudes.
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- Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1988
References
1 Reading Myself and Others (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 162. Further references to this collection of essays and interviews will be cited in the text as RM.Google Scholar
2 Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), p. 10. All further quotation from the trilogy will be to this edition. Pagination of the original edition of The Ghost Writer is the same as its pagination in Zuckerman Bound.
3 Romantic Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 2.Google Scholar
4 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 215.Google Scholar
5 For a full discussion of the theme of metamorphosis in Roths fiction, see my essay, Fictions of Metamorphosis: From Goodbye Columbus to Portnoys Complaint, in Milbauer, Asher Z. and Watson, Donald G., eds., Reading Philip Roth (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 82–104.Google Scholar
6 For a somewhat different version of the relationship between Amys and Zuckermans use of Anne Frank as a way of gaining acceptance in the Jewish community, see Wirthnesher, Hana, The Artist Tales of Philip Roth, Prooftexts 3 (September 1983): 263–272.Google Scholar
7 Jonathan Brent, in Philip Roth: Imagination and the Self, in Milbauer and Watson, Reading Philip Roth, makes a strong argument for Zuckerman as in fact a nihilistic character: a character with no centre at all, a vortex of energy producing a vacuum within (p. 184).