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NATHAN ZUCKERMAN, the UNIVERSITY of CHICAGO, and PHILIP ROTH's NEO-ARISTOTELIAN POETICS by DANIEL PAUL A

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NATHAN ZUCKERMAN, the UNIVERSITY of CHICAGO, and PHILIP ROTH's NEO-ARISTOTELIAN POETICS by DANIEL PAUL A PLATO’S COMPLAINT: NATHAN ZUCKERMAN, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, AND PHILIP ROTH’S NEO-ARISTOTELIAN POETICS by DANIEL PAUL ANDERSON Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Thesis Adviser: Dr. Judith Oster Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY January, 2008 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis of ______________________________________________________ candidate for the Master of Arts degree *. (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 1 Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………...…………………………....2 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….3 Chapter One: The Ghost Writer………………………………………………………….20 Chapter Two: Zuckerman Unbound……………………………………………………...40 Chapter Three: The Anatomy Lesson…………………………………………………….54 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….78 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...89 2 Plato’s Complaint: Nathan Zuckerman, the University of Chicago, and Philip Roth’s Neo-Aristotelian Poetics Abstract by DANIEL PAUL ANDERSON This thesis examines how Philip Roth’s education at the University of Chicago shaped the Zuckerman Bound books. By investigating the influence that the Chicago “Neo- Aristotelians” had on Roth’s graduate work, I show how Aristotle and Plato organize the tension between Zuckerman’s career as a novelist and his heritage as a Jew. The thesis examines how the Chicago emphasis on the critical powers of Pluralism was derived from Aristotle’s Poetics and how that literary practice influenced Roth. The Chicago emphasis on Pluralism emerged from a disagreement between Plato and Aristotle over the nature of art, specifically, whether a work of art exists in and of itself, or if it’s simply part of a single organizing system. Like his Chicago mentors, Roth models the tension between Zuckerman’s heritage and art after the philosophical disagreement between Plato and Aristotle. A close reading of the Zuckerman Bound books reveals that Chicago criticism is alive and well in literature. 3 Introduction In a 1981 interview with Alan Finkielkraut, Philip Roth pronounces his disdain for the terms “structure,” “form,” and “symbols” by claiming that “they are usually the stock-in-trade of the most naïve high school literature teachers. When I teach . I forbid my students to use those words, on pain of expulsion” (Conversations 124). While Roth’s point is well-taken, this study will nonetheless look at a very particular structure, or more correctly, a framework that is inherent in many of Roth’s novels, classical philosophy; specifically, I explore how the University of Chicago and its English department’s emphasis on Aristotelian poetics helped shape the narrative arc of the Nathan Zuckerman novels. In Raphael’s famous painting, The School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle are prominently depicted in the center of a great room that is filled with other philosophers and their pupils. Plato is shown gesturing to the sky as Aristotle points to the ground. These actions effectively demonstrate the philosophical distance between the two greatest philosophers of the ancient world; Plato is concerned with the metaphysical while Aristotle’s interests are in the material world. Plato’s metaphysics dictate that truth lies in the ideal world of the forms and that the material world is made of copies of those ideals. In one of Plato’s greatest works, The Republic, this privileging of the ideal over the physical means that no aspect of life, particularly art and poetry, can be viewed independent of its effect on Plato’s ideal state. Conversely, Aristotle, in his Poetics, addresses poetry and art as material artifacts which are to be studied on their own terms, 4 without regard to their effect on the state. This dichotomy, beautifully depicted by Raphael’s painting, is what drives Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman books. Zuckerman, like Aristotle, believes in the particularity of art. This belief leads him to write fiction which conflicts with the values of his Jewish family and community, who, like Plato, cannot divorce literature from its effect on society. Roth’s autobiography, The Facts, concludes with the fictional Zuckerman responding to Roth’s life story and reducing the essential conflict of Roth’s own life to: “You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe’s stereotype of itself” (172). This effectively explicates the tension which Roth has attached to classical philosophy. Despite the frequency with which they appear, classical aesthetics aren’t typically seen as primary in Roth’s work. Instead, most critics focus on Roth’s satire and, to an even greater extent, his concern with Jewish-American identity struggles. His novels and short stories are filled with characters making attempts (frequently by way of sexual rebellion) at breaking free from the constraints of their Jewish heritage. In Portnoy’s Complaint, for example, Alexander Portnoy spends most of his life trying to separate himself from his cultural heritage, and the perceived shackles it places upon him. At one point, he reflects upon the Jewish kosher traditions that he finds hollow and ignorant. When he links the blood of his mother’s menstrual cycle with the bleeding process of making meat kosher, the exasperated Portnoy says, “I sound like a son of the House of Atreus with all this talk of blood” (46). Not only does this episode address Alex’s issues with his cultural heritage, it is also indicative of Roth’s tendency to arrange portions of his work in a context of classical form and philosophy; in this case, his character’s 5 obsession with Jewishness is framed in a classical metaphor which conjures up Agamemnon, the Trojan War, and The Iliad, suggesting that Portnoy’s struggle is, at least in his mind, of epic proportion. This epic ambition, however, is not without irony; Portnoy’s Complaint can hardly be seen as an epic or a tragedy. Instead, Roth, by way of classical references like this, places his narrative in what Roger B. Salomon refers to as the “mock-heroic” tradition, which is consistent with Roth’s famous satire. Salomon, in his book Desperate Storytelling, writes that the mock-heroic tradition dates back to Cervantes’ Don Quixote and includes writers “who felt themselves to be living beyond or “post” any cultural period in which conventional heroic narrative could still be credibly written and yet who still remained committed in some fashion to the values generated by such narrative” (3). This is certainly true of Roth, who does not even have the benefit of writing in high-Modernism, when classical forms were the rage. Modernist writers such as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot often relied on the classics to structure their work, and in their cases the classical structure was obvious; Ulysses, for example, is explicitly organized around Homer’s The Odyssey. Roth, on the other hand, is a satirist, describing his own unique experience. Salomon continues, “. these writers of mock-heroic narrative on the Cervantine model have been directly and explicitly concerned with the full and complex relation of heroic experience to their own immediate environment” (4). Roth’s invocation of classical imagery to describe the comic nightmares of growing up Jewish in 1940’s Newark, New Jersey clearly falls under Salomon’s definition and it also points to Roth’s and Zuckerman’s process of literary creation, which entails taking his real-life experiences and fictionalizing them. That Roth, like Zuckerman, attaches his fictionalized experience to classical forms only reinforces the mock-heroic quality of his 6 fiction and it makes his use of classicism even more important to the understanding of his work. The use of classical references is not unique in modern literature; however, reference is not always structure; simply invoking the name of Agamemnon does not necessarily indicate an attempt at classical structure. Roth’s classical aesthetics are instead manifest in the philosophical tension that is explored in the eight Nathan Zuckerman novels (a ninth is forthcoming this fall). Alan Cooper effectively demonstrates the unity of The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy, in his monograph, Philip Roth and the Jews. Exploring the common themes in these books, Cooper perceives that “What keeps all the Zuckerman books bound, with their different obsessions with fathers, is the tug of Jewish origins, the father principle in its larger sense, and Jewish authenticity as measured by the bond to fathers” (Cooper 182). Cooper is writing about fathers in the physical and intellectual senses, but Roth’s use of classical aesthetics also points to ideological fathers. Thomas Pughe, in his book, Comic Sense, explores the ramifications of Roth’s intertextual references. He writes: In the discursive world of the Zuckerman novels, references to the names and works of Mann, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy and James function as a kind of intertextual shorthand: they point to a certain style or mode – psychological realism – and (more importantly,
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