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Philip Roth: the Major Phases Philip Roth: The Major Phases David Gooblar UCL UMI Number: U591486 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U591486 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 I, David Gooblar, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract: This thesis is a study of the major phases of the career of Philip Roth. In the nearly fifty years since his first book, Roth has published close to thirty works, creating a body of work now as large and as varied as any twentieth century writer. In an attempt to chart the progression of this career, I break down Roth’s oeuvre into six chronological phases, beginning in the late 50s and ending at the start of the new century. Having carried out extensive research into Roth’s archive in the Library of Congress, contemporary reception of the books, and a variety of often overlooked cultural contexts, I have attempted to offer a new and original take on Roth’s most interesting and distinctive preoccupations. Beginning with Goodbye, Columbus, Roth’s first book, I examine the author’s complicated relationship with, and treatment of, the idea of Jewish community in America. The second chapter follows Roth’s vexed pursuit of, and eventual rejection of, an ideal of literary seriousness in the 1960s, especially in relation to the example of the New York Intellectuals. Chapter 3 looks at Roth’s preoccupation with two figures from twentieth century European Jewish history, Franz Kafka and Anne Frank, who figure in a number of Roth’s books during the 1970s. Chapter 4 examines the important role that psychoanalysis plays in Roth’s books, from the burlesque of an analytic session of Portnoy's Complaint, to an apparent break with psychoanalytic thinking in 1986’s The Counterlife. The next phase is Roth’s “autobiographical” period of 1988 to 1993, during which he produced four books each at a different point along a continuum between autobiography and fiction. In these works, Roth comes to grips with the ethical issues that his fiction had played with for so long. Finally, the last chapter looks at Roth’s final books of the century, investigating how his assessment of three periods of twentieth century American history shows a fascination with individuals who attempt to break free from the forces of determination. Rather than, as is commonly espoused, a break with his earlier work, I argue that the “American Trilogy” continues concerns that have preoccupied Roth from the very start of his career. 3 Contents Acknowledgments 5 List of Abbreviations 6 Introduction: Inward/Outward 7 1 “Is it us?”: Goodbye, Columbus 19 2 Portnoy's Complaint and the Idea of Seriousness 52 3 After Portnoy I: Franz Kafka, Anne Frank, and Roth’s “Personal Culture” 88 4 After Portnoy II: “Oh Freud, do I know!” 131 5 “I am a thief and a thief is not to be trusted” 159 6 “You flood into America and America floods into you” 195 Conclusion: (There’s no) Remaking Reality 225 Bibliography 232 4 Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the support of the UCL English Department and Graduate School in helping me to complete this thesis. I could not have asked for better supervisors than Kasia Boddy and Pamela Thurschwell, and they deserve much more than a thank you for all the care, time, and work they put into helping me in my research and writing. Finally, there is no way to fully acknowledge the support (in all senses of the word) I’ve received from my parents, Linda and Howard Gooblar, and from my partner, Katarina Perovic. They have my endless gratitude. 5 List of Abbreviations American Pastoral AP The Anatomy Lesson AL The Counterlife C Deception D Everyman E The Facts F The Ghost Writer GW Goodbye, Columbus GC The Human Stain HS I Married a Communist IMA C “Looking at Kafka” “Kafka” My Life as a Man MLM Operation Shylock OS Patrimony P Portnoy's Complaint PC The Professor o f Desire PD “Writing American Fiction” “Writing” 6 Introduction Inward/Outward In 1973, at the age of forty, having published seven books, Philip Roth took a moment to sit back, reflect, and interview himself on the subject of the shape of his career to date. For a writer who has claimed that “the art of impersonation” is “the fundamental novelistic gift,” impersonating his own interviewer came naturally enough.1 Asking himself a question about his alternation between the “serious” and the “reckless,” Roth allowed himself a long response that, after taking in his early battles with Jewish critics over his debut publication Goodbye, Columbus (1959), eventually cites Philip Rahv’s 1939 essay “Paleface and Redskin,” which posited two polarized types of American writer.2 Paleface writers, like T.S. Eliot and Henry James, were refined, educated, east coast figures, exhibiting an old world interest in moral concerns. Redskins, like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, were the writers of the frontier and the big city: emotional, vernacular, energetic writers who reflected the new world’s vitality and the explorer’s spirit of curiosity. After introducing Rahv’s dichotomy, Roth claims membership in a new, hybrid category of American writer—the “redface,” who is some combination of paleface and redskin, while remaining “fundamentally ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds.” It is telling that Roth does not go on to claim that he writes like some combination of paleface and redskin—there is no assertion of the ways in which he has been influenced by, 1 Philip Roth, “Interview withThe Paris Review,” in Reading Myself and Others, (New York: Vintage, 2001), 123. ‘ Philip Rahv, “Paleface and Redskin,” in Image and Idea: Twenty Essays on Literary Themes, Revised and Enlarged (London: Weidenfeld and NicoIson, 1957), 1-6. 7 say, both James and Twain—but rather it is the alternation between opposing modes, the awkward uncertainty as to which path to choose, that is emphasized: To my mind, being a redface accounts as much as anything for the self-conscious and deliberate zigzag that my own career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before, as though the author was mortified at having written it as he did and preferred to put as much light as possible between that kind of book and himself.3 This “self-conscious and deliberate zigzag” has continued to define Roth’s career to the present day, creating a body of work as varied and fertile as that of any writer in recent memory. Is there another writer of fiction who has been so many things to so many readers? At one time or another, Roth has been seen as the sharp-eyed chronicler of the affluent Jewish-American suburbs; the best-selling celebrity author of sexual transgression; the keeper of the flame of Jewish humour; the self-hating Jewish writer, eager to drag his people in the mud to sell a few more copies of his books; the politically incisive satirist in the tradition of Swift and Orwell; the self­ obsessed teller of psychoanalytic tales of the self; the champion of the work and traditions of Eastern European writers behind the Iron Curtain; the playful postmodernist, blurring the lines between fiction and fact; the nostalgic bard of Newark, New Jersey; and the unabashed Great American Novelist, writing works that condense and comment upon whole decades of American experience. How are we to make sense of such a career? In another interview eleven years later, in 1984 (this time with Hermione Lee as the interviewer), Roth spoke of Nathan Zuckerman’s actions in The Anatomy Lesson (1984)—in which he both decides to become a doctor and spontaneously impersonates a pomographer who publishes a magazine called, appropriately enough, Lickety Split —in terms that seem to recall his earlier vision of himself as a redface: There had to be willed extremism at either end of the moral spectrum, each of his escape-dreams of self-transformation subverting the meaning and mocking the intention of the other [...] The thing about 3 Philip Roth, “On The Great American Novel, in Reading Myself and Others, 72-3. 8 Zuckerman that interests me is that everybody’s split, but few so openly as this.4 Later in the same interview, Lee asked Roth about his alternation between first and third person narration in the Zuckerman Bound novels; Roth’s explanation again describes a balancing act, a movement between two poles: The Ghost Writer is narrated in the first person, probably because what’s being described is largely a world Zuckerman’s discovered outside of himself, the book of a young explorer. The older and more scarred he gets, the more inward -looking he gets, the further out I have to get. The crisis of solipsism he suffers in The Anatomy Lesson is better seen from a bit of a distance.5 Alternating between inward and outward perspectives, between the willed extreme of a noble profession and the willed extreme of a sordid one, between paleface and redskin, Roth has made a career out of such shifts, and in this thesis I will argue that this has been a defining characteristic of Roth’s writing from its beginnings to the start of the present century.
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