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Karen Van Damme

Dr. Leen Maes

Master thesis English literature

30 July 2008

The evolution of Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost.

0. Introduction

I was introduced to Philip Roth and the compelling voice of his fiction during a series of lectures on the topic of Jewish-American authors by Prof. Dr. Versluys in 2006 at Ghent

University. The Counterlife (1986) was one of the novels on the reading list, in which I encountered for the first time his famous protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman. Ever since I have read this novel, I have been intrigued by Roth‟s work. My introduction to Jewish-American writing has made a lasting impression through him, which is why the choice was an easy one to make when we were asked to select a topic for this master thesis. I will not be dealing with Philip

Roth‟s whole oeuvre, since the man is such a prolific writer and his work is in title to a thorough discussion. I will write about the first and the last novel in his Zuckerman-series, namely The

Ghost Writer (1979) and Exit Ghost (2007). Nathan Zuckerman can be seen as Roth‟s alter-ego, an American- Jewish writer with a sharp pen. Since I have, unfortunately, only had the opportunity to read four of the eight Zuckerman-novels, I want to make it absolutely clear that the two novels mentioned here will be the sole basis for my analysis of the story-line and the character named Nathan Zuckerman.

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[…] the fact that he himself is such an eloquent and persuasive critic of his own work, and

that other criticism of Roth has become something of a minor (or maybe not so minor)

industry, makes the task of finding something new and worthwhile to say about his work a

challenging one. ( Brauner 2)

In his introduction to Philip Roth (2007), David Brauner managed quite well to capture the feeling that overtook me as I had just started my research into the literature about and by the prolific author Philip Roth, and so this quote very adequately reveals the challenge inherent in the task I have set myself. Many critics have gone before me in writing about this Jewish-American novelist and I realize very well that these are big shoes to fill, especially when considering that

Roth has written and spoken about his own work on numerous occasions. Since it is impossible to read everything that is written on the subject of Roth and The Ghost Writer, I had to narrow down the material I was going to use for that part of my thesis. I did not have to go through a similar process when discussing Exit Ghost though. Due to the fact that this novel has been published only a year ago, I have been unable to find many secondary sources. However, by comparing the two novels it was possible to relate certain elements in the novel to literature that discusses

Roth‟s work more in general.

My master thesis will consist of two major parts. There are many references to The Ghost

Writer to be found in Exit Ghost which made it very interesting to compare certain aspects that are linked to the character of Nathan Zuckerman specifically and to some of the other characters more in general. I will discuss Jewishness, authorship and postmodern elements in each novel and contrast my findings in the final conclusion. I have decided to put in an introductory chapter also that deals with the possible autobiographical nature of Roth‟s fictional writing, since this will provide further insight into his novels.

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1. Roth and autobiography

Before starting my analysis of the two novels, there is one question I should address in order to make clear where I stand when reading and discussing Roth‟s work. There has been some discussion with regard to the question whether Roth can be seen as an autobiographical writer or not. Due to the many similarities in Roth‟s own life to that of Nathan Zuckerman, it is alluring to jump to conclusions. However, there is more to it than meets the eye. In his autobiography The

Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography1 written in 1988, in which the similarities mentioned above can be easily discovered, Roth makes his view on the autobiographical interpretation of his own novels abundantly clear. I am familiar with Roland Barthes‟ idea that the author of a text is dead, metaphorically speaking. Still, in the case of these particular novels I believe that a look at Roth‟s own ideas on authorship can contribute to an understanding of his writing rather than form a limitation, especially because he does not try to simplify the problem or to impose his interpretation on the reader. In fact, what Roth seems to being doing in The Facts is to question several issues related to the process of writing and to the introduction of autobiographical elements into fiction. His vision can be placed next to those of other critics and can form a valuable contribution in my opinion, though we should not grant it a superior position. It is just another way of gaining insight into the meaning of his texts, but this possibility definitely deserves some attention and further exploration.

I will first introduce the vision of Alan Cooper as discussed by Margaret Smith in her essay

“Autobiography: False Confession?”, and I will discuss her own vision as well. Margaret Smith writes:

Alan Cooper, in his Philip Roth and the Jews (1996), refers to The Facts categorically as

autobiography, the nature of which would “finally disclose or confirm [that] whole episodes

1 When using quotes from The Facts, I will indicate the page in the following manner : e.g.(Facts 1) Van Damme 4

and some key plots of the sixties‟ and seventies‟ novels were indeed drawn from Roth‟s

young adult life, [and] that major characters were fictionalizations of friends, relatives, lovers

and his first wife. (Smith 99)

According to Cooper, “all Roth‟s narratives could be construed as fiction” (Smith 99) prior to the publication of The Facts. He claims that the publication of The Facts opens up the possibility for speculations about how certain scenarios in Roth‟s fictional work might be seen as “re- enactments of his past life.” (Smith 99) He then goes on to caution us that “they [the facts] have already been assaulted by the imagination” (Smith 99), therefore we can never be sure. In

Margaret Smith‟s words: “Hence any attempt to link life and fiction is mere conjecture.”

(Smith 99) She goes on to say: “I argue that Roth does not write autobiography as such and that his fiction is not a mere rendition of facts colored by his imagination. On the contrary, Roth contrives to blur the boundaries of both fiction and autobiography as a narrative strategy; indeed, this can be understood as his own personal stance regarding his work.” (Smith 100) In The Facts,

Roth introduces a vision similar to that of Cooper and Smith.

Roth starts his autobiography with a letter to his alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, asking him whether he – Roth – should publish The Facts or not. This act in itself already reveals the complexity of the relation that exists between fiction and reality, they seem to have become intertwined. I will come back to this relation when I deal with certain postmodern characteristics of the novels under discussion in this thesis. In his letter, Roth claims that writing his autobiography has been a reversal of the process by which he normally creates his fictional work.

“Yet, to my surprise, I now appear to have gone about writing a book absolutely backward, taking what I already imagined and, as it were, desiccating it, so as to restore my experience to the original, prefictionalized factuality.” (Facts 3) He informs Zuckerman – and thereby his readers - how his own life has been the starting point for his novels. But the „facts‟ of his life Van Damme 5 which where the source of his inspiration have been changed in order to make them less ordinary.

This was what Alan Cooper was talking about when he said that “they [the facts] have already been assaulted by imagination.” (Smith 99) According to Roth‟s description, his fiction consists of a transformation of certain events and persons taken from his own life. He conceives of his writing as being “a kind of intricate explanation to myself of my world”(Facts 4)

Autobiographical elements and fantasy are mixed together into a more interesting blend according to him. So these autobiographical facts are placed in what is often an entirely different context, and certain changes are added to reach more effect. A relevant example is the fact that

Philip Roth‟s father has always supported his son‟s writing, even when the Jewish community reacted furious after the publication of “Portnoy‟s Complaint”. In The Ghost Writer this scenario is obviously altered dramatically: Nathan Zuckerman‟s father does not want him to publish his story „Higher Education‟ because he – in line with the Jewish community in general - thinks it is disrespectful towards the Jews. This transformation heightens the dramatic impact of Roth‟s rebellion against his Jewish background drastically, making it more personal and interesting to the reader.

“So why claim biographical visibility now, especially as I was educated to believe that the independent reality of the fiction is all there is of importance and that writers should remain in the shadows” (Facts 4) Apparently, Roth also struggles with the question whether or not his autobiography could possibly become an obstacle for reading his fiction. Fantasy and transformation are what make his fiction to what it is and there is no need to intrude with unadorned information about his actual life. However, Roth claims that he is actually writing The

Facts for himself, in order to bring about a process of “demythologization and depathologization”. The immediate cause of his need to do this seems to be the nervous breakdown he has suffered: Van Damme 6

[…] what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led

to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental

dissolution. It was in the period of post-crack-up meditation, with the clarity attending the

remission of an illness, that I began, quite involuntarily, to focus virtually all my waking

attention on worlds from which I had lived at a distance for decades – remembering where

I had started out and how it had all begun. (Facts 4)

He has also written the autobiography as a means to come to terms with the death of his mother, which he can not understand, and with the fact that the death of his father is approaching rapidly now. (in “Exit Ghost, he finds himself to be in a similar position as the one his father is in here)

Roth longs again for the time when he was still young and when the death of his parents was still too far away to worry him. Roth seems to want to believe himself that it is not actually an attempt to show to his readership what is and what is not autobiographical in his novels, while in a way it is inevitable to look at it as being exactly that. Zuckerman is a transformed version of himself; a person who resembles Roth in several ways but still is a separate and different person.

In The Facts, Roth wanted to take the transformation away and unravel the intricate network of connections between him and Zuckerman:

As a matter of fact, the two longish works of fiction about you, written over a decade,

were probably what made me sick of fictionalizing myself further, worn out with coaxing

into existence a being whose experience was comparable to my own and yet registered a

more powerful valence, a life more highly charged and energized, more entertaining than

my own…which happens to have been largely spent, quite unentertainingly, alone in a

room with a typewriter. (Facts 6)

In The Ghost Writer,this feeling is shared by Lonoff – a Jewish writer greatly admired by the protagonist - as he is visited by young Nathan Zuckerman, in Exit Ghost it is the latter who seems Van Damme 7 to undergo the same dilemma: a life which is full of action vs. living a secluded and non-eventful life while writing about that active type of living. I will discuss this under the heading of

„Authorship‟ in both chapters.

Roth realizes very well that even in an autobiography we are dealing with a subjective representation of so-called facts:

I recognize that I‟m using the word “facts” here, in this letter, in its idealized form and in

a much more simpleminded way than it‟s meant in the title. Obviously the facts are never

just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous

experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your

imagining of the facts. There is something naïve about a novelist like myself talking about

presenting himself “undisguised” and depicting “a life without the fiction”. ( Facts 8)

Roland Barthes is also convinced that writing is a problematic form of representation. James S.

Duncan describes Barthes‟ vision as put forward in Empire of Signs (1982) in the article

“Me(trope)olis: Or Hayden White Among the Urbanists.” Barthes believes that there is no necessary, inherent relation between signifiers and referents, an idea that makes the notion of representation highly problematic. In Empire of Signs, he illustrates this idea by writing a book about Japan that actually is not about Japan at all when we look at it on another level. From that different perspective, it is a book about writing. This is what Roth is trying to accomplish in his

Zuckerman novels as well, be it in a different way than Barthes. Is Roth presenting us with a representation of a generic life of „a‟ Jewish-American author? Is he writing about his own life while at the same time he is not? Are the Zuckerman-novels in fact searches into what it means to be a writer more in general and into the process of writing? These are definitely ideas that are incorporated into his fiction, since Roth is a clear example of a postmodernist writer who Van Damme 8 attributes a substantive amount of attention to metafiction and intertextuality in his work. Derek

Parker Royal proposes a postmodern viewpoint when discussing Roth‟s fiction in his essay

“Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism”: “Perhaps a more useful way of approaching

Roth‟s work, at least in terms of the author‟s stance vis-à-vis influence, is through a more postmodern lens, one that problematizes more traditional (two-dimensional and linear) notions of literary influence and instead reconceptualizes in terms of two different narrative strategies: intertextuality and metafiction.” (Royal 24) Roth likes to consciously explore the boundaries between fiction and reality in his work, as will be shown in the following chapters. Ben Siegel formulates it as follows:

Philip Roth, like his two esteemed colleagues, [ Siegel is talking about Saul Bellow and

E.L. Doctorow here, two other esteemed Jewish-American writers] has also devoted – to

a much greater degree – a good deal of his fiction in recent years to this postmodernist

habit of writing about writing. His protagonists or heroes almost always seem to resemble

their author in age and appearance, time and place, and in personal circumstances. But

after having teased his readers with such strong parallels, especially in the recurring figure

of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth likes to dismiss the autobiographical elements in his work as

products of his creative imagination. (Siegel 22)

This does not necessarily have to contradict Wallace Stegner‟s statement quoted by Siegel:

“Because he [Roth]writes fiction in order to reflect or illuminate life, his materials obviously must come out of life.” (Siegel 23) Stegner points out that autobiography is definitely the base from which fictional writing starts out, but the alterations that are made to that material are what distinguish reality from fiction, an idea also stated by Roth in The Facts. Stegner adds: “The people of his stories and novels will be, inevitably but in altered shapes, the people he himself has known.” (Siegel 22) Van Damme 9

This discussion about the boundaries between autobiography and fiction is also of great relevance when we look at certain issues the writer Nathan Zuckerman and some of the other characters are struggling with. In The Ghost Writer, a conflict arises with Zuckerman‟s Jewish father and the Jewish community more in general when he uses an episode from his own family history in his short story „Higher Education‟. He is accused of being an anti-Semite Jew, even though he initially never intended to offend anyone. In Exit Ghost, the problem of autobiography is centered around Lonoff, who‟s alleged last novel has apparently quite a controversial topic: a young critic named Kliman believes that Lonoff has had an incestuous relationship with his sister in the past and at the end of his life decided to write about it. Zuckerman claims – or at least he wants to convince himself and others – that this is only fiction, based on the life of Nathaniel

Hawthorne who lived in the area where Lonoff resided for the greatest part of his life.

The Facts has as its closing piece the letter written by „Zuckerman‟, in which he offers

„his‟ reply to Roth‟s questions. Roth cleverly uses this letter as a vehicle to voice his own objections to his autobiography in my opinion. He can afford to make Zuckerman make the objections, because the personality of his alter-ego suits the purpose perfectly: a man who does not shy away from formulating harsh, brutally honest and provocative opinions. This is the advice Zuckerman gives to Roth:

Don‟t publish – you are far better off writing about me than “accurately” reporting your

own life. Could it be that you‟ve turned yourself into a subject not only because you‟re

tired of me but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can

detach yourself from your biography at the same time you exploits its crises, themes,

tensions, and surprises? Well, on the evidence of what I‟ve just read, I‟d say you‟re still as

much in need of me as I of you – and that I need you is indisputable. (Facts 161) Van Damme 10

Zuckerman puts the word “accurately” between parenthesis for obvious reasons: Roth has already admitted in his own letter that he is fully aware of the fact that an autobiography can not be considered to a totally objective document. Ben Siegel agrees with this notion: “Most experienced readers have learned that no novelist or fiction writer is to be entirely believed when discussing his or her own life. Indeed, when has any autobiography been entirely devoid of creative selection and convenient arrangement of personal details?” (Siegel 22-23) But what is more, Zuckerman believes that Roth is more capable of honesty in his fiction then he is in his autobiography: “What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you‟re permitted to tell when nothing‟s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best.” (Facts 162) Inhibition has caused Roth to change certain names and tread lightly on certain topics – when not leaving them out completely. Zuckerman regrets his. In his frame of mind this makes Roth‟s writing less interesting. Furthermore, he believes it to be the cause of “a slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment.” (Facts 162) Zuckerman has come to realize that he is in a way a vehicle for Roth‟s uncensored message: “I am your permission, your indiscretion, the key to disclosure. I understand that now as I never did before.” (Facts 161-162) Zuckerman can say and do what Roth can not due to his inhibitions, that is exactly the strength of his protagonist. That is why Zuckerman gives Roth the following advice: “Your gift is not to personalize your experience but to personify it, to embody it in the representation of a person who is not yourself. You are not an autobiographer, you‟re a personificator.” (Facts 162)

In the following quote taken from “Reading Philip Roth” by Ben Siegel, an important question is asked by David Lida: “As David Lida points out, Roth offers himself „as a nice

Jewish boy who, after an almost suffocatingly rosy childhood, grew up into a nice Jewish man who „writes books and wants to be left alone‟‟. But, adds Lida rather shrewdly, „because the book Van Damme 11 is written with such a politesse and filial respect, one is bound to wonder about the unexplained sources of rage that inform so many of Roth‟s novels.” (Siegel 28) Roth has beaten his critics to it, as pointed out by Siegel, since he has already made sure that Nathan Zuckerman asks Roth the very same question in his letter. So Zuckerman is not only voicing Roth‟s reservations about writing an autobiography. According to Siegel, “Roth is simply up to one of his oldest tricks: he has often attempted to disarm his critics by asking and answering their questions before they can ask them.” (Siegel 28). However, the answers to those questions are not provided by Zuckerman, leaving the origin of Roth‟s poignant style a mystery.

In the end, Roth does not take Zuckerman‟s letter to heart. To me, this suggests that he is still in charge of his character, and not the other way around. Zuckerman did not have to fear that The

Facts might make him redundant though, since after the publication of his autobiography, Roth has written another number of novels in which Nathan Zuckerman is featured as the protagonist,

Exit Ghost being the final one.

Ben Siegel said: “He [Roth] has tried to explain to his readership that we are not to read his fiction as autobiography or his alleged autobiography as literal fact” (Siegel 22). I think this neatly summarizes the message of this chapter, and I will try to keep this in mind when discussing The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost.

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2. The Ghost Writer2

2.1. Jewishness

2.1.1. Introduction

Since 1886 the Statue of Liberty has welcomed many immigrants who decided to take a challenge and make the long ocean voyage to the New World, leaving Europe behind. This statue, which is situated on Liberty Island, symbolizes freedom and the escape of oppression.

America was seen as a place of opportunities where you could start over with a clean slate, an uncorrupted world where everyone would get the same chances in life. To the Jewish people who made the journey this must have been an appealing prospect, considering the anti-Semitic sentiment and actions that often made life difficult in their European native countries. In 1903, a sonnet entitled “The New Colossus” was engraved on a bronze plaque which was placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. This famous poem was written by Emma Lazarus, the daughter of Portuguese Sephardic Jews. For the Jewish people who arrived at Ellis Island, it could be seen as signal of hope for a better life and a future without anti-semitism. However, in his article

“Secular Sermons and American Accents: The non-fiction of Ozick, Bellow and Roth”, Michael

Greenstein points out that most of the immigrants probably were not aware of the fact that this poem had a Jewish author.

Unfortunately, history has taught us that human nature is difficult to change. Prejudices and racial tensions seemed to have traveled along with the new inhabitants of America. The clean slate apparently still had some imprints left of the mentality in Europe. Michael Greenstein points out that for example “Henry James's negative comments about the Yiddish language of these immigrants at Ellis Island and on the Lower East Side of New York undermined the

22 When quoting from The Ghost Writer, I will indicate the page (x) in the following manner: (Ghost x) Van Damme 13 acceptance of Jews into the American mainstream” (Greenstein 4) This illustrates the negative attitude that existed in America towards Jewish people.

Furthermore, a new beginning as „Americans‟ would also prove to be a more complex enterprise than many Jews initially had expected. Leaving the native country did not necessarily mean leaving religious and other traditions behind. Especially the following generations encountered a struggle between being American and being Jewish. Some saw America as a place of freedom where their Judaism would no longer form a problem and chose to live by the Jewish religious rules and traditions. Others rebelled against their Jewish origin, wanting to be „real‟

Americans. Intrinsically connected to all of this are the heritage of The Holocaust, its repercussions and anti-Semitism more in general. How do – in this case American -Jews cope with surviving or even escaping World War II and its cruelties? Do they have to feel guilty for wanting to be Americans rather than Jews? Does it bring along certain obligations? I will specifically look into the way in which Zuckerman tries to deal with all of these questions.

In The Ghost Writer Nathan Zuckerman obviously is the rebelling type. The various manifestations of this will be discussed in the following paragraphs. Furthermore, I will try to show that this resistance to his Jewish origins is ambiguous.

2.1.2. Zuckerman‟s upbringing

Nathan Zuckerman spends his childhood in a neighborhood in Newark which is maily inhabited by Jews. He is brought up by his parents as typical Jewish-American boy who learns

Hebrew after school hours and who loves baseball. Family and tradition are very important to his doting parents and the community in which he lives. His friends are predominantly Jewish. For a while, this is the only world that Nathan knows. It is a world very well known to Roth himself.

From The Facts we learn that he grew up in a similar environment. As Zuckerman grows older, Van Damme 14 he realizes that being Jewish has certain implications. An example of these implications which strikes him, concerns the quotas that restricted the number of Jews that could enter medical school. This results directly in his father‟s career as a chiropodist rather than a real doctor:

“Hi, Doc – how are you?” So the neighbors we passed along the way always greeted my

popular and talkative father, and though he seemed never to be bothered by it, for a time

his class-conscious little boy used to think that if only there had been no quotas and he‟d

become a real physician, they would have greeted him as “Doctor Zuckerman.” “Doc”

was what they called the pharmacist who made milk shakes and sold cough drops.

(Ghost 84-85)

2.1.3. Resistance

When he leaves his hometown to study at the University of Chicago, Nathan‟s world opens up extensively. He now realizes that there are many other ways of living than the one in which he has been brought up. Rebellion against one‟s parents and the surroundings in which one has grown up is characteristic at this age. Especially for a Jewish-American boy from the second generation, this behavior is part of a tradition. Nathan starts to react against what he considers to be the smothering boundaries set by the previous generation of Jewish immigrants.

After he finishes his studies and has served in the army, Zuckerman moves to “a five- flight walk-up of lower Broadway” (Roth, 6) in New York. His girlfriend Betsy who is a ballet dancer, lives there with him. She is a shiksa or shikse. This Yiddish word is used as a pejorative or a mock-pejorative term for a woman who is not Jewish. In her essay entitled “Roth and

Gender”, Debra Shostak explains why the shikse is so attractive to many of Roth‟s male Jewish characters: “The shiksa, the derogatory Yiddish term for the Gentile woman, is for the Jewish man the highly eroticized image of cultural difference. A forbidden fruit, the shiksa becomes an Van Damme 15 object of consumption analogous to the unkosher foods that tempt the Jew to disobey the rules that identify his body as Jewish and hence neither a “man” nor fully American” (Shostak 117).

Nathan seems particularly interested in the shiksa friends of Betsy, with whom he has sex on several occasions when Betsy is out dancing. This sexual promiscuousness goes directly against the cultural and matrimonial values of the community he was brought up in. As the girls are not

Jewish, it can be considered extremely rebellious behavior that can also be found in other characters created by Roth. Hermoine Lee wrote a study for a series on contemporary writers entitled Philip Roth (1982) , in which she wrote the following about “Portnoy‟s Complaint: “

Portnoy‟s pursuit of shiksas is a pursuit of „junk‟ sex, unkosher goods.” (Lee, 15) Nathan does not really seem to love Betsy, their relationship reinforces his desire to be an American rather than a Jew. By the time that Zuckerman visits Lonoff, his relationship is ruined because she finds out that he is not faithful to her.

Zuckerman‟s rebellion takes on other forms as well. He writes a story entitled “Higher

Education”, which will enrage his father and the Jewish community in which he grew up. This was initially not an intended act of rebellion:

The story was the most ambitious I had written – some fifteen thousand words – and, as I

saw it, my motives for sending it to him were no less benign than those I‟d had in college,

when I mailed home poems for the family to read even before they appeared in the student

verse magazine. It wasn‟t trouble I was looking for but admiration and praise. Out of the

oldest and most ingrained of habits, I wanted to please them and make them proud.

(Ghost 80)

In the past, his father was always proud of his son‟s writing. However, this time the result is not quite the same. Contrary to the praise and loving support that former stories elicited, this story fills Doc Zuckerman with absolute horror because “Higher Education” is about a painful episode Van Damme 16 from their family history characterized by greed and violence. When Nathan goes home for

Sunday brunch which is a family tradition, a disturbingly high number of family members and friends turns up. During a walk in the park after brunch, Nathan realizes that his intuition was right. These people were present because his father wanted to show him the importance of loyalty towards his Jewish family and community. Nathan‟s father does not deny that Zuckerman‟s story is truthful, but he regrets the fact that it portrays his Jewish family in a manner that corresponds to the stereotypical idea that he believes to be present in the mind of many gentiles: “It is about kikes. Kikes and their love of money. That is all our good Christian friends will see, I guarantee you.” (Ghost 94) He wonders why his son did not show the positive side of their family: “The fact remains, son, there is more to the family, much much more, than is in this story. Your great- aunt was as kind and loving and hard-working a woman as you could ever meet in this world.”

(Ghost 87) He asks Zuckerman not to publish the story, but his son refuses since he does not want to be censored by his father‟s moral objections. Zuckerman leaves his father at the bus stop while they are still arguing and gets on the bus to go the writers colony in Quahsay: “But I hopped on the bus, and then behind me the pneumatic door, with its hard rubber edge, swung shut with what

I took to be an overly appropriate thumb, a symbol of the kind you leave out of fiction.” (Ghost

95)This “thumb” symbolizes the differences that exist between the first generation of Jewish immigrants and their children, differences that often are unbridgeable. Doc Zuckerman is desperate and consults a Jewish judge called Wapter. Several years ago this judge wrote Nathan‟s letter of recommendation for the University of Chicago. Since the judge and his wife are also shocked when reading the story, they write a letter to Nathan that has to persuade him not to publish it and not to write anything similar again. On the surface the letter appears to be polite, as it refers to the good relations between the Zuckerman family and the judge, and Wapter mentions the high hopes that he has for Nathan. The judge also makes a comparison with Socrates, Van Damme 17 implying that he does not want to censure Zuckerman. Beneath all these niceties, the message of the letter is clear: Nathan‟s story is morally unacceptable and anti-Semitic, and a Jewish writer has ethnic responsibilities. The letter is accompanied by a questionnaire entitled “Ten questions for Nathan Zuckerman” (Ghost 102), which aim to awaken a moral awareness in Zuckerman and to make him see that his decision to write this particular story equals an anti-Semitic deed. They also politely suggest that he only thinks about the financial gain of his writings, and not about the consequences for the Jewish people. The last question is especially confronting to Nathan: “10.

Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a

Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?” (Ghost 103).This implies that the Wapters‟s think of

Nathan as a self-hating Jew. In his essay “Roth and the Holocaust”, Michael Rothberg analyses this letter as follows:

As an antidote to Nathan‟s alleged self-hatred, Judge Wapter suggests a dose of mid-

1950‟s Holocaust culture: “If you have not yet seen the Broadway production of The

Diary of Anne Frank, I strongly advise you to do so. Mrs. Wapter and I were in the

audience on opening night; we wish that Nathan Zuckerman could have been with us to

benefit from that unforgettable experience” (62). It is this therapeutic and sentimental

version of Holocaust memory that Roth had already anticipated in 1959 and against which

he now turns his considerable satiric powers. (Rothberg 59)

Zuckerman decides not to answer the letter, which aggravates the conflict with his father.

2.1.4. Lonoff

When young Zuckerman discovers the fiction of E.I. Lonoff, he is in awe of Lonoff‟s style and his poignant descriptions: “a Chaplin, I said of Lonoff in my senior paper, who seized upon just the right prop to bring an entire society and its outlook to life” (Ghost 13). This Jewish Van Damme 18 writer lives as secluded life and has since long been the laughing stock of the literary scene in

Manhattan. Since he wrote his first novel, Lonoff has “had virtually no readership or recognition, and invariably would be dismissed, if and when he was even mentioned, as some quaint remnant of the Old World ghetto, an out-of-step folklorist pathetically oblivious of the major currents of literature and society. Hardly anyone knew who he was or where actually he lived, and for a quarter of a century almost nobody cared” (Ghost 10). However, the literary world has gained an interest in Lonoff, a fact that does not affect him much. Zuckerman makes the following statement about this: “What was so admirable to me want not only the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time but that having been “discovered” and popularized, he refused all awards and degrees, declined membership in all honorary institutions, granted no public interview, and chose not to be photographed, as though to associate his face with his fiction were a ridiculous irrelevancy.” (Ghost 11) When Nathan resides at the writers colony in

Guahsay he decides to write Lonoff a letter and includes his stories that have been published.

This results in an invitation to spend an evening at Lonoff‟s house, which Nathan thankfully accepts: “[f]or I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E.I.

Lonoff‟s spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and his love” (Ghost 9). As this quote reveals, his motives to visit

Lonoff concern more than literary guidance as Zuckerman looks for a father figure who will understand and support him. He wants approval, and needs confirmation that he did not do anything wrong. There are several reasons why Zuckerman chooses Lonoff as his moral mentor.

First of all, the disinterest of his first chosen literary mentor Abravanel makes Nathan look elsewhere for a new mentor: “Felix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three- year old son.” (Ghost 66) I will discuss the differences between Lonoff and Abravanel more in Van Damme 19 depth under the heading of “Authorship”. A second reason can be found in the following revealing quote:

(…) in the college essay where I “analyzed” Lonoff‟s style but kept to myself an

explication of the feelings of kinship that his stories had revived in me for our own largely

Americanized clan, moneyless immigrant shopkeepers to begin with, who‟d carried on a

shtetl life ten minutes‟ walk from the pillared banks and gargoyled insurance cathedrals of

downtown Newark; and what is more, feelings of kinship for our pious, unknown

ancestors, whose Galician tribulations had been only a little less foreign to me, while

growing up securely in New Jersey, than Abraham‟s in the Land of Canaan.” (Ghost13)

This quote amply demonstrates that Lonoff‟s writing is important to Zuckerman because it connects him to his Jewish roots. It is hard for Nathan to admit this, but the quote illustrates that he certainly is aware of these Jewish sympathies. Still, there is more to Zuckerman‟s adoration of

Lonoff‟s stories than this revived feeling of kinship:

But then, along with tens of thousands of others, I discovered E.I. Lonoff, whose fiction

seemed to me a response to the same burden of exclusion and confinement that still

weighed upon the lives of those who had raised me, and that had informed our relentless

household obsession with the status of the Jews. The pride inspired in my parents by the

establishment in 1948 of a homeland in Palestine that would gather in the unmurdered

remnant of European Jewry was, in fact, not so unlike what welled up in me when I first

came upon Lonoff‟s thwarted, secretive, imprisoned souls, and realized that out of

everything humbling from which my own striving, troubled father had labored to elevate

us all, a literature of such dour wit and poignancy could be shamelessly conceived.”

(Ghost 12) Van Damme 20

To Zuckerman, the discovery of Lonoff‟s writing entails a form of liberation, because it allows him to see that you can simultaneously be a Jew and critical about certain aspects of Jewishness in your writing at the same time. Although Lonoff has lived for the greater part of his life outside society with his wife and children, on a remote farm in the Berkshires, his stories are still explicitly dealing with issues related to Jewishness. Zuckerman is puzzled by this: “And still all you write about are Jews” (Ghost 51). Donald M. Kartiganer has written about this in his essay

“Zuckerman Bound: the celebrant of silence”:

As we soon learn, there are in fact disturbances that threaten Lonoff‟s tower of

detachment. In addition to a wife occasionally given to outrage at his “religion of art” that

rejects life, Lonoff has three children, now grown, and a guest at the house, Amy Bellette,

an attractive young woman of somewhat unclear origins who may be his lover. Sufficient

activity, it would appear, to distract any number of dedicated artists, yet none of these has

penetrated the fiction itself. Zuckerman recalls that in Lonoff‟s seven volumes of stories

“I could not think of a single hero who was not a bachelor, a widower, an orphan, a

foundling or a reluctant fiancé” (71). Not a single hero, in other words , who belongs to a

family, who weds, fornicates, fathers, who reflect the life of Lonoff himself.

(Kartiganer 36)

The burden of exclusion and confinement due to their Jewish identity is something that preoccupies both of them and that is reflected in their work. To Nathan, it is liberating to finally engage in a discussion about his favorite writers and about what it means to be a Jewish writer.

When they talk about Babel, another Jewish writer, this is what Zuckerman says:

Even when they are appalled, they‟re in awe. Deep reflective Jews a little lovesick at the

sound of all that un-Talmudic bone crunching. Sensitive Jewish sages, as Babel says,

dying to climb trees. (Ghost 48) Van Damme 21

This quote illustrates that Zuckerman‟s concept of a Jewish writer does not correspond to that of his father. Lonoff understands what Zuckerman is talking about though. In the following quote

Nathan is thinking about Amy Bellette when he is making his bold statement. She is a former student of Lonoff who temporarily is staying at Lonoff‟s house to sort out his manuscripts and to try and persuade him to hand those over to the library of Harvard University. However,

Zuckerman is talking about something other than sexual arousal at the same time. He wants to get rid of the stifling decency that his parents value so highly, because in his view this is not what

Jewish writing – or life, for that matter - is about:

But Lonoff had read my designing mind, all right; for when I came upon Babel‟s

description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his

nose, I had been inspired to add, “and blood in his penis,” and had then recorded the

words like a challenge –a flaming Dedalian formula to ingite my soul‟s smithy.

(Ghost 49, original emphasis)

2.1.5. Anne Frank

Last but not least I want to discuss the third chapter called „Femme Fatale‟. This chapter is a result of Zuckerman‟s failure to compose the letter to his father and to Wapter. In his essay

“Zuckerman Bound: the celebrant of silence”, Donald M. Kartiganer says: “In defiance of all these barriers to writing, Zuckerman turns, in a burst of bizarre impersonation, to Anne Frank, the writer who made a book both in, and of, incarceration. The Jew silenced is what Jewish writers make words of in The Ghost Writer […] ” (Kartinager 39). Zuckerman‟s imagination and feelings of guilt run away with him in a reverie of wishful thinking. He dreams up a story in which Amy

Bellette is Anne Frank who did survive The Holocaust. This intriguing girl has a similar appearance to the writer of Het Achterhuis. Apparently, Amy has lived in Europe and she has an Van Damme 22 accent that Nathan cannot place. Even though Zuckerman considers it to be possible that she is

Jewish, this is never explicitly made clear. She is exactly as old as Anne would have been, had she survived Bergen-Belsen. Furthermore, Amy has remarkable writing skills, is highly intelligent and not so easily intimidated. Similar Anne Frank, she is a bold young woman who is highly opinionated. The letter in which she introduces herself to Lonoff – here described by

Hope Lonoff - can provide a nice sample of her audacity: “She said she was a highly intelligent, creative, and charming sixteen-year-old who was now living with a not very intelligent, creative or charming family in Bristol, England. She even included her IQ.” (Ghost 41) In short, she shares numerous characteristics in common with Anne Frank.

Prior to his wish fulfilling dream on Lonoff‟s couch, Zuckerman overhears a conversation between Amy and Lonoff in the bedroom, above the study where he is supposed to sleep that night. He climbs onto Lonoff‟s desk, to eavesdrop, but since it is not high enough he uses a volume of stories by Henry James: “Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccountable uses of art! Dencombe would understand. James would understand. But would Lonoff?” (Ghost 117)

Dencombe is the protagonist in one of James‟ stories. I will discuss the symbolical value of this episode in further depth under the heading of “Authorship‟. Zuckerman is confused by what he hears. Amy is trying to persuade the older writer to leave his wife and come with her to live in

Florence, but he rejects her. The scene is somewhat ambiguous. Amy talks to Lonoff in a way that implies that he was or could be her lover, but at the same time she calls Lonoff

“dada”(Ghost 120). This indicates that Amy might be looking for a father figure and this triggers something in Zuckerman‟s mind. As soon as he saw her sitting on the floor of Lonoff‟s study, he had developed all sorts of theories about Amy‟s relationship with Lonoff. He now realizes that her physical appearance is very similar to that of Anne Frank. Pim, Anne Frank‟s father, was one of the most important persons in her life. When reading her diary, one can see how she was Van Damme 23 constantly looking for his approval, and she simply adored him. For those who want to see it, it is not hard to notice the parallel again between the lives of the two girls.

The trigger for Nathan‟s fantasy is bound up with his feelings of guilt towards his father and his related struggle with his own Jewishness. Hermione Lee puts it as follows:

Through this invention Nathan acts out his own anxiety about the double burden placed

on the Jewish writer: disinheritance from those he must write about, responsibility to their

story. (Lee 70)

Before he hears the disturbing conversation, Nathan is engaged in other activities. He is trying to write a letter to his own father: again the father figure is crucial – in which he wants to make amends for what has gone wrong between them. However, this proves to be quite an impossible task, since Zuckerman is convinced that he has not done anything wrong. He is offended because his father has involved Wapter, and is especially enraged by the allegations of the judge and his wife that he would be an anti-Semitic writer. Lonoff‟s praise, contrastingly, has touched him deeply. By telling his father about the toast that Lonoff made saying: “To a wonderful new writer”( Ghost 29), and his compliment about Nathan‟s “voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head” (Ghost 72), Zuckerman hopes to convince his father to let go of his anger. While he is writing several drafts of the letter, he realizes that his father will not understand him. His father is a traditional Jewish man of the previous generation of Jewish-American immigrants and believes that every Jew has certain obligations towards his family and towards the Jewish community. Zuckerman‟s story is inexcusable in his eyes Lonoff‟s sentiments about the story will not convince his father to change his point of view. If Amy were

Anne Frank, then she could become Zuckerman‟s best defense against his father‟s dismissal of his story. In his fantasy, he conjures up Amy/Anne as his wife. In this way, nobody could accuse him any longer of being anti-Semitic, as Anne Frank is a famous symbol of Jewish suffering. Van Damme 24

Since her name is inextricably connected to The Holocaust, Zuckerman marriage to her would not only prove that he is not an anti-Semite. It would also show his awareness of this tragic part of Jewish history.

The letter written by judge Wapter may well have planted the seed for Nathan‟s fantasy of a Jewish marriage in his mind. The judge suggests that Nathan should go see the Broadway production of the Diary of Anne Frank as he and his wife have, hoping that this will make

Zuckerman more sensitive to the suffering of the Jews. Marrying Anne Frank is the perfect solution for all his problems. It would please his parents and the Jewish community that he did not elope with a „shiksa‟ like Betsy after all. It would make clear to his critics that he really can not be an anti-Semitic person. However, this fantastical scenario raises several problems. First of all, Zuckerman realizes that if Amy is Anne Frank, she should keep her real identity hidden. This realization hits Amy/Anne when she goes to see the dramatization of her diaries and she is confronted with the reactions of the audience: “ They wept for me,” said Amy; “they pitied me; they prayed for me; they begged my forgiveness. I was the incarnation of the millions of unlived years robbed from the murdered Jews. It was too late to be alive now. I was a saint.” (Ghost 150)

Even if Nathan were to marry this imagined Anne, he would never be able to reveal who she really was. Hence, she could not defend him from the Jewish criticism of his father and judge

Wapter. Secondly, Nathan does realize that his fantasy would be considered to be perverse by exactly the same people against whom he wants to defend himself. David Brauner confirms that

[h]is very willingness to entertain this means of reconciliation with his Jewish judges,

Zuckerman recognises, paradoxically, only emphasises the gulf between his position and

theirs: enlisting the aid of Anne Frank, the most sacred of Jewish icons, in this dispute

with the elders of the community, would exacerbate rather than mitigate his sins in their

eyes” (Brauner 33). Van Damme 25

It is important to point out that Anne Frank was not the prototypical observant Jew and neither were her parents. Her sister Margot Frank was the only one who cared about the religious implications of being Jewish: “Margot‟s ambition was to be a midwife in Palestine. She was the only one of them who seemed to have given serious thought to religion.” (Ghost 142) This is how the family is described in The Ghost Writer: “ […] neither she nor her parents came through in the diary as anything like representative of religious or observant Jews.” (Ghost 142) Zuckerman realizes the irony that this absence of Jewishness is probably part of the reason why her story is so popular:

But that was the point – that was what gave her diary the power to make the nightmare

real. To expect the great callous and indifferent world to care about the child of a pious,

bearded father living under the sway of the rabbis and the rituals- that was pure folly. To

the ordinary person with no great gift for tolerating even the smallest of differences the

plight of that family wouldn‟t mean a thing. To ordinary people it probably would seem

that they had invited disaster by stubbornly repudiating everything modern and European

– not to say Christian. But the family of Otto Frank, that would be another matter! How

could even the most obtuse of the ordinary ignore what had been done to the Jews just for

being Jews, how could even the most benighted of the Gentiles fail to get the idea when

they read in Het Achterhuis that once a year the Franks sang a harmless Chanukah song,

said some Hebrew words, lighted some candles, exchanged some presents – a ceremony

lasting about ten minutes – and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not

even take that much. It took nothing – that was the horror. And that was the truth. And

that was the power of her book. (Ghost 144) Van Damme 26

According to Zuckerman, Anne Frank does not symbolize Jewishness as such. She is the incarnation of an innocent victim, and this explains why her diary evokes so much emotions.

Anne Frank can be an eye-opener for those gentiles who perceive Jewish people as being radically different from e.g. Christians, since her diary shows how much she resembles e.g. the

Dutch girls that went to school with her. Unlike for her sister Margot, Anne‟s dreams and aspirations are not connected to her Jewish religious background at all, e.g. her dream to become a movie-star. Hence, the arbitrariness of the Nazi‟s choice to make a scapegoat out of the Jews is brought to the surface. It could have happened to anyone, but the Jews became the victim. It would be morally wrong to say that Anne Frank‟s suffering is more or less tragic because she was not an observant Jew. What Zuckerman is emphasizing here, is the fact that Anne Frank‟s suffering is tragic because she is a human being, as was everyone who became a victim of The

Holocaust, observant or not. Hence, Zuckerman is saying that he does not want to look at her from the traditional Jewish viewpoint in which Anne Frank is portrayed as a Jewish icon. Anne

Frank wrote down her own uncensored opinions in her diary and several times criticized her own family, especially her mother. Zuckerman writes an honest story about his family and he is called an anti-Semite. The Holocaust has shown how anti-Semitism can kill, which is why his father and

Wapter react so extremely. Zuckerman experiences this as censorship, in his opinion one must not let this fear take over. He agrees with the notion that anti-Semitism is dangerous. What he does not agree with is the way his father and Wapter approach this problem. When one is not allowed to write anything negative about a Jew, Jewishness acquires a status of holiness.

Uncensored writing hence is made virtually impossible, and Zuckerman does not believe censorship to be the answer to anything. To him, the truth is holy. The reactions of his father and

Wapter can be linked to what Rothberg described as “this therapeutic and sentimental version of

Holocaust memory” (Rothberg 59) Rothberg makes the following insightful remark: Van Damme 27

As The Ghost Writer makes clear, the moral authority that Nathan‟s parents and Judge

Wapter evoke involves a confusion between the situation of the Jewish victims of Europe

and the Jews situated, more or less comfortably, in the United States. […] Mainstream

Jewish America, Roth wants to point out, has come a long way from Eli‟s ode to the

“peace and safety” of suburbia. It is now the “unforgettable experience” of the Holocaust

that grounds Jewish identity as much as does the urge to fit in with the gentiles. Indeed,

instead of warding off the specters of the genocide, it is identification with the martyred

innocence of Anne Frank that seems to provide the ticket of admission to the mainstrean

(Rothberg 59).

I believe that Anne Frank‟s lack of an explicitly religious Jewish identity is exactly the reason why she fits so well into Zuckerman‟s fantasy. Not only does she share a lot of characteristics with Amy, but there are many similarities between Anne and Zuckerman as well: their audacity, their love for more worldly things (e.g. he loves baseball and she adores moviestars) their rebellion against authority and their personal struggle with certain aspects of their Jewish origin. The following quote indicates another similarity between Nathan and Anne.

There is a burglary in the house in which Anne and her family are hiding. In its aftermath they fear that the police will them. This does not happen, even though we all know that it will only be a matter of time before their luck runs out:

In the aftermath of that gruesome night, she went around and around trying to understand

the meaning of their persecution, one moment writing about the misery of being Jews and

only Jews to their enemies, and then in the next airily wondering if it might even be our

religion from which the world and all people learn good…We can never become just

Netherlanders, she reminded Kitty, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too – Van Damme 28

only to close out the argument with an announcement one most assuredly would not have

come upon in “The Diary of Margot Frank”: I’ve been saved again, now my first wish

after the war is that I may become Dutch! […]” (Ghost 143, original emphasis)

The ambiguous feelings of ethnic and national identity that are described in this excerpt are similar to Zuckerman‟s experience. Both Anne and Zuckerman do not want to be confined to their Jewishness. He wants to be an American, and Anne wants to be Dutch. At the same time, they have to face up to the fact that they are Jews. Jewishness is part of their personality and their history. However, there is an obvious difference between Anne Frank and Zuckerman: Anne‟s history is directly linked to the Holocaust, which is the case for Zuckerman‟s history. Rothberg makes the following statement:

Nathan‟s absurd fantasy reveals how the Holocaust, far from evoking anxiety, as it did in

the Jews of Woodenton, has come to fortify an acceptable Jewish identity. And it suggest

that the saintly image of Anne Frank – too universal and optimistic in her Broadway and

Hollywood incarnations to be threatening to Jews or Gentiles – has helped to transform

the genocide‟s status. In The Ghost Writer, Roth daringly employs comedy to expose

Jewish-American‟s ambiguous position as a “well-off” minority related through cultural

and kinship ties to a deeply tragic, recent history that is ultimately not their own.

(Rothberg 61)

It is also striking is that Anne Frank feels “the guilt-tinged bafflement when she realizes that, unlike Lies, she had again been spared.” (Ghost 143) Lies was a friend from school who had already been deported to a concentration camp. This form of survivor-guilt may help to explain why Nathan Zuckerman will never be able to deny his Jewish identity. The Holocaust is part of his Jewish heritage, even though he and his family were never directly confronted with it. Van Damme 29

An example of how it was embedded into his daily life as a boy: “But at the table, when he‟d said that she had come to Athene as a refugee, I was reminded of “the children starving in Europe” whom we had heard so much about when we were children eating in New Jersey.” (Ghost 54) In order to honor those who did not survive, he is expected to be loyal to his Jewish heritage. That is certainly the view of judge Wapter and his father, who believe all Jews have to stick together.

That is also partly the reason why his father is so enraged about his story. Zuckerman does understand this, but in order to resist what he experiences as the constraints of his Jewish heritage, self-mockery is the only way in which he can write about Jewishness.

2.2. Authorship

In his essay entitled “Roth, literary influence and postmodernism”, Derek Parker Royal states that “many examples of metafiction [can be] found throughout Roth‟s oeuvre.” (Royal 26)

The Ghost Writer is no exception to this rule. Several issues related to the process of writing and to authorship take up a prominent position in the novel. Nathan Zuckerman has published a few short stories and is trying to find out how to become a successful writer. That notion can be seen as problematic, since the definition of a „successful writer‟ may vary tremendously depending on the point of view one takes. As the previous chapter shows, many problems and questions arise out of Nathan Zuckerman‟s attempt to incorporate his Jewish- American identity into his fiction.

Several of the dilemma‟s he is struggling with are embodied in the two writers Zuckerman admires: E.I. Lonoff and Felix Abravanel. They are both successful writers, but differ in numerous ways. Though Zuckerman does not mention this on his visit to Lonoff, he has already tried to gain the moral sponsorship of Abravanel too : “I should mention here that some three years earlier, after several hours in the presence of Felix Abravanel, I had been no less overcome.” (Ghost 57) Hermoine Lee looks into the distinction between Lonoff and Abravanel: Van Damme 30

“In “The Ghost Writer” (1979), the aspiring Jewish writer, looking for a literary father to replace the Newark foot doctor, chooses between the „good‟, highminded, conscientious, reclusive

Lonoff and the „bad‟, sensual, jet-setting, self-publicizing Abravanel.” (Lee 37)

In her essay entitled “Roth and Gender”, Debra Shostak links this distinction to the ethical opposition between the “Jewboy” and the “nice Jewish boy” as described by Roth when he wanted to explain the development of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). She writes:

The conceptualizations of Jewish manhood are dichotomized in special relation to the

regulation of the Jewish male body. […] The Jewboy strives to conquer American soil on

its own terms – to satisfy desires, to be as big as he might be, to eat, earn, and fornicate in

a display of masculine power. The Jewboy does not concern himself with moral nicety.

The nice Jewish boy, however, fearful that any show of Jewish selfhood might awaken

anti-Semitism, endeavors to find a place among American gentiles by erasing himself –

especially any telltale desires or differences – in irreproachable behavior. The nice Jewish

boy, alert to the feelings and, especially, the judgments of others, pretends that his body

simply doesn‟t exist. (Shostak 113)

When these two definitions are applied to The Ghost Writer, it becomes clear that two distinctions can be made. First of all, there is the distinction between Abravanel and Lonoff.

Hermoine Lee‟s description makes clear how the former is a perfect example of the Jew boy, while the latter fits into the description of the nice Jewish boy. Zuckerman, a college senior at that moment, meets Abravanel at a lecture given by the famous writer. Abravanel has brought along his girlfriend Andrea, a young and sensual beauty. He oozes charm and his appearance reflects his expensive life-style. This is how Zuckerman describes him: “He wore a five-hundred- dollar suit, a burgundy silk tie, and gleaming narrow black tasseled loafers […]” (Ghost 59) Van Damme 31

Abravenel puts himself on display for the world, he definitely is not hiding. Lonoff, contrarily, lives a secluded life in the Berkshires. He also takes immaculate care of his clothing, but in his case this can be seen as one of the many rituals around which Lonoff has constructed his life.

Shostak says:

The nice Jewish boy is the image of the Diaspora Jew who ideally marked himself off

from non-Jews by his bookishness, his unworldliness, and his rejection of carnality and

violence. In clear opposition to the image of action, power and virility that dominate

masculinist ideology, therefore, the figure of the Jewish man inevitably seems feminized.

(Shostak 114)

An illustration of this idea can be found in Zuckerman‟s description of Lonoff: “With hands that were almost ladylike in the swiftness and delicacy of their movements, he hiked the crease in each trouser leg and took his seat. He moved with a notable lightness for a such a large, heavyset man.” (Ghost 6) Their physical appearance, mannerisms, living conditions and lifestyle are not the only differences that can be discovered between Abravanel and Lonoff. The fiction they both write differs substantially, as becomes clear when Lonoff voices his opinion of Abravanel as a person and as a writer:

Not up my alley maybe, all that vanity face to face, but when he writes he‟s not just a little

Houyhnhn tapping out his superiority with his hooves. More like a Dr. Johnson eating

opium – the disease of his life makes Abravanel fly. I admire what he puts his nervous

system through. I admire his passion for the front-row seat. Beautiful wives, beautiful

mistresses, alimony the size of the national debt, polar expeditions, war-front reportage,

famous friends, famous enemies, breakdowns, public lectures, five-hundred- page novels

every third year, and still, as you said before, time and energy left over for all that self- Van Damme 32

absorption. The gigantic types in the books have to be that big to give him something to

think about to rival himself. Like him? No. (Ghost 53)

Abravanel is “the writer whose absorption with “the grand human discord” made his every paragraph a little novel in itself, every page packed tight as Dickens or Dostoevsky with the latest news of manias, temptations, passions, and dreams, with mankind aflame with feeling […]

(Ghost 57). This description can be directly opposed by the description of Lonoff‟s writing by

Donald M. Kartiganer:

Lonoff is the remote artist sacrificing what he calls “ „[o]rdinary human pleasures‟” in

order to produce an art comparably remote, autonomous, cleansed of history, mass

culture, the quotidian. It is an art filtered through a net of linguistic and existential

prohibition: one or two laboriously chiseled sentences a day, figuring the emptiness of his

life – “Nothing happens to me” (The Ghost Writer, 16) – into a fiction of and about

emptiness.” (Kartiganer 36)

As pointed out earlier, Lonoff does have a life in which there exist a wife, three children and a possible mistress. However, the nice Jewish boy lives in his head and pretends that his body does not exist according to Shostak. This can explain why Lonoff treats his family and wife as something that exists only in the background, and why he does not allow his family life to enter his fiction. It can also explain why Lonoff rejects Amy. His rational side is in charge, and his bodily desires are subordinate to that. He takes a decision which he believes to be responsible and morally justified. By sacrificing and erasing his body, he brings an offering to the high altar of art: he believes it will serve his writing. Abravanel has taken the other option and has left former wives for new mistresses several times already. His abilities to produce new novels do not suffer from these decisions. However, as they are different types of writers they might need different strategies to enable them to write. Van Damme 33

A second distinction can be made, since Lonoff and Zuckerman also differ in numerous ways. Lonoff is aware of this, and tries to warn Zuckerman that he should not follow his example: “Don‟t try it,” he said. “If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you‟ll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years.” Lonoff made “Fantasy” sound like a breakfast cereal.” (Roth, 30) Lonoff feels burdened by the life he has to lead in order to be able to write, but he thinks it is the only possible way for him. He believes that Zuckerman is a different kind of writer though. During a discussion with his wife Hope in the presence of Zuckerman,

Lonoff says: “[…] an unruly personal life will probably better serve a writer like Nathan than walking in the woods and startling the deer. His work has turbulence – that should be nourished, and not in the woods.” (Ghost 33) Zuckerman is aware of the burden Lonoff is carrying. Only after a few hours at Lonoff‟s house, he is aware of the fact that Lonoff lives a rigidly planned life in which rituals are crucial and change cannot be tolerated. He is impressed by Lonoff‟s discipline: “Oh, the fussiness, the fastidiousness! The floorwalker incarnate! To wrestle the blessing of fiction out of that misfortune – “triumph” didn‟t begin to describe it.” (Ghost 74)

Kartiganer comments on the differences between Zuckerman and Lonoff:

Nathan Zuckerman, the novice in quest of a mentor as well as a father to replace the one

with whom he has quarreled, and E.I. Lonoff, the chosen “Maestro,” are, for all their

mutual adoration for each other‟s work, opposed writers in virtually every respect. The

most obvious area of difference, presented in broad parodic strokes, is the characterization

of Lonoff as the selfless saint of high modernism and Zuckerman as the self-indulgent,

irreverent postmodernist.” (Kartiganer 35)

Zuckerman, like Abravanel, can be considered to be a Jew boy. His sexual pursuit of shiksas is a good illustration of this, and so is the fact that Zuckerman does not want to change the content of

“Higher Education”. His father and the Judge have taken up the position of the nice Jewish boys, Van Damme 34 afraid that the story will stir up anti-Semitism. Zuckerman definitely does not fit into the description of the nice Jewish boy.

An explicitly metafictional comment is inserted into The Ghost Writer in the form of an intertextual reference. Zuckerman spends the night in Lonoff‟s study and discovers “two annotated index cards” (Ghost 76). One card refers to a piece of music by Chopin, which

Zuckerman links to Amy and her talent for playing the piano. On the other card, a few sentences from Henry James‟ story “The Middle Years” are quoted:

It required no ingenuity to guess the appeal of the quotation typed on the other card. After

what Lonoff had been telling me all evening, I could understand why he might want these

three sentences hanging over his head while beneath them he sat turning his own

sentences around. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have.

Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

(Ghost 77)

The quotation directly refers to Lonoff‟s way of living. Even though this rigidly planned life is a burden, it can be justified by the message inherent in this quote: Lonoff lives in function of art.

His suffering and his secluded life-style honor the divine purpose that art is to him, they are necessary sacrifices that give sense to his life.

Van Damme 35

2.3. Postmodern elements

2.3.1. Introduction

Philip Roth is renowned as thé typical example of a postmodernist Jewish- American writer. I will be using Bart Vervaeck‟s study Het postmodernisme in de Nederlandse en Vlaamse roman 3 (2004) to analyze certain postmodern characteristics of The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost.

As the title already reveals, Vervaeck exclusively writes about Dutch and Flemish novels, and this thesis will extend his findings to the discussed American novels. Imperative to mention here, is the fact that Vervaeck obviously uses those examples which illustrate his theoretical framework in a clear and unambiguous manner, what often means that he has used the most extremely postmodern examples he could locate in the Dutch and Flemish literature. Since Roth is not afraid to play with postmodern elements and to make them his own, his texts do not always fit the frame as neatly as those particular examples do. There is always his sense of psychological realism on the background as well, which makes his fiction less explicitly postmodern as the postmodernism described by Vervaeck. This does not imply that his fiction is less postmodern than the examples used by Vervaeck, it only means that one has to dig a bit deeper – though only just beyond the surface - to discover its postmodern characteristics.

When using the term postmodernism, one should be careful to avoid ambiguities. The term is used to refer to various phenomena, which makes it difficult to define. Vervaeck “does not believe there is such a thing as postmodernism as a movement or the postmodern novel.”4 He agrees with Elrud Ibsch who claims that we are not dealing with an empirical “literary reality”

3 I myself will translate the excerpts that I use, the original wording used by Vervaeck in the source text will be added in the footnotes. 4 “Ik geloof niet dat er zoiets bestaat als het postmodernisme of de postmoderne roman.” (Vervaeck 7) Van Damme 36 but with “a cognitive construction”.5 To Vervaeck, postmodernism is not a historical movement that can be placed in time, as a follow-up or a counter-movement to modernism, developing its principles in reaction to the ideas of this latter movement. As he points out in his introduction, it is possible to interpret „postmodern‟ as an umbrella term for a number of features that are attributed by literary criticism to certain texts. Vervaeck gives an important example of a typically postmodern characteristic, namely that the literary conventions which are normally hidden in traditional texts, will now be made explicit. Roth definitely makes use of this technique in The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost, hence this will be discussed to great length in this chapter.

Vervaeck explains his viewpoint with a model of concentric circles. A number of postmodern characteristics can be distinguished. Those novels in which many of these particularly postmodern characteristics can be found, can be placed at the center of the model.

This is definitely where The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost belong. The novels that display less postmodern qualities can be situated at the outskirts of the concentric circles. According to

Vervaeck, the analysis of literature is actually a matter of gradation.

Vervaeck strongly emphasizes that his work is not a handbook that one can use to determine whether a novel is actually postmodern or not, he conceives of his book as an alternative reading method, a guide to our reading that can provide insight in a different manner.

Vervaeck does not consider the term postmodern to be a label that indicates quality, even if other critics such as Hugo Bosset have used it in this manner in the past. I agree when he says that it is his belief that a novel is not necessarily better just because we can find many postmodern elements in it. Therefore, it is not my quest to find out whether the first and last Zuckerman- novels are to be labeled postmodern. Roth‟s reputation as a postmodernist writer has already been

5 “Elrud Ibsch zegt terecht dat het niet gaat om een empirische “literaire realiteit” maar om “een cognitieve constructie.” ( 7) Van Damme 37 established. I will analyse and compare postmodern features in The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost, specifically focusing on the main character Nathan Zuckerman, using the postmodern characteristics that Vervaeck presents in his book as guidelines for my analysis.

I will not discuss every chapter of Vervaeck‟s study, since that would not allow a thorough discussion of both novels. The objective of my thesis in the first place is to study the evolution of Nathan Zuckerman specifically and the other characters more generally from The

Ghostwriter to Exit Ghost. Therefore, I have decided to discuss those aspects of „Worldview‟ and „View on mankind‟ that are most relevant for the purpose of this master paper. I believe these two chapters are most inherently bound up with the study of the characters. However, I will from time to time introduce elements from the other chapters as well. Since there are many overlaps between the different chapters, this approach should pose no problems. This also means that I will include certain structural and formal postmodern characteristics, e.g. intertextuality will be discussed in function of „Worldview‟ and „View on mankind‟.

In this chapter I will be discussing the postmodern characteristics of The Ghost Writer specifically. I will use the same structure when I take a closer look at Exit Ghost in the second part of this thesis. Important to mention here is that I will introduce the theoretical framework developed by Vervaeck in this chapter, and that I will not repeat this information in the chapter on Exit Ghost, except when this is required . That way, I hope to keep the oversight transparent and to avoid confusion.

Van Damme 38

2.3.2. World view

2.3.2.1. The world of texts6

Vervaeck states that a certain degree of recognition is necessary in order to establish the credibility and persuasiveness of a novel. He makes a distinction between traditional and postmodern novels in this respect. In traditional novels it is the recognition of social and psychological realities that matters. In postmodern novels, everything revolves around the recognition of the fictional world. Vervaeck explains that a postmodern novel involves the reader because its fictional techniques are made explicit. The illusion of reality is obliterated and the emphasis now lies on fiction. “The world which is described in the novel is emphatically presented as a world of books, a story, a fiction.”7 Vervaeck does not understand this as writing without meaning. He claims that it comments on traditional descriptions of fiction and reality.

Conventions that were traditionally intended to be invisible in the latter, are revealed in many postmodern novels. “This shattering of the fictional illusion immediately comments on traditional descriptions of reality. Reality is also structured by convention. For mankind, life is only accessible and conceivable in the format of a story.” 8 Vervaeck crucially remarks that this does not imply that “postmodernism denies the inevitabilities of life and reduces everything to fantasy.

[…] But: those realities do not exist separate from those forms in which they are fitted by mankind and those are conventional forms, narrative fictions.”9

In many novels that are qualified as postmodern, reality is perceived of as the portrayal of fiction. An example in The Ghost Writer clearly illustrates this. Amy Bellette tries to persuade

6 “ De wereld van teksten” (17) 7 “De wereld in het boek wordt nadrukkelijk voorgesteld als een boekenwereld, een verhaal, een fictie.” (19) 8 “Dit doorprikken van de fictionele illusie is meteen een commentaar op de traditionele omschrijving van de realiteit. Ook de werkelijkheid is opgebouwd uit conventies. Voor de mens is het leven slechts toegankelijk en vatbaar in de vorm van een verhaal.” (19) 9 “ […]dat het postmodernisme de onvermijdelijkheden van het leven miskent en dat het alles reduceert tot fabeltjes en verzinsels. […]Alleen: die realiteiten bestaan niet los van de vormen waarin ze door de mens gevat worden en dat zijn conventionele vormen, narratieve ficties.” (19) Van Damme 39

Lonoff to leave his wife Hope and start a new life with her. She takes off her clothes in a desperate attempt to win him over. At that stage, Lonoff accuses her of putting up an act, referring to the world of drama: “Melodrama, Amy. Cover up” [Lonoff] “You prefer tragedy?”

[Amy] “Don‟t wallow. You are not convincing.” [Lonoff] (Ghost 120) He fends of her seductions by telling her and to a certain extent also himself – in a very rational manner - that she is only playing a prescribed role, and badly at that. In this way, he can avoid any confrontation with feelings that might exist between them. It is actually a form of defense here. Another example can be spotted in the episode directly following Hope‟s outburst in the kitchen, when Lonoff and

Zuckerman somewhat spasmodically try to get into their roles of the worldly-wise writer and his protégée sharing a glass of brandy, pretending nothing has happened. Nathan Zuckerman actually has never drunk brandy and it seems that Lonoff hasn‟t either, since he does not know where to locate the right glasses and discovers them covered in dust. But they both seem to feel the need to use this stereotypical script as a way to circumvent the need to talk about the domestic crisis. “I had so far experienced brandy only as a stopgap household remedy for toothache: a piece of absorbent cotton, soaked in the stuff, would be pressed against my throbbing gum until my parents could get me to the dentist. I accepted Lonoff‟s offer, however, as though it accorded with my oldest post-prandial custom. The comedy thickened when my host, another big drinker, went to look for the right glasses.” (Ghost 44) In both examples, fictional terms are at a first glance used not to reveal the novel‟s fictitiousness, but to hide the character‟ psychological realities. Hence this invites questions about the postmodern nature of this technique in these particular episodes. However, it is possible that both ends are united in the same technique, which is made clear by the following insightful remarks made by Vervaeck:

All those descriptions of reality in terms of fiction make implicit or explicit statements

about reality. Hence, the tautological world view of the postmodern novel is not a closed Van Damme 40

and circular system. The world of the novel is a world of books, but this does not isolate

the novel from social reality. On the contrary, it will bring that reality into the world of

fiction. It turns the world into a fiction and therefore makes a statement about „our‟

world.10

This implies that the social reality of people trying to hide their feelings can be brought into a novel without this necessarily having to undermine or contradict the idea that their ways of doing this correspond to postmodern techniques. Their behavior and the specific way it is described, can become a technique that emphasizes the fictitious nature of the novel, while at the same time it carries psychological meanings.

The Ghostwriter is not a novel in which“the landscape is made out of paper‟11, where the illusion of fiction is continually shattered as Vervaeck‟s examples of postmodern fiction often do.

Roth uses these particular postmodern images in a less literal way. However, I managed to find two examples that could be linked to this idea. The first example can be situated in Zuckerman‟s fantasy, at the moment when Amy/Anne Frank is rereading her own diary on the bus to

Stockbridge and becomes possessed by the idea that she was a great writer as a young girl:

Perhaps what got her going was the rumbling, boundless, electrified, indigo sky that had

been stalking the bus down the highway since Boston: outside the window the most

outlandish El Greco stage effects, outside a Biblical thunderstorm complete with Baroque

trimmings, and inside Amy curled up with her book- and with the lingering sense of tragic

10 “Al die beschrijvingen van de realiteit in termen van fictie zeggen impliciet of expliciet iets over de realiteit. Het tautologisch wereldbeeld van de postmoderne roman is dus geen gesloten en circulair systeem. De wereld van het boek is een boekenwereld, maar dat gegeven isoleert het boek niet van de sociale realiteit. Integendeel, het brengt de realiteit juist in de wereld van de fictie binnen. Het maakt een fictie van de wereld en zegt dus steeds iets over „onze‟ wereld.” (21) 11 “Het landschap in het boek is van papier.” (17)This is how Vervaeck decribes “Inferno” by Brakman, a novel in which the techniques of fiction are made highly explicit. Van Damme 41

grandeur she‟d soaked up from the real El Grecos that afternoon in the Boston Museum of

Fine Arts.” (Ghost 141, my emphasis)

In this example, we find a reference to a book (the bible) as well as references to another art- form, namely painting. These last references reveal how fiction can form an influence on reality, since what is suggested here is that the actual visual impressions of the El Greco paintings determine the way in which Amy perceives the weather. A bit further there is also suggested that

Amy/Anne Frank is so exhilarated about her own diary, exactly – among other things - because of the dramatic effect the paintings have had on her mood. I realize that the reality I am referring to here is a fictional reality : Roth/Zuckerman is writing about a fictional girl on a bus. But since

Vervaeck has pointed out that reality and fiction blend together in an never ending number of layers, it is plausible to state that –in the novel, in chapter tree- there is a „real‟ girl that is influenced by the fictional nature of the El Greco painting. The second example that can be linked to a „paper‟ landscape, be it in quite a circumstantial manner, is the description of the view from Lonoff‟s window: “Outside, it was like a silent-film studio, where they made snowstorms by hurling mattres wadding into a wind machine.” (Ghost 53) This does refer to the world of movie-making, but only indirectly to the fictional world of the movie in itself. Both examples illustrate that the fictional nature of the novel is made more explicit to the reader: the world of the novel is linked to other artforms, such as paintings and movies, which emphasizes its own fictional nature and places it in a network of texts.

The previous examples thus gave us a first glance of the importance of intertextuality in

The Ghost Writer. Roth refers on numerous occasions to other writers and their work, which is a consistent characteristic in his oeuvre according to Derek Parker Royal. In his essay “Roth, literary influence and postmodernism”, Royal writes: “The interconnectedness of Roth‟s texts – Van Damme 42 one to the other or one to those of other writers – forms a solid narrative network. As with a spider‟s web, you touch one part of it and other spaces reverberate.” (Royal 25) Anne Frank‟s diary Het Achterhuis is one of the most obvious examples in The Ghost Writer. From one point of view it can even be argued that this is the original source text of the novel. This idea will be crucial for the further analysis of the postmodern characteristics of The Ghost Writer.

Intertextuality can be found in many novels. What separates postmodern intertextuality from its traditional counterpart, however, is the way in which the use of intertextual elements is explicit and has gained a broader meaning, since references to other fictional elements no longer solely include texts. This was already illustrated in the last example in which Roth made references to the El Greco paintings. Vervaeck explains this as follows:

The fact that the world in postmodern novels is empathically presented as the staging of

fictions, could be perceived as a form of intertextuality. In that case, you have to interpret

textuality as also including movies, paintings and sculptures. Hence, you might say that

the world in a postmodern novel is grafted on other fictitious worlds and not really on the

„real‟ world. But then you would miss an essential dimension of the postmodern reality,

namely the implication that the real world is also a fiction.12

The problematic nature of representation as discussed by Roland Barthes thus resurfaces again in this discussion. Vervaeck states that novels with postmodern characteristics no longer hide this problematic nature. Instead, it has become a focal point. In postmodernist literature fiction is no longer perceived as being just a representation of reality. It is considered to be a

12 “Dat de wereld in postmoderne romans nadrukkelijk wordt voorgesteld als de opvoering van ficties, zou je kunnen beschouwen als een doorgedreven vorm van de aloude intertekstualiteit. Tekstualiteit moet je dan zo ruim interpreteren dat ook films, schilderijen en beelden eronder vallen. Je zou dan kunnen zeggen dat de wereld in een postmoderne roman is geënt op andere fictieve werelden en niet zozeer op de „echte‟ wereld. Maar dan zou je een essentiële dimensie van de postmoderne werkelijkheid missen, namelijk de implicatie dat ook de echte wereld een fictie is.” (21-22) Van Damme 43 two-way process. Reality and fiction blend according to Vervaeck. Since reality is a world of conventions, as fiction is, it is a text in itself. A novel hence can be perceived as an intricate network of references to other texts, including the real world, by which several layers of meaning are brought together and new meanings are constantly created . This is the reason why Vervaeck does not consider the postmodern novel as a closed and circular system.

A text that is built on other texts is not a new way of writing. So what is specific about postmodern grafting according to Vervaeck? A first notable characteristic concerns the explicitness of the process. Roth provides us with an example of this explicitness when he introduces the story of Anne Frank into The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman consciously changes it into an entirely new story. His drastic changes render the novel‟s intertextuality more explicitly visible. The idea that Anne Frank has survived the war obviously would have massive implications. When Het Achterhuis is considered to be the original source text of The

Ghostwriter, these alterations are crucial and can be conceived as a conscious postmodern act by

Roth. This will be discussed in more depth when the topic of erasure is introduced. This concept in which Zuckerman invents an alternative history for Amy and an alternative future for Anne

Frank, also illustrates the idea discussed by Vervaeck that people necessarily create stories in order to understand life. When Zuckerman witnesses the strange relationship between Lonoff and

Amy, he is unable to see it for what it is. He feels the need to construct a narrative in which fantasy and intertextual elements are brought together in order to give meaning to the situation.

The explicitness of the parasitic nature of the postmodern novel13 has certain implications according to Vervaeck: “the world of the postmodern novel has something unmistakably compulsory to it: reality is a forced staging of fiction. That is why this world lies close to the

13 “ […]de postmoderne roman expliciteert zijn parasitaire bestaan […]” ( 22) Van Damme 44 ritual (and more generally: the religious).”14 A representative example of this ritual reality is the rigidly planned way in which Lonoff conducts his life (cf. chapter “authorship”). Lonoff‟s lifestyle corresponds to the particular sort of image of the writer that is often presented in fiction: an old man who lives a secluded and tightly structured life to serve his writing. He is a slave to the very same script that often surfaces in his own fictional writing. Hence, Lonoff is a slave to fiction. Zuckerman describes the protagonists in some of Lonoff stories as “the bemused isolate”

(Ghost 14). He also adds to this description:

[…] was he inspired to write that brilliant cycle of comic parables […] in which the

tantalized hero does not move to act at all – the tiniest impulse toward amplitude or self-

surrender, let alone intrigue or adventure, peremptorily extinguished by the ruling

triumvirate of Sanity, Responsibility, assisted handily by their devoted underlings: the

timetable, the rainstorm, the headache, the busy signal, the traffic jam, and most loyal of

all, the last-minute doubt. (Ghost 15)

Vervaeck claims that postmodern characters tend to see this staging of rituals more as a submission than as a return to the source text. The presiding feeling is one of predestination, because what happens to these characters was already determined by a script. “That is why the slavish servitude is a recurrent theme in postmodern novels. Life serves fiction, man serves the scenario.” 15 Lonoff feels that this ritual way of living is the way he has to live, even though it does not grant him satisfaction or happiness. He feels imprisoned by it: “And at home what is there to distinguish Sunday from Thursday? I sit back down at my little Olivetti and start looking at sentences and turning them around. And I ask myself, Why is there no way but this for me to

14 “De wereld van de postmoderne roman heeft onmiskenbaar iets dwangmatigs: de realiteit is een gedwongen opvoering van een fictie. Daarom ligt deze wereld erg dicht bij het rituele ( en algemener: het religieuze.” (23) 15 “Daarom is het slaafse dienen een vaak weerkerend thema in postmoderne romans. Het leven staat in dienst van de fictie, de mens in dienst van het scenario.” (23) Van Damme 45 fill my hours?” (Ghost 18). This quote reveals that Lonoff believes that there is no other option available to him. When Amy begs him to leave Hope, he can not submit to her wishes, even though he has dreamt about going to Florence with her. When Lonoff accuses Amy of playacting, he does not seem to realize that he is guilty of the same „sin‟. Lonoff is following a script that is laid out for him. He submits to the script of the stereotypical writer, who has to live in secluded circumstances to enable him to write. The kind of writer who can not afford to be distracted by the outside world . In this script, eloping with a young, attractive admirer has to remain a dream in order to serve his writing. This submission is a burden. Maybe that is why Lonoff so cynically remarks the following: “Only my „self‟, as you like to call it, happens not to exist in the everyday sense of the word” (Ghost 41). Lonoff has lost his sense of identity and has become a slave to the script, losing his „self‟ in the process. He has literally become a ghost-writer. Vervaeck puts it as follows: “The servility is a form of erasing. The servant ignores himself, he is abolished by his servitude.”16 Hope, however, refuses to submit. She no longer wants to play the role of the typical wife of a tormented but brilliant writer, and erase her own existence in order for her husband‟s talent to blossom. She hands over this role to Amy : “There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!” ( Ghost 175). By doing this, Hope forces Lonoff to leave the script he has come to inhabit like an old but uncomfortable suit.

Lonoff‟s ritual lifestyle brings us to the second characteristic op postmodern intertextuality according to Vervaeck: “The scenario on which the postmodern novel is grounded, is called upon in such an explicit manner that it becomes ironic.”17 The irony in The Ghost

16 “De serviliteit is een vorm van uitgummen. De dienaar cijfert zichzelf weg, hij wordt opgeheven door zijn dienstbaarheid.” ( 23) 17 “Het scenario waarop de postmoderne roman zich baseert, wordt zo expliciet opgeroepen dat het geïroniseerd wordt.” (24) Van Damme 46

Writer is that Lonoff believes that he has to give up life in order to be able to write about it. At least, that is what his script seems to require from him.

A third characteristic of postmodern intertextuality is the stereotype.18 As much as Lonoff is the stereotypical canonical writer who needs seclusion to nourish his talent, Nathan Zuckerman is the stereotype of the young writer who wants to gain approval and support from an elder author, whom he has put on a pedestal. He is seeking a new father-figure,as he is also the stereotypical angry young man who‟s convictions clash with those of the previous generation, which culminates in the conflict with his father. Vervaeck claims that “Postmodern novels that prefer the stereotypes of the scenario reveal that events and modes of conduct are almost ritual performances of stereotypical patterns”.19 Every genre consists of several typical elements. In the case of The Ghost Writer, we are dealing with a bildungsroman. (cfr. “View on Mankind). The struggle of a young man who wants to stand on his own two feet and therefore has to rebel against his parents, be it initially on an unconscious level, it is a common scenario in this particular type of novels. Nathan Zuckerman – just like Lonoff – seems to be following a highly stereotypical script. Derek Parker Royal is convinced of “the presence of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Ghostwriter.” (Royal 25) Hence, it is not implausible that this is the original source text for Zuckerman. The Ghost Writer can also be considered as a typical work of Jewish-

American fiction of the later generations . As shown earlier on, the conflict between Zuckerman and his father can be situated in the stereotypical clash between the first generation of Jewish immigrants who came to America and the following generation. Even though he loves his father, this conflict was virtually unavoidable, due to the different notions that exist for each generation about what it means to be Jewish. Writing “Higher Education” was initially not an intentional act

18 “Dit voert naar het derde typisch postmoderne kenmerk van de enting: het clichématige.” (25) 19 “Postmoderne romans die een voorliefde hebben voor de clichés van het scenario, tonen dat de gebeurtenissen en gedragingen welhaast rituele opvoeringen zijn van stereotiepe patronen.” (25) Van Damme 47 of rebellion by Zuckerman : “It wasn‟t trouble I was looking for but admiration and praise.”

(Ghost 80) Zuckerman‟s Jewish background as a child of the second generation forms a script that will define him as a person and that steers him into certain directions, directly influencing his choices.

This brings us to the fourth and last characteristic of postmodern intertextuality. In

Vervaeck‟s words: “[…] the erasing of the so-called original. The core of the scenario is served so empathically and stereotypically, that it becomes erased. This is the most important characteristic of postmodern grafting: the postmodern novel is literally grafted on fiction, on something that is not „real‟, something that is not „present.”20 Vervaeck gives in his study several examples of novels in which this process is explicitly present. This notion becomes severely problematic in The Ghost Writer. If Anne Frank‟s diary is considered to be the source text of this novel, then this has serious implications in connection to this last characteristic. Zuckerman‟s alterations to the story can be seen as an attempt to erase the original text. However, this proves to be impossible in The Ghost Writer. First of all, it is imperative to realize that Zuckerman has not changed the diary itself. In that sense, the original text is not altered. What is crucial, however, is that he has changed Anne Frank‟s history dramatically. By letting her walk away from World War II alive, Zuckerman changes the symbolical value of the diary entirely. The fantasized Anne Frank herself – and therefore Zuckerman too - is accutely aware of this. (Cf. chapter “Zuckerman and Jewishness”) Anne Frank is worshipped as a saint and has become an icon of Jewish innocence. There seems to be a holiness attached to everything that is associated with her tragic history : “ […] the super-practical achterhuis was now a holy shrine, a Wailing

Wall. They went away from it in silence, as bereft as though she had been their own.” (Ghost

20 “Ze leidt altijd tot het uitwissen van het zogenaamde origineel. De kern van het scenario wordt zo nadrukkelijk en clichématig opgediend, dat hij uitgegumd wordt. Dat is meteen het belangrijkste kenmerk van de enting: de postmoderne roman is letterlijk geënt op een fictie, op iets dat niet „echt‟ is, iets dat niet „aanwezig‟.” (27) Van Damme 48

150) By letting her survive, Anne Frank can escape martyrdom. At the same time, her diary loses its power, exactly because she is not dead. Zuckerman again condemns Anne Frank to become a martyr, by making her realize that she can never reveal her true identity. He does this in order to save the powerful message of Het Achterhuis. Secondly, this attempt to erase the source text is situated in a chapter that is in its totality a fantasy of the character Nathan Zuckerman. The message that is given to the reader by Roth, is that the erasure of the source text in this case is only possible in a fantasy-world. By embedding this particular plot in Nathan Zuckerman‟s imaginative writing, it seems to be implied that Het Achterhuis can or should not be erased.

Hence, a link can be established to The Holocaust and the problematic notion of testimony. The refusal of the source text to be erased, contains a fundamental message. Negationists can be accused of abusing the problematic nature of representation. Testimony is always subjective, but this does not have to take away its meaning entirely. The Holocaust stays present in the heritage of the Jews. Zuckerman can not write this historical burden and trauma away. In this case, writing does not become erasure. Therefore, we can conclude that Roth‟s vision is deviating on this subject from Vervaeck‟s theory. In Philip Roth’s Rude Truth; the Art of Immaturity (2006), Ross

Posnock states: “Along with Vácklav Havel […], Kundera and Roth share an abiding suspicion of lyricism and utopian thinking, of pastoral and idylls, all fantasies of regression cultivated by totalitarianism (and, for Roth, by American exceptionalism) to erase the past and sanitize the present.” (Posnock 63, my emphasis) This description fits the vision expressed by Roth in The

Ghost Writer. In his essay “Roth and Ethnic Identity”, Timothy Parrish makes the following accusation:

At times Roth‟s challenging account of The Holocaust seems secondary to his willingness

to use The Holocaust as the staging ground for Nathan Zuckerman‟s questions about how

free he is to define his art as he pleases. When, in The Ghost Writer, Anne Frank becomes Van Damme 49

not just a historical figure but an invented character brought to life in the mind of an

imaginary novelist, Roth eloquently portrays how the memory of The Holocaust may

diminish one‟s ability to portray The Holocaust‟s meaning. However, the meaning of The

Holocaust cannot remain static and consequently must be subject to revision.

Zuckerman‟s account of Anne Frank‟s history after The Holocaust suggests how

malleable even the most stubborn facts of history can be. (Parrish 132)

I can understand where Parrish is coming from. Still, the fact that Anne Frank‟s altered story is embedded by Roth in the fantasy of his character Zuckerman, could be understood as an emphasis on the fact that her story is fundamentally unalterable. Her inclusion in Zuckerman‟s fantasy has ripped Anne Frank and her tragic story away from sainthood for a little while. This can be interpreted as an attempt to make us look with renewed attention to The Holocaust and the meanings that are attached to it. The imaginative nature of chapter three is explicitly revealed in chapter four by Zuckerman himself, which contradicts the notion that “even the most stubborn facts of history” are portrayed as “malleable” by Roth and by Zuckerman.

When we let go of the literal approach as described by Vervaeck, it is possible to say that

Lonoff is erasing himself and becomes less „real‟ because of his writing. Vervaeck says that

“Writing becomes erasure.”21 Hence, Roth is actually erasing Lonoff by writing about how

Lonoff erases himself through writing. This scenario in turn is erased by Hope‟s decision to leave

Lonoff and start a new life. This corresponds to Vervaeck‟s statement that this erasure “means

21 “Schrijven wordt dan uitwissen.” ( 27) Van Damme 50 that the postmodern world is not a predictable and entirely compulsory execution of a libretto.

There is room for the unpredictable […].”22

Vervaeck quotes from Atte Jongstra‟s novel Groente: “ The postmodernist [sic] “points to the place where the source of all things can be found. In a book, where else. But which book?”23

The search for the ultimate text is present in “The Ghostwriter.” Zuckerman for example struggles to find the words for his introductory letter to Lonoff:

But then nothing I had ever written put me in such a sweat as that letter. Everything

undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater

the effort to be sincere, the worse it went. I finally sent him the tenth draft and then tried

to stick my arm down the mailbox to extract it. (Ghost 8)

Later on, Nathan attempts to write a letter to his father that could be the first step of their reconciliation. However, words fail him and after writing several drafts he gives up. Zuckerman then proceeds to fantasize chapter 3 “Femme Fatale” (Ghost 122), which seems to be a camouflaged answer to his father, even though he does not intend to send it to him or even consciously thinks of it as an answer. It is a way for him to explore his own doubts and to find justification for writing „Higher Education.‟ The idea that words can never exactly capture what we want to say is a distinctive motif in The Ghost Writer. It refers to the problematic nature of representation as discussed by Roland Barthes. However, Zuckerman‟s troubles to formulate his thoughts in those particular letter probably might be attributed more to his awe for Lonoff in the former case, and in the latter to the differences of opinion that exist between him and his father, despite and in contrast to their formerly loving interaction. There is a better illustration of the

22 “In ieder geval betekent de vervaging van het scenario dat de postmoderne wereld geen voorspelbare en volledig dwangmatige uitvoering van een libretto is. Er blijft plaats voor het onvoorzienbare […].” (27) 23 “De postmodernist “wijst naar waar de oorsprong der dingen gelegen is. In een boek, waar anders. Maar welk boek? (1991:190)” (26) Van Damme 51 problematic nature of representation to be found in The Ghost Writer. A fictitious example that can be found in the excerpt taken from “Middle March” by Henry James, in which the protagonist - a novelist named Dencombe – is described as follows: “a passionate corrector” never able to arrive at a final form […]” (Ghost 114) Lonoff always produces numerous drafts of the stories he is writing. Amy Bellette tries to sort out his manuscripts: “I‟ve just found twenty- seven drafts of a single short story.” (Ghost 25) Lonoff‟s laconic response is: “To get it wrong,

[…] so many times.” (Ghost 25). Lonoff does not mention though whether this means that he had to rephrase his fiction so many times in order to achieve a pleasing result in the end, or whether he has always failed to get it right. To desperately try and fail to get to the core of what one wants to say is a typical theme in postmodern literature. Vervaeck explains that the unpredictability of the postmodern world implies that” the postmodern world can not be summarized by Derrida‟s statement “Everything is text‟ ”24, since we can not reduce everything that happens to a script. “Postmodern novels centralize the elusive and the bordertraffic between text and context, fiction and reality. They denounce the metonymical reasoning that wants to retrace back a particular phenomenon (the world) to another (the fiction that would function as scenario).”25 This is also why the notion of absence is important in postmodernism. Lonoff says to Zuckerman: “At the end of the page I try to summarize to myself what I‟ve read and my mind is blank” (Ghost 23) Lonoff is talking about his faltering memory, but on another level this quote also implies the elusiveness and even the absence of meaning.

Reminiscent of Barthes‟ notion of the problematic nature of representation, Vervaeck states that “The relationship between the world and the fictitious source is one of reflection, not

24 “Daarom kun je de postmoderne wereld niet samenvatten in een slogan als: „Alles is tekst‟ ” (27) 25 “Postmoderne romans stellen eerder het onvatbare centraal en het grensverkeer tussen tekst en context, fictie en realiteit. Ze verwerpen het metonymische redeneren dat een bepaald fenomeen ( de wereld) wil terugvoeren tot een ander ( de fictie die als scenario zou fungeren).” (28) Van Damme 52 portrayal. There is no starting place from which the world of the novel is the portrayal. If that were the case, everything would be predetermined and that would be infernal.” 26 He explains that this is often made clear by the use of a mise en abyme of fictions. “One fiction is embedded in another, but there turns out to be no end and no superior level that can serve as framework.”27

Roth applies this technique in “The Ghostwriter. Autobiographical elements are mixed with fantasy, intertextual elements and historical data. Anne Frank‟s diary – a historical document - is embedded in the story, but at the same time Zuckerman invents an entirely different context in which Anne survived. This context can be situated at the level of the protagonist‟s imagination.

When we link this to Vervaeck‟s statements, we can conclude that the fantastical level is not inferior to the story-line of Lonoff. Every layer of the story is equally important, be it in a different manner.

2.3.2.2. The world inside28

Vervaeck states that “ the world shown by the postmodern novel, is not just one of books but also of the mind. […]The paper nature of the postmodern world problematized the distinction between fiction and reality. The mental nature of that world problematizes the distinction between an inside and an outside world.”29 Memory often plays a central role in postmodern novels. Vervaeck explains this more thoroughly: “[…] memory, which is featured in several postmodern novels as one of the most important way to build up a world and a reality. To

26 “De verhouding tussen de wereld en de fictieve brontekst is er dus een van weerspiegeling en niet van afspiegeling. Er is geen beginpunt waarvan de romanwereld de afspiegeling zou zijn. Als dat wel het geval was, dan lag alles vast en dat zou infernaal zijn.” ( 20) 27 “ De ene fictie wordt in de andere ingebed, maar er blijkt geen eindpunt te zijn en geen hoogste niveau dat als reëel kader kan dienen.” (29) 28 “ De wereld van binnen.” ( 30) 29 “De wereld die de postmoderne roman toont, is niet alleen die van de boeken, maar ook die van de geest.[…]Het papieren karakter van de postmoderne wereld problematiseerde het onderscheid tussen fictie en realiteit. Het geestelijke karakter van die wereld problematiseert het onderscheid tussen binnen- en buitenwereld. ” (30) Van Damme 53 remember means to bring it inside again. Hence, it first of all suggests that the process takes place at the inside and secondly that it is about reliving events that took place in the past.”30 Ben Siegel says: “Like Bellow, whom he has long admired, Roth places a good deal of importance on memory.” (Siegel 22)When we take a closer look at the first sentence of The Ghost Writer, we learn that the novel actually consists for the largest part of the memories of Nathan Zuckerman which he is sharing with the reader: “It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago […]when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.” (Ghost 3) At a more general level, Zuckerman is relating to us his memories of his visit to Lonoff, a visit that comprised only one evening, a night and the following morning at Lonoff‟s house in the

Berkshires. However, a whole network of memories is again brought to life by this, since

Zuckerman makes all sorts of associations: to his childhood, to his love-life, his work situation and his family-ties among other things. This illustrates the postmodern idea that there is to be found no beginning nor an ending in the labyrinth of our mind. Remembering is a process without ending, resembling a mental falling motion. An example of this process can be found when Zuckerman describes walking through the neighborhood where he grew up:

We had by now descend the long incline of our street and reached Elizabeth Avenue. No

lawn we passed, no driveway, no garage, no lamppost, no little brick stoop was without its

power over me. Here I had practiced my sidearm curve, here on my sled I‟d broken a

tooth, here I had copped my first feel, here for teasing a friend I had been slapped by my

mother, here I had learned that my grandfather was dead. There was no end to all I could

30 “ […] de herinnering, die in vele postmoderne romans ten tonele gevoerd wordt als een van de belangrijkste manieren om een wereld en een realiteit op te bouwen. Herinneren betekent: opnieuw binnen brengen. Het suggereert dus ten eerste dat het proces zich afspeelt aan de binnenkant en ten tweede dat het gaat om het opnieuw beleven van iets wat vooraf gebeurde.” (31) Van Damme 54

remember happening to me on this street of one-family brick houses more or less like ours

[…] (Ghost 89)

Vervaeck claims that “The palace of memory that is the postmodern novel, exposes the traditional historical classifications as a false order. It replaces the traditional walk towards the source by the endless straying.”31

Added to Zuckerman‟s own memories are the memories of the other characters, at least those memories they talk about with Zuckerman so he can share them with the reader. This results in the presentation of several - often incomplete- life-histories of Zuckerman himself, Lonoff,

Hope and several of the other characters that are featured in a more indirect way, such as certain relatives. We are also introduced to the memories of Anne Frank, through the excerpts of her diary that are included in the novel. Furthermore, Zuckerman provides us with an amount of factual information about her life that he probably picked up in history books. This part did not require Nathan Zuckerman‟s use of fantasy, since we know that he has read the diary of Anne

Frank: “I read the book. Everybody read the book.” (Ghost 107) However, Zuckerman also creates memories about the transportation and the camp life, and invents postwar memories for the alternative Anne Frank, the one who did survive the war in his fantasy. He does not have much to go on about Amy‟s real history, but her foreign accent and mysterious origin leave room for imagination. The descriptions that Zuckerman gives us might be derived from testimonies of those witnesses who –unlike Anne Frank- walked away from the concentration camps alive.

There is no way of knowing to which extent verifiable knowledge has been his source, since

Zuckerman obviously has no scruples about putting his imaginative skills to work in chapter three.

31 “Het geheugenpaleis dat de postmoderne roman is, ontmaskert de traditionele historische classificaties als een schijnorde. En vervangt de traditionele wandelgang naar de oorsprong door het eindeloze dolen.” (35) Van Damme 55

Vervaeck explains how the postmodern novel shares with the New Historicism the opinion that “history can only be approached as a story, as fiction.”32 Memories always distort reality, and they are always presented as a construction. Hence Vervaeck‟s following statement :

“The postmodern memory consequently has the same basic characteristic as the postmodern grafting: it does not reconstruct the scenario nor the past, on the contrary, it deconstructs both.”33

Zuckerman has already tried to reconstruct Lonoff‟s life-history using books and informants, even before he has met the man. He gives his readers a page-long summary of his conclusions, starting with the words : “She had met Lonoff when he came at the age of seventeen to work for a chicken farmer in Lennox. He himself had been raised just outside Boston, though until he was five he lived in Russia.” (Ghost 31). Later on, Zuckerman discusses Lonoff‟s past with the writer himself, who asks him were Zuckerman gets that information: “And all of this is recorded where?

Hedda Hopper?” (Ghost 50) In Exit Ghost it will be revealed that Zuckerman‟s summary was more than incomplete, and there will even be grounds to doubt whether it was correct after all.

Anne Frank‟s history is obviously also grossly distorted in The Ghost Writer. Vervaeck quotes the narrator in “Het huis M.” van Atte Jongstra: “Memory is a carnival-mirror.”34 Again, this brings to the surface the notion of elusiveness. Vervaeck warns us that “we should not reduce postmodern novels to slogans such as: all is memory and nothing is real. The issue is exactly the problematical and the intangible in the relationship between memory and the „real‟ reality.”35

Obviously, the notion that memories are actually not reliable is not new in the history of literature, but Vervaeck points out that “that unreliability does not traditionally corrode the authenticity of the past and of what has happened. Memory fails, not reality. In postmodernism

32 “[…] de opvatting dat de geschiedenis alleen als verhaal, dus als fictie benaderbaar is.” ( 32) 33 “De postmoderne herinnering heeft dus hetzelfde basis-kenmerk als de postmoderne enting: ze reconstrueert het scenario of het verleden niet, integendeel, ze deconstrueert beide.” (32) 34 “In het huis M. zegt de verteller: “Het geheugen is een lachspiegel.”(Jongstra 1193:109)” ( 35) 35 “Postmoderne romans moet je niet reduceren tot slogans zoals: alles is herinnering en niets is echt. Het gaat juist om het problematische en het ongrijpbare in de relatie tussen herinnering en „echte‟ realiteit.” ( 35) Van Damme 56 the opposite idea exists : memory functions and reveals how incomplete, how fictitious and how inaccessible reality is.” 36 In Zuckerman‟s letter to Roth at the end of The Facts we find a passage that indirectly refers to this notion: “Why is it that when they talk about the facts they feel they‟re on more solid ground than when they talk about the fiction? The truth is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up.” (Facts 166) Memory can be understood to be a – often unconscious - form of imagination, since it is not a correct portrayal of reality. Hence, we can conclude that Zuckerman agrees with the postmodern view on reality. However, this concept of a fictitious and ungraspable reality as described by Vervaeck does not correspond entirely to the vision that is put forward by Roth in The Ghost Writer. As discussed earlier, Roth does not radically erase the story of Anne Frank in the novel, he shows us how certain realities can not and should not be denied. Imagination is important in Roth‟s writing, as he made clear in The Facts, but some facts should not be touched in an inappropriate manner. Their inaccessibility can never be an excuse for that sort of actions.

A few pages into the story, we are reminded of the fact that we are reading about

Zuckerman‟s memories by a side-comment of the narrator that is put between brackets, in which

Zuckerman reveals that at the time of writing Lonoff has already died: “ (for he died in 1961 of a bone-marrow disease; and when Oswald shot Kennedy and the straitlaced bulwark gave way to the Gargantuan banana republic, his fiction, and the authority it granted to all that is prohibitive in life, began rapidly losing “relevance” for a new generation of readers.)” (Ghost 14)

36 “[…] traditioneel tast die onbetrouwbaarheid de echtheid van het verleden en het gebeurde niet aan. Het geheugen faalt, niet de werkelijkheid. In het postmodernisme is juist het omgekeerde het geval: het geheugen werkt en toont hoe onvolkomen, hoe fictief en hoe onbetrouwbaar de werkelijkheid wel is.” (34) Van Damme 57

In a way, it gives the reader the sense that he has gained access to the future, as Lonoff‟s destiny is revealed. However, this feeling is not justified, and this comment reminds us of the true nature of the story: its contents is entirely built up of the memories of Nathan Zuckerman. Vervaeck points out that the explicitly addressing of the reader is a typical feature of postmodern novels.

We find a more obvious example later on in the novel: “Virtuous reader, if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E.I. Lonoff‟s study and see how you feel when it‟s over.” (Ghost 113) Vervaeck explains the intention behind these formulations:

“Not only do they focus the attention on the process of narration and the narrator, but they also often make the reader more involved in the story.”37 Furthermore, these formulations remind the reader of the constructed nature of the narrative.

The falling motion is an important motive in many postmodern novels according to

Vervaeck: “That the postmodern world reveals the world in our head, does not imply that a fixed and pre-existing inner world is portrayed in a static, photographic manner. The subject here is an endless fall inside.” I already discussed the notion in relation to the endless network of memories brought on by association. In several postmodern novels it is also common that a literal fall of one or more characters is featured. In The Ghost Writer I did not find any examples, except at the end when Hope falls in the snow. But I do not think this fall is significant at all. In a more symbolical way, I believe we could see Lonoff‟s lifestyle as a form of falling „inside‟. He has locked himself away in a farmhouse in the Berkshires. The physical conditions under which he lives enforce his reclusive lifestyle. Zuckerman describes it as a “hideaway” (Ghost 3) and says:

37 “Zulke formuleringen richten niet alleen de aandacht op het vertellen en de verteller, maar brengen meestal ook de lezer binnen in het verhaal.” (118) Van Damme 58

My guess was that it would take even the fiercest Hun the better part of a winter to cross

the glacial waterfalls and wind-blasted woods of those mountain wilds before he was able

to reach the open edge of Lonoff‟s hayfields, rush the rear storm door of the house, crash

through into the study, and, with spiked bludgeon wheeling high in the air above the little

Olivetti, cry out in a roaring voice to the writer tapping out his twenty-seventh draft, “You

must change your life” And even he might lose heart and turn back to the bosom of his

barbarian family should he approach those black Massachusetts hills on a night like this,

with the cocktail hour at hand and yet another snowstorm arriving from Ultima Thule. No,

for the moment, at least, Lonoff seemed really to have nothing to worry about from the

outside world.” (Ghost 27-28)

Lonoff has lost almost all contact with the world outside on a social level also. He does go out to teach literature at Athene college once a week, but his actual life seems to take place inside his mind: when he is reading and writing. He even shuts out his own wife, and hence lives virtually alone. Zuckerman and Amy are allowed a little peek into his world, but they do not get full access to his mind either.

2.3.3. View on mankind

2.3.3.1. Man as text

Vervaeck says: “In a postmodern novel, the characters do not try – like in a traditional novel – to give the impression that they are people made of flesh and blood. They are definitely what they „really‟ are, namely a collection of words and texts […] In a more general sense, Van Damme 59 postmodern characters are literally characters out of books. ”38 I think we can find an illustration of this on the first page of The Ghost Writer, when Zuckerman says: “[… I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman.” (Ghost 3) That is probably also why a certain terminology is used by Zuckerman at times, a terminology that is linked to the world of books: e.g. “I wasn‟t doing any better in the plain and cozy living room with my autobiography.”

(Ghost 8) His „autobiography‟ comprises his talk about his life with Lonoff, so he is not talking about the actual document as such. Furthermore, we can discover an example of a different nature in The Facts that could be linked to this idea: Zuckerman writes to Roth: “My guess is that you‟ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text.” (Ghost 162) This last example hence illustrates again the postmodern idea that fiction also can have its influence on reality, and not only the other way around: Roth‟s own life has become influenced by the fictional character he has created.

Vervaeck links this idea of man as a character from a book to the compulsory nature of the postmodern world that was already discussed earlier on. He states that “you could see the textual existence of mankind as the postmodern version of two old clichés. First of all, the Don

Quichot- or Madame Bovary Syndrome, which means that man organizes his life like a novel.”39

This aspect emphasizes mostly the narrative quality of the human life, according to Vervaeck. In that sense, we could deduce that Zuckerman unconsciously is following the script of a typical

Bildungsroman hero, a script that I discussed earlier on already. We must keep in mind that the

38 “In een postmoderne roman proberen de personages niet, zoals in een realistische roman, de indruk te wekken dat ze mensen van vlees en bloed zijn. Ze zijn wel degelijk wat ze „echt‟ zijn, namelijk een verzameling woorden en teksten. […] In algemenere zin zijn postmoderne personages letterlijk figuren uit boeken.” (64) 39 “Het tekstuele bestaan van de mens zou je kunnen zien als de postmoderne versie van twee oude clichés. Ten eerste het Don Quichot- of Madame Bovary syndroom, wat erop neer komt dat de mens zijn leven inricht als een roman.” (65) Van Damme 60 narrator of The Ghost Writer is Zuckerman more than twenty years after his actual visit to

Lonoff. So it is only in retrospect that Zuckerman is conscious of the possibility that his younger self was following that particular script.

The second cliché is that of “the world as a stage, which implies that man is an actor and his world is a scenery.”40 I already gave some examples that could be linked to this cliché: e.g.

Lonoff accusing Amy of acting like in a melodramatic play, Zuckerman referring to the silent- film studio when he is describing the world outside Lonoff‟s house, etc; ,…Here, the theatrical qualities of postmodern life are emphasized. We can find another good example in the episode in which Hope is reading aloud the letter of an Indian student who is begging Lonoff in a very outspoken way to let him come to America and to accept him as his protégé. This could be seen as an attack on Amy, since she has done a similar thing in the past. Hope feels threatened by Amy by now, thinking the young girl is going to steal her husband away. Amy is fully aware of this, but pretends nothing is happening, at least on the surface:

“ “I didn‟t mean to embarrass you.” [Hope probably díd want to embarrass her]

“But I‟m not embarrassed,” said Amy, innocently.” [implying that she has done nothing wrong]

“I didn‟t say you were,” Hope conceded. “I said I didn‟t mean to.”

Amy didn‟t follow – that was the act. She waited for Hope to explain herself further.” (Vervaeck,

165, my emphasis) [ I put my personal comments between brackets, they are not part of the quote]

This could easily be a scene taken from an actual play: it is a stereotypical situation in which the underlying tension between the wife and the presumed mistress creates the real energy of what is happening and the power the words carry in them. This is the equivalent of a fight in my opinion.

40 “Ten tweede het cliché van de wereld als een schouwtoneel, wat impliceert dat de mens een acteur is en zijn wereld een decor.” (65) Van Damme 61

The pretended innocent silence and lack of understanding as presented by Amy are ways of provoking Hope, while her „innocent‟ remark probably has a similar goal. The bystanders, Lonoff and Zuckerman are very well aware of what is „really‟ being said and done, just as the spectators of a play would be.

In Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Roth (2006), Elaine B. Safer introduces a radical idea that can be linked to the staged quality of certain events in the novel. She claims that everything that happens during Zuckerman‟s visit has been staged in order to bring out his qualities as a writer. In that sense, The Ghost Writer can be seen as the fruit of a successful play staged by Lonoff to encourage the young writer. Quite early into the story, there is to be found a revealing episode in which Lonoff explains to Hope what he beliefs Zuckerman needs in order to become a great writer: “I was only suggesting- surmising is more like it – that an unruly life will probably better serve a writer like Nathan than walking in the woods and startling the deer. His work has turbulence – that should be nourished, and not in the woods. All I was trying to say is that he oughn‟t to stifle what is clearly his gift.” (Ghost 33) Lonoff wants to discourage

Zuckerman from living the secluded life he has been living, because he believes that this will not stimulate the young writer enough. Since he is of the opinion that Zuckerman needs action and turbulence to inspire his writing, he creates exactly those circumstances. If this is taken a step further, this also could imply that he is just pretending to be unhappy, knowing that what makes him successful is not necessarily the same as what Zuckerman needs. At the end of The

Ghostwriter, the impression of a staged quality is made more explicit. As Lonoff is heading out to chase after Hope – who has stormed out of the house – he inform Zuckerman that there is paper on his desk for “Your feverish notes”. (Ghost 179) What follows next illustrates definitely

Safer‟s idea of a staged event:

“You had an earful this morning.” [Lonoff] Van Damme 62

I shrugged. “It wasn‟t so much.”[Zuckerman]

“So much as what, last night?” [ Lonoff]

“Last night?” [ Zuckerman] Then does he now all I know? But what do I know, other than

what I can imagine?

“I‟ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You

are not so nice and polite in your fiction,” he said. “You‟re a different person.” [Lonoff]

“Am I?” [Zuckerman]

“I should hope so.” [ Lonoff] Then, as though having concluded administering my rites of

confirmation, he gravely shook my hand. (Ghost 180, my emphasis)

From a psychologically realistic viewpoint, Lonoff can not know that Zuckerman has heard him.

Of course, there is always the possibility that he is aware of the fact that the ceiling in his study is not soundproof. He could also just be a good judge of character, who guesses rightly that the quarrel with Amy will have intrigued Zuckerman. But there definitely is room for ambiguity here. Then there is the statement “It could be an interesting story” (Ghost 180). Combined with the fact that he shows Zuckerman where to find paper to write everything down, this is adding credibility to Stager‟s idea. The staging of the events hence can be perceived as being “rites of confirmation” (Ghost 180) of which The Ghost Writer is the final result.

Derek Parker Royal writes : “[…] the many examples of metafiction found throughout Roth‟s oeuvre. While not solely a postmodern phenomenon, metafiction is a narrative form that is highly self-reflective – or put another way, a mode of writing wherein texts are aware of an refer to themselves as constructed narratives – and as such, are usually considered an expression of postmodern writing.” (Royal 26) Safer‟s way to give meaning to The Ghost Writer is definitely postmodern. From her viewpoint, The Ghost Writer is the result of one long exercise in writing a good novel, hence emphasizing the constructed nature of the narrative. At first sight, it seems Van Damme 63 almost absurd to think that everything is staged. However, the clues which Roth seems to give away at the end of the novel are ambiguous. Furthermore, there are more leads that could point in the direction of a staged event: why, for example does Amy, who is well into her twenties, dress like a little girl? Zuckerman himself is been puzzled by it, and it will later on contributed to his fantasy of Amy being Anne Frank: “The costume, now that she had it on, seemed like a little girl‟s. That she could act so so wise and dress up so young mystified me.” (Ghost 26, my emphasis) The particular phraseology again points in the direction of a staged event. If the quarrel between Lonoff and Amy is staged, their references to the world of theater also can be seen in a different light. When Amy says “Do you prefer tragedy?” (Ghost 120) , she might actually be imploring Lonoff to provide the necessary stage-directions. That would imply that she is involved in Lonoff‟s set-up. Safer has provided a new way of reading The Ghost Writer that reveals another layer of the endless amount of layers out which a narrative exists according to

Vervaeck.

Vervaeck claims that “postmodernism, contrary to the traditional readings of similar clichés, sees life as a novel or a play not as a deviating from real life. In other words: the „real‟ identity does not exist, except as a false role or story. This makes the postmodern character unfit for an analysis in terms of the social role-play or of the psychological battle between false and real roles.”41 He also claims that a postmodern character can be perceived as “the intersection of several fictitious scenarios.”42 I suppose Zuckerman is an example of this: he plays the role of the loving son who wants to make his parents proud but through rebellion causes conflict, he is the

41 “In tegenstelling tot de traditionele lezingen van die clichés ziet het postmodernisme het leven als roman of als theater niet als een afwijking van het echte leven. Met andere woorden: de „echte identiteit‟ bestaat niet, tenzij als „valse‟ rol of verhaal. Dat maakt het postmoderne personage ongeschikt voor een analyse in termen van het sociale rollenspel (Goffman 1995) of van de psychologische strijd tussen valse en echte rollen.” (65) 42 “een snijpunt van talrijke fictieve scenario‟s.” ( 68) Van Damme 64

Jewish young man with the urge to „conquer‟ as many shiksas as possible, he is the insecure young writer who wants to earn the moral sponsorship from the older writer he adores, but he is also the short-story writer who has earned a very modest degree of recognition through the publication of some of his stories, and because of this feels in title to a certain type of behavior:

“ „Yes, be careful,‟ I called to her, in the guise of Mr. Zuckerman the short-story writer.”

(Ghost28). All these roles are part of his personality, they are part of his identity. Vervaeck points out that this sort of multiplicity is a condition which should be avoided according to a modernist, since it is just like an illness such as schizophrenia. Not so for a postmodernist however, who considers it to be a form of freedom and indefiniteness. Another difference is that “this multiplicity in postmodernism does not presuppose a disintegrated centre, which is often the case in modernism. There is not first an “I” which disintegrates through translation. The “I” only exists in the language, but it becomes immediately erased there also.”43 This definitely seems to be the case for Lonoff, who established his identity largely through his writing but at the same time is losing himself through the very same process.

According to Vervaeck “identity is always paradoxical in the postmodern novel, because of the way identity blends with the fiction of a story, play or film.” 44He explains how that

“paradoxical combination of real and fictitious becomes again redoubled when „real‟ people become characters in a novel. Then we can talk about a transworld identity, which can be situated on the border of the fictitious and the real world.”45In the chapter entitles “Femme Fatale” in The

Ghost Writer, Roth definitely plays with this concept. He succeeds in complicating this idea of a

43 “ […] veronderstelt de veelvuldigheid in het postmodernisme helemaal geen centrum dat uiteengevallen zou zijn, zoals dat bij het modernisme meestal wel het geval is. Er is niet eerst een ik dat dan in de vertaling meteen uiteen zou vallen. Het ik bestaat slechts in de taal, maar het wordt er meteen ook uitgewist.” (71) 44 “Door deze versmelting van de identiteit met de fictie van verhaal, toneel en film is de identiteit in de postmoderne roman steeds paradoxaal.” ( 68) 45 “De paradoxale combinatie van echt en fictief wordt nog eens verdubbeld wanneer „echte‟ mensen als romanpersonages optreden. Dan is er sprake van een transworld identity (Eco 1979: 176), die op de grens staat van de fictieve en de reële wereld.” (68) Van Damme 65

„transworld identity‟ even more thoroughly: his character Nathan Zuckerman is the supposed writer of this chapter, in which the idea is introduced that Amy Bellette, a fictional character, is actually Anne Frank, the „real‟ girl. However, Zuckerman leaves room for doubt: from his description, it is clear that Amy herself is convinced that she in Anne Frank. It could be a plausible scenario. On the other hand, Lonoff – in this chapter a fictional character of another level than in the other chapters, as is Amy, since they can now be considered to be the inventions of Zuckerman who is on another level an imaginative creation of Roth - dismisses this scenario in his mind and thinks of sending her to a psychiatrist. In the former scenario, Amy/Anne Frank is a transworld identity, while in the second one this is not the case. Hence, I believe that the subtitle

“Femme fatale” can be interpreted in different ways. In the scenario in which Amy ís Anne

Frank, the name has an ambiguous ring to it, since then she is a woman who has survived a war that was believed to be fatal to her. In the scenario in which she is only imagining to be the famous Jewish icon, “Femme Fatale” has the meaning that is more typically attributed to it:

Of course he told Hope nothing about who Amy thought she was. But he didn‟t have to,

he could guess what she would say if he did: it was for him, the great writer, that Amy had

chosen to become Anne Frank; that explained it all, no psychiatrist required. For him, as a

consequence of her infatuation: to enchant him, to bewitch him, to break through the

scrupulosity and the wisdom and the virtue into his imagination, and there, as Anne Frank,

to become E.I. Lonoff‟s femme fatale. (Ghost 155, original emphasis)

I would also like to add here that the notion „femme fatale‟ is a stereotype that returns often in literature. Again, a stereotypical script is implied by the subtitle of this chapter. The explicit use of stereotypes is a typically postmodern technique, as I have explained earlier. Typically postmodern also is that this stereotypical image is ironized in The Ghost Writer: the „femme Van Damme 66 fatale‟ does not succeed to break up the marriage, it is Hope Lonoff – the wife – who will be responsible for that.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of the postmodern novel according to

Vervaeck is the way in which characters melt together. “Since a rich character stages several scenarios, there is an increased chance that there are overlaps with related scripts staged by other characters.”46 In the chapter on Jewishness ( 2.1.) I already described certain resemblances in character between Zuckerman and Anne Frank, their rebelliousness and their talent for writing being just two obvious examples. The physical resemblance between Amy and Anne Frank definitely is also worth mentioning here. However, the question whether Anne Frank can be considered to be an actual character in The Ghost Writer is an ambiguous one.

3.2.2. Man as body

Vervaeck says: “The importance of corporality is striking in most postmodern novels.”47

As I will try to show later on in this thesis, this is definitely the case in Exit Ghost. In my opinion, the emphasis on corporality is less striking in The Ghost Writer, but it is still there. Zuckerman‟s sexual exploits are definitely an illustration of this, for example the episode where Nathan has sex with a friend of his girlfriend Betsy: “[…] shouldering the burden of perfidy for two, I pinned her pelvis to the kitchen linoleum, while she continued, through moist smiling lips, to inform me of my character flaws. I was then at the stage of my erotic development when nothing excited me as much as having intercourse on the floor.” (Ghost 34) Vervaeck claims that postmodern characters often long for purity and the divine, but in their search they often end up in more

46 “Omdat een rijk personage veel scenario‟s opvoert, wordt de kans groot dat het overlappingen vertoont met andere figuren die verwante scripts opvoeren.” (69) 47 “In de meeste postmoderne romans valt het belang van het lichamelijke onmiddellijk op.” ( 77) Van Damme 67 vulgar situations, as described here. That way, it is shown how the criminal can also include the divine, and the way in which purity gets perverted. There is also a description of Zuckerman masturbating on the daybed in Lonoff‟s study, which can be interpreted as a desecration of the maestro‟s sanctuary. Vervaeck says that “the postmodern preference for the impure and hybrid can be linked to the idea of infinite body.”48 Earlier on in the manual he has already elaborated on this idea: “Generally speaking you could connect the postmodern preference for the body with the preference for the open, the limitless, the elusive and the unspeakable. The body is not seen as an enclosed space, but as an embodiment that implicates inside and outside, then and now. In the body the outside world and the past are accumulated.”49 This idea is reflected in the following example, in which Lonoff is referring to his enlarged stomach in relation to his patience, a concept that is linked to time and to the past:“ „They ought to construct a monument to your patience,‟ she told him. „He gestured vaguely toward the crescent of plumpness buttoned in beneath his jacket. „They have.‟”

( Ghost 26)

Vervaeck goes on to say that “the postmodern body definitely is not perfect. Verhelst talks about the imperfect body as a symbol for the current times. […] The body is marked by the absence that characterizes man and that is why there is often something missing.”50 I did not really find examples that fit the last part of the above description in The Ghost Writer, while in

Exit Ghost this has not been a problem at all. However, I did find examples of „imperfect‟ bodies

48 “De postmoderne voorkeur voor het onzuivere en het hybridische heeft ook met het grenzeloze lichaam te maken.” ( 83) 49 “In het algemeen zou je de postmoderne voorkeur voor het lichaam kunnen verbinden met de voorkeur voor het openene, het grenzeloze,het onvatbare en het onuitspreekbare. Het lichaam wordt niet gezien als een in zichzelf besloten ruimte, maar als een belichaming die binnen en buiten, toen en nu op elkaar betrekt. In een lichaam liggen de buitenwereld en het verleden opgestapeld.” (78) 50 “Volmaakt is het postmoderne lichaam zeker niet. Verhelst heeft het over het gebrekkige lichaam als symbool voor de huidige tijd. […] Het lichaam is getekend door de afwezigheid die de mens kenmerkt en daarom ontbreekt er vaak iets aan […].” (82) Van Damme 68 in The Ghost Writer. One of those can be situated in Zuckerman‟s description of Amy Bellette on their first meeting: “But what had seemed from a distance like beauty, pure and severe and simple, was more of a puzzle up close. […] I saw that the striking head had been conceived on a much grander and more ambitious scale than the torso.” (Ghost 23-24) Typically postmodern here is also the idea of the puzzle. Attributing meaning to what he sees again proves to be difficult for Zuckerman. Getting closer in the literal sense does not equal getting closer to meaning, quite the opposite is true here. Another important element in his description is the importance that is given to Amy‟s head. Vervaeck says: “ You could say with a witticism that according to modernism and postmodernism as well, all is situated in the head, but in the latter case the head is a much more physical entity. Formulated more precisely: for postmodernism it is about the bodypart that metaphorically draws a bridge between then and now, inside and outside, while in modernism the head is perceived more as a metonym for the mind.” 51 This postmodern idea can be found literally in Zuckerman‟s thoughts concerning Amy‟s strange bodily proportions: “[…] but that I couldn‟t return her gaze directly had also to do with this unharmonious relation between body and skull, and its implication, to me, of some early misfortune, of something vital lost or beaten down, and, by way of compensation, something vastly overdone. I thought of a trapped chick that could not get more than its beaked skull out of the encircling shell” (Ghost 24). Later on, this vague idea will gain form in Zuckerman‟s mind when he starts to link other elements to it, such as Amy‟s historical background which is a mystery to him and the accent he can‟t place. He starts to associate the idea of the head to the tragic history of Anne Frank, and a story is born.

51 “Met een boutade zou je kunnen zeggen dat zowel voor het modernisme als voor het postmodernisme alles in het hoofd gelegen is, maar dat het hoofd in het tweede geval een stuk lijfelijker is. Preciezer geformuleerd: voor het postmodernisme gaat het om het lichaamsdeel dat metaforisch een brug slaat tussen toen en nu, binnen en buiten, terwijl het voor het modernisme vooral gaat om het hoofd als metoniem voor de geest.” (78) Van Damme 69

3. Exit Ghost52

3.1. Jewishness

The Ghost Writer explicitly deals with several issues relates to Jewishness. The story of

Anne Frank that is incorporated in the novel establishes a direct link with the Holocaust. Nathan

Zuckerman is rebelling against what he finds to be the confinement of being Jewish, not only by his way of living but also in his writing. In short, Jewishness is crucial in more than one way in the story-line of The Ghost Writer, influencing a substantial amount of the choices that are made in the novel and the events that take place. Exit Ghost, contrarily, is not a novel in which the issues related to Jewishness are a focal point. In fact, hardly any references to Jewishness can be discovered. Exit Ghost is the story of a writer who is facing the end of his life and tries to deal with this. Roth quotes from “Find Meat on Bones”, a text by Dylan Thomas: “Before death takes you, O take back this”(Exit) This quote is placed as a motto on the page before the title page, and it captures beautifully the message of the novel. It is an appropriate statement for Zuckerman, but for Roth as well. They are both aged men by now, for whom death no longer is as unconceivable as it used to be when they were young and invincible.

In this chapter, I will show that the idea of rebellion is still present in Exit Ghost.

However, the notion has undergone two major transformations: First, I will try to show how

Nathan Zuckerman is no longer rebelling against his Jewish background. He is now battling against the more elemental challenges and problems that are brought along with his old age and his bad health. The second change that can be observed in comparison to The Ghost Writer is the way in which rebellion is presented in relation to the younger writers that are featured in the novel.

52 When quoting from Exit Ghost, I will indicate the page (x) in the following manner: (Exit x) Van Damme 70

The first difference concerning the nature of Roth‟s rebelliousness in The Ghost Writer and in Exit Ghost can be linked to age. In The Ghost Writer, the protagonist is a young man, aged twenty-three, who is taking his first steps into adulthood. At that time in his life, Zuckerman‟s search for his own identity is conducted largely through rebellion against his Jewish background.

However, in Exit Ghost the protagonist is an aged man of seventy-one who is reaching the last part of his life and who is fully and painfully aware of this. Zuckerman‟s Jewish background no longer appears to be relevant. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman had to deal with the confrontation with his father, but in Exit Ghost, Zuckerman is confronted with himself. He starts to rebel against the limitations that are set by his deteriorating body. This decision is reflected in his return to New York, as described by Zuckerman at the opening of the book:

I hadn‟t been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a

cancerous prostate, I‟d hardly been of my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those

eleven years and, what‟s more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news

since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of less – merely at the outset, a kind of drought

within me – I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The

impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed. (Exit 1)

This description reveals how Zuckerman‟s current life is highly reminiscent of Lonoff‟s life as described in The Ghost Writer. As young Zuckerman went to visit Lonoff, he did think for a while that this lifestyle would once become his own: “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one‟s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live” (Ghost 5). However, after a few hours Lonoff has made clear to Zuckerman that his romanticized view of this life does not correspond to the burden it is in reality. Then why would Zuckerman still opt for this lifestyle, was it in function of his fiction? Initially, this is not what caused Zuckerman to give up Van Damme 71 his turbulent life in New York. The direct cause are the death threats from an unknown source.

Here, Zuckerman‟s Jewish identity does come to the surface again, though not by his own choice.

Lonoff did also receive anti-Semitic hate-mail in The Ghost Writer, but the one that is read by

Hope on the morning that Zuckerman will leave is at least signed : “Sally M., Fort Wayne”

(Ghost 163) and is only verbally abusive rather than directly threatening. The messages

Zuckerman gets are more aggressive and personal:

The same location never appeared on a postmark twice, though the figure pictured on the

front of the card was invariably the current pope, John Paul II […]. The first postcard

read: Dear Jew Bastard, We are part of a new international organization to counter the

growth of the racist, filth-laden philosophy ZIONISM. As yet another Jew parasitizing

“goy” countries and their inhabitants, you have been marked down to be targeted. Because

of the location of you Jew York apartment, it has fallen to this “department” to do the

“targeting.” This notice marks the beginning. (Exit 53, original emphasis)

Other postcards follow, and despite the protection offered by the FBI in the form of “an agent named M.J. Sweeney” (Exit 55), Zuckerman is terrified. When a novel of his is nominated for a prize, Sweeney advices him to stay away from the ceremony. This is the last straw: “The next morning I rented a car and drove to western Massachusetts, and within forty-eight hours I‟d bought my cabin […]” (Exit 56). However, this does not explain why he stayed there after the death threats stopped coming by mail. This is how Zuckerman explains it himself:

All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation

and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than

desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life. I stayed away because over

the years I conquered a way of life that I (and not just I) would have thought impossible,

and there‟s pride taken in that. I may have left New York because I was fearful, but by Van Damme 72

paring and paring and paring away, I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was

to my liking much of the time. I shed the tyranny of my intensity- or, perhaps, by living

apart for a decade, merely reveled in its sternest mode (Exit 58).

What Zuckerman does not mention here, is that there are two more practical reasons that have contributed to the desirability of his solitude. The surgery to remove his cancerous prostrate has had serious side-effects, leaving him incontinent and impotent. The incontinence obligates him to wear special undergarments and pads to prevent leakage, and the accidents he has from time to time are humiliating. Zuckerman has even given up his weakly trip to the swimming pool at the local college due to this problem. Hence, his desire for company has substantially diminished.

Furthermore, the impotence has made him give up on the idea of a love-life altogether.

Zuckerman submits to what he believes to be his faith, and tells himself: “[…] isn‟t the work all I need, the work and the working? What does it matter any longer if I‟m incontinent and impotent”

(Exit 5) Like Lonoff, Zuckerman starts to live his life in his head, so he can forget about his declining body. The quotation from Henry James‟ “The Middle Years” that he once discovered in

Lonoff‟s study in The Ghost Writer would now be appropriate for his life too. To tell himself that giving up life is a sacrifice in the name of art is a comforting thought, but in his case life in the physical sense is starting to give up on him as well.

The lives of both writers have changed dramatically at the end of their life. However, there is an important difference to be noted in the way this takes place. Lonoff is left by his wife

Hope and starts a new life with Amy Bellette. In his case, the change was involuntarily.

Zuckerman, contrarily, decides to take charge himself and returns to New York. There are several reasons that induce him to take this decision.

First and foremost, he goes to “Manhattan to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital who specialize[s] in performing a procedure to help the thousands of men like me left incontinent by Van Damme 73 prostate surgery.” (Exit 2) It is Zuckerman‟s way to rebel against his declining body, as he hopes that the doctors will help him to turn back time and at least temporarily circumvent some of the unwanted consequences of old age. In the past, he was rebelling against the confinement brought along by being Jewish. Now, he is fighting against the confinement of a deteriorating body in which he is trapped. The procedure does not come with a guaranteed success, but Zuckerman sees it as the possible beginning of a new life: “In the country there was nothing tempting my hope. I had made peace with myself. But when I came to New York, in only hours New York did what it does to people – awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out” (Exit 16) This last sentence could be seen as a postmodernist intertextual reference to The Ghost Writer as well, referring to

Hope Lonoff who also decided to give up life in the Berkshires and to leave for the city. Initially, though, Zuckerman is not planning to stay in New York. He intends to return when the procedure is finished.

Chronologically, however, the first reason behind Zuckerman‟s departure probably is the suicide note of his neighbor Larry Hollis, one of the few people with whom Zuckerman has had contact. After Larry is diagnosed with cancer, he commits suicide. He leaves a note for

Zuckerman that says: “[…] You must promise me that you will not go on living as you were when I found you. […]” (Exit 13) Zuckerman says: “So was this why I remained in the urologist‟s waiting room – because one year earlier, almost to the day, Larry had sent me that note and then killed himself? I don‟t know and it wouldn‟t have mattered if it did” (Exit 13). This implies that the note might have given him the first push towards his decision to go to New York, and that he now believes that the important thing is that he is following through with this decision.

Zuckerman‟s third reason for leaving might be indirectly connected to the death threats that made him leave New York in the first place. On several of the threatening postcards, the Van Damme 74 message was just: “AK-47 fire” (Exit 55). Then the following happens: “It was on the last day of

June 30 that the name “AK-47” returned to alarm me” (Exit 59). Zuckerman fired a painted who was supposed to paint the outside of his house but never finished the job. It is this man who allegedly whispers these words into Zuckerman‟s ear. Paranoia sets in, and Zuckerman starts to wonder whether his house in the Berkshires is still safe. Still, he knows this is probably just a coincidence: “His intending to harass me with the very word that I‟d been harassed with through the mails some eleven years earlier was nothing but the weirdest of coincidences” (Exit 62). This can be linked to Vervaeck‟s claim that “the postmodern attention for the stream of passing things is a form of attention for those elements that stay unnoticed in the normal experience of time.

[…] That is why the postmodern narration attaches great significance to the marginal and the coincidental which stays unnoticed in the chronology.”53 Later on, Zuckerman even starts to doubt whether it was not some “auditory hallucination” (Exit 62). He does not trust his own memories any longer, since his mind is starting to fail him also.

The second transformation of the rebellion-theme in comparison to The Ghost Writer is the way in which rebellion is presented in relation to the younger writers that are featured in Exit

Ghost. While Zuckerman is staying in New York after the procedure to reduce his incontinence, his eye falls on an ad in The New York Review in which a young writers couple proposes to change their residence in Manhattan for a house in the country for the period of one year. In a rash moment, invigorated by the thought that the medical procedure might change his life,

Zuckerman decides to take them up on their offer and arranges to meet them. Their names are

Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan. Certain issues related to Jewishness are brought to the surface

53 “ […] de postmoderne aandacht voor de vliedende stroom is een aandacht voor wat in de gewone tijdservaring onopgemerkt blijft. […] Daarom hecht de postmoderne vertelling zoveel belang aan het marginale en het toevallige dat in de chronologie onopgemerkt blijft” (155). Van Damme 75 in Exit Ghost through the character of Billy Davidoff. Contrary to Zuckerman, however, this young Jewish-American writer is not the rebelling type. He is trying to write about the history of the family business: “Davidoff‟s fashionable luggage” (Exit 74). However, Billy seems to struggle to find the right words, as he explains to Zuckerman:

“You‟re writing about the family business, are you?” [Zuckerman]

He nodded and he shrugged and he sighed. “And the family. I‟m trying to anyway. I more

or less grew up in the store. I‟ve heard a thousand stories from my grandfather. Every

time I go to see him I fill another notebook. I‟ve got stories to last a lifetime. But it‟s all a

matter of how, isn‟t it? I mean, how you tell them.” [Billy] (Exit 75, original emphasis)

Billy Davidoff fits into Shostak‟s description of the nice Jewish boy who takes the feelings of others in careful consideration. Zuckerman has always been the perfect opposite of this type of writer. He was about the same age as Billy as he wrote ”Higher Education” and even after he learned that his father was hurt by the story, Zuckerman refused to change it. Later on,

Zuckerman spends some time alone with Billy. This are Zuckerman‟s thoughts, which further confirm the image of the nice Jewish boy:

Is he a throwback, I wondered, or do they still exist like this, middle-class Jewish boys

who continue to be branded with the family empathy that, despite the unmatchable

satisfaction of its cradling sentiments, can leave one unprepared for the nastiness of less

kindly souls? In the Manhattan literary milieu particularly, I would have expected

something other than the brown eyes weighty with tenderness and the full angelic cheeks

that lent him the air, if not still of a protected small boy, then of the generous young man

wholly unable to inflict a wound or laugh with scorn or shirk the smallest responsibility

(Exit 71). Van Damme 76

Jamie Logan, Billy‟s beautiful young wife, resembles Zuckerman much more in terms of her rebelliousness. She is not Jewish though. “Her father was a Houston oilman with origins as

American as Americans could be”( Exit 33). The relationship between Jamie and her father has never been ideal, and ever since her father refused to tend to her sister Jessie as she was dying of

Lou Gehrig‟s disease, they live on bad terms. Like Zuckerman, Jamie is rebelling against her background. However, Jamie was raised in a typical Midwestern environment, her high school, called Kinkaid, was “a very protected place where to be socially acceptable was everything”(Exit

79) Socially acceptable has different connotations in the neighborhood were Jamie grew up than in the Jewish community where Zuckerman has spend his childhood. Therefore Jamie‟s rebellion comes in exactly the opposite way of Zuckerman‟s. While as a young man, Zuckerman has several sexual affairs with shiksas, Jamie‟s act of rebellion consists among other things out of marrying a Jewish man, Billy. Billy points out to Zuckerman how Jamie has always had many

Jewish friends, a fact much resented by her parents. Therefore, marrying a Jew is the perfect way to stand up to her controlling father. He threatens to disinherit her if Jamie does not cancel the wedding, but she is headstrong and does not give in. This is how Billy describes the attitude that exists towards Jews in the environment in which Jamie grew up:

Though you would have thought that the father would have been used to it by the time she

got around to me. „It‟ being Jamie and Jews. Their country club lets in Jews now. That

wouldn‟t have been the case in her grandparents‟ time, or even as recently as fifteen years

ago, with her parents generation. It‟s all pretty new (Exit 79).

Her parents attitude towards Jews is not the only thing that greatly disturbs Jamie. Their political preferences also deeply shock her. They are “archconservative Texans” (Exit 89) who are

“members of the same country club as the elder George Bush” (Exit 88). Jamie wants to swap residences exactly because she believes that 9/11 was only the beginning of something worse to Van Damme 77 come. She blames Bush‟s policy and his voters for what has happened since and for endangering the world, fearing that New York will be attacked again, and says:

“These are terrible, evil people,” she told me, echoing her husband. “I know these people.

I grew up with these people. It wouldn‟t just be a shame if they won – it could prove to be

a tragedy. The turn to the right in this country is a movement to replace political

institutions with morality – their morality. Sex and God. Xenophobia. A culture of total

intolerance…” ( Exit 82)

Jamie is not surprised to hear that her parents have voted for Bush and not for Kerry as she calls them after the election, but it still pains her to think about it:

In her voice you could hear just how battered she was, not least by the fact that her parents

were the very sort of people her liberal conscience couldn‟t abide, and yet she still

happened to be their daughter and still needed, apparently, to lay her troubles at their feet.

You could hear both the great bond and the great struggle against (Exit 89).

Even though the relationship and the problems differ, this obviously reflects the difficult relationship between Zuckerman and his father at the time he wrote “Higher Education”. Both conflicts arise because son/daughter differ in opinion with their father, but they still love him and feel connected to him.

Another Jewish issue is forwarded by Billy‟s father who also has voted for Bush, which is very disappointing and humiliating to Billy. His father explains his choice by saying: “I did it for

Israel” (Exit 89). In his case, his Jewishness still determines the choices he makes in life.

There is another resemblance between Jamie and Zuckerman as a young man, namely the vehemence with which they defend their liberal political viewpoint and the way in which they are engrossed in American politics. However, the older Zuckerman in Exit Ghost no longer is aware of electoral politics: “After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions. Otherwise, I told Van Damme 78 myself, you‟ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman […]” (Exit 69). Hence, it was a conscious decision:

I‟d hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan politics, but now, having

lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer

to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child- the emotions of a child and

the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage

to remain in America without America‟s ever again being absorbed in me” (Exit 69).

Zuckerman‟s choice to shut out life as he used to know it is intrinsically connected with his place of residence. The Berkshires are the perfect place to forget about the world and to concentrate on fiction only. In New York, contrarily, this proves to be impossible. Not only is Zuckerman confronted with politics for the first time in years, he is also highly aware of his bodily desires again: “And I noticed the young women. I couldn‟t fail to. The days were still warm in New York and women were clad in ways I couldn‟t ignore, however much I wanted not to be aroused by the very desires quelled through living in seclusion across the road from a nature preserve” (Exit 65).

Zuckerman feels especially intrigued and attracted by Jamie Logan. The consequences and implications of this infatuation will be discussed later. Zuckerman is starting to hope that if a procedure can take away the problem of his incontinence, then maybe there is a way to overcome his impotence too. He starts to hope that swapping residences will give him a new start in life, even though deep down he knows he is kidding himself:

Unwilling to oppose the power of the crazed hope of rejuvenation that was affecting all

my actions, the crazed hope of the procedure‟s reversing the strongest side of my decline,

and aware of the mistake I was making, a revenant, a man who‟d cut himself off from

sustained human contact and its possibilities yielding to the illusion of starting again. And

not through my own distinctive mental capacities but through the body refashioned, life Van Damme 79

seeming limitless again. Of course this is the wrong thing to do, the insane thing to do, but

if so, I thought, what is the right thing to do, the sane thing, and who am I to claim that I

ever knew enough to do it? (Exit 31)

Several times during his stay in New York, Zuckerman feels like he needs to go home and stop his rash behavior. The confrontation with himself is hard to bear at times:

[…] speed north for home, where I could quickly put my thoughts back were they

belonged, under the transforming exigencies of prose fiction, which allow for no sweet

dreams. What you do not have, you life without – you‟re seventy-one, and that‟s the deal.

The vainglorious days of self-assertion are over. Thinking otherwise is ridiculous. There

was no need to learn anything more about Amy Bellette or Jamie Logan, nor was there

any need to learn anything about myself. That too was ridiculous. The drama of self-

discovery was long over (Exit 42).

Zuckerman will eventually decide to go home at the end of the novel. Zuckerman refers to Amy

Bellette here because he has seen her at the hospital when he was there for the collagen injection that should resolve his incontinence. He realizes that this girl, so admired by him in the past, has aged also. Later on, Zuckerman will learn that Amy has had brain surgery

The third young writer who is introduced in Exit Ghost is Richard Kliman, a freelance journalist. Kliman is a former boyfriend of Jamie Logan, who “knew Jamie from Harvard, where she was two years ahead of him”(Exit 44). What Jamie and Kliman have in common is their rebellion against their rich and privileged background and their conflicts with a headstrong and authoritative father. This is how Jamie describes his rebellion, starting by describing the sort of house he grew up in: Van Damme 80

He lives in a big house in Beverly Hills. It‟s, in my book, extremely ugly. It‟s large, it‟s

ostentatious. […] Extremely landscaped. Very manicured. That‟s not his world. He went

to college in the Northeast. He‟s come to New York. He‟s chosen to live in New York and

work in the literary world and not become super-rich and live in a marble palace in L.A.

and hound people for a living. He‟s got the skills to be a professional hound – he learned

them from his father- but that‟s not what he wants” (Exit 115).

Jamie is referring to his father‟s career as a “notoriously aggressive” (Exit 112) entertainment lawyer. According to her, Kliman‟s rebellion consists of his choosing the uncertain career of a writer. However, Zuckerman will find out that Kliman is just as aggressive as his own father when he wants to achieve a certain goal: in this case the goal is Kliman‟s plan to write Lonoff‟s biography and to enlist Zuckerman‟s aid for this.

In Exit Ghost, Roth makes an important reference to the Holocaust and the story of Anne

Frank as featured in The Ghost Writer that should not be left out of this discussion. Zuckerman learns that Amy “miraculously escaped death during Word War II, though [her] youth had coincided with Hitler‟s maturity” (Exit 188). The accent can be attributed to her country of origin, which is Norway instead of the Netherlands. Furthermore, Amy tells him how she has lost her parent and her oldest brother in the war. This makes Zuckerman reflect upon the other biography he had developed for her in The Ghost Writer:

[…] the genuine biography, which, if less inflated with the moral significance my own

invention held for me back then, was factually contiguous with what I‟d come up with. It

had to be, for everything that had happened on the same doomed continent to a member of

the same doomed generation of the same doomed enemy of the master race. Transforming

herself out of what I‟d transformed her into did not permit erasing the fate by which her Van Damme 81

family had been no less besieged than the Franks. That was a disaster whose dimensions

no mind could rewrite and no imagination undo and whose memory even the tumor

wouldn‟t displace, until it had killed her (Exit 188).

This confirms the idea that was already inherently present in The Ghost Writer, namely that the erasure of the original source text is impossible in certain cases. Amy Bellette‟s story as well cannot be erased, not even by the severe memory-loss induced by her brain tumor.

3.2. Authorship

Exit Ghost may differ from The Ghost Writer in the sense that it is not a novel about

Jewishness anymore, but they are both highly metafictional novels. Several important issues in

Exit Ghost are related to authorship. Roth is also renowned as being a writer who uses a lot of intertextual elements. In Exit Ghost, the character of E.I. Lonoff returns in several ways.

Zuckerman is first reminded of the writer when he encounters Amy Bellette in the elevator of the hospital after she has had brain surgery. Zuckerman does not seek contact with her, but seeing this figure from the past causes him to buy the six volumes of Lonoff‟s short stories again, even though he has these books already at home. Zuckerman starts to re-read them, wondering whether he will still be as impressed as he was as a young man, and concludes:

He was as good as I had thought. He was better. It was as though there were some color

previously missing or withheld from our literary spectrum and Lonoff alone had it. Lonoff

was that color, a twentieth-century American writer unlike any other, and he had been out

of print for decades. I wondered if his achievement would have been so completely

forgotten if he had finished his novel and lived to see it published. I wondered if he had

been working on a novel at the end of his life (Exit 20). Van Damme 82

Zuckerman finds it hard to understand how such a talented writer as Lonoff has lost all recognition and barely has a readership left. The novel Zuckerman is talking about becomes an important topic of discussion in Exit Ghost. According to Kliman, this novel is Lonoff‟s autobiographical story. Kliman wants to write a biography of E.I. Lonoff in which he plans to reveal that the latter had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister when he was still a young man. He relies on the manuscript of this alleged first and last novel written by Lonoff to back up his claims. Hence, Zuckerman was right when he made the assumption that Lonoff had written a novel in the five years he shared with Amy. However, Zuckerman finds it difficult to believe the assumptions that are made by Kliman. When Kliman phones Zuckerman to ask him for his help with his project and to verify certain facts about Lonoff‟s life, this is the beginning of a series of discussions between the two writers.

First of all, there is the problem of privacy that surfaces during their discussions. Kliman claims that “[a] thoroughly documented critical biography could go a long way toward resurrecting Lonoff and restoring his rightful place in twentieth-century literature” (Exit 49).

Zuckerman, contrarily, has a different vision on the subject. He knows how much Lonoff valued his privacy while he was alive. Furthermore, Zuckerman believes that Kliman is an opportunist who wants to benefit from exposing the scandal in Lonoff‟s life, rather than to highlight the fact that Lonoff was a talented writer: “So you‟re going to redeem Lonoff‟s reputation as a writer by ruining it as a man. Replace the genius of the genius with the secret of the genius. Rehabilitation by disgrace” (Exit 101) Jamie Logan defends her friend: “If he were an opportunist, he‟d follow in his father‟s footsteps. He wouldn‟t write a biography of a writer nobody has heard of” (Exit

116). However, Zuckerman no longer takes the position of the Jew Boy that he so vehemently inhabited as a young man. He is now starting to sound like his father and like Billy Davidoff: “To resurrect him how is the question” (Exit 108, original emphasis). While he was rereading Van Damme 83

Lonoff‟s stories, Zuckerman did find it sad that Lonoff was no longer the well-read author he used to be. However, he now believes anonymity is preferable over recognition for the wrong reasons. Zuckerman believes that Lonoff‟s fiction will now only be seen “through the lens of incest” (Exit 196). He has become the nice Jewish boy who cares about the emotional impact of a text on people. When he wrote “Higher Education”, a story that hurt his family to whom he was close, Zuckerman did not take those feelings into consideration. Zuckerman‟s view on authorship definitely has changed since he was the protagonist in The Ghost Writer. However, Zuckerman still makes a distinction between a writer and the sort of journalist he believes Kliman to be, as becomes clear during the following conversation:

“Why do you insist on trivializing what I want to do? Who do you rush to cheapen what

you know nothing about?” [ Kliman]

“Because the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research is just about the lowest of the

literary rackets.” [Zuckerman]

“And the savage snooping calling itself fiction?” [Kliman]

“You characterizing me now?” [Zuckerman]

“I‟m characterizing literature. It nurtures curiosity too. It says the public life is not the real

life. It says there is something beyond the image you set out to give – call it the truth of

the self. I‟m not doing anything other than what you do. What any thinking person does.

Curiosity is nurtured by life.” [Kliman] (Exit 102, original emphasis)

Kliman does not agree and states that he is basically doing the same as what Zuckerman is doing in his fiction as well. In fact, Kliman seems to have several characteristics in common with the young Jew boy Zuckerman. When Zuckerman makes the following accusation, it could also be interpreted as an unconscious accusation of himself as he was young: “I know you: you wish to gain the approval of the adults you clandestinely set about to defile. There‟s a cunning pleasure in Van Damme 84 that, and safety too” (Exit 99). Zuckerman knows Kliman, in the sense that he recognizes himself in the young man. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman was also looking for the approval of his family, while at the same time showing them at their worst in the name of truth and art. Kliman says about himself to Zuckerman: “I‟m not a tactician, I‟m an enthusiast” (Exit 46). It is a statement that could easily be applied on young Zuckerman as well. Kliman knows that

Zuckerman does not tolerate censorship, so this is exactly what Kliman accuses him of: “This is censorship. You, yourself a writer, are trying to block the publication of another writer‟s work”

(Exit 270) Zuckerman recognizes the audacious way in which Kliman approaches him:

Without its ever turning outright belligerent, the unfaltering forward march of the voice

made clear he [Kliman] was prepared to do battle. It was, unexpectedly, a passing

rendition of me at about that stage, as though Kliman were mimicking (or, as now seemed

more to the point, deliberately mocking) my mode of forging ahead when I started out.

There is was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his

coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The

ruthless sense of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of an obstacle. Those

grand grandstand days when you shrink from nothing and you‟re only right. Everything is

a target; you‟re on the attack; and you, and you alone, are right” (Exit 48).

Kliman has become everything that fits into the description of a Jew boy, except the fact that he is not Jewish. Hence, Kliman be interpreted as a metaphor: Zuckerman is battling against his younger self. It is “the merciless encounter between the no-longers and the not-yets” (Exit 279).

The juxtaposition between the old and the young man becomes explicit when they meet in

Central park after the election. Kliman is portrayed as a young, strong, vital and healthy man who is as he is “jogging around the oval of the big green lawn(Exit 95)”, staying fit and running of his frustrations concerning the reelection of Bush. They talk again about Lonoff but do not agree, and Van Damme 85 when they get up Zuckerman realizes that he has wet himself again: “[…] I could tell that the pad cradled in my plastic underwear to absorb and contain my urine was heavily soaked […]. Kliman not only confronts Zuckerman with his own sickness and bodily weakness just by being so young and healthy. When Zuckerman tells him that he will do everything to sabotage Kliman‟s attempts at writing Lonoff‟s biography, Kliman responds in anger:

“You stink,” he shouted at me, “you smell bad! Crawl back into your hole and die!”

Shambling athletically, loose and limber, he sprinted off, calling back over the swell of his

shoulder, “You‟re dying, old man, you‟ll soon be dead! You smell of decay! You smell

like death!” But what could a specimen like Kliman know about the smell of death? All I

smelled of was urine” (Exit 104).

Hence, Kliman literally confronts Zuckerman with his own decay and mortality. This example illustrates perfectly Kliman‟s statement about being an enthusiast rather than a tactician, but it also shows that Zuckerman is not the only one who is aware of the age difference. According to

Kliman, this explains why Zuckerman is not cooperating with him:“Look, old men hate young men. That goes without saying” (Exit 50). Zuckerman knows this is part of the explanation. He starts to wonder himself why he is so vehemently trying to stop Kliman:

In keeping with my wildly fluctuating behavior in New York, I now wondered what the

writing of Lonoff‟s biography could possibly have to do with me. After my visit to his

house in 1956 to his house in 1956, I‟d never again been in his presence, and the one

letter I sent him after that visit he had not answered, thus stifling any dream I may have

had of his serving as a master to my apprenticeship. As regards either a biography or a

biographer, I had no responsibility to E.I. Lonoff or his heirs. It was seeing Amy Bellette

after so many years – especially seeing her infirm and disfigured, evicted from the

dwelling of her own body – and after that going to buy his books and rereading them at Van Damme 86

the hotel, that had set in motion the response that Kliman would elicit with his allusions to

a sinister Lonoff “secret” (Exit 111, original emphasis).

Zuckerman is concerned about Amy Bellette, since he knows that she does not want Kliman to publish Lonoff‟s biography: “A biography, Nathan. I don‟t want that. It‟s a second death. It puts another stop to a life by casting it in concrete for all time. The biography is the patent on life

[…]” (Exit 153). Since Lonoff‟s death, Amy has lived alone. The five years she spent with

Lonoff have defined her life. She has lived with her memories of him since he died, and even imagines that they are still having conversations: “Oh, yes. We‟ve circumvented very nicely the predicament of his being extinct. We‟re so unlike everyone else now and so like each other” (Exit

172). Zuckerman is surprised to hear this: “You were thirty when he died. To have your entire life defined by one episode…You were still a young woman.” I stopped myself from saying

“Was everything that followed crushed by those few years?” because the answer was obvious by now. Everything, every last thing” (Exit 172). After this conversation, Zuckerman realizes even better how important it is to protect Lonoff‟s heritage in order to protect this vulnerable woman.

Another reason for Zuckerman to contradict Kliman lies in the pure pleasure of contradiction, it makes Zuckerman feel alive again:

Back in the drama, back in the moment, back in the turnmoil of events! When I heard my

voice rising, I did not rein it in. There is the pain of being in the world, but there is also

the robustness. When was the last time I had felt the excitement of taking someone on?

Let the intensity out! Let the belligerence out! A resuscitating breath of the old contention

luring me into the old role, both Kliman and Jamie having the effect of rousing the virility

in me again, the virility of mind and spirit and desire and in intention and wanting to be

with people again and have a fight again and have a woman again and feeling the pleasure Van Damme 87

of one‟s power again. It‟s all called back – the virile man called back to life! Only there is

no virility. There is only the brevity of expectations (Exit 103).

Zuckerman even thinks of Kliman as a sexual rival, for he believes that Jamie and Kliman are having an affair. Zuckerman himself is interested in Jamie in a sexual manner, but he knows his impotence in itself makes an affair impossible, increasing his jealousy towards the young man.

Zuckerman‟s last reason to cross Kliman‟s objectives can be linked to his realization that

Kliman may have had a hidden motive when he contacted him. First and foremost, Kliman wanted to get the second part of the manuscript through Zuckerman, since Amy Bellette refused to speak to him anymore. Kliman also knows that Zuckerman has known Lonoff and hence hopes to get some additional information from him. However, Zuckerman starts to realize that Kliman could also be collecting information to write a biography of Nathan Zuckerman: “Wasn‟t Lonoff his literary stepping stone to me? And what would my “incest” be? How would I have failed to be the model human being? My great, unseemly secret” (Exit 275). Unconsciously, Zuckerman is identifying himself with Lonoff. He is an old man, aware that death is approaching, and he starts to wonder if he will be given the same sort of attention as Lonoff is about to receive from

Kliman:

The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after

death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him, his covert brand of baseness

discovered and described with uncompromising candor, clarity, self-certainty, with grave

concern for the most delicate issues of morality, and with no small measure of delight. So

I was next. Why had it taken till now to realize the obvious? Unless I had realized it all

along” (Exit 275).

Van Damme 88

For a certain amount of time, there is no certainty about whether Kliman is telling the truth about Lonoff‟s history. Zuckerman initially does not believe him, since this is not consistent with Lonoff‟s biography as composed by himself for several sources. To him, it seems out of character for the sort of man Lonoff was. Kliman mocks this attitude: “I‟m sorry that the thought of an incestuous relationship tortures you. It‟s hard for me to believe that the man who wrote your books would rather he be sanctified” (Exit 120). According to Kliman, Lonoff lived a secluded as he did as a result of the scandal: “Lonoff was in hiding, not just as a man but as a writer. The hiding was the catalyst for his genius” (Exit 47). “He stood perpetual vigil over himself – it‟s in his life, it pervades his work. He sustained his constraints because he lived in fear of exposure” (Exit 100). Hence, this would contradict Zuckerman‟s idea of Lonoff as the writer who sacrificed life in function of his art. Lonoff‟s fiction then would not have been the result of his rigid life-regime in itself, but of the after-effects of the love between him and his half-sister. This could explain also why the heroes in his story are all bachelors or widowers. The love of his life has disappeared from his life, hence no women are featured in his fiction.

When he meets Amy, she tells Zuckerman that the manuscript exists but that Lonoff never intended to publish it. Due to the tumor she has forgotten how she has given Kliman the first part of this manuscript, a deed Amy regrets with all her heart. This can be explained by the fact that the tumor has radically changed her behavior. She tells Zuckerman that Lonoff did have an affair with his half-sister for two years, but Zuckerman tries to circumvent reality by inventing an alternative scenario. In an effort to reassure Amy that she has nothing to fear, he convinces her that “[t]he source for Manny‟s tale of incest wasn‟t his life. It couldn‟t have been. The source was the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne” (Exit 199). Since Lonoff was familiar with Hemmingway‟s reference to Hawthorne‟s “great secret” (Exit 200) and the conclusions about an incestuous relationship between Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth that certain scholars had drawn from, it Van Damme 89 could be a plausible scenario that this inspired Lonoff to invented the incestuous relationship described in the novel . However, Zuckerman is not convinced himself, though he would like to be:

For this wholly unautobiographical writer, blessed with his genius for complete

transformation, the choice was almost inevitable. It‟s what opened his predicament out for

him and enabled him to leave the personal behind. Fiction for him was never

representation. It was rumination in narrative form. He thought, I‟ll make this my reality.”

While, in fact, I was thinking in much the same vein: “I‟ll make this reality mine, Amy‟s,

Kliman‟s, everyone‟s. And for the next hour I proceeded to, effulgently arguing its logic

until I had come to believe it myself .” (Exit 200)

Amy also makes an attempt to show what is wrong with Kliman‟s project by writing a complaint letter to the editor of The Times about an article for which “a reporter went to

Michigan to try to hunt down the real life-models for Hemmingway‟s Upper Peninsula stories”

(Exit 181). It is not clear though whether she consciously intends to write about Kliman.

Zuckerman is the one who interprets the letter as such, which is easy to understand when one takes a closer look at the content of the letter:

Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination,

cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have the right

to blah-blah-blah?” It is hypersensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature

of the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose

privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have

for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel (Exit 182). Van Damme 90

The letter is one long defense of the imagination. Amy is confused again due to the brain tumor.

She now says that Lonoff has dictated the letter to her: “They‟re his words. He said:

“Reading/writing people, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era – take this down”

(Exit 186). However wrote it, the message is clear: journalists such as Kliman are a danger to the integrity of fiction.

The second issue related to authorship that will be addressed is the impact of Zuckerman‟s deteriorating memory on his writing. This process has been going on for quite a while, though

Zuckerman tried to ignore it. However, this no longer is possible:

By the time I‟d decided to seek medical help in New York, the leakage I‟d been

experiencing wasn‟t just from my penis, nor was the failure of function restricted to the

bladder‟s sphincter - nor was the crisis awaiting to alter me next one that I could continue

to hope would isolate the loss in the body alone. This time it was my mind (Exit 162)

Zuckerman is starting to forget phone numbers, names, appointments and other practicalities.

However, what is worse is that his memory even fails him during the process of writing his novels. He simply starts to forget what he wrote about in the previous chapter or even the previous page. Zuckerman feels he is defenseless against this process and is aware of the implications for him as a writer:

Nor did vigilance seem much help against what felt less like the erosion of memory than

like a slide into senselessness, as though something diabolical residing in my brain but

with a mind of its own – the imp of amnesia, the demon of forgetfulness, against whose

powers of destruction I could bring no effective counterforce – were prompting me to

suffer these lapses solely for the fun of watching me degenerate, the ultimate gleeful goal Van Damme 91

to turn someone whose acuity as a writer was sustained by memory and verbal precision

into a pointless man” (Exit 159).

Zuckerman‟s fear is confirmed when he sends of a new manuscript to an old student of his who has always provided him with honest commentary. This time the man circumvents real criticism by saying that he has “nothing useful to say, on the grounds that he found himself so out of touch with a protagonist toward whom I was altogether sympathetic that he‟d been unable to sustain the interest to be helpful” (Exit 160). Zuckerman interprets this answer as a polite way of saying that the novel is badly written.

3.3.Postmodern elements

Exit Ghost definitely is a postmodern novel. The high level of metafictionality is already an indicator of this. In this chapter, I will compare the way in which the postmodern characteristics as featured in The Ghost Writer are used in Exit Ghost.

3.3.1.World view

3.3.1.1. The world of texts

Roth likes to play with postmodern elements, as already became clear in the discussion of

The Ghost Writer. Therefore, the examples taken from Exit Ghost can differ from the more literal approach of postmodernism as described by Vervaeck. I did not find any literal examples of “the landscape made of paper” in Exit Ghost . However, the novel is a clear illustration of Vervaeck‟s statement that “the world which is described in the novel is emphatically presented as a world of books, a story, a fiction.”54 This is made explicit in the chapter entitled “Amy‟s brain”, in which

54 “De wereld in het boek wordt nadrukkelijk voorgesteld als een boekenwereld, een verhaal, een fictie.” (19) Van Damme 92

Zuckerman is complaining about the effect of his deteriorating mind on his writing. The passage is ended by an interjection between brackets, of which I will quote the first part:

That is why, uncharacteristically, I‟m working here as rapidly as I can while I can, though

unable to proceed anywhere near as rapidly as I should because of the very mental

impediment that I‟m struggling to outflank. Nothing is certain any longer except that this

will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences

and paragraphs of a book. Because permanent groping is what it is now, a groping that

goes well beyond the anxious groping for fluency that writing is to begin with. […]”

(Exit 159)

This passage creates ambiguity: Is this Roth speaking or Zuckerman? The specific details that are given later on in this passage, e.g. the trip to New York and the incontinence, make clear that

Zuckerman is speaking/writing here. However, that would imply that Zuckerman is not only the narrator in Exit Ghost but that he is writing the novel as well. This passage hence does not only make the reader aware of the fact that he is reading a book, it also creates confusion about the conventional idea of the writer and his protagonist. A character that is writing the novel he appears in himself is definitely not conventional. It is an ingenious way of Roth to play with the speculations that have been made about Zuckerman being an autobiographical character, without actually revealing anything. He could be referring to a deterioration of his own mind, but then again he might not be.

Another reason why Exit Ghost can be perceived as a world of books is the fact that intertextual references are very important in this last Zuckerman-novel, as was also the case in

The Ghost Writer. There are numerous references to other existing novels and authors, e.g. to

Faulkner and Hemmingway (Exit 161), to Elliot‟s Little Gidding (Exit 169), to The Shadow-Line Van Damme 93 by Conrad, to Lawrence‟s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Anna Karenina, Hardy‟s Tess of the

D’Ubervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre (Exit 229) etc, …

There are also intertextual references to other media. Jamie for example refers to Tom Cruise, a movie star. When Zuckerman starts to re-write his conversations with Jamie in the form of a play, he mentions a particular piece of music in the stage directions: “Strauss‟s Four Last Songs […]

For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve” (Exit 124). The choice of this piece of music is symbolically charged, since it can be applied to Zuckerman‟s own situation. In this play he can drop all masks and be brutally honest about his thoughts and his desire for Jamie. The actors in the play do not have names, they are referred to as HE and SHE.

However, it is obvious that he means: Zuckerman and Jamie. At the end of one of those invented scenes, he adds a postscript:

[…] A scene constituting the opening of HE and She, a play of desire and temptation and

flirtation and agony – agony all the time – an improvisation best aborted and left to die.

Chekhov has a story called “He and She.‟ Other than the title, he remembers nothing of

the story ( perhaps there is no such story), though from words of advice about such

storytelling in a letter Chekhov wrote while still quite young, he can remember the key

sentence even now. A letter by a greatly admired writer he read in his twenties is still

fresh to him, while the time and the place of appointments he made the day before he now

forgets completely. “The center of gravity,” wrote Chekhov in 1886, “should reside in

two: he and she.” It should. It has. It won‟t ever again (Exit 146).

This excerpt shows how highly appropriate the title of Zuckerman‟s play is: It is about him and

Jamie, about the fact that he wants a relationship with her and about the fact that this is no longer possible. Due to his impotence, he will never again be able to have a sexual relationship with a Van Damme 94 woman. Kliman is a metaphor for what he can no longer be; Jamie is a metaphor for what he can no longer have. The former Jew Boy who like to indulge in carnal pleasures no longer exist. That is to say, the desire is still there but his body no longer cooperates. Just like the Lonovian hero,

Zuckerman ends up alone.

Intertextual elements are often used to explain the feelings of a character. As he arrives in New

York, Zuckerman has “a moment not unlike Rip Van Winkle‟s when, after having slept twenty years, he came out of the mountains and walked back to his village believing he‟d merely been gone overnight” (Exit 14) This reference to Washington Irving‟s famous short story illuminates and describes very adequately how Zuckerman is feeling. It is like he has been in hibernation in his house in the Berkshires, while in New York life opens up to him again, in a changed form from of what he used to know. He remarks: “[…] when I continued north on Broadway I felt not so much that I was in a foreign country as that some optical were being played on me, that things appeared as in the reflection of a fun-house mirror, everything simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable” (Exit 30) Like Rip Van Winkle, who is not aware of the fact that he is now an

American rather than an English constituent, Zuckerman is no longer aware of the political situation in America.

The text that is most often referred to in Exit Ghost is definitely The Ghost Writer. Several characters that have crossed Zuckerman‟s path in The Ghost Writer reappear in his life, be it in the literal sense, like Amy Bellette, or through memory, as is the case for Lonoff. There are numerous references to the events that took place in The Ghost Writer as well. I already pointed out that Zuckerman has taken over Lonoff‟s reclusive life-style, including the rigidly planned rituals, e.g. his routine to keep fit by swimming in the pond behind his house: “I do my laps for half an hour every day” (Exit 4). This illustrates two important characteristics of postmodern writing. First of all, the blending together of different characters. Vervaeck said: „Since a rich Van Damme 95 character stages several scenarios, there is an increased change that there are overlaps with related scripts staged by other characters.”55 Zuckerman lives a life very similar to that of Lonoff in exactly the same environment: the Berkshires. Intertextuality again is important here, in the sense that Lonoff is no longer a real character in Exit Ghost, strictly speaking. However, the blending together takes place over the boundaries of the novels, since they are related in numerous ways to each other. The blending of characters is one of the ways in which the novels are tied together. The second characteristic of postmodern writing that is illustrated here is that the world of the postmodern novel lies close to the ritual. Vervaeck states that postmodern characters tend to see this staging of rituals as a submission. Zuckerman, like Lonoff, has submitted to this script for several reasons, his bad health being one of them.

Zuckerman‟s life corresponds even better to the script of the Lonovion hero than Lonoff‟s life used to, since Zuckerman literally lives alone while Lonoff only lived alone in his head. This bring us to the second characteristic of postmodern intertextuality according to Vervaeck: “The scenario on which the postmodern novel is grounded, is called upon in such an explicit manner that it becomes ironic.”56 The irony in Exit Ghost consists out of the fact that on the one hand it is the Jew boy Zuckerman who ends up alone, due to his impotence, while on the other hand the nice Jewish boy Lonoff is forced to start a new life with his mistress. A reversal of the scripts of the Jew boy and the nice Jewish boy has taken place, independent of the protagonists‟ own wishes.

55 “Omdat een rijk personage veel scenario‟s opvoert, wordt de kans groot dat het overlappingen vertoont met andere figuren die verwante scripts opvoeren.” (77) 56 “Het scenario waarop de postmoderne roman zich baseert, wordt zo expliciet opgeroepen dat het geïroniseerd wordt.” (24) Van Damme 96

The third characteristic of postmodern intertextuality is the stereotype according to

Vervack.57 Similar to Lonoff, Zuckerman has become the stereotypical romantic image of the writer who sacrifices life in the name of art, though this was definitely not Zuckerman‟s initial intention as he went to live in the Berkshires. Another stereotypical image that is important in

Exit Ghost is that of the clash between the young and the old, as described by the juxtaposition between Kliman and Zuckerman. The last attempt of an old man to rebel against his failing body can be considered as a stereotypical image as well. Roth plays with the idea of stereotype in Exit

Ghost when he describes Nathan‟s initial thoughts as he meets Jamie Logan and Billy Davidoff:

My guess was that the money was his, that they had met at Amherst or Williams or

Brown, a tame, wealthy, kindhearted Jewish boy and an intense poor girl, Irish, maybe

half Italian, who from grade school on had never stopped excelling, self-propelled,

perhaps even something of a climber… (Exit 33)

Here we see how Zuckerman, virtually the icon of rebelliousness against Jewish stereotypes, is caught of being guilty of exactly the same sin he has accused so many others of. His stereotypical, romanticized viewpoint is wrong: “The money was hers and it came from Texas”

(Exit 33) This illustrates how preconceived notions can steer our perception of reality.

Zuckerman notices that they are well of and directly assumes the money belongs to the Jew, since this scenario would correspond to the stereotypical image of the rich and the greedy Jew and the romantic but also stereotypical image of the poor but beautiful girl.

According to Vervaeck, the last characteristic of postmodern intertextuality is the erasing of the so-called original. He states: “Writing becomes erasure”. 58 In Exit Ghost, Roth plays with

57 “Dit voert naar het derde typisch postmoderne kenmerk van de enting: het clichématige.” (25) 58 “Schrijven wordt dan uitwissen.” ( 27) Van Damme 97 the postmodern idea of writing being the erasure of an original source text. As the novel evolves,

Roth is erasing his famous protagonist and alter-ego both on a physical and mental level by writing the last Zuckerman-novel. This is the ending of the novel:

Thus, with only a moment‟s more insanity on his part – a moment of insane excitement –

he throws everything into his bag – except the unread manuscript and the used Lonoff

books – and gets out as fast as he can. How can he not [as he likes to say] He

disintegrates. She‟s on her way and he leaves. Gone for good (Exit 292).

This seems to imply that Zuckerman dies, therefore the erasure takes place in a very literal sense.

One could also interpret this as being the end of Zuckerman as a writer due to the disintegration of his mind. However, if the interjection discussed earlier implies that Zuckerman is writing Exit

Ghost, this means that he is erasing himself through his writing. This becomes highly ambiguous when we take a closer look at how Zuckerman is simultaneously resisting the erasure by writing the play entitled “HE and SHE”. In this play, Zuckerman tries to rewrite his destiny. In this imagined conversation with Jamie the sexual tension is made much more explicit, than in real life. He freely talks with Jamie about her sexual past, in that sense he has let go of all inhibitions, and he even voices his desires for her. Zuckerman projects some of his wishes into the play, e.g. he fantasizes that Jamie does not find Kliman an exciting lover. However, Zuckerman still hints at his own impotence in this play, when SHE/Jamie asks him why he has not had sex for such a long period of time. He answers: “It decided to give me up” (Exit 223). This can imply that

Zuckerman is trying to keep his fantasy close enough to his real life, in order for him to be able to believe that it could be a possible alternative scenario, rather than the frustrated dream of an old man that can never come true. Hence, the play is partly a projection of his dreams and partly based on reality. Van Damme 98

At a certain point, the conversation in the play takes on the form of a role play in which

Zuckerman is interviewing Jamie for a job: “The job of leaving the husband who adores you and coming to live instead with a man you can read aloud to” (Exit 230). Here, Roth plays again with the idea of characters melting together. This situation is a reversal of the moment when Amy

Bellette asked Lonoff to leave Hope. First of all, the reversal lies in the fact that the couple is young this time and it is the elder man who is pleading to the wife to give up the husband.

Secondly, there is the gender difference: this time it is a single old man who is trying to persuade a married young woman whereas in Amy‟s case it was the other way around. However, the outcome is not the same: Zuckerman ends up alone, while Amy in the end did get her life with

Lonoff. The job-interview reflects Zuckerman‟s state of mind, even in his fantasy he has lost control:

SHE: “If the job gets offered to me, I‟ll have to figure out whether or not I can arrange my

life so that I can do the job well. Then I‟ll get back to you.”

HE: “This isn‟t fair. I‟ve lost my authority.” (Exit 238, original emphasis)

Hence, we can conclude that several layers of meaning are added to Exit Ghost when one takes into account the many references to The Ghost Writer, which can be contrasted with the events that take place in Exit Ghost. Zuckerman‟s behavior becomes more interesting when compared to certain elements and characters in The Ghost Writer, including his own behavior as a young man.

Van Damme 99

3.3.1.2. The inner world

Vervaeck states that “the world shown by the postmodern novel is not just one of books but also of the mind.”59 Chapter three and four Exit Ghost carry titles that refer directly to the mind: “Amy‟s Brain” (Exit 148) and “My Brain” (Exit 202). The novel will prove to be an exploration of the deteriorating mind of Nathan Zuckerman. Hence, Exit Ghost definitely confirms Ben Siegel‟s statement that “Roth places a good deal of importance on memory” (Siegel

22). As in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman is the narrator in this novel. Exit Ghost is his description of one week he spent in New York. When Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette in the hospital, this triggers memories of the events that are described in The Ghost Writer. At first, he does not approach her, but later he does decide to call her: “[…] my determination to reach her had transported me nearly fifty years back, when gazing upon an exotic girl with a foreign accent seemed to an untried boy the answer to everything” (Exit 150). Amy‟s voice still sounds like that of a little girl : “The voice was as distinctive as the accent, especially as it wasn‟t a voice one would associate with her wraithlike looks but a young person‟s voice, incongruously girlish and innocent of hardship” (Exit 17). This does not only emphasize that she is a figure from the past, it also is related to the fact that part of her family died during the Holocaust. Later on, Zuckerman comes to understand this as she is telling him about her traumatic past: “For you to say I stayed in my childhood my whole life means I stayed in this terrible story – life remained a terrible story. It means that I had so much pain in my youth that, one way or another, I stayed in it forever”

(Exit 193). Hence, her voice is a direct reminder of the pain that was caused by the Holocaust.

Coming to New York in itself triggers many memories, since the city is more visually stimulating than the environment of his house in the Berkshires: “[…] assimilating the streets through one‟s animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of the city

59 “De wereld die de postmoderne roman toont, is niet alleen die van de boeken, maar ook die van de geest.” (30) Van Damme 100 inspire” (Exit 64). The city is a postmodern metaphor for chaos and can be linked to the postmodern image of the world as a labyrinth. Zuckerman feels overwhelmed by all this new stimuli and the associations that come with them, associations that often transport him back to the past: “Precipitously stepping into a new future, I had retreated unwillingly into the past – a retrograde trajectory not that uncommon, but uncanny anyhow” (Exit 52)

Vervaeck quotes Atte Jongstra, who said that “ a postmodern novel dwells “in the labyrinth that is called memory” and does not offer the reader a beginning or an end.”60 The idea of a labyrinth is explicitly present in Exit Ghost, and not just through the representation of New York. Since

Zuckerman‟s mind is rapidly deteriorating, he starts to lose track of things. He forgets for example how he has arranged for Billy to go and see his house in the Berkshires. When Jamie mentions this arrangement on the phone, Zuckerman has no memory of it whatsoever: “[…] in fact, in recent years I had been having a problem remembering any number of small things. To address the difficulty, I had begun to keep, along with my daily calendar, a line school composition book […] in which to list each day‟s chores and, in more abbreviated form, to note my phone calls, their contents and the letters I wrote and received. Without the chore book, I could (as I‟d just proven) easily forget whom I had spoken to about what as recently as yesterday, or what someone was supposed to be doing for me in the following day. I had started accumulating chore books some three years before, when I first realized that a perfectly reliable memory was beginning to fray […]” (Exit 105).

Zuckerman‟s memories of his younger self are not only triggered by meeting Amy. They are revived through the confrontation with Kliman and his infatuation with Jamie as well, as

60 “Een postmoderne roman dwaalt “in de doolhof die memorie heet” (Jongstra 1193: 227) en biedt de lezer geen begin of eind.” (35) Van Damme 101 already became clear. The following quote can be linked especially to their political engagement which is very similar to his attitude in the past:

They were some six to eight years out of college, I thought, and so Kerry‟s loss to Bush

was taking a prominent place in the cluster of extreme historical shocks that would

mentally shape their American kinship, as Vietnam had publically defined their parent‟s

generation and as the Depression and the Second World War had organized the

expectations of my parents and their friends” (Exit 97).

Zuckerman realizes that his former political indignation has its place in a cycle, and that this type of vehement indignation belongs primarily to the youth. Roth refers here to facts from the real world, which illustrates Vervaeck‟s notion of postmodern intertextuality: references to real events and real persons can be considered as forms of intertextuality, since the real world can also be perceived as a text. Again, fiction and reality are blended together.

Zuckerman is not the only one who has problems with his memory. Amy Bellette has brain cancer and the tumor has radically changed her, including her capacity to remember things.

However, her forgetfulness is mainly restricted to practical matters, which is also the case for

Zuckerman. This sometimes leads to confusing situations, e.g. when Zuckerman arranges to meet

Jamie at an Italian restaurant, she does not turn up and he thinks he is the one who made a mistake. Later he realizes that it is Amy who was mistaken: “It occurred to me for the first time since I‟d been waiting for her at Pierluigi‟s that it wasn‟t I who had gone to the wrong restaurant; it was Amy. The tumor that had come back was turning her inside out again […]” (Exit 177).

Amy often repeats herself and is generally confused. She even asks Zuckerman:“Was I ever married to you?” (Exit 187) Of course, this is reminiscent of Zuckerman‟s dream as a young man in which he married Amy/Anne Frank. Since Amy cannot know anything about this fantasy, it can be interpreted as a wink of Roth to the reader. Van Damme 102

Amy is much more lucid when it comes to the memories of Lonoff and of her traumatic childhood. She replaces the biography‟s of Lonoff and herself as Zuckerman had designed them in his fantasy in The Ghost Writer by their real biography‟s. She is capable of telling Zuckerman all about Lonoff‟s death in great detail, she even remembers several things he has said to her that day, such as: “The end is immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly” (Exit 152). Then again, Zuckerman realizes that memory is fallible: “I wondered which of these stories she had herself transformed, garbled, distorted, misinterpreted and misunderstood” (Exit 194, my emphasis). This is in line with the viewpoint from the New

Historicists who claim that “history can only be approached as a story, as fiction”61 and with

Vervaeck‟s statement that says that memories distort reality. Amy is aware of the fluctuating capacities of her memory. Therefore, she is thrilled when she hears that Zuckerman has overheard the conversation between her and Lonoff on the night she tried to persuade him to leave Hope . It is a confirmation of the fact that this is not a memory Amy invented or distorted, and to have witnesses to those treasured memories makes her happy: “To have a witness to something so long gone – what a gift!” (Exit 173) It is a comforting thought to her on the day that she has learned that the tumor has returned.

Vervaeck states that “memory […] is featured in several postmodern novels as one of the most important ways to build up a world and a reality”.62 However, Zuckerman‟s memory is starting to fail him. Hence, his world is also starting to disintegrate. To counteract this deterioration, Zuckerman creates alternative memories in the form of the play entitled “HE and

SHE”:

61 “[…] de opvatting dat de geschiedenis alleen als verhaal, dus als fictie benaderbaar is.” (32) 62 “[…] de herinnering, die in vele postmoderne romans ten tonele gevoerd wordt als een van de belangrijkste manieren om een wereld en een realiteit op te bouwen.” (31) Van Damme 103

My chore book recorded what I did do and what was scheduled to do as an aid to a failing

memory; this scene of dialogue unspoken recorded what hadn‟t been done and was an aid

to nothing, alleviated nothing, achieved nothing, and yet, just as on election night, it had

seemed terribly necessary to write the instant I came through the door, the conversations

she and I don‟t have more affecting even than the conversations we do have, and the

imaginary “She” vividly at the middle of her character as the actual “she” will never be.

But isn‟t one‟s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without

giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for

some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing,

constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on

paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most (Exit 147).

Since Zuckerman no longer has a grasp on his bodily existence, he tries to get a grasp in his mind by creating an alternative life on paper. He is writing in order to survive. In his play, Zuckerman pretends that his mind is still as capable of remembering as it used to be:

SHE:“The passage you recited for me you got exactly right. You have a good memory.”

HE: “For books, for books.[…]” (Exit 226). However, this is wishful thinking. As Zuckerman‟s memory is slipping, so is his capability to write. Even fantasy will not be able to save him any longer. The falling motion as discussed by Vervaeck can be linked to this: As Zuckerman‟s mind is starting to fail, he reaches out to every possible means to stop him from falling: the procedure, the alluring idea of a relationship with Amy, fiction and fantasy. However, his attempts will not be rewarded.

Van Damme 104

3.3.2. View on mankind

3.3.2.1. Man as text

In Exit Ghost, several examples can be discovered of Vervaeck‟s theory that characters in postmodern novels are a collection of words and texts who no longer give the impression that they are made of flesh and blood. This is particularly emphasized in Zuckerman‟s play, when

SHE says the following: “When you left her, you said it was killing you and you didn‟t want to see her again” (Exit 281). She is using the third person singular, because she is speaking about

Jamie and SHE is only the invented version of Jamie. SHE is aware that she is Zuckerman‟s creation. The real Jamie also sees through him. When Zuckerman phones her up to ask her if she would come and join him in his hotel room, she replies:

Please stop. It doesn‟t take much to make me go over off the rails. You think I‟m

combative? Bristling Jamie? Aggressive Jamie? I‟m a combative bundle of nerves. You

think Richard Kliman is my lover? You think that still? That I would have nothing to do

with him sexually should be abundantly clear to you by now. You‟ve imagined a woman

who isn‟t me. Can‟t you realize what a relief it was when I met Billy and someone wasn‟t

screaming all the time when I didn‟t accede to his wishes? (Exit 277, my emphasis)

Jamie is aware of the fact that Zuckerman is trying to make her into a character in a novel that he is trying to design himself. However, she refuses to cooperate in his attempt to circumvent reality. This will eventually lead to Zuckerman‟s decision to leave New York. Jamie has opened his eyes to the fact that he cannot avoid his faith: death.

Zuckerman realizes himself that his fictional portrayal of Jamie is enlarging his obsession with her and makes him think of her as someone she is not: “On rereading the scene in bed before

I went to sleep, I thought: If ever there was something that didn‟t need doing, it‟s this. Now you Van Damme 105 are take up with her totally” (Exit 93). This is a good example of how fiction can influence real life.

According to Vervaeck we can link the idea of man as a character from a book to the compulsory nature of the postmodern world. He states that “ you could see the textual existence of mankind as the postmodern version of two old clichés: First of all, the Don Quichot- or

Madame Bovary Syndrome, which means that man organizes his life like a novel.63 I did not find any literal examples of this in Exit Ghost. However, from a less literate angle it is fair to say that

Lonoff has become the Lonovian hero, though not by choice. He rebels against this script, but in the end he has to go back to it. The rebellion of an old man against time could be compared to the story of Don Quichote who went to fight the windmills. However, even in New York Zuckerman still has the feeling that he has to follow a script:

I started out toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there,

where the biggest thing of all occurred; but because I‟ve withdrawn as witness and

participant both, I never made it to the subway. That would have been totally out of

character for the character I‟d become. Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in

the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan museum, wiling away the afternoon like someone

who had no catching up to do (Exit 15).

The character Zuckerman has become is interested in art, not in politics. Even in the city, he is still acting like the Lonovian type of hero.

Roth introduces another deviating example in the form of Larry Hollis. This neighbor of

Zuckerman has written out the script for his own life as a young boy, and has meticulously followed every step in his rigid plan: “Larry was two years my junior, a meticulous, finicky man

63 “Het postmoderne bestaan zou je kunnen zien als de postmoderne versie van twee oude clichés. Ten eerste het Don Quichot – of Madame Bovary Syndroom, wat erop neer komt dat de mens zijn leven inricht als een roman.” (65) Van Damme 106 who seemed to believe that life was safe only if everything in it was punctiliously planned […]”

(Exit 5) “In a boy‟s diary of “Things to do,” he laid out a future for himself that he followed to the letter for the rest of his life; from then on, everything undertaken was deliberately causal.”

(Exit 6) In this plan, Jewishness is not welcome. He changes his Jewish name Irwin Golub into

Larry Hollis, which sounds more American. Larry says to Zuckerman: “I did not want to marry a

Jewish girl. I did not want my children to be raised in the Jewish religion or have anything to do with being Jews.” He does not explain why he has made these decisions, but it seems to imply that Larry believes the life of an American to be more agreeable than the life of a Jew in

America. “He was sixty-eight years old when he died and, with the exception of the plan recorded in “Things to Do” diary to one day have a son named Larry Hollis Jr., he had, amazingly, achieved every last goal that he had imagined for himself when he was orphaned at ten” (Exit 13).

The second cliché that is discussed by Vervaeck is that of “the world as a stage, which implies that man is an actor and his world is a scenery.”64 Exit Ghost is filled with references to the world of the theater. Many of these references belong in the framework of the play

Zuckerman is writing himself. The following quote for example is part of the postscript of a scene from “HE and SHE”:

On the street, starting back on foot to the hotel, thinking of the scene just enacted – and if

he feels himself to be an actor, coming from having rehearsed a scene from an

unproduced play, it‟s because she seemed so like an actress to him, a highly intuitive,

intelligent young actress who listens carefully and concentrates on totally and responds

quietly- he is reminded of the scene in A Doll’s House […]” (Exit 145).

64 “Ten tweede het cliché van de wereld als een schouwtoneel, wat impliceert dat de mens een acteur is en zijn wereld een decor.” (65) Van Damme 107

This illustrates how intertextual references help Zuckerman to get a grasp on life, he turns to them in order to compare his own situation and make sense of what is happening. The next quote from another postscript in his play reveals how Zuckerman does not want to think about his mortality in “HE and SHE”, even though he knows it is there:

“So they never kiss and he never touches her – so what? He takes that hard? So what? His last love scene? Let it be. Never mind. Remorse must wait” (Exit 240). In his fantasy, there is no room for remorse.

Aside from references to Zuckerman‟s play, several other examples can be found that refer to the world of the theater. Zuckerman thinks that one of the advantages of moving to the

Berkshires was the fact that he no longer had to play the role that was expected of him by certain people:

I had been out of contact with a lot of things for a long time, and not just with the

resistance of vital beings but with having either to endlessly enact the role of myself or to

parry fantasies of the author extrapolated from fiction by the most naïve readers – a stale

labor from whose tedium I had also disengaged (Exit 254)

Since Zuckerman is referring to “the role of myself”, this excerpt illustrates Vervaeck‟s theory that there is no such thing as a distinction between real and false roles, nor can we speak about a real identity. In the presence of Jamie Logan, Zuckerman is no longer able to feel at home in his role of the world-wise author: “And we were alone, and so, far from feeling like some personage able to inspire awe, I felt myself stripped of my status by her hold over me […]” (Exit 111).

There is also the reference to Kliman who is following a certain script: “The invulnerable boy who thinks he‟s a man and is seething to play a big role. Well let him play it” (Exit 48). Van Damme 108

Zuckerman recognizes this script since it is very similar to the one he used to live by in The

Ghost Writer.

Vervaeck writes about certain language games that often occur in postmodern novels. He describes a technique that is used on a regular basis :“every repetition is in fact a distortion, a forgery. This is exactly what is illustrated by the distortion of names in the postmodern novel.”65

A good example of this theory can be discovered in Exit Ghost and The Ghost Writer: Amy and

Jamie. Amy represents the past, Jamie represents the future. As young women, the both of them are attractive and somewhat mysterious, and Zuckerman has been intrigued by the both of them.

However, neither one of them is available to him. In Exit Ghost, they even seem to blend together in Zuckerman‟s mind at times. This has definitely something do to with the fact that the image of

Amy as a young girl still lingers in his mind. The following happens when Zuckerman phones

Amy: “When she answered, I addressed to her words something like those that I‟d wanted to address to Jamie Logan. “I want to come to see you. I‟d like to come to see you now”(Exit 165).

Across the boundaries of the two novels, these two characters have blended into each other.

3.3.2.2. Man as body

Exit Ghost is a perfect illustration of Vervaeck‟s theory that “the importance of corporality is striking in most postmodern novels”66,especially in the sense that the postmodern body definitely is not perfect. The novel revolves around Zuckerman‟s struggle with his deteriorating body and mind. His incontinence and impotence are humiliating and confronting.

Vervaeck claims that “the body is marked by the absence that characterizes mankind and that is

65 “Elke herhaling is in feite ook een vervorming, een vervalsing. Dat is exact wat de vervorming van namen in de postmoderne roman laat zien” (75). 66 “In de meeste postmoderne romans valt het belang van het lichamelijke onmiddellijk op.” (77) Van Damme 109 why there is often something missing”.67 In Zuckerman‟s case, what is missing is the functionality of his penis. This cynical remark of Zuckerman describe his specific problems in graphic terms: “The once rigid instrument of procreation was now like the end of a pipe you see sticking out of a field somewhere, a meaningless piece of pipe that spurts and gushes intermittently, spitting forth water to no end, until a day arrives when somebody remembers to give the valve the extra turn that shuts the damn sluice down.” (Exit 111) Consequently, sexuality and the lack of it has become an important issue in Exit Ghost. Most references to sexuality can be linked directly to Zuckerman and his imagination, which implies that he has to invent what lies no longer in his reach. However, he does not fantasize about having sex himself, his fantasies revolve around Jamie. First of all, Zuckerman writes a scene in which he is talking to Jamie about her sexual history. This is how SHE describes her first sexual experience: “He was captain of the tennis team at Tulane. I didn‟t sleep with him, but we did all the other stuff. A cold fish. I didn‟t enjoy it. Adolescent sex is awful. You don‟t understand it and mostly you‟re trying to see if you even can do it, and it‟s not enjoyable at all. Once I threw up, fortunately all over him, when he kept thrusting himself too far down my throat (Exit 208). The following excerpts are taken from a scene in which Zuckerman describes how SHE/Jamie tries to break up her sexual affair with

HE/Kliman:

HE: “I know that. Billy is the guy to marry and I‟m the guy to fuck. You tell me why all

the time. “It‟s so thick. The base is so thick. The head is so beautiful. This is just the kind

I like.” (Exit 257)

HE: I thought you were so articulate. You are when we play our games. You say all kinds

of devilish things when we play call girl and client. You make all sorts of delicious sounds

67 “Het lichaam is getekend door de afwezigheid die de mens kenmerkt en daarom ontbreekt er vaak iets aan […].” (82) Van Damme 110

when we play at Jamie being taken by force. Is this all you can say now – “Shut the fuck

up” and “stop it”? (Exit 259)

Each of these examples illustrate “the postmodern preference for the impure”.68 In essence,

Zuckerman is looking for life and love, but his search for the divine is brought back to vulgar fantasies. The frustration of not being able to perform sexually might be responsible for the vulgar nature of the words he uses and the aggressive undertone.

Vervaeck says: “You could say with a witticism that according to modernism and postmodernism as well, all is situated in the head, but in the latter case the head is much more a physical entity. Formulated more precisely: for postmodernism it is about the bodypart that metaphorically draws a bridge between then and now, inside and outside, while in modernism the head is perceived as a metonym for the mind.”69 Both the modernist and the postmodernist approach to the head can be found in Exit Ghost. The former approach is reflected in the attention that is given to Zuckerman‟s brain in connection with his wandering mind. The latter approach is personified by Amy Bellette. This is how Zuckerman describes her head as he first sees it after the brain surgery:

The side of her head facing me was shaved bald, or had been not too long ago – fuzz was

growing there – and a sinuous surgical scar cut a serpentine line across her skull, a raw,

well-defined scar that curved from behind her ear up to the edge of her brow. All her hair

of any length was on the other side of her head, graying hair knotted loosely in a braid and

along which the fingers of her right hand were absent-mindedly moving – freely playing

68 “De postmoderne voorkeur voor het onzuivere […]” (83) 69 “Met een boutade zou je kunnen zeggen dat zowel voor het modernisme als voor het postmodernisme alles in het hoofd gelegen is, maar dat het hoofd in het tweede geval een stuk lijfelijker is. Preciezer geformuleerd: voor het postmodernisme gaat het om het lichaamsdeel dat metaforisch een brug slaat tussen toen en nu, binnen en buiten, terwijl het voor het modernisme vooral gaat om het hoofd als metoniem voor de geest.” (78) Van Damme 111

with the hair as the hand of any child reading a book might do. The age? Seventy-five.

She was twenty-seven when we met in 1956” (Exit 18).

What is remarkable about this description is that the image of a young girl and an old woman seem to have melted together. Her physical appearance may be that of an old woman, but the braid and her gestures are those of a child. This childishness has already been discussed in connection with her voice, it can be linked to the Holocaust. Hence, her head functions as a link between that period of horror and the present moment. To Zuckerman, she is also a metaphor for the time when he was young. Amy brings him again in connection with his memories of Lonoff and of his younger self. The brain tumor is definitely a very physical image, but it is linked to the mind in the sense that it is destroying her patterns of thinking. Hence, both the modern and the postmodern approach to the head are reflected by her state. However, the peculiar shape of

Amy‟s head had already been cause for speculation in The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman had made the connection with the Holocaust, even though the story that he attached to it was not correct.

Amy‟s head has undergone a dramatic change now, but the memories of the Holocaust are still vividly present.

Van Damme 112

4. Conclusion

After making the comparison, it is fair to say that Nathan Zuckerman as presented in Exit

Ghost has undergone several dramatic changes since he was featured in The Ghost Writer

First, there is a remarkable difference to be noted when it comes to the issue of

Jewishness. In The Ghost Writer, this is a central issue. Zuckerman is rebelling against his Jewish background and is trying to work out for himself what it means to be a Jewish-American writer.

Since a conflict arises between him and his father over his alleged anti-Semitic story entitled

“Higher Education”, he is seeking affirmation and a new father-figure. Abravanel, a typical Jew boy according to Shostak‟s description, turns him down. Therefore, Zuckerman turns to the nice

Jewish boy Lonoff. The introduction of Anne Frank‟s diary into the novel provides a link to the

Holocaust, and Zuckerman‟s alternative version of Anne Frank‟s life will raise important questions linked to Jewishness. Exit Ghost, contrarily, is not a novel about Jewishness. It is the story of a writer who is confronted with his own mortality, and who starts to think about the way he has lived his life. Zuckerman is still trying to grasp life through Jamie and through his writing but he will not be able to hold on to it. The juxtaposition of Zuckerman and Kliman emphasizes the confrontation with the memory of his younger self: the young, healthy and virile Zuckerman who was not incontinent and could rely on his brain. Since his body and mind are rapidly deteriorating, this is no longer the case. Kliman reminds him of what he can no longer be, Jamie reminds him of what he can no longer have.

What both novels do have in common is their postmodern nature. Roth likes to play with stereotypical scripts and irony. The melting together of character is also a technique he often applies, e.g. Jamie and Amy, Zuckerman and Lonoff, etc.,… Metafictional writing characterizes each novel; profound questions about authorship and the process of writing rise to the surface.

The juxtaposition of Zuckerman and Kliman for example revolves also around two different sort Van Damme 113 of writing: cultural journalism and fiction. According to Kliman, he basically does the same as

Zuckerman: encouraging curiosity. Zuckerman does not agree. An interesting change lies in the way Zuckerman‟s opinions concerning authorship have evolved. In The Ghost Writer,

Zuckerman fitted exactly into Roth‟s description of the Jew boy, like Abravanel, but in Exit

Ghost he has taken over several characteristics of the nice Jewish man. First of all, he has started to live the secluded life of a Lonovian hero. However, his solitude is partly forced upon him by his incontinence and impotence. Zuckerman also starts to take into account people‟s feelings when it comes to writing, e.g. he does not want Kliman to publish a biography of Lonoff , as he knows that it will hurt Amy Bellette. In The Ghost Writer, he was the one resisting censorship.

As always in postmodern novels, one can discover numerous levels of meaning.

Intertextual elements, such as references to other texts, to movies, music or even politics add extra meaning. Therefore, the novels do not have a clear message and are hard to summarize.

This is what Vervaeck was talking about when he stated that the novel is not a closed entity.

Novels communicate with each other and with the world when we read them. The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost are intrinsically intertwined with each other and provoke new meanings when contrasted. Roth does not always apply the postmodern techniques in his typically playful mode.

The fact that Anne Frank‟s story cannot be erased in The Ghost Writer, sends out the message that the Holocaust cannot and must not be denied. Roth‟s talent hence lies in the way he manages to fold together layers of seriousness with a lightness and a comical touch, while also revealing the tragedy in human life. The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost are packed with different meanings which all have their value. They show the evolution of the writer Nathan Zuckerman, but there are a thousand other stories to be discovered in them as well, especially for those who want to make the effort to take a closer look. Van Damme 114

Bibliography

Primary literature

Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 30 Bedford Square, 1979

--- The Facts: A Novelists’ Autobiography. New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988

--- Exit Ghost. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007

Secondary literature

Barthes, Roland. “De dood van de Auteur”, in: Roland Barthes, Het werkelijkheidseffect, vertaling en samenstelling door Rokus Hofstede en Jürgen Pieters, Groningen : Historische uitgeverij, 2004. 113- 22

Brauner, David. Philip Roth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007

Duncan, James. “Me(trope)olis: Or Hayden White Among the Urbanists.”Re-presenting the City.

Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis. Ed. Anthony D. King. New York:

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