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Philip Roth As Moral Artist at Mid-Career

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Philip Roth As Moral Artist at Mid-Career PHILIP ROTH AS MORAL ARTIST AT MID-CAREER by James Phelan B.A., Concordia University, 2007 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December, 2009 © James Phelan, 2009 Abstract As a serious young man in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, Philip Roth believed writing fiction was an exalted calling with a high moral purpose. He was a committed social realist with a Lionel- Trilling-like ethics of fiction and a grand, unrealized ambition to write about public life. Then, fifteen years into his career, he wrote Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), a rollicking extravaganza of scurrilous comic invention and exaggerated grievance. Revelling in wildness and transgression, he found a voice that galvanized his talent as nothing before had done. Yet he still seemed to feel bound by his old ethical commitments. This was not the artistic breakthrough he had been hoping for. My paper considers how Roth works at reconciling his deep-seated sense of moral responsibility as a writer with his inescapable talent for imaginative recklessness in three novels, each of which marks a turning point in the middle of his career, Portnoy , The Ghost Writer (1979), and The Counterlife (1986). I take this moral/aesthetic problem to be an important preoccupation of Roth’s and make that preoccupation the basis for readings of the novels. In doing so, I try to show that his ethics and aesthetics are much deeply entangled than is usually acknowledged. In Portnoy he does all he can to contain Alex Portnoy’s rampaging monologue inside a morally proper narrative frame. With The Ghost Writer , he eschews his old ethics of fiction and makes a complex declaration of aestheticism by appropriating Anne Frank’s life story and voice to his pointedly reckless fiction. The Israel chapters of The Counterlife are a watershed in his career. In them, he puts his aesthetic wildness to work for his moral probity, while opening his fiction up to the public scene. He presents a dialogical, non-normative moral fiction investigating the question of Israeli settlement on the West Bank by imaginatively projecting himself into a range of ethically engaged Israeli subject positions and having the characters he invents debate the controversy in variations on his characteristic ii voice. In the mid-eighties as in the early sixties, Roth’s objective as a moral writer is the “expansion of moral consciousness.” iii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION Roth’s Complaint ........................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE A Contained Explosion ............................................................................. 11 CHAPTER TWO A Frank Reappraisal .................................................................................. 22 CHAPTER THREE An Ethics of “And” ................................................................................... 39 CONCLUSION Serious in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties .......................................... 67 Notes.............................................................................................................................................. 71 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 75 iv Acknowledgements My heartfelt thanks to the members of my supervisory committee, John Cooper, Jeff Severs, and Laura Moss, without whose sure guidance and surpassing generosity I would no doubt still be fiddling with the details of my prospectus; to Patsy Badir, Mary Chapman, and Sandy Tomc, each of whom had a turn as MA Advisor over the time I took to plan and write this paper; to Lee Johnson, who offered encouragement in the late planning stages; to Katharine Streip and Ariela Freedman, who oversaw my first attempt at writing about Roth; to Chris Gaudet, Medbh Lavery, Anna Sarneso, and Saro Setrakian, dear friends who helped the paper along; and to my unstintingly supportive parents, Chris and Linda Phelan. The project that culminated in this paper was handsomely funded by the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture. v In memory of Anthony Munday (1560? -1633) This paper is divided in five parts... vi INTRODUCTION Roth’s Complaint Portnoy’s Complaint (pôrt´-noiz kəm-plānt) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: ‘Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, autoeroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s “morality,” however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification [...] (Spielvogel, O. “The Puzzled Penis,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse , Vol. XXIV, p. 909) Epigraph to Portnoy’s Complaint Fifteen years into his literary career, in 1969, the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint marked an explosive development in Philip Roth’s fiction. The restrained style, evident moral seriousness, and social realism of his first books had given way to virtuosic wildness, delight in transgression, and outlandish comedy. Portnoy , a novel in the genre of the Jewish joke, consisting almost entirely of a fervid psychoanalytic monologue by the morally conflicted exhibitionist, voyeur, fetishist, onanist, and oral coitus enthusiast whose condition is pathologized in its epigraph, won Roth fame as a comic writer of prodigious talent and notoriety as an emerging generation’s laureate of sexual depravity. “Alas,” he would write a few years later, “it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind” (“Imagining Jews” 215). Before writing Portnoy , he had been the very model of a serious young literary man of the fifties, a devotee of the Partisan Review and disciple of Henry James who wrote fiction that was realistic and moral in the sense that Lionel Trilling would have understood those categories. Were he ever to know fame, he then imagined, it would be like the fame of Aschenbach in Death in Venice (216)—Aschenbach, who “earned... the gratitude of a younger generation by showing it a 1 path to moral fortitude” (11). His great regret about contemporary American fiction, his own fiction included, was that the scale at which it engaged moral questions was too small. The concerns on which it brought moral imagination to bear were all but exclusively private, because, he supposed, public life had grown so strange and unruly as to seem unreal and (it follows, for a committed realist) unimaginable. He seems never to have lost his sense that fiction writing ought to be a moral activity and engage as wide a world as possible. However, the apparently amoral mischief-making of Portnoy , a novel whose subject matter is as private as that of any sexual obsessive’s analytic session, galvanized his talent as nothing before had done, arguably bringing him to the height of his powers as an artist. After so many years of discipline in pursuit of probity, he succeeded at last in summoning the voice that would distinguish him as a writer by indulging in imaginative recklessness. This development creates for Roth a kind of Portnoy’s Complaint: the reckless impulse that animates Portnoy is at odds with the moral imperative by which he feels bound as a writer. I will consider how he works at reconciling that impulse with that imperative in three pivotal novels from the middle of his career: Portnoy , The Ghost Writer (1979), and The Counterlife (1986). In all three, he is preoccupied with the Jewish twentieth century and questions of identity and ethics arising from it—among them, what it is to be good, a Jew, a good Jew, a good writer, or a good Jewish writer when the context or subject is the Holocaust or Israel, and whether to be any of those things. I will follow that thematic thread through the novels, focusing my attention on the Israel chapter of Portnoy , the Anne Frank chapter of The Ghost Writer , and the Israel and El Al chapters of The Counterlife . I am concerned with Roth’s treatment of the theme not in itself but as an index to his engagement with the aesthetic/moral problem raised above. My contention is that after suspending the responsibility his early ethics of fiction would have him assume in Portnoy and 2 eschewing it in The Ghost Writer , all in service of his rampaging talent, he comes to write both with inspired wildness and moral probity in The Counterlife , a novel about modern public life whose art is equal to its strangeness and unruliness. Before I begin to argue that contention, I will take a few pages to describe in more detail the young Roth’s literary-ethical commitments and the wild tendency in his writing that draws him astray from them. Roth sets out his ethics of fiction in two essays adapted from speeches he delivered in the early sixties. His fiction from that time
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