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“the agitation of the autobiographical”: National Politics and Aesthetic Autonomy in Philip Roth's Exit Ghost
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
Abstract
Through a close reading of Exit Ghost, this paper examines in a fresh manner the conflicts between notions of authorial context and autonomous literary creativity that dominate not just this novel, but all of Roth's works. In particular, I will look at how Exit Ghost reprises the antagonism and confusion that has existed between disinterested notions of authorial self-effacement and forms of autobiographical self-exposure within Zuckerman's (and Roth's) writing. By exploring how the fraught relationship between Zuckerman's private self and his publicly accessible body of fiction has been closely tied to his more youthful erotic adventures in earlier novels, I will discuss in detail the significance of the eviscerating impact of old age and impotence that he endures in Exit Ghost. In addition, I will discuss these complex issues of desire and authorship in the context of Roth's creative treatment of the Bush/Kerry Presidential election of 2004 in Exit Ghost. I will look at how the presence, albeit marginal, of such large-scale political events in this novel provides an interesting insight into the tangled intersection between literature and the raw “facts” of American history in Roth's fiction.
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References
1 Roth, Philip, I Married a Communist (London: Vintage, 1998), 72Google Scholar.
2 Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson (1983), in idem, Zuckerman Bound (London: Vintage, 1998), 293–505, 424.
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6 According to Posnock, Roth's attacks upon agitprop literature in I Married a Communist and identity politics in The Human Stain are stark evidence of his ongoing assault against the “antihumanism” of those who would carry out a “redirection of scholarship from author to context.” Posnock, Philip Roth's Rude Truth, 50, 51. Similarly, David Brauner discusses how Roth's engagement with recent history in the American trilogy primarily serves to place a certain immutable concept of “anti-pastoral humanism” at odds with narrow historical or ideological definitions of subjectivity. Brauner, David, Philip Roth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 157CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Insisting that the “Roth canvas is vertical, in portrait mode, not horizontal, in [historical] landscape,” Mark Shechner has argued that the postwar history upon which the American trilogy draws is “merely backstory” or a “prop.” Mark Shechner, “Roth's American Trilogy,” in Timothy Parrish, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 146, 143, 145. Following this trend toward emphasizing issues of literary style over historical content, Elaine Safer argues that the historical episodes which Roth treats in later works are not subject to a serious consideration of the American past, but rather serve as suitable backdrops for the author's overriding stylistic concern with “mingling … tragic and comic” effects. Safer, Elaine B., Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 70Google Scholar.
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12 For example, Cleanth Brooks, one of the founders of New Criticism, has argued that literature is predicated upon “being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” Cleanth Brooks, “The Well Wrought Urn” (1947), in Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 1353–65, 1365.
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14 The Facts, 4.
15 The Counterlife, 247.
16 Ibid., 238, 232.
17 Ibid., 226.
18 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (1979), in idem, Zuckerman Bound (London: Vintage, 1998), 1–129, 41.
19 Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound (1981), in idem, Zuckerman Bound (London: Vintage, 1998), 131–292, 140.
20 Philip Roth, The Prague Orgy (1985), in idem, Zuckerman Bound (London: Vintage, 1988), 509–69, 568–69.
21 The Counterlife, 30, 35, 235.
22 Exit Ghost, 41.
23 The Human Stain, 44.
24 Exit Ghost, 14–15.
25 Ibid., 279.
26 The Ghost Writer, 3, 4, 30.
27 Exit Ghost, 47.
28 Ibid., 22.
29 Ibid., 156.
30 Ibid., 102.
31 Ibid., 252.
32 Ibid., 267.
33 Ibid., 45.
34 Ibid., 254.
35 Ibid., 66.
36 Ibid., 36–37.
37 Ibid., 147.
38 Ibid., 147, 146, original emphasis.
39 Ibid., 279, 67.
40 Ibid., 165–66, original emphasis.
41 Ibid., 221.
42 Ibid., 103.
43 Ibid., 147.
44 Ibid., 44.
45 Ibid., 102.
46 Ibid., 116, 120, 253.
47 Ibid., 274.
48 Ibid., 199–201.
49 Of course, Rooseveltian liberalism is highly fused with notions of pragmatism, conflict and compromise that make it far less mechanically linear or cohesive than this last remark might suggest. At the same time, modern liberal belief in America has managed to find a certain degree of momentum from what Anthony Hutchinson terms its “invocation of an ever-improving future that appeal[s] to an Enlightenment-rooted faith in reason and progress.” Hutchinson, Writing the Republic, 68.
50 Wendy Wall, for instance, argues that the Roosevelt period saw the birth of the modern idea of a unifying “American Way.” Wall explains that although this concept of national cohesion was subject to many contested claims in later history, it found a particularly pointed definition during the New Deal as “the ability of diverse individuals to live together harmoniously.” Wall, Wendy, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Elsewhere, Todd Gitlin has referred to the universal assumptions underlying modern liberal ideas as stemming from “a belief in progress through the unfolding of a humanity present – at least potentially – in every human being.” Gitlin, Todd, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995), 85Google Scholar.
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61 Reading Myself and Others, 114–15.
62 Ibid., 110, 123, original emphasis.
63 Exit Ghost, 81–82, 36, 37.
64 Ibid., 97, 94–95.
65 American Pastoral, 86; Zuckerman Unbound, 221.
66 Exit Ghost, 43.
67 Ibid., 81, 95, 82, 86.
68 Ibid., 86–87, 87.
69 For instance, George Packer bemoans this manner in which American liberalism has lost its previous sense of purpose within national life. Instead, he explains, liberalism has “becom[e] known as the creed of the weak, the soft, the guilt-ridden, the hyperintellectual, the privileged, the out-of-touch, the hypocritical – all those who don't want to see the world as it really is.” Packer, George, Blood of the Liberals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 300Google Scholar.
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74 Ibid., 275.
75 Ibid., 275, original emphasis.