Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia Corso di Laurea Magistrale Lingue e Letterature Europee, Americane, e Post-Coloniali Joint Master’s Degree in English and American Studies Tesi di Laurea Dans Le Vrai Philip Roth and the Shadows of the Real Relatore: Prof. Pia Masiero (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia) Correlatore: Prof. Mark Jay Mirsky (The City College of New York) Laureando: Marco Lazzarin 810332 Anno Accademico 2012/2013 Dans Le Vrai Dans Le Vrai Philip Roth and the Shadows of the Real Marco Lazzarin 2 Dans Le Vrai 3 Dans Le Vrai Contents Introduction 9 My Life as a Reader (of Philip Roth) 1 18 Counterauthors 2 37 Improvisations on a Self 3 78 The Bankruptcy of the Business of Other People Epilogue 120 Eulogy of the Doubt 4 Dans Le Vrai MACBETH: Life’s a tale told by an idiot — W. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into. — Nathan Zuckerman, in The Counterlife Life consists Of propositions about life — Wallace Stevens, “Men Made Out of Words” The undevelopedness, the unplottedness, what is merely latent, that is actuality, you are right. Life before the narrative takes over is life. —Ivan, in Deception. 5 Dans Le Vrai Abbreviations The following abbreviations appear parenthetically in the text to identify references to Roth’s books and a interview series. GW The Ghost Writer D Deception HS The Human Stain AL The Anatomy Lesson OS Operation Shylock S Shop Talk C The Counterlife AP American Pastoral PAA The Plot Against America F The Facts IMC I Married a Communist EG Exit Ghost WOS Web of Stories:Roth PRS Philip Roth Studies 6 Dans Le Vrai Dans Le Vrai: Philip Roth and the Shadows of the Real 7 Dans Le Vrai 8 Dans Le Vrai Introduction MY LIFE AS A READER (OF PHILIP ROTH) One Long Speech I’ve Been Listening To All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. — William Faulkner, “The Art of Fiction” When she talks to her friends about me, my mother often mentions a moment she remembers from my early childhood. She says that I used to spend entire afternoons sitting on the sofa with a children’s book in my hand, listening to a cassette with the reading of the story. I could not read yet, but I knew that I had to turn the page every time a bell rang. This is the first reading memory she 9 Dans Le Vrai has of me. I spent my childhood and part of my adolescence either outside or with a guitar in hand, but always far from books. Only in my mid-teens did I begin to discover the pleasure of reading. The first time I decided to approach a novel was as a continuation of my musical education, a search for the roots of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. I took months to finish Kerouac’s On the Road, and I still remember running in the kitchen to say to my mother that I had finished it, telling her how good its final sentence was. Some months later, under the influence of a friend, I got interested in The Lord of the Rings, and for a couple of years I plunged in Middle Earth. Once I emerged from it, a fortuity led me to Hemingway. I read several of his major novels, and I became devoted to his short stories. I went on reading The Great Gatsby, and I could not wait to read The Sound and the Fury. When I had to decide what to study at university, it was clear that my field of choice was American literature. While I was making my first steps in learning to read seriously and developing a critical mind-frame during my first semester at university, I came across Philip Roth’s novels. Those books were a sublime teaching lesson on the power of literature. Soon he supplanted Hemingway as my chosen author, and I began reading his oeuvre, one piece after another. It took some time. While I was reading his greatest works, he was publishing one book a year, giving me another item to put in my reading list. While I read his minor works, I was enticed to return to the milestones of his career. While I read the American trilogy once again, another of his novels was on the syllabus of a course. My life as a serious reader has never been without the Bard of Newark. When the time came for me to write this work, my first book-length piece of literary criticism, the choice, quite naturally, fell on him. My timing could not have been more apt. Around the days in which I began reading some new criticism before starting to write, Philip Roth announced his retirement. At eighty, after fifty years of uninterrupted dedication to the art of fiction, and several novels worthy of a place in the pantheon of literature, he quit. After months spent agonizing over the beginning of a new book, he realized he no longer had to do it. After rereading the works of his favorite author, he reread almost all of his own novels, and made his judgment: “At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Luis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had” (Remnick, “Enough” nd). The fast-growing oeuvre stopped, and it was ready for assessment. Philip Roth’s career reminds the one of other age-defining artists, such as James and Conrad, Shakespeare and Dickens, Bach and Beethoven, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis: extensive and metamorphic, with a constant drive toward reinvention, one work closely tied to the previous and 10 Dans Le Vrai the following one, while being fresh and independent. The twenty-six-year-old author of Goodbye, Columbus is nothing like the aging reclusive writer of American Pastoral, who bears little similarity to the publicly-involved often-interviewed literary megastar of the Nemeses tetralogy. Roth’s novels have certainly different concentrations, various modes, diverging degrees of intensity, but everywhere in his oeuvre one can detect his stubborn determination in the merciless and shameless evisceration of his subject. The ever-present principle of Roth’s fiction is the relentless depiction of reality stripped of any idealization, any illusion, any naiveté, any romanticism, any moral prescription. There is no ethical code in his representations of life: they include the ludicrous in the tragic, the disdainful in the righteous, the ambiguous in the certain. His career has been a fifty-year battle against the oversimplification of the real. He embraces reality in all its profound complexity and manifold contradictions, and his attempt lies in illuminating such neglected complexities of the real. In Leo Glucksman’s writing lesson to Nathan Zuckerman in I Married a Communist we can find the driving impulses of Roth’s literary endeavor. As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, à la Hemingway, the task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction, not to deny the contradiction, but to see where, within the contradiction, lies the tormented human being. To allow the chaos, to let it in. You must let it in. (IMC 223) For thirty-one books, Philip Roth’s scrutinizing eye looked into the twists and turns of the human existence, “making the transparent opaque, the opaque transparent, the obscure obvious, the obvious obscure” (Oates 95). Whether he dealt with the subjective identity, sexual desire, the life of the writer, Jewishness in post-war America, American history, or all of them together, one could rest assured to find his playful exuberance and his sheer intelligence, his comic freewheelingness and his tragic gravity, his seething attention to the lively detail and his recognizable keen voice. With him, one is always in for a disillusioned reality, in full bloom. Before moving on to introduce the particular focus of my work, I feel the obligation to make some remarks on my approach to literary criticism. When I came to write about Philip Roth, I felt I could not detach myself from my individual perspective. Literary criticism, as I understand it, is “the art of making what is implicit in the text as finely explicit as possible,” as Harold Bloom says (“Books” nd). I follow this dictum faithfully. However, it did not feel right for me to abide by the widespread impersonality of such art. A commentary on the text is the record of a reading experience, which I believe is inseparable from the subjective point of view. The analytical work cannot but be expressive of the individual mind in which it originates. Reading is a profoundly 11 Dans Le Vrai personal activity, and I do not see the point in concealing the peculiar singularity of the reader. As I considered writing about the long hours spent on a chair with a Roth novel in hand, I began to see this work as the equivalent of an autobiography—a reader’s autobiography. I have decided to write the following pages in the first person singular. We live in the first person, and we read in the first person. I have not yet found a valuable reason to omit the subjectivity of the reading experience.