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Nathan Zuckerman's Role in Philip Roth's American Trilogy

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Nathan Zuckerman's Role in Philip Roth's American Trilogy Nathan Zuckerman’s Role in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy Hovedoppgave Institutt for litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk Humanistisk fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo Allmenn litteraturvitenskap Stian Stang Christiansen Veileder: Hans H. Skei 2006 Vår Abstract This thesis examines Philip Roth’s American trilogy – American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain – with emphasis on the narrator/author, long- standing Roth character Nathan Zuckerman. I argue that the most fruitful reading of the trilogy is one that constantly keeps in mind that significant portions of the plot are imagined – or “authored” – by this familiar character. Such a reading is aware of how the American trilogy both “rewrites” the previous Zuckerman fictions, and turns the stories of the three novels’ respective protagonists, Seymour “Swede” Levov, Ira Ringold and Coleman Silk, into useful fictions through which Zuckerman can explore how the myth of America corresponds to the realities of postwar history. The thesis is divided into five chapters. In Chapter 1, I summarize the plot in each novel and make my case for a Zuckerman-centred reading. In Chapter 2, I map out who Zuckerman is and describe the transformation he has gone through when we encounter him in the American trilogy. In Chapter 3, I analyze the narrative strategy in each novel, and discuss the implications of the way Zuckerman explicitly brings the narrative process to our attention. In Chapter 4, I analyze thematically the decline of postwar America we are presented with in the trilogy. And in Chapter 5, I discuss the trilogy’s view of the human condition – what Zuckerman has learned in the narrative process. 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mariann and Kristian who have both read the penultimate draft of this thesis and made valuable suggestions for alterations. I am also much obliged to my supervisor, Hans H. Skei, for the feedback and support he has provided me with in the writing process. And I am grateful to the Philip Roth Society, whose up-to-date online bibliography of Roth scholarship has been an invaluable resource in my work with this thesis. Keeping track of all Roth-related publications would indeed have been a daunting task, if not for the thorough bibliographical work done by the Society founder, Derek Parker-Royal. Oslo, May 2006. Stian Stang Christiansen 3 Contents CHAPTER 1: PHILIP ROTH’S AMERICAN TRILOGY...........................................................5 1.1: INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................5 1.2: THE STORIES .........................................................................................................................6 1.3: THE THESIS ...........................................................................................................................9 CHAPTER 2: THE NARRATOR................................................................................................ 13 2.1: WHO IS ZUCKERMAN?.......................................................................................................... 13 2.2: ZUCKERMAN’S TRANSFORMATION ........................................................................................ 15 CHAPTER 3: REIMAGINING AMERICAN LIVES................................................................. 22 3.1: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES ...................................................................................................... 22 3.2: AMERICAN PASTORAL ............................................................................................................ 26 3.3: I MARRIED A COMMUNIST...................................................................................................... 34 3.4: THE HUMAN STAIN ................................................................................................................ 40 3.5: THE TRUE NATURE OF THE AMERICAN PASTORAL ................................................................. 46 CHAPTER 4: THE ANATOMY OF THE FALL....................................................................... 49 4.1: THE HUMAN STAIN .............................................................................................................. 50 4.2: BETRAYAL IS AT THE HEART OF HISTORY.............................................................................. 52 4.3: WEEQUAHIC, NEWARK – ZUCKERMAN’S COMBRAY............................................................... 56 4.4: AMERICAN MYTH VS. REALITY ............................................................................................ 62 4.5: THE POVERTY OF NON-REFERENTIAL DISCOURSE.................................................................. 71 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION..................................................................................................... 79 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 82 4 Chapter 1: Philip Roth’s American trilogy “Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I’d overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer. 1.1: Introduction In his 1960 essay “Writing American Fiction”, Philip Roth wrote that “the American writer … has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” (Reading 167) What he proposed as a “solution” to this problem was to disregard society and turn the self into the subject of American fiction. Because, he maintained, “the social world has ceased to be as suitable or as manageable a subject as it once may have been”. (172) In a broad sense, the “blueprint” presented in “Writing American Fiction” was the one Roth followed for his own fiction for three decades. However, towards the end of the 1990s, Roth seemed to face the challenge he shied away from in 1960, that of describing and making credible American reality: From 1997 to 2000, he published three novels – American Pastoral, I Married A Communist and The Human Stain – that together formed a loose trilogy1. In an interview with The New York Times, Roth said: “I think of it as a thematic trilogy, dealing with the historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation.” (“McGrath Interview”2) The moments he has in mind are the McCarthy era of the 1950s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s, and the impeachment of President Clinton in the late 1990s. Each novel tells the story of how the destiny of its protagonist is shaped and intertwined with these historical events. Furthermore, all three novels are narrated by Roth’s long-serving literary alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman – one of the selves that has already served as a subject in several previous Roth novels. Hence the novels in the trilogy in a way merge both the 1 In 2005, the trilogy was also published in one volume as The American Trilogy in the Everyman’s Library series. 2 References without page numbers refer to articles from the Internet. challenge of the 1960 essay with its tentative solution: That of describing and making credible American reality, but through a specific subject, a subject that Roth had already investigated thoroughly and made his readers familiar with. 1.2: The Stories In the following I will give a brief outline of the story in each novel. However, the novels are not only narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, but to a large degree authored by him as well: In both American Pastoral and The Human Stain, he quickly starts to expand upon the “facts” and lets his imagination run free with the stories of Swede Levov and Coleman Silk. I will return to the distinction between “fact” and “fiction” and the process by they which are intertwined in Chapter 3. For now, “fact” and “fiction” are left blurred, and these are outlines of the stories as Nathan Zuckerman imagines them. American Pastoral In American Pastoral, Zuckerman – once a womanizing celebrity-writer, now a hermit in the New England mountains – encounters his childhood hero, Seymour “Swede” Levov. Back in Newark in the 1940s, the Swede had been “the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews” (4) – the boy most likely to leave every trace of the Old World behind and blend effortlessly into Wasp America. And on the surface he does just that – at least for a while: The Swede becomes a successful businessman as owner of the Newark Maid glove factory he inherits from his father Lou. He marries (initially against his father’s wishes) Dawn, an Irish Catholic and former Miss New Jersey, and together they go to live in a centuries-old colonial stone house in rural Old Rimrock, New Jersey, surrounded by Mayflower descendants. Then Dawn gives birth to a girl, Meredith “Merry” Levov. They are in other words living an American pastoral idyll. Until the mid-1960s, that is, when Merry becomes a teenager, and is deeply shocked by seeing a Vietnamese Buddhist monk’s self-immolation on television. Then she grows into an anti-war radical, starts mingling with the more drastic segments of the antiwar movement in New York and eventually blows up the local post office (the closest thing she can find to a federal building) in order to “[b]ring the war home” to Old Rimrock. (112) Unfortunately she murders the local doctor in the process. She disappears and the Swede’s life, and all the pastoral illusions he had maintained about 6 it, starts
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