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)

______

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(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

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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, perhaps) to an aesthetic ideology that stresses the autonomy of the work of art and the quasi-sacral status of the artistic calling” (Pughe 97-8).

The autonomy, or in terms of this study, the particularity, of art is what is important here.

In the preface to his excellent monograph, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, Ross Posnock refers to Roth’s literary process as a “republic of culture,” which is 7

found on no map save the one drawn by literature. . . . I attend especially to his practice of appropriation – by which he claims his literary forebears wherever he finds them – as one mode of transport to this kingdom of world culture. Like the rude play of immaturity, appropriation insists on democratic access and resists preordained authority (including the authority of historical context). This skepticism encourages the letting go of culturally enforced restraint and the experience of aesthetic bliss . . .” (Posnock xiii).

Posnock’s use of the term “republic of culture,” as it is applied to Roth, becomes ironic in this study in that I maintain that the model for Roth’s representation of Zuckerman’s

Jewish culture is Plato’s Republic, but the rest of Posnock’s analysis is important to note.

Posnock, like Pughe, juxtaposes Roth’s worldview, which privileges art over cultural restraint, with a world view that sees art as having an organizing role in society. Posnock perceptively notes that Roth’s “appropriations” locate his fiction as standing opposed to the power of cultural restraint and promoting the position that art should be appreciated for its own sake. According to Posnock and Pughe, that Roth contextually locates the ideological forces behind his fiction by referencing his literary forbears is important in understanding how Roth, both directly and indirectly, “appropriates” the philosophies of

Plato and Aristotle. This study, in part, seeks to illuminate Roth’s interactions with classical philosophy, or as Posnock defines the main effort of his book; “to construct these overlapping frames of reference, using them as a resource for literary criticism of the fiction, and making vivid Roth’s creative engagement with a rich lineage of intellectual history” (Posnock 3). A close reading of the Zuckerman books reveals that

Roth has placed the prevalent theme of his work, his protagonists’ struggles with their

Jewish identity, in the frame of the philosophical differences between Plato and Aristotle.

Roth’s use of Plato and Aristotle is a very specific one, however, and in order to properly 8 understand the context in which Roth is using classical philosophy, it is important to understand the educational environment from which Roth emerged.

Pughe defines the ideology that arises out of Roth’s aesthetic choices in the following way: “This ideology – he likes to call it ‘seriousness’ – Roth strongly associates with the values taught in a liberal arts education in America in the ‘50s”

(Pughe 98). This ideology is therefore deeply connected to Roth’s own educational experience, which is bestowed, in some ways, upon Zuckerman in the Zuckerman Bound novels. Nathan Zuckerman’s education is a subject that is repeatedly brought into the narrative of his saga. Zuckerman’s undergraduate education was at the University of

Chicago, where Roth did his graduate work. In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman presents

Chicago as the first place that he felt liberation from the constraints of his culture. In

Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman recalls specific lessons learned at Chicago, specifically those lessons which taught him about Aristotle. In the Anatomy Lesson, an older

Zuckerman attempts to return to the University in an attempt to recapture a happier, more hopeful time. Roth seems to be making an overt effort to highlight this very real

University as formative in Zuckerman’s life as an artist. Conversely, it is worth noting that the other educational institution of importance in the Zuckerman narrative is a fictional location called Athene College. The implications of this invocation of Athens will be explored in Chapter One of this study, but the fact that Roth creates one fictional institution (out of an overtly classical reference) to go along with an actual one, highlights the significance of the University of Chicago to Roth’s classical aesthetics, and, when looked at in tandem, these two educational institutions are important clues to 9 the form of classicism that Roth uses to create Zuckerman’s narrative; namely the poetic philosophy of Aristotle.

In order to understand the classical influence that Chicago had on Roth, it is important to understand the English department in which Roth studied in the 1950’s. The

University of Chicago was, of course, the home of the “Chicago School” of criticism, whose members (who included, among others, R.S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Elder

Olson) were also known as “Neo-Aristotelians.” Roth’s former roommate, William I.

Elliott, recalls that the “influence of Ronald S. Crane on that department was still much in evidence . . . Crane and such disciples as Elder Olsen and Norman Maclean were still around” (Elliott 137). Roth himself recalls his academic training with members of the

Chicago School in a 1991 interview with Molly McQuade; “…I took the standard master’s degree program in literature. Good courses with Elder Olson . . .”

(Conversations 281). The influence of those “good courses” in that department can be seen clearly in Roth’s work, not only in the frequent references in his fiction, but also in the form and aesthetics of the narrative of that fiction. Because of this, I will explore the environment in which Aristotle was filtered down to Roth, and that process took place through a “Neo-Aristotelian” filter.

The influence of Aristotle on the Chicagoans was, in a way, codified by R.S.

Crane (effectively, the group’s spokesperson) in the 1952 book, Critics and Criticism:

Ancient and Modern, which he edited. A manifesto of sorts for the school, it contains essays by Crane, W.R. Keast, Richard McKeon, Norman Maclean, Bernard Weinberg, and the aforementioned Olson. In the preface to the abridged version, Crane makes no effort to deny the influence of Aristotle on the group’s work, noting that the term “Neo- 10

Aristotelian” was bestowed upon them by Kenneth Burke, “who was aware of their active study at that time of the Poetics and other treatises of Aristotle” (iii), and that “Aristotle is thus conspicuously behind what they have sought to do in many of their essays in poetic theory and practical criticism” (iv). This conspicuous presence manifests itself, according to Crane, in the group’s “pluralism” (iv). Crane and his disciples began forming their opinions about criticism in the mid-1930’s when the New Criticism was revolutionizing the discipline of English studies. The Chicago School came to mistrust the narrow form of criticism that was being institutionalized by the New Critics and sought a diversity of critical approaches. In the unabridged version of Critics and

Criticism, Crane includes an essay of his own entitled “The Critical Monism of Cleanth

Brooks.” When analyzing Brooks’ emphasis on “irony” and “paradox,” he writes, “what troubles me is that, for Brooks, there are no other points. Irony, or paradox, is poetry, tout simplement, its form no less than its matter” (84). (It is worth pointing out that, despite the complaints of Crane et al, the New Critics did a valuable service to the discipline of English by re-focusing the discussion of literature back to the texts, making, in many respects, the work of the Chicago School possible). Monism, the belief in a single correct way to “do” criticism, became, to the Chicagoans, the enemy of their profession. In his book, The Languages of Criticism and the Structures of Poetry, Crane proposes that

literary criticism is not, and never has been a single discipline . . . but rather a collection of distinct and more or less incommensurable ‘frameworks’ or ‘languages,’ within any one of which a question like that of poetic structure necessarily takes on a different meaning. . . (13).

11

What Crane and his associates were arguing for was a versatile criticism which allowed for the individual critic to treat each subject of criticism as a particular and not as part of one uncompromising, narrowly-defined whole; the group found the philosophical model which would allow them to do this in Aristotle.

Crane calls Aristotle “the great multilingual philosopher” (Languages 40). B y this he means that Aristotle saw the world in particulars not as part of a single system.

Any particular act of criticism, to Crane and the Chicago School, exists in its own context and is, therefore, not subject to one overarching set of critical practices. Aristotle opens the door to this line of reasoning with the opening words of the Poetics, where he writes

“I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each. . .” (Poetics I). This type of reasoning is significant to the Chicago School because it distinguishes between forms of poetry, thus setting the stage for diverse approaches to criticism. If each of the “various species” of poetry has an essential quality, then Aristotle is implicitly claiming that those qualities are distinct, making various kinds and aspects of poems individual and not part of a single category; therefore, there must be multiple modes of criticism with which to analyze them.

Within this intellectual framework, the New Critics, with their supposedly reductionist methods of criticism, were the natural philosophical enemies of the Chicago

School. Critics and Criticism contains an essay by Elder Olson titled, “William Empson,

Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction.” Olson interprets Empson’s poetic theory of ambiguity as one which claims that “poetry is simply an aspect or condition of language; it is therefore definable in terms of its medium; it is language differentiated from other language by a certain attribute” (46). To Olson and his colleagues, this is the 12 common error of the “New Critics” (a term which the Chicago Critics nearly always put in quotation marks, as if to undermine the authority of the phrase) and Olson’s complaint is that Empson’s theory “deals only with a single part of poetry, and that part the least important one poetically . . . for ambiguity is neither peculiar to poetry nor universal to all, or to the best, poetry” (56). Though, to a modern reader, language is one part of a poem which, in the best poetry, works with the other parts, the debate over the importance of language in poetry was one of the major points of difference between the

New and the Chicago Critics. In defending the New Critics, René Wellek points out the hypocrisy of the Chicago position, writing:

Plot, character, genre are the central concepts, while language is relegated to the lowly position of a mere material cause or occasion of poetry. The Chicago Critics often embrace concepts common in Renaissance Aristotelianism. Language is to them inert matter like stone for the sculptor, and genre becomes a rigid scheme of definitions and exclusions (Wellek 321).

Nevertheless, despite the inherent contradictions between the Chicagoans’ professed advocacy of pluralism and their possibly dogmatic critical practices, using Aristotle’s standard of particularity, Olson is arguing that one cannot reduce all poetry to one type of interpretation. This undermining of totalizing critical systems is the key feature of the

Chicagoan reading of Aristotle, and perhaps Plato represents the most totalizing form of world-views. His Republic reduces everything, every person, and every act, including the creation of poetry, to the service of the perpetuation of his ideal state. Thus, for the purposes of this particular study, it is important to point out how the Chicago School

Critics addressed the philosophical challenge of Plato, as the Platonic/Aristotelian tension is important as an organizing principle of the Zuckerman narrative. 13

To illustrate the critical advantage that Aristotle offers over monistic critical approaches, Crane opposes him to Plato, in whose criticism “the fundamental language of the discussion is always the same, and it is the same, also, as the language in which Plato discusses all other questions” (Languages 39-40). Plato, according to Crane, can only take what is on his critical plate and reconcile it with the one system of criticism that is available to him, his totalizing philosophy of the world. Art cannot be considered as an entity which is independent of the larger society. Everything, including art and poetry, is subject to the principles and laws which govern his Republic. Richard McKeon, in his essay “The Concept of Imitation in Antiquity,” (also collected in Critics and Criticism) reduces the fundamental difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s treatment of poetry to the following:

In Plato’s analysis, on the other hand, poetry cannot be considered in isolation; it is one of the numerous strands of man’s life and takes its importance and meaning from those strands; it bears analogies to all the other arts, to the phenomena of nature and the actions of the gods; distinctions in art parallel those of education, of science, of moral, social, and political life; in the dialectical examination of all these activities the same contraries are employed, the one and the many, being and becoming, the true and the false, knowledge and belief, the fair and the foul, and all of them involve imitation. Art is, therefore, never dissociated in the Platonic approach from the full context of life; and it is always subject to moral, political, educational, and scientific criticism, for there can be no other, no purely aesthetic, criticism of art (Critics 166).

This is in great contrast to the poetic philosophy of Aristotle, who sees no reason why poetry cannot be considered as a distinct and separate entity.1 Rather than defiling

1 While this is a key part of the Chicago neo-Aristotelian literary philosophy, it should also be noted that their nemeses, the New Critics, would similarly insist on the separation of art and state. 14

Plato’s “truth” by falsely imitating Ideal Forms, Aristotle asserts that artistic imitation is natural and good. In Chapter IV of the Poetics, he writes:

the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated.

This relates directly back to Nathan Zuckerman in his assertion that, according to Alan

Cooper, “Only fiction . . . has the power to convey the many-sidedness of fact” (Cooper

1). In other words, Zuckerman’s mimetic process, by not reproducing fact exactly, does in fact represent a fuller picture of life. His Aristotelian imitation presents something deeper than mere fact.

Aristotle’s separation of art from Plato’s totalizing morality is a pluralistic act.

Thus, by criticizing the way that art and poetry are inseparable from law, the natural and applied sciences, and morality in Plato’s philosophy, McKeon is effectively towing the

Chicago party-line, which states that monism limits the role that art can play in the world.

In Plato’s ideal Republic, of course, this is not a problem as all things (and people) are part of one fixed system which organizes all aspects of reality both physical and metaphysical, the world of Ideal Forms. For an author like Nathan Zuckerman, however, these restraints are a great disadvantage. When Crane describes Plato’s critical method with specificity, he maintains that, “no matter what the subject, the dialectic is invariably controlled by his central proportions of being and becoming, knowledge and opinion, and by reference of everything ultimately to the One and the Good” (Languages 40, my italics). Crane’s complaint against Plato’s monism precisely describes Nathan

Zuckerman’s antagonistic relationship with his Jewish heritage, from which Zuckerman 15 constantly tries to break free. For example, Zuckerman’s brother, Henry, accuses him of killing their father with his work. According to Henry, Nathan twisted reality and brought shame, grief, and embarrassment to the family. According to some members of the Jewish community, Nathan’s act of imitation (to borrow Plato’s language) distorted the truth and the result of this distortion led to the dissolution of the stability of the family structure, or the symbolic Republic, as Plato warns in the Republic.

Book X of the Republic is where Plato famously discusses the “quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” As Crane and McKeon have pointed out, Plato’s philosophical system does not allow for a consideration of poetry outside of his larger concern with the

Ideal Forms. In Plato’s model, only certain enlightened ones are able to see past the deceptive shadows that make up our perception of the Ideal Forms to the real truth, and according to Plato, only these “philosopher kings” are fit to educate and guide the

Republic. This is central to Plato’s expulsion of the poet from his society, for what does a poet do, if not cast shadows, which are distant from the “Platonic truth?” This distance, according to Plato, corrupts the stability of the Republic. In Book X of The Republic, he writes, “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” Zuckerman’s style and form of “imitation” (the creation of fictional, often sexually immoral narratives loosely based on real-life family stories) leads him into conflicts with his family and culture which are similar to the conflicts experienced by the poet in Plato’s Republic. He has written a controversial book, Carnovsky (a fictionalized version of Portnoy’s Complaint), which is loosely based on his own familial and cultural experiences. This imitative act results in a hostile reaction from Zuckerman’s peers, who see it (as Plato would have) as 16 destructive to Jewish culture, Zuckerman’s own “Republic.” As I will show in the first chapter, the Platonic Republic metaphor that is suggested throughout the Zuckerman

Bound books is made obvious in the trilogy’s epilogue, The Prague Orgy.

Aristotle, on the other hand, offers room for the individual to operate in circumstances that are particular and unique, which is important, not only to our understanding of the Chicago School’s reliance upon Aristotle for their critical process, but also to our understanding of how Roth uses a similar approach in his novelistic work, particularly the Nathan Zuckerman novels. Glenn Meeter, in an essay comparing Roth with Bernard Malamud (the model for E.I. Lonoff of The Ghost Writer), notes, in a section titled “Universalist and Particularist,” that

While teaching at Iowa Roth was fond of criticizing student stories in which ‘symbols’ appeared too frequently, symbols that were necessary, the writers assured him, to make the story ‘universal.’ His answer was, Why not make it particular? (Meeter 11).

For Meeter, this dichotomizes Roth as a “particularist” (a very Aristotelian notion) and

Malamud as a “universalist.” Meeter’s claim that “Roth’s own effort, it has been suggested, is not to show that all men are Jews but that all Jews are men” (9), has great ramifications for this study. If Meeter is correct, and Roth is less interested in establishing Jewishness as a center of identity than he is using Jewishness towards a specific (i.e. particular) end, there are grounds for viewing Roth’s use of Jewishness as having Aristotelian, rather than Platonic purposes.

Zuckerman, as stated above, has been “Aristotelianized” by means of his

University of Chicago education. This is apparent not only in his freedom to do the act of imitation, but by his reliance upon Aristotle to defend himself from his critics. In 17

Zuckerman Unbound, when confronted by an obsessed and mentally unbalanced fan,

Alvin Pepler, who is angry at Zuckerman for fictionalizing history, Zuckerman says, “Oh, if only Alvin had studied Aristotle with him at Chicago! If only he could understand that it is the writers who are supposed to move the readers to pity and fear, not the other way around” (378). This is a humorous manifestation of the problem that Zuckerman faces by being an Aristotelian in a Platonic culture, but it is important to remember that this tension is closely linked to the Chicago School’s insistence on pluralism over monism.

Pluralism allows Zuckerman (and Roth) to separate his art from the moral obligations of his culture. To Zuckerman, fiction is fiction; it does not have to be consistent with the morals and traditions of society.

This study is divided into three chapters which focus on the Zuckerman Bound books. It is in these narratives that Roth establishes Zuckerman’s story as a portrayal of the Plato/Aristotle tension. The issues at stake in these books are deeply rooted in the influence that Aristotle had on Zuckerman as a student in Chicago; poetic imitation, monistic vs. pluralistic world views, and the treatment of history are of primary importance. In The Ghost Writer, the young Nathan Zuckerman demonstrates his mimetic technique for us, creating a narrative which both borrows from and distorts historical fact. This directly addresses Aristotle’s assertion that poetry is a higher thing than history, and it is the first instance of Zuckerman’s Platonic trouble with his family and the Jewish community at large. Zuckerman Unbound focuses more on those troubles with his community and also makes the references to Plato and Aristotle more overt as we are introduced to Alvin Pepler, who acts as a kind of stand-in for Plato opposite

Zuckerman’s Aristotle. In The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman’s troubles with his 18

“Republic” begin to wear him down physically and he attempts to reconcile himself and his art with Plato’s ideal community, only to be thwarted by his Aristotelian profession; in essence, Zuckerman’s inexplicable pain is, by default blamed on his Aristotelian break from his culture. The Prague Orgy is a short epilogue which solidifies the Platonic metaphor that runs through the trilogy by sending Zuckerman into an actual version of

Plato’s Republic in order to rescue a piece of literature.

The Zuckerman Bound novels establish the literary parameters of the more recent

Zuckerman books, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, where we find a much older, impotent Zuckerman who is no longer the protagonist of the narratives, but rather the narrator. This shift in roles points to a significant change in the subject matter of the books. Still present are characters trying to free themselves from cultural restraints, but now that familiar narrative is in aid of a larger thematic purpose: the telling of a certain kind of American national narrative. Zuckerman is still creating stories out of historical events as he was doing in his first book, but that process is no longer highlighted by the narrative. Now Zuckerman is interested in the tragedy of the stories he’s telling. In some sense, it seems that Zuckerman is exploring how to deal with the loss of the very monistic worldview he tried so desperately to replace with his

Chicago pluralism in the first series of books.

The new trilogy culminates in The Human Stain, which is the most overtly classical of all the Zuckerman books. Returning the location of the action to the setting of The Ghost Writer (now spelled Athena College), Roth is quite purposeful in tying the entire Zuckerman narrative together. This culminating book, as made clear by Geoffrey

Bakewell in his essay “Philip Roth’s Oedipal Stain,” also is interestingly modeled quite 19 overtly after Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, which, fittingly, was considered by Aristotle to be the premier example of tragedy. Bakewell, as we will see later, finds many parallels between Coleman Silk, the protagonist of The Human Stain, and Oedipus, particularly in the way that questions about the identities of the characters ultimately lead to their downfalls. This Oedipal allusion, I argue, is an appropriate move by Roth in the grand scheme of the Zuckerman books. It brings the Zuckerman narrative, in a sense, full circle, ending in the locality at which it began. Given the circular narrative movement of the books, along with the thematic and narrative devices that Roth employs, the

Zuckerman novels can be looked at as two movements of a grand narrative. The first series of books is about Nathan Zuckerman’s attempts to break free from the constraints of “Plato’s Republic,” and the later books deal with the consequences of that break in the context of a real Republic, America; in some sense it seems that the later books are

Roth’s attempt to portray “Aristotle’s Republic,” which is a Republic without the firm ideals of truth that Plato mandated. Aristotle’s willingness to allow imitation and adaptation lead to slipperiness of truth, which is apparent in the narratives that

Zuckerman must create since the truth is unknowable. Despite Roth’s threat to expel his students from the “Republic” of his classroom, one cannot ignore the intricate design of the Nathan Zuckerman books. When looked at individually and in total, there is a clear organization, if not structure, that is both apparent and worth exploring. 20

Chapter One: The Ghost Writer

In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman frequently describes the tranquilizing effect of the snow that surrounds and covers the secluded farmhouse of E.I. Lonoff, his literary father. Lonoff lives an isolated life in the Berkshires and Nathan, upon arriving for a visit, almost immediately describes the scene outside Lonoff’s refuge: “Beyond the cushioned windowseats and the colorless cotton curtains tied primly back I could see the bare limbs of big dark maple trees and fields of driven snow.” The snow-capped scene is described by Zuckerman as “Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion.” The peacefulness that these terms imply and elicit cause Zuckerman to immediately proclaim,“This is how

I will live” (5).

There is, however, a tension implicit in Zuckerman’s description; the serenity that is so attractive to the fledgling writer is something that is forced on an otherwise natural scene. The snow has not simply fallen, it is “driven,” leaving the living things in this picture, the maple trees, “dark” with “bare limbs.” Even Lonoff’s curtains are rendered

“colorless.” The particulars of the landscape are either dead or covered by the snowfall; the snow which provides the simplicity and the serenity of Lonoff’s home has also obliterated living, wild things with a white, unifying veneer. The reader is immediately reminded of the conclusion of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” in which the snow famously covers the living and the dead, thus unifying the lives of the living with the lives of those who preceded them in the world. Despite the contrast between the gentle snowfall that

Joyce describes with the driving, almost violent imagery which Roth uses, a similar purpose is fulfilled in The Ghost Writer. The snow in the Berkshires, as in Ireland, has a 21 unifying purpose; in Roth’s case, however, it represents a purity which is forced upon the inhabitants of the landscape. “Purity,” a term which Zuckerman himself uses to describe the effect of the snow, proves to be one of the novel’s major concerns, and I contend that this concern has its roots in a rebellion against a Platonic conception of oneness which does not distinguish the individual from the State, and, in fact, privileges the requirements of the State over the desires and uniqueness of the Individual.

As the novel progresses, Lonoff’s serene refuge reveals itself to be something more like a prison. He is committed to maintaining the predictability and stability of the life he lives, resisting every urge to live selfishly. (The fact that his profession as a novelist, which Plato would abhor, is the reason for his isolation will be addressed later in this chapter). This ethic, which is in harmony with Plato’s demands of his populus, is described by Lonoff’s wife, Hope, when she finally attempts to leave him at the end of the novel, unable to continue his life of sacrifice; “Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet . . .” (174). The metaphor of a lifestyle acting as a restraint on individual desires and ambitions is a logical place to begin when reading

Roth’s narrative as a comment upon Plato’s totalizing philosophy. Plato, in his Republic, diminishes the individuality of his ideal state’s citizens, or as Hope Lonoff puts it

“everybody must be quiet.” The individual must know his or her place in maintaining the continuity and perpetuity of the Republic. In fact, Plato divides his populace into three classes in order to accomplish this: the “workers,” the “soldiers,” and the “guardians.”

Each class is assigned certain duties which are to be performed without neglect, and the

Guardians are the ones who guide the State. In some ways, Lonoff’s self-sacrificing existence serves to place him in the role of one of Plato’s “guardians.” His role as a 22 professor at what is fittingly called Athene College makes this view of him even more illuminating. The profession which gives him refuge from the isolation of his occupation as a writer (more on this later), teaching the young, bestows on him the responsibility of properly bringing up future generations of citizens of “the Republic.” As is the case with every other aspect of his life, he takes these duties seriously. For Lonoff, to pursue one’s own wishes would violate the delicate social contract which exists between him and society. For example, when Zuckerman expresses his doubts that he could, as Lonoff does, control himself if he were to teach “at a school with such beautiful and gifted and fetching girls,” Lonoff coldly replies, “Then you shouldn’t do it” (29). To Lonoff, acting upon one’s own desires is an act of betrayal. William Boyd, in an introductory work on the Republic, summarizes how Plato teaches that individual desires are ruinous to the stability of the State. In examining why personal property, an individual pursuit of another kind, is denied the guardians, Boyd writes, “Plato takes away from the guardians every personal possession . . . It is only in this kind of state, he thinks, that there can be recognized a unity like that of the human body, such that the pleasure or pain of one member affects all with a like feeling” (62-63). By denying himself his own desires,

Lonoff is upholding his duties as a “guardian,” and defending the unifying stability of the

“Republic,” and at the same time, defending Plato’s totalizing philosophy of life. At one point, Lonoff voices his relinquishing of personal interest himself when he argues with his wife about his lack of selfish motivation. When responding to the charge that he never accounts for his own needs, he replies “Only my ‘self,’ as you like to call it, happens not to exist in the everyday sense of the word. Consequently, you may stop lavishing praise upon it. And worrying about its ‘needs’” (41). This complete 23 relinquishing of the quest for personal gain cements Lonoff’s role as a kind of metaphorical guardian in a society which does not allow for the individual. However, despite the evidence that Lonoff seems dedicated to the unity of Plato’s Republic, the fact that he is a writer also provides Roth the means to counterpoint Plato’s synthesis of individual and Republic.

Lonoff’s temptation to break free of his restrictive way of living is represented by the character of Amy, a former student. Amy’s threat to the controlled life of consistency that Lonoff leads is symbolized by her relationship to the unifying snow on the landscape. Her visit to the Lonoff home is preceded by a snowplow clearing the way for her arrival (111). This disruption of the stability and purity which the snow provides to the landscape also applies to the thematic concerns of the novel; just as Amy’s arrival disturbs the snow covering of the landscape; it also disturbs the stability of Lonoff’s

Platonic existence. Lonoff can only exist as a writer by following a strict regimen guided by a discipline that stifles his personal life. Baumgarten and Gottfried maintain, in

Understanding Philip Roth, that Lonoff’s decision to retreat into the snow of the

Berkshires is one based on self-preservation. They write that Lonoff lives his isolated life “because he believes it is a haven from the totalitarian Nazi terror of twentieth- century history” (160). This insistence upon Lonoff’s self-defense motivation, however, ignores the fact that his life is, in fact, devoted to self-denial in defense of the stability of society. Therein lies the paradox of his existence, however; despite his efforts to maintain the purity of this Platonic society, his occupation as a novelist is also the reason he must live his life isolated from that society. In this way, though he is a writer, engaged in an occupation which Plato forbids, he is actually fulfilling Plato’s wishes, and 24 doing the work of a good guardian, by removing himself from “the Republic.” When

Hope attempts to leave at the end of the novel, she voices her wish to rejoin the larger culture by claiming that she is moving to Boston (178). Being married to an artist who has submitted to the isolation demanded by Plato, Hope Lonoff is also married to the fate of the artist in a Platonic state. Seeking to divorce herself from that cold, lonely existence, Hope wishes to leave Lonoff to his snowbound life. This is not simply an attempt to leave her husband, who will never live with other people. By stating her wish to join a large community, she is also actively rebelling against the purity of Plato’s

Republic by disobeying his mandate that the artist be kept apart from the Republic.

Zuckerman also realizes that Lonoff will never re-enter society. He sees that Lonoff’s life and his isolation are impenetrable, remarking,

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!” (27).

In Baumgarten’s and Gottfried’s seminal study, this passage is interpreted as dichotomizing Zuckerman and Lonoff. They write that “The comic intrusion of the menacing medieval Hun is ironic Zuckerman’s comment on the differences he perceives between Lonoff and himself” (161). While this is true enough (there certainly are differences between Lonoff and Zuckerman), this observation fails to take into account the significance of the Hun reference. By attaching Lonoff’s isolation to the imagery of a snowbound fortress being invaded by Huns, the destroyers of the Classical world, 25

Zuckerman emphasizes the relationship that Lonoff has with the larger, classically

Republic-like society that he, in his own way, upholds; he must remain on the outside, and to live otherwise would bring an end to the classical Republic, just as if barbarians were at the gate. As a writer, Lonoff is what he is; he cannot, or will not, give up his profession. Though this profession is offensive to the Republic, Plato makes no requirement that poets stop writing, only that they be expelled from society, which

Lonoff essentially is.

Hope realizes, or at least believes, that Lonoff desires Amy and she wishes that he would simply give up his super-human restraint and live a human life: “Let’s all have what we want, please,” she says to Lonoff (171). Hope says this in the midst of a jealous tantrum, so it is difficult to determine if she actually wants her husband to leave her for a younger woman. If, however, Lonoff were to act on his desire for Amy, Hope would be free of the artistic prison in which, by way of her marriage to an artist, she is trapped, which might offer her some consolation for losing her husband. However, with Lonoff’s acceptance of his role in the Republic, this is not an option. Zuckerman, on the other hand, full of youth and vigor, and armed with his recent education at the University of

Chicago, with its Aristotelian bent, has the option of carving out a place for the individual. Having what one wants, however impossible in the Platonic worldview, is permissible and encouraged in Nathan Zuckerman’s philosophies of life and art. To

Nathan Zuckerman, the freedom that his University of Chicago, Aristotelian education provided for his art also freed him from moral cultural constraints. By eliminating the

Platonic hold that culture has over the artist’s work, Aristotle’s materialist philosophy also effectively removed the moral obligations to society, with which Zuckerman was 26 raised. He thinks he can now have exactly what he wants. Cooper clarifies the difference between Zuckerman and Lonoff by his comparison of the fiction of Roth and Malamud.

He writes that, “To read Malamud is to give up the world and to feel better for having given it up. But Roth’s characters seldom accept their fate” (Cooper 6). Like one of

Malamud’s characters, Lonoff has given up the world, and Zuckerman, at this point, refuses to give it up.

The difference between Zuckerman and Lonoff is illuminated in an interesting way by Glenn Meeter’s 1968 study comparing Roth and Malamud. Written as part of a series entitled Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective, Meeter’s essay implicitly deals with issues of Platonic monism, which of course includes such models as the

“Christian perspective.” Just as Auerbach saw Jewish literature as part of a monotheistic social ideology2, Meeter’s essay looks at the literature of Roth and Malamud by locating their philosophical proximity to Christian ideology. Both Christianity and Judaism, as they are presented in their holy scriptures, see all material things in the context of their relationship to God, on whom the Christian (and Jewish) “Republic” is centered. Meeter labels Malamud (the model for Lonoff) a “universalist” in an effort to attach his fiction with a sense of unity with society by citing Malamud’s claim that in his fiction, “All men are Jews” (Meeter 6). In this model, individual particularism is lost to a Platonic privileging of the unified state. By attaching his literature to a cosmic ideal of

Jewishness, Malamud’s fiction becomes, in some ways, the “official” literature of the

Jews. Roth, conversely, is a “particularist” based partly on his claim in an article called

2 See “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis, p. 14, where Auerbach writes, “The claim of the Old Testament stories to represent universal history, their insistent relation – a relation constantly redefined by conflicts – to a single and hidden God, who yet shows himself and who guides universal history by promise and exaction, gives these stories an entirely different perspective from any the Homeric poems can possess.” 27

“Writing About Jews” in Commentary in 1961 that, as Meeter paraphrases, “accuses his fellow Jewish novelists of fleeing from the realities of the present into an imaginary ethnic or symbolic world – that is, of fleeing from their responsibilities as American writers” (Meeter 9). As Roth states it himself, while responding to criticism about his fiction from a certain rabbi, David Seligson, in “Writing About Jews,” “What fiction does and what the rabbi would like it to do are two entirely different things. The concerns of fiction are not those of a statistician – or of a public relations firm” (Reading 156). This viewpoint clearly illustrates Roth’s Aristotelian mettle. Aristotle not only brought literature back into the State, he also legitimized its practice by privileging it over such disciplines as History. Roth, in this statement, seems to take Aristotle’s notion of poetry’s position as a “higher thing” seriously; writers, according to Roth, have a responsibility to poetically transform reality into art. Malamud’s and Roth’s conflicting literary philosophies, as outlined by Meeter, demonstrate a similar philosophical gap between Lonoff and Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer, and this gap can be traced back to the Athens of Plato and his own Zuckerman-like apprentice, Aristotle.

It is significant that Roth locates the place where Zuckerman meets Lonoff near

Athene College. Athens is where Aristotle learned from Plato and Athene is where

Zuckerman seeks to become Lonoff’s “spiritual son” (9). Similarly, just as Aristotle found, as Boyd puts it, “Plato’s state an inferior state: its excessive unity is in his opinion its condemnation” (69), Zuckerman is unable to conform to the Platonic way of life that

Lonoff has chosen for himself. Looking again to the novel’s references to snow, we can see a major difference in the philosophies of the two writers. Whereas Lonoff is loath to 28 disturb the stillness of his snowbound life, Zuckerman recounts with relish his experience at a writer’s colony where,

Just a few evenings before, after a day-long snowstorm, I had accompanied the Colony handyman when he set out after dinner on the snowplow to clear the trails that twisted for miles through the Quahsay woods. I described for the Lonoffs my exhilaration at watching the snow crest in the headlights of the truck and then fall away into the forest; the bite of the cold and the smack of the tire chains had seemed to me all I could ever want at the end of a long day at my Olivetti (30).

Zuckerman’s exhilaration at clearing his writing landscape of the unifying snow indicates clearly that he will have no patience for Lonoff’s resignation to Platonic ideals of a holistic society. Even Lonoff sees that Nathan is a different kind of writer, claiming that

“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” (33). In other words Lonoff sees that Nathan’s fate as a writer is to try and fight against Plato’s isolation of the poets. Nathan, at least as a young writer, will live in New York City, not the Berkshires.

The significance of the writer’s early journey in Roth’s fiction is explored by

Peter Rudnytsky in his study entitled “Goodbye, Columbus: Roth’s Portrait of the

Narcissist as a Young Man.” Rudnytsky notes that at the end of “Goodbye, Columbus,”

“Neil Klugman is not yet a writer, only someone who works in a library; but ‘the broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved,’ is an emblem of Roth's oeuvre to come” (41).

Rudnytsky subsequently interprets the fact that Klugman’s books form a “broken wall” as suggestive of Roth’s fiction’s defensive and disorderly quality. I use this metaphor to infer that Roth’s (and therefore Zuckerman’s) fiction is defensive in its intended purpose 29 as a shield by which Roth defends his individual freedom from the social demands of his culture and disorderly in the way that Roth’s fiction interacts with that culture, as we will see later. In addition, the imperfect nature of that metaphoric shield allows a certain amount of infiltration. In other words, try as he might, Zuckerman is unable to escape the influence of the culture that he is using literature to defend himself from. In a similar fashion, Zuckerman’s early experience establishes the themes of his later fiction.

Zuckerman recounts his early journey toward becoming a writer, and in doing so establishes the themes that will dominate the entire narrative of the Zuckerman Bound books, as well as the later Zuckerman books: literary creation and cultural and familial alienation. This journey, of course, begins at the University of Chicago where Nathan begins to write the stories which will infuriate his family and isolate him from his culture.

Amy Hungerford summarizes Zuckerman’s choice of art over culture in the following way:

What Nathan identifies with in The Ghost Writer is not the Jewish community, his family, and the history they both hold out as the reason why he should identify with them, but with his nascent art and the individual ‘madness of art’ revered by James, Lonoff, and Nathan himself (Hungerford 139).

Just as Pughe and Posnock identify Roth’s affiliation with art as a substitute for cultural loyalty, Hungerford here notes the strong pull of Zuckerman’s art. Her focus on “the individual ‘madness of art’” recalls Aristotle’s privileging of the individual over the corporate, providing a link between Zuckerman’s Chicago-Aristotelian-liberal-arts education and his rejection of his culture which seeks to restrain the individual. While the influence of Aristotle on Zuckerman’s literary philosophy isn’t explicit in The Ghost

Writer, as it is in Zuckerman Unbound, it is still implicitly evident. It is after he has been 30 educated at Chicago (home of the neo-Aristotelians) that he is enabled to write his short stories which accomplish everything that Plato warned his listeners against while using the literary freedom offered by Aristotle’s Poetics.

As Nathan himself admits in recounting how his work alienated him from his family and culture, “Our trouble had begun when I gave my father the manuscript of a story based on an old family feud in which he had played peacemaker for nearly two years before the opponents ended up shouting in court” (79). The key phrase in this statement is “a story based on an old family feud.” To his father, Zuckerman’s exploitation of his family business was a betrayal. To Zuckerman, he was simply using raw material from real life to create fiction. This conflict mirrors that which lies between

Plato, for whom any deviation from the “truth” is heresy, and Aristotle, for whom literature is a higher thing than the mere retelling of historical fact. The fact that

Nathan’s story is entitled “Higher Education” only adds to the irony that Nathan’s own

Aristotelian, pluralist education leads to the conflict between him and his family.

Zuckerman’s father, a Platonic monist, in Chicagoan terminology, cannot separate

Zuckerman’s fiction from its relation to the actual culture, claiming that to Gentiles,

Nathan’s story will simply be seen as being about “Kikes and their love of money” (94).

The fact that Nathan leaves out positive aspects of the characters and focuses only on unflattering material is a betrayal of reality and it damages the community, or in Plato’s terminology, the “State.” This argument echoes Plato’s quarrel with the poets in Book X of Republic where he claims that the base is more dramatic than the pure and therefore poets will privilege aspects of human nature which are vile over those things which are good and thereby weaken the stability of the State. To his father, Zuckerman has done 31 just this by way of his story; not just the Zuckerman family, but the Jewish people as a whole have been weakened by Nathan’s “imitation.” This is in direct conflict with the neo-Aristotelian concept of pluralism which Roth and Zuckerman were exposed to at the

University of Chicago. To an Aristotelian, unlike a Platonist, literature is a separate thing from society; this rejection of monism allowed the Chicago School to embrace a plurality of critical methods and it allows Zuckerman to freely mine his culture and family for fiction-making material. In attempting to defend his use of certain family members in his fiction, Zuckerman claims that “the story is not about them,” to which his father replies,

“But they are part of the story. They are the whole story as far as I’m concerned” (87).

The Platonists’ inability to separate literature from the culture at large is the root of

Nathan’s conflict with them. Though Nathan never specifically says what his story is about, the fact that, to him, it is not about the innocent members of his family means that he is using “particulars” to create “universals,” as Aristotle encourages in Chapter IX of the Poetics.

The cultural hornet’s nest that Nathan stirs up exists not only within his own family, but also within the Jewish community at large. Nathan was admitted to Chicago partially upon the recommendation of a prominent judge within the Jewish community,

Leopold Wapter. In our Platonic metaphor, Wapter, as a judge who is responsible for the education of the youth of his community (he writes five college recommendations each year), acts as one of the guardians of the Republic (though the Wapters do hold great personal wealth). Wapter interviews young Nathan (99), and satisfied that Zuckerman has potential to become a community leader himself, writes him a much cherished recommendation for his college application. Important for our conceptualization of 32

Judge Wapter as a guardian of a kind of Platonic “State” is the fact that in preparation for his interview, Nathan studies “the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of

Independence, and the editorial page of the Newark Evening News” (99). The organizational natures of these items are particularly interesting; Nathan familiarizes himself with two founding documents of a very real “Republic” of which Wapter is a representative, and he studies the editorial section of his Jewish community’s local newspaper, which brings the Republican imagery to his localized community.

Higher Education has a profound influence on Nathan’s relationship with his community. His imitation of Jewish life is deemed to have negatively affected that community by way of soiling the reputation of Jews. Morriss Henry Partee writes that

“Throughout the Republic, the effect of poetry lies uppermost in Plato’s mind. He refuses to divorce poetry from the urgent needs of the state” (Partee 59). In our model, the “state,” represented by Zuckerman’s Jewish community, sees its most urgent need as its own survival. In the wake of the Holocaust, Nathan’s community has painful memories of how a negative impression of Jews affected the stability and viability of the

Jewish people. That Nathan is part of a community which views, organizes, and protects itself in a Platonic fashion becomes clearer when Wapter, a “guardian” of the metaphorical State, is called on to bring Nathan back into the fold when “Higher

Education” threatens the community. In a letter to Nathan in which Wapter acknowledges a guardian-like “interest in the development of our outstanding young people” (100), Wapter includes a list of “Ten Questions For Nathan Zuckerman” (102).

That there are also ten books in Plato’s Republic may be strictly coincidental, but the similarities in the broad concerns of the two documents are not. Just as Plato complains 33 that the poet chooses the base over the upright, Wapter asks, “What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime?” (103). Plato, as we have seen, required that private property be eliminated from the Republic as he believed individual greed would cause citizens to choose the self over the whole. Likewise, Wapter asks, “Aside form the financial gain to yourself, what benefit do you think publishing this story in a national magazine will have for (a) your family; (b) your community; (c) the Jewish religion; (d) the well-being of the

Jewish people?” (103). Clearly, Wapter believes, as Plato did, that personal greed is causing Nathan to sell out his “Republic,” but Nathan already sees himself as a man apart from the constraints that his culture tries to place on him. When Nathan’s mother asks,

“But – what about your father’s love?” he replies, “I am on my own!” (109). The freedom which Chicago bestowed on him via his own “Higher Education” in the poetic philosophy of Aristotle which allows him to envision himself as an individual and not a part of an organic whole, has led to his self-imposed isolation (philosophical isolation, not physical like Lonoff’s) and has cut him off from the encapsulating “Republic” of his cultural heritage. When Wapter asks Zuckerman, “what credentials qualify you for writing about Jewish life for national magazines?” (103), the point that he is trying to make is that Zuckerman, in his mind, has no business presenting an “imitation” of the truth of Jewish culture to the world. Boyd summarizes Plato’s argument against the authority of the poet as follows: “The mistake that men make is to take the poets seriously in the belief that poetry contains the truth about life, and is worthy to be studied in earnest; whereas, in his opinion, poetry and art never deal with anything real, but confine themselves to copying real things” (108). To Plato, only the philosopher who can 34 see “the Truth” is fit to be taken seriously and guide the citizens of the Republic; the imitators of the Truth are not.

To Zuckerman, however, imitation is desirable. Aristotle, spiritual father of

Nathan’s education, prioritizes the possible over the actual. As long as the “possible” retains an acceptable degree of verisimilitude, it need not be “actual,” or even “factual.”

In Chapter IX of the Poetics, he compares the historian who is slavishly bound to actual, historical truth, with the poet who is free to adapt historical fact for the larger purpose of relating the “universal” by way of the particular, writing, “the difference lies in the fact that the historian speaks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen. Hence poetry is a more philosophical and serious business than history.”

Roth himself echoes this assertion in Reading Myself and Others, when he writes about the importance of fiction to a mid-twentieth-century neo-Aristotelian; “I was one of those students of the fifties who came to books by way of a fairly good but rather priestly literary education, in which writing poems and novels was assumed to eclipse all else in what we called ‘moral seriousness’” (Reading 215). This claim, of course, directly contradicts Plato’s (and Zuckerman’s Jewish community’s) assertion that poetry, as a cultural artifact, cannot be taken seriously. Poetry and literature of the type which

Zuckerman produces is taken seriously only in the way that it impacts the “state,” which is why Nathan’s community is so outraged by his fiction. Zuckerman understands that this contradiction, or tension, between philosophical worldviews will mean his expulsion from the Republic, just as Plato commands, yet he pursues his craft in the Aristotelian fashion. After overhearing Amy’s failed seduction of Lonoff, and being overwhelmed by the drama of Lonoff’s “mad, heroic restraint” (121), Nathan waxes prophetic, thinking; 35

If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! But if I ever did, what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would my elders hold up against that? And if they couldn’t, if the blow to their sentiments was finally too wounding, just how well would I hold up against being hated and reviled and disowned? (121).

The question, “How would my elders hold up against that?” betrays an understanding that

Nathan’s Aristotelian philosophy, which allows art for its own sake, is a direct assault upon the Platonic Republic-like tenets of the elders of his culture. Also implied in this passage is an acknowledgement that there are real consequences for his rebellion; expulsion from the predicable comforts of the Republic. Given the stakes which are laid out in this soliloquy, this may very well be the central paragraph in the Nathan

Zuckerman saga; the philosophical tension that is the basis for the conflict of

Zuckerman’s entire drama is illustrated, as is the risk Zuckerman is taking in creating that tension. Most importantly, however, this statement directly precedes our first glimpse at the literary technique of Nathan Zuckerman.

The third chapter of The Ghost Writer entitled “Femme Fatale,” serves as an illustration of Zuckerman’s Chicago-Aristotelian philosophy of literary creation. As if to fulfill his own just-stated wish to create drama as compelling as life, Zuckerman creates a story before our very eyes. His fascination with Amy, Lonoff’s elusive former student and would-be lover, prompts him to take the facts of her life that he has access to and augment them with an invented story which replaces the unknown. The story he creates is startlingly bizarre and unexpected; Amy, as Zuckerman writes her, is Anne Frank, who 36 somehow survived the Holocaust after all3. Zuckerman’s choice of subject matter reveals a process of personalization inherent in the creation of his narrative. When Wapter was trying to talk Nathan into being a good Jewish boy again, he urged him, in his letter to go see the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank (102); therefore, this narrative creation once again exhibits Nathan’s capacity for using the Republic’s own culture against it.

Amy/Anne’s narrative also parallels Zuckerman’s own in terms of her relationship with her father, who is also still alive. Just as Zuckerman is becoming estranged from his father by his refusal to rejoin the mainstream equilibrium of the Jewish community,

Amy/Anne refuses to reveal her existence and thereby reunite with her aging father (133).

Like Zuckerman, whose alienation from his own father is a matter of literary principle

(he is aligning himself with the “serious” role that fiction plays in society), Anne, in

Zuckerman’s narrative, is also alienating herself in service of a fiction. She knows that her story is more powerful, and therefore important, if Anne Frank is dead, even if this is not true.

This imitation of painful, personal events in his created stories reveals a

Zuckerman who seems to be attempting to put into practice Aristotle’s idea of catharsis from Chapter VI of Poetics. Through his own “pity and fear” he is trying to purify himself through his fiction. Gerald Else, in an introduction to the Poetics, writes of obscurity of the term “catharsis” in the Poetics. Amid the confusion surrounding the

3 I agree with the assertion that Zuckerman’s Anne Frank story is a created fiction, though there is some ambiguity surrounding the issue. The “Femme Fatale” chapter begins with Zuckerman claiming, “It was only a year earlier that Amy had told Lonoff her whole story” (Zuckerman Bound 122). Technically, the subsequent story could have been relayed to Nathan by Lonoff, thus making the narrative of “Femme Fatale” Amy’s and not Nathan’s. I however argue that Nathan’s wish in the paragraph that precedes “Femme Fatale;” “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” (121), establishes that the subsequent narrative is a presumptuous invention. I also argue that this viewpoint is strengthened by the fact that Nathan has just been recollecting the way that Anne Frank’s story has been used as a cultural weapon against him by Judge Wapter and others. Anne Frank, being fresh in his mind, is, therefore, a natural subject from which to find fictive material. 37 term, Else writes that, “The most that can be said with confidence – and this much can be said with confidence – is that ‘catharsis’ belongs in some way to Aristotle’s defense of the emotional side of poetry against Plato” (Else 6). This validation of emotion in literature is what is important to Zuckerman’s own poetics. Aristotle wrote of arousing pity and fear in the reader, but Zuckerman’s personal relationship with literature makes catharsis a two-way street (see Zuckerman’s relationship with Alvin Pepler in Zuckerman

Unbound in the next chapter). Literature is not only a means to evoke pity and fear in others, it is also a means of working through his own emotions. This again is in direct violation of Plato’s creed, but perfectly in line with Aristotle’s. Else compares Plato’s and Aristotle’s concepts of imitation in the following way: “whereas for Plato ‘imitation’ had been a self-defeating, sterile activity, for Aristotle it is a positive and fruitful one. . .”

(6). In Chapter IX, Aristotle writes of the process of narrative creation, which Zuckerman exhibits for us: “it is evident that the poet should be a maker of his plots more than of his verses, insofar as he is a poet by virtue of his imitations and what he imitates is actions.”

Here, Aristotle explicitly states that what Zuckerman is undertaking is not simply permissible, but necessary for the poet. To simply record the strife between himself and his family and community in a straightforward, biographical way that is true to history is to stop being an artist. By infusing the “Truth” with material from his imagination,

Zuckerman is fulfilling his destiny and mission as a writer, and he has Aristotle to thank for that.

Zuckerman’s literary method not only makes use of Chicago Aristotelianism, it does so, in some ways at the expense of the New Critics, the Chicagoan nemeses who are, in Chicagoan terms of monism, partially interchangeable with Plato in the 38

Zuckerman narratives. In her book, The Holocaust of Texts, Amy Hungerford explores the notion of “personification” of texts, or the New Critical tendency to see a text as a type of living being which is as responsible to the society as any other actual being. This philosophy allowed the New Critics to examine texts as if they had no authors. In other words, the biography of the poet is irrelevant to the New Critic when examining a poem because the poem contains, in itself, all that is necessary in order to study it. Hungerford notes how Roth reverses that notion. Not only does The Ghost Writer choose art over family as Zuckerman’s object of allegiance, “it also rejects personification of texts”

(Hungerford 139). This is evident in the Anne Frank narrative that Nathan concocts.

Hungerford shows how, “Instead of turning texts into persons, Roth does the reverse, turns persons into texts” (139). In the case of Amy/Anne, Zuckerman has taken the person that is Amy and turned her into the text that is the Anne Frank of “Femme Fatale.”

This, of course, is not only true in the case of Amy/Anne Frank, but also with the stories that Zuckerman created for Higher Education, which is ultimately the cause of his conflict with his culture. Hungerford’s analysis gives us insight into how this literary philosophy is linked, at least tangentially to the Neo-Aristotelian work of the University of Chicago and their struggle against the monistic New Critics.

Though Plato’s and Aristotle’s presence is unmistakable in The Ghost Writer, they are invisible except in the light of the other Zuckerman Bound novels. However, by being aware of the implications of the fact that Nathan learned to write at an Aristotelian hotbed, we are prepared for the themes and concerns of the rest of the trilogy and epilogue. Beginning with Zuckerman Unbound, the references to the two great classical 39 philosophers become explicit as Zuckerman’s narrative shifts from exhibiting the mechanics of the philosophical tension to the consequences of that tension.

40

Chapter 2: Zuckerman Unbound

In the epigraph to Zuckerman Unbound, Roth repeats a line spoken by E.I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer: “Let Nathan see what it is to be lifted from obscurity. Let him not come hammering at our door to tell us that he wasn’t warned” (181). This quotation is a fitting introduction to the second Zuckerman book as it re-iterates the philosophical tension of The Ghost Writer, thereby linking the themes of the two narratives, while simultaneously removing Nathan from the isolation of the snowbound landscape of

Athene College and placing him in a bustling, urban, thoroughly modern environment, where for Zuckerman, obscurity is impossible. Baumgarten and Gottfried correctly point out that Zuckerman is unable to attain anonymity in “the vastness of New York City”

(Baumgarten 173), but their assertion that an anonymous life is what Zuckerman was seeking when moving to the city is, I maintain, incorrect. If it were anonymity that

Nathan wanted, then he would have followed the lead of his idol, Lonoff and lived a rural life as he did. Urbanity in fact, (as opposed to rusticity) is one of the distinguishing features of Zuckerman Unbound, and the dialectic between city and country has its roots in The Ghost Writer, when Hope Lonoff establishes the opposition between the rural and the urban by attempting to leave the isolation of Lonoff’s cottage for Boston, a major metropolis. In her wish to live the life most opposite to the one she currently leads, she chooses the City as her destination. Zuckerman, likewise, moves to a large city, New

York, and in doing so, he also denies Lonoff’s version of Platonic ethics, which acknowledge that there is a propriety in the unifying philosophy of life which requires that the artist (who is an unreliable imitator of Platonic truth) be isolated from the larger world. The frozen landscape of the Berkshires symbolizes not only the unified vision of 41 life, but also the isolation of the imitator-artist. Zuckerman Unbound, conversely, begins with Zuckerman located in that most urban of symbols, the bus, and surrounded by other people who, as Plato predicted, are in fact affected by the imitation inherent in his fiction, including two young school girls, whose mother is reading Zuckerman’s controversial book, Carnovsky. The effect that Zuckerman’s fiction has on the society around him is one of the driving tensions of the book, specifically the effect on Zuckerman’s immediate family and the character of Alvin Pepler, from Zuckerman’s hometown of Newark, New

J e r s e y .

As with Lonoff and Athens, Pepler is similarly tied to Zuckerman by place; they are both from Newark. However, whereas Athens locates the philosophical tension explored in the Zuckerman novels by paralleling Roth’s characters with Plato and

Aristotle and thus meditates on those issues in an abstract way, Newark acts as a means to actively apply the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle to the real world. With this book, Newark begins to take on the role of a kind of metaphor for a lost homeland in

Roth’s work; a lost “Republic” in the Platonic sense. This is important in reading the

Zuckerman books as a metaphor for the struggle between the Platonic and the

Aristotelian. In order to use the Aristotelian philosophy that he borrows from the

University of Chicago, Roth must construct a straw man against which to oppose that critical philosophy, just as the Chicagoans had the New Critics. The Chicago definition of the New Critics as “monists” is clearly apparent in Roth’s decision to pit Zuckerman against Platonic ideals of cultural unity; Plato, the supreme monist, and his unified and unifying Republic, act as Roth’s model for monist philosophy. Newark becomes a physical manifestation of the individual-repressing ideals of Plato’s Republic, and this is 42 due, in large part, to the conception that Zuckerman’s relationships with his Jewish culture and family are complicated by the Aristotelian/Platonic tension which is represented by Nathan’s dealings with his father and with Judge Wapter in The Ghost

Writer. The increased focus on Newark assigns a physical location, in Zuckerman’s own world, to Plato’s Republic, and it furthers the notion that the Jewish culture in which

Nathan was raised (and against which he is now rebelling) acts, in practice, as a Platonic republic, with all of its constraints on the desires and will of the individual and its resistance to change, in service of the perpetuation of the Republic.

Zuckerman is now an established (and famous, against the advice of Lonoff) writer who has used his Aristotelian freedom to adapt his struggle against cultural restraints into a best selling and controversial book, Carnovsky. The intra-cultural tension that Zuckerman experienced with his writing Higher Education, in The Ghost

Writer, neither prevented Zuckerman from writing Carnovsky nor prepared him for the consequences of imitating the reality of his family and culture for the sake of art.

The attempts of Judge Wapter and Nathan’s father to convince Nathan to not publish Higher Education (a fictional double for Goodbye, Columbus) not only fail, they actually embolden young Zuckerman to pursue his Aristotelian freedom while at the same time to flee the structure of his culture. This process is dramatized in Zuckerman’s narrative creation, which envisions Amy as Anne Frank in disguise. Anne Frank is one of the figures which Wapter invokes in order to try and convince Nathan to consider the effect his fiction might have on the Jewish community. Zuckerman is angered and insulted by Wapter’s attempt at manipulation and he uses the Judge’s own example of ideal Jewish identity, Anne Frank, to subsequently make yet another imitation, “Femme 43

Fatale.” The Anne Frank who is created by Zuckerman struggles not necessarily with

Jewish identity (she wishes to hide her Jewishness), but with the relationship between author and creation, which just happens to mirror Nathan Zuckerman’s own story.

Zuckerman’s Anne Frank has an ethical dilemma with her literary creation. She will ultimately allow the fiction of her story to overwhelm and obliterate the actual person because of the ability of that fiction to unify and strengthen the Jewish people.

Conversely, Zuckerman, while similarly ignoring the facts in order to create a good story, aligns himself not with the Jewish people, but with art for its own sake, making that his goal. This act, using the semi-sacred Anne Frank as source-material for his rebellious fiction, is an act of hostility toward his culture. By inverting his own literary experience with his culture, Nathan is making a mockery of the type of nation-building literature his culture wishes to see him publish. Just as Zuckerman used material from his experience of “real” Jewish culture in order to make an imitative form of that experience for the sake of his art, his Anne Frank story mines yet another component of collective Jewish identity for mimetic material, and in this case the imitative act was one of explicit rebellion.

Having been only the more stubbornly emboldened by the cultural resistance to

Higher Education, Zuckerman returns to mimetic form with his publication of

Carnovsky, which scandalizes his family with its graphic sexuality and its dependence on stereotypes such as the overbearing Jewish Mother-figure. The results of this act of imitation are fame, fortune, and a complete separation from his culture. One method that

Roth employs in order to communicate the scope of Zuckerman’s fame is the periodic inclusion of fan letters that Nathan receives. In some cases, these letters locate 44

Zuckerman’s reputation in the spectrum of the literary world. For example, one young woman sends Zuckerman an erotic photo of herself reading a John Updike novel, which

Zuckerman subsequently forwards to Updike along with a note asking for the same courtesy (238). The confusing of Zuckerman and Updike not only indicates the literary level that Zuckerman has reached, but the erotic nature of the photograph indicates that portions of the reading public are being titillated by Nathan’s imitative/imaginative work, fulfilling Plato’s expectations of the morally dangerous nature of art. The Platonic nature of portions of the Jewish community which similarly detest what Zuckerman is doing is also evident in some of the letters that Nathan receives. One is addressed simply to “The

Enemy of the Jews” (238). Still others take a Wapterian stance against Nathan, attacking his cultural sensitivity with opening lines such as “This letter is written in memory of those who suffered the horror of the Concentration Camps” (239). Like Plato, this segment of the Jewish community believes that Nathan’s artistic actions are damaging to their own metaphoric republic and they react accordingly. One letter that Nathan receives is particularly telling with regard to the perception that fictional art has real consequences. Nathan receives a letter from a Harry Nicholson, a retiree who has recently finished a novel “with college characters and explicit sex” (286). Nicholson claims that he decided not to try and publish the novel because “If the book turned out to be successful and the people here found out that I wrote it, we would lose our friends and would probably have to sell our home and leave” (286-7). Though it is not specified as to whether Nicholson is Jewish (based on the name “Nicholson,” probably not) , the potential consequences within his community are similar to the ones that Nathan faces, which is why Nicholson inquires as to whether Zuckerman would like to buy his 45 manuscript and put his own, or even someone else’s name on it. The consequences are taken straight from Plato, as the author of such a book would be forced by public pressure into expulsion from the community, or metaphorically, the Republic.

The final chapter of Zuckerman Unbound is entitled “Look Homeward, Angel.”

This reference to the 1929 novel by Thomas Wolfe accomplishes several things. First, it provides yet another source of thematic continuity between The Ghost Writer and

Zuckerman Unbound by reminding the reader that young Nathan Zuckerman, in his interview with Judge Wapter, named Wolfe as his favorite writer. Second, this thematic continuity again foregrounds the conflict between the will of the individual and requirements of a society as Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel, alienated him from his own community of Asheville, North Carolina in a manner similar to that which

Zuckerman experiences. Like Zuckerman, Wolfe imitated the reality of his hometown, including the fictionalization of real people, and this imitation cause a rift in his relationship with his home. In an introduction to the novel, Wolfe makes what for us in the midst of this study on the novelistic application of Aristotle should be a most familiar claim: “Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged with purpose.” This statement is analogous to Chapter IX of the Poetics, which states, “It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen, -- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.” In both instances the redactive power of literature is held in high esteem. The poet, by selectively arranging fact, is only doing his duty. B y rephrasing and invoking Aristotle’s dichotomy between poetry and history, Wolfe is establishing the narrative practice that Zuckerman takes to heart, and he suffers similar 46 consequences. Perhaps ironically, as if to fulfill Plato’s demand that the artist be expelled from the Republic, Wolfe wrote later wrote a novel called You Can’t Go Home Again.

Zuckerman, in a sense, does attempt to go home again to visit his father on his deathbed and the tragedy of Zuckerman’s self-imposed excommunication becomes evident in the process. As the family gathers around the elder Zuckerman to say their goodbyes, we are offered an image of the anti-Nathan, his younger brother Henry

Zuckerman. Henry is dutiful and as close to an ideal member of his Platonic community as one could hope to find outside the text of The Republic. Henry, like his older brother, had artistic ambitions at one time, but denied himself this dream out of a sense of duty to his father, becoming a respectable, successful dentist. Though he does tempt himself with affairs with various women, Henry cannot (until The Counterlife, where fiction and reality are nearly impossible to distinguish) leave his wife and family and responsibly returns home each time. In Nathan Zuckerman’s world, Henry is the nearest thing to an ideal member of society and this manifests itself in his appearance: “Henry was the tallest, darkest, and handsomest by far of all the Zuckerman men, a swarthy, virile, desert

Zuckerman whose genes, uniquely for their clan, seemed to have traveled straight from

Judea to New Jersey without the Diaspora detour” (368). That Henry seems to be from a pre-diaspora time in Jewish history places him ever closer to the ideal of Plato, who saw corruption in the distance from an ideal form. In this case, if there is an ideal Jewish

“Republic” it would most certainly be in Judea. The Jewish diaspora, in the Platonic sense, darkens the shadows which are reflected from the ideal, leaving the Newark

Jewish Community, though still organized as a self-perpetuating Republic, a kind of 47 imitation of the ideal. Nathan’s subsequent imitation of that community for the sake of his fiction therefore justifies Plato’s claim that art is a copy of a copy.

The act of copying, which Nathan is guilty of, dooms his relationship with his father, thus severing him from the Jewish community, placing him in a Platonic exile from the Republic. Nursing a strained relationship with his father since the publication of his fiction, first Higher Education and later Carnovsky, Nathan says goodbye to his father, dying of a massive coronary, a broken heart, if you will, by telling him about the ever-expanding universe (186). When Nathan tells his father about the “- universe expanding outward ever since, the galaxies all rushing away, out into space, from the impact of that first big bang. And it will go on like this, the universe blowing outward and outward, for fifty billion years” (367), he is acknowledging that he is aware that his fiction has distanced him from his family. This astronomical imagery is Zuckerman’s way of symbolizing and reproducing for his father, and the reader, the “shadowing” effect that began, for the Jewish Republic, with the Diaspora away from Judea. This is a startling concession to the philosophy of Plato. Zuckerman seems to be recognizing the sadness that this separation brings with it; that his own Aristotelianism has set in motion a separation which results in the loss of the clarity and stability of family and culture.

Just before his father dies, Zuckerman makes a gesture towards reconciliation by trying to reassure his father that the separation isn’t necessarily permanent. Zuckerman says that “instead of everything coming to an end, instead of all the light going out because of all the energy fizzling away, gravity will take over. The force of gravity”

(371). This gravity, Zuckerman claims, will lead to a state where “the whole thing will begin to contract, will begin to rush back toward the center.” This return to the center 48 recalls the imagery of the Prodigal Son’s return home and this is clearly Zuckerman’s intention, his way of trying to make amends with his father at the very end. That

Zuckerman is sincere in his attempt at belated reconciliation is made evident a few paragraphs later in which he makes a point to explain to the reader that he withheld from his father his own doubts about the probability of this cosmic return to one center, for reasons “having to do with the density of matter in the universe being marginally insufficient for the friendly, dependable force of gravity to take over and halt the expansion before the last of the fires went out” (372). The “density of matter” of which

Zuckerman speaks can be interpreted as “too much baggage.”

Zuckerman’s feelings that reconciliation is impossible are then verified by his father’s last word; “bastard” (373). After the fact, Nathan questions whether he mis- heard and his father’s last word was “faster,” “better,” or “batter.” Henry eventually confirms for Nathan that his father did, with his dying breath call Nathan a bastard.

Whether this was a lie told in order to hurt his rebellious older brother or the truth finally revealed is effectively irrelevant. Nathan comes to believe that he was bastardized by his father’s last words and the rest of Zuckerman’s saga follows that assumption.

When Victor Zuckerman uses his final act to attach this label to his eldest son, he is, in effect, fulfilling Plato’s wishes and symbolically expelling Nathan from the

Republic. Nathan Zuckerman now has no father and therefore no connection to the

Jewish Community in which he was raised. As a bastard, he is without familial and community ties and is, in a sense “unbound” from the narrative of his Republic, giving the book’s title an unexpected connotation. Zuckerman’s use of Aristotle’s freedom has severed him from the community. 49

Aristotle, in fact, casts an imposing shadow on Zuckerman Unbound. In this book, Zuckerman now references Aristotle explicitly in explaining his creative process, claiming that he “believed everything Aristotle taught me about literature” (275). This is not entirely a celebration of freedom, however. Zuckerman laments, “Well, Aristotle let me down. He didn’t mention anything about the theatre of the ridiculous in which I am now a leading character – because of literature” (275). His fame, derived from adapting the “particular” into the “universal” in his own Aristotelian way, has garnered him not only fortune, but also a stalker named Alvin Pepler, who, in several ways, acts as a stand- in for Plato.

Like Lonoff and his compulsive study of real historical events, Pepler, too, is linked intricately to objective, historical truth. He is a former “quiz kid,” (of the 1950’s television game show variety) who is nearly perfect in his recollection of historical events. This distinguishes him from Zuckerman, and his blatant adaptations of history, in a way that parallels the philosophical distance between Plato and Aristotle. Is it any wonder that Pepler takes such violent exception to Zuckerman’s adaptation of his history? If we view Pepler as a stand-in for Plato’s philosophy it seems to be a natural reaction against the violation of truth. Zuckerman, in fear of this passionate reaction, laments “Oh, if only Alvin had studied Aristotle with him at Chicago! If only he could understand that it is the writers who are supposed to move the readers to pity and fear, not the other way around” (378). This rather explicit opposition of Aristotle and Plato in

Roth’s text is central to the metaphor that organizes the Zuckerman Bound books.

Another Platonic parallel lies in the characters’ processes of disseminating information. Plato famously abhorred writing, and thought that verbal speech was a more 50 reliable conveyor of truth. Likewise, Pepler is in the process of attempting to tell his story by dictating what he knows into a tape recorder. This oral method of storytelling stands in stark contrast to Zuckerman’s profession as a writer and serves as yet another metaphor for the Plato/Aristotle philosophical tension. The narrative device of the oral storyteller was, in some ways, first explored in Portnoy’s Complaint, as detailed by

Steven Milowitz in Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the

American Writer. Portnoy’s narrative is in the form of a story told to his therapist, with the therapist’s response, “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” concluding the book.

Milowitz traces the dichotomy between speech and writing to Derrida’s attack on Plato’s speech-preference (Milowitz 142). Milowitz, in his monograph, seeks to establish the

Holocaust as the driving force behind all of Roth’s work and he claims that Portnoy’s opposition of speech and writing is modeled on the disagreement between Plato and

Derrida, with: “Plato’s privileging of absolute truths anticipates Hitler’s sure pronouncements, and Derrida’s slipperiness makes guilt impossible; the truth of the horror becomes deconstructed” (Milowitz 142). For the task of theorizing Roth as a

Holocaust writer, opposing Derrida’s deconstruction against Plato’s absolutism is useful.

However, in seeking to draw out Roth’s general theory of art from his the tensions in his work, Aristotle is a better figure with which to oppose Plato. Milowitz, I maintain, places too much importance on the role of the Holocaust in Roth’s work, and too little on the influence of Aristotelian theories of art. The Ghost Writer, for instance, does depend heavily upon Anne Frank, but in the service, not of developing a narrative of the

Holocaust, but of portraying Zuckerman’s fiction-making process and examining how literature functions in a type of closed society. Where Derrida’s interests are in denying 51 meaning, Roth (through Aristotle) is interested in just the opposite; Roth and his fictive agent, Zuckerman, are interested in creating meaning through art. For this reason,

Aristotle’s opposition to Plato is much more useful than Derrida’s when examining

Roth’s work.

Where Milowitz is correct is in his observation that Roth unites Plato with his ideological other (142). While that other is Aristotle and not Derrida, the sense that Roth has a foot in two theoretical worlds fires the tension of the Zuckerman novels. Unlike the case of Portnoy, where the entire text is written as if it were an oral presentation, in

Zuckerman Unbound, Roth presents us with a conflict between techniques, and this conflict mirrors the tension between Plato and Aristotle and extends into virtually every part of the text. Conflict, in fact, is how Zuckerman Unbound ends, with Nathan visiting his old home in Newark and being confronted with the drastic change the city has undergone. As if to solidify his use of Newark as a classical metaphor, Roth has Pepler make the claim that “Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome” (336). Newark, in this vision, is not simply the victim of urban blight; it represents the fall of a classical

“Republic.” Therefore, in this book, it serves as an area of philosophical contention between Pepler and Zuckerman. Pepler takes issue with, what is in his mind,

Zuckerman’s fantasy-laden portrayal of Newark. He asks, “What do you know about

Newark, Mama’s Boy?” (335). He then lays out the “real” truth of Newark for

Zuckerman; he describes a city in ruins, rotting from the inside out. This interaction is complicated when viewed in terms of the Plato/Aristotle debate. When Pepler chides

Zuckerman with, “You fuck up Newark and you steal my life—“ the order of events isn’t entirely clear. Did Zuckerman’s Aristotelian adaptation of history in some metaphoric 52 way cause the fall of Newark, in the way that Plato warned against when expelling the poet, or is his neglect of truth the “fuck up?” At any rate, Zuckerman stands outside his old apartment and is faced with Pepler’s real truth (402). He finds that his old home, the one he sarcastically depicted in Carnovsky, has become a slum with boarded-up windows, missing doors, and most appropriately “There was exposed wiring where once there had been two lamps to light your way in” (402). The missing lamps symbolize the darkness in which Zuckerman now finds himself. He is separated from his past, now living a life steeped in the isolation of modernity, and without the old light of his home to guide him. When a young black man asks him who he’s “supposed to be,” Zuckerman correctly replies “No one” (404). He confesses to himself, “You are no longer any man’s son, you are no longer some good woman’s husband, you are no longer your brother’s brother, and you don’t come from anywhere anymore, either.” Zuckerman’s proclamation that his name is “No one” recalls Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclops, where he presents himself as “Nobody” in order to deceive his captor (Odyssey Book IX).

However, where Odysseus’ adoption of the name “Nobody” facilitates his evasion from confinement and death, Zuckerman’s use of the name punctuates not a heroic escape, but rather a tragic separation from cultural and familial ties. This is the moment that Nathan

Zuckerman sees what his Aristotelian Odyssey has wrought and the loss is complete.

Unlike Odysseus’ reconciliation with Penelope, Zuckerman can never return home.

Telemachus continually sought to be reunited with his father, Odysseus, and, in the end, he was. Nathan, though his narrative ultimately finds him attempting a similar reconciliation with his father-figures (as we will see in The Anatomy Lesson), is never granted Telemachus’ reward. His bastardization at the hands of father has, indeed 53 separated Nathan from his community’s version of Plato’s Republic, and his past is now completely lost to him. Even the location of his religious training has been converted to an African Methodist Episcopal Church, leaving Zuckerman both symbolically and effectively isolated from his culture. This isolation and Nathan’s attempts to overcome it and somehow re-connect himself to his roots are the driving forces behind the third book in the Nathan Zuckerman trilogy, The Anatomy Lesson. In this book, Zuckerman interacts with Platonic monism in an entirely new way, not running from it, but chasing it down, and finding it elusive.

54

Chapter 3: The Anatomy Lesson

Michael Sprinkler, in his assessment of the historical importance of R.S. Crane and the Chicago School of Criticism, finds a peculiar inconsistency in Crane’s

Aristotelian theory. Noting that Crane placed a great deal of importance on the ability of literature to elicit emotions from the reading audience, Sprinkler insists that “Crane’s swerve from Aristotle consisted in locating catharsis, not in the functional integration of the elements of tragedy itself, but in the experience of the audience” (Sprinkler 197).

From this, Sprinkler concludes that though Crane intellectually fought against the monism of the New Critics and their assertion that literature should serve to enlighten the society for which it is written, ultimately, Crane could not ignore the ability and obligation of literature to organize a society. Sprinkler writes:

Crane's program for Chicago poetics, despite its important differences from those instances of critical monism against which Crane polemicized (e.g., Leavisite aesthetic criticism and Anglo-American New Criticism), shares with those discourses a common problematic: the status of the human subject. For Leavis and for the "Coleridgean" poetics of New Criticism, the importance of poetry to culture, and ultimately of culture as a whole to the maintenance of social stability, depended upon the power of poetry to produce or cultivate [reading] subjects. Crane's poetics, while it discriminates among a variety of disciplines and possible methods in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, conserves the foundational power of the subject for inquiry (201).

This “foundational power” of literature undermines, in some ways, the purity of Crane’s

Aristotelian poetics since it concedes that literature does indeed exist in a sphere larger than its particularized self. In other words, literature is not an entity completely divorced from society at large. This is a point of view much closer to that of E.I. Lonoff, self- exiled in the snow of the Berkshires than the young Nathan Zuckerman, plowing through 55 the snow of his writer’s colony. The older Nathan Zuckerman of The Anatomy Lesson, however, moves much closer to this literary philosophy, although when seen as a whole,

Zuckerman, even as early as The Ghost Writer, shows signs of a wish for attachment to his culture and re-connection to Jewish history. As George Searles posits, “Zuckerman’s fantasized marriage to Anne Frank reveals the intensity of his subconscious desire for family sanction” (Searles 33). The difference between the Zuckermans of The Ghost

Writer and The Anatomy Lesson is the consciousness of that desire. In the early novel, the desire for sanction is overwhelmed by Zuckerman’s desire for freedom, leaving the warm feelings for his family somewhat more buried. The Anatomy Lesson, on the other hand, depicts Zuckerman actively attempting to somehow reconcile his life spent in the arts with the social contract of a stable society.

The Anatomy Lesson finds Nathan Zuckerman suffering from pain which seems to have no source. The narrative finds him experimenting with various remedies to eliminate this pain, which culminates in his attempted return to the University of Chicago as a 40-something student in the medical school. Not only does this attempt at return effectively bring Zuckerman’s story-arc full circle, as the third book in the Zuckerman

Bound trilogy, this book also plays an important role in rounding out the struggle with classical philosophy that has been at the center of what Nathan labels his

“Bildungsroman” in The Ghost Writer (3). As in the previous Zuckerman novels, The

Anatomy Lesson relies on classical imagery to narrate this “epic” journey and, consistent with Roth’s previous explorations of what Salomon refers to the post-romantic “mock- heroic” style of storytelling, Zuckerman’s allusions to classicism are often ironic and satirical. Nonetheless, the investment in classicism in The Anatomy Lesson, as in the 56 other books of the Zuckerman saga, organizes the major themes of the novel, including the writer’s craft, familial relations, and attachment to ethnic heritage.

As part of his pain-coping regimen, Zuckerman employs a series of women to take care of his needs, both in terms of business and sexuality. One of these women,

Jenny, makes a key observation about Zuckerman’s condition. She tells Zuckerman “I’m coming down to Lemnos to watch you lick your wounds” (424). When Zuckerman is puzzled by the reference, she reminds him that Lemnos is “Where the Greeks put

Philoctetes and his foot.” This humorous reference, despite falling into the mock-epic mode, makes a most serious rhetorical point. By conjuring up the imagery of Philoctetes’ role in The Iliad, Roth uses Zuckerman’s illness to comment both upon his isolation as a writer and to link that isolation and the pain it subsequently brings to Zuckerman’s isolation from his family.

On the way to Troy and the Trojan War, the Greeks abandoned Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos where he suffered for ten years with an injury to his foot. In his 1941 essay, “Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow,” Edmund Wilson notes that the story seems odd to modern readers. He writes that “The idea of Philoctetes’ long illness and his banishment to the bleak island is dreary or distasteful to the young, who like to identify themselves with men of action . . .” (418). The fact that Philoctetes, like

Zuckerman, is removed from the action of actual historical events is significant to our understanding of Zuckerman’s isolation and it recalls Plato’s complaint about the artist and society. As we know, Plato wished that the poet be removed from the decision- making mainstream of society. Lonoff, in The Ghost Writer, embodied that ethos by purposefully removing himself from the larger events of world history and living in 57 isolation in the Berkshires. Zuckerman, on the other hand, in Zuckerman Unbound, has fought against this and moved to New York City, where he attempts to live amongst other citizens of the republic of America. Zuckerman’s unexplained pain then becomes almost a punishment for breaking the rules of Plato’s metaphysics. By attempting to live with the rest of the world, Zuckerman is like Philoctetes joining the Greeks on the way to the

Trojan War. Just as a snakebite to the foot derailed Philoctetes’ journey, Zuckerman’s chronic pain does the same for his ambition to action; both are overcome and left isolated from the events of history (though, in the end, Philoctetes does play a role in the Greek victory over Troy).

The historical event which eludes Nathan Zuckerman is not a war, but the

Watergate Hearings and the fall which occurs from this event is not that of Troy, but of

Richard Nixon. In Zuckerman’s helpless state, he can only lie on the floor and watch the

Watergate Hearings on television (416). As if the victim of a cruel Platonic joke,

Zuckerman cannot even watch the events of history with his own eyes. His pain forces him to lie on the floor (his head resting on Roget’s Thesaurus!) and watch the hearings through what he refers to as “prism glasses” (416). In reality, these spectacles are not so much prisms as reflectors which allow the bedridden wearer to view television at right angles. Just as Jenny sees Zuckerman’s dilemma as modernity’s adaptation of the story of Philoctetes, these glasses can be seen as a similar updating of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Instead of viewing the shadows of ideal forms on a cave wall, Zuckerman is viewing reflections of actuality, as represented on a television set, through his new prism glasses; both scenarios isolate the subject from actual, historical truth. This isolation from actual events is also implicit in the narrative. Zuckerman’s story is about 58

Zuckerman’s own pain, or as the novel refers to it, “the selfness of pain” (416). It is significant that Zuckerman is not writing about Nixon, or as Zuckerman calls him “the only other American he saw daily who seemed to be in as much trouble as he was” (416).

More than either of the previous books in the trilogy, The Anatomy Lesson seems to instill in the reader a sense of the inescapability of Plato’s philosophy of art’s place in society. Nathan’s mysterious pain incapacitates his former Aristotelian energies, leaving him desperate for a Prodigal Son-type return to a Platonic home, as if beckoned by Plato himself, (though, as we will see, re-admittance to the Republic is impossible for Nathan).

Zuckerman’s youthful attempt to engage with history and truth are now impossible. He wrote about actual life (his experiences with Jewish culture) with a confidence in his

Aristotelian philosophy of art in The Ghost Writer, but now, Zuckerman is unable to write about the events of reality; he is not even writing about the most important events of his time. (This aspect of Zuckerman’s career undermines the presumption by some that Zuckerman is, in fact, Roth, who did indeed write about Nixon in 1971’s Our Gang).

In fact Zuckerman is not writing at all; his physical pain prohibits him from doing so. This fact forces Zuckerman into yet another state of contrition towards Plato. In an attempt to get around his inability to physically sit at a typewriter and write, Zuckerman fruitlessly attempts to dictate his fiction to one of his assistants. This act recalls Alvin

Pepler, the Plato stand-in from Zuckerman Unbound, and his dictation of his memoirs. In

Pepler’s case, dictation of his work acted, in some ways, as a means of distancing him from the mainstream profession of the modern writer. Pepler seems a bit foolish in his attempts to speak his story and this foolishness undermines his credibility as a writer. In

Zuckerman’s case it seems as if Plato, with his distrust of the written word and his 59 privileging of the spoken, is yet again imposing himself upon Zuckerman, punishing him for the arrogance he showed in publishing Higher Education and Carnovsky, works which, for some, undermined the stability of Nathan’s Platonic culture. However, this episode also highlights yet again the incompatibility of Zuckerman with Plato’s world- view. Despite his efforts to dictate his fiction, Zuckerman “couldn’t write without seeing the writing; though he could picture what the sentences pictured, he couldn’t picture the sentences unless he saw them unfold and fasten one to the other” (417). The physicality of the acts of writing and seeing for Nathan Zuckerman is what is at work in this passage.

Zuckerman’s requirement that he be able to see words is at once a physical manifestation of his Aristotelian poetic philosophy and a signifier of his philosophical distance from

Plato. Aristotle, and the Neo-Aristotelian Chicagoans though whom he was filtered to

Roth, believed, as we have seen, in the particularity of poetry, as opposed to Plato, who could not and would not separate the artifact from its ideal referent. In the above passage, Zuckerman uses the act of writing to portray the tension between his

Aristotelianism and Plato’s metaphysical philosophy of imitation. Like Plato’s enlightened ones, Zuckerman can see the true ideal, or as he puts it “he could picture what the sentences pictured.” But without the ability to physically imitate that ideal he is helpless. In terms of Aristotelian mimesis, Zuckerman’s pain affects his concentration in such a way that he is unable to represent anything other than his debilitating suffering.

The “selfness” of his pain, as he puts it, effectively cuts off the physical world which he imitates in his fiction. With the freedom to imitate the ideal that Aristotle’s philosophy gave him taken away by his physical pain, Zuckerman is left exactly where Plato would have the poet; in a position where he is unable to imitate, thereby effectively expelled 60 from the Republic. This episode perfectly illustrates the central drama of The Anatomy

Lesson; Zuckerman, even when willing to give in to Plato’s philosophy is unable to as he is inseparable from his Aristotelianism and thus he remains punished. Like Oedipus,

Zuckerman (the mock-epic hero) is at the mercy of fate. By staining himself with

Aristotle’s Poetics, he is exiled from The Republic.

The fact that Zuckerman’s late father was a foot doctor makes the reference to

Philoctetes and his exile on Lemnos doubly poignant. Philoctetes’s injured foot was the reason for his being left behind and Zuckerman’s broken relationship with his chiropodist father creates a similar isolation. Zuckerman’s career as a novelistic imitator of reality has left him in pain which, as we have seen, has led to his isolation from the events of history. Similarly, his career, built on the reproduction of Jewish life in America as he has seen it, has also led to an emotional pain which results in his exile and isolation from his own family and culture.

When Victor Zuckerman “bastardized” Nathan with his dying words in

Zuckerman Unbound, he symbolically left Nathan as a man with no familial connections.

It is not by accident that the people who help and comfort Nathan through his time of trouble are not family members, but employees who each act as secretary, housekeeper, friend, and concubine. The roles that would have been filled by members of Nathan’s cultural community are left in the cold arrangements of the employer/employee relationship. This distancing from his cultural roots is recounted by Nathan in the chapter, appropriately entitled “Gone,” where he differentiates his father from himself in the following way: “A first-generation American father possessed by the Jewish demons, a second-generation American son possessed by their exorcism: that was his whole 61 story” (446). What is at work here is not simply youthful rebellion, but the process, accomplished through the mechanism of generational rebellion, of Plato’s account of the separation from some ideal center. Whereas the elder Zuckerman’s obsession was with the protection of the traditions which mark him and his family as Jewish, the younger is obsessed with the Aristotelian freedom to individualize himself by removing those aspects of tradition which inhibit his freewill.

The inescapable tragedy of the dichotomy between Zuckerman and his elders is that despite the older generation’s pretense of holding on to tradition, they too are part of a gradual removal from an ideal, Jewish center. The fact that the elder generation with which Nathan comes into contact and conflict largely idealizes Newark as a Jewish homeland is important in understanding that the cultural separation which Nathan experiences is only part of a process which is and has been ongoing. As we have seen,

Victor Zuckerman is described as being obsessed with Jewish demons. Implicit in the use of inflammatory words such as “demons” is an understanding that there is a conflict at work which predates the establishment of Newark as a type of Zion. In Zuckerman

Unbound, when Henry Zuckerman is described as looking as if he were directly from

Judea without the dilution of the Jewish Diaspora, Nathan hints that the Jewish ideal from which he is separated is not simply the culture of Newark Jews which he antagonizes with his novelistic imitations, but something even more remote and unattainable; the first and ultimate Jewish “Republic.”

Ranen Omer-Sherman, in his book, Diaspora & Zionism in Jewish American

Literature, looks closely at the Jewish Diaspora as it is represented in Roth’s fiction.

Omer-Sherman claims that “The truth is that Roth backs off from ever defining 62

‘Jewishness.’ In spite of the fact that an exhaustive list of Jews can be catalogued in his novels and that the Jewish milieu, from the Holocaust to Israel, is woven into the fabric, there is a way in which his narratives undercut or negate all the forms of Jewish identity that appear in his work” (207). This is apparent in the struggle, undertaken by

Zuckerman’s elders, to establish a Jewish essentialism in old Newark. With the destruction of Newark’s Jewish identity, Jewishness is subsequently dispersed into

America-at-large. As Omer-Sherman writes, Roth “has always questioned the viability of a tangible Jewish self in the American milieu” (192). Nathan focuses this doubt on his elders’ belief that their Newark is a new, lost Zion.

The focus of Nathan’s Jewish elders on Newark as a location of ideal Jewishness is hinted at in episodes like the funeral of Nathan’s mother, in Florida, where many elderly Jewish characters are sketched by Nathan. One character, named Maltz informs

Nathan that he regrets ever having left New Jersey for Florida. He states his intention to leave as soon as his lease expires, “Then I go home. I have fourteen grandchildren in north Jersey. Sombody’ll take me in” (463). This myopic view of New Jersey as “home” indicates a removal of Jewish identity from Israel to an American homeland.4 This removal is earlier on the timeline of the corruption, in the Platonic sense, of an ideal

Jewishness than Nathan’s removal of himself from the culture which, in some ways, has already become distant from a centered Jewishness. The fact that Maltz has an established extended family in New Jersey indicates an enclave of a Jewish culture and community, but perhaps not the Jewish culture and community in the Platonic, ideal sense. Nathan’s Aristotelian particularism seems to give him some insight into the

4 As I write of the Platonic nature of ancient Israel, it is important to note that Israel pre-dated Plato himself by centuries. 63 hypocrisy of the complaint levied against him by way of the American, and specifically

New Jersey Jewish community which he has insulted with the imitation in his fiction, but even he, in The Anatomy Lesson, begins to mourn the loss of Jewish Newark, complaining that “What he’d made his fiction from was gone – his birthplace the burnt- out landscape of a racial war and the people who’d been giants to him dead” (445). What

Zuckerman is able to realize, however, is that Jewish identity does not rest in the memory of historical Newark, but in a more metaphysical space. Zuckerman, remarks that “The great Jewish struggle was with the Arab states; here it was over, the Jersey side of the

Hudson, his West Bank, occupied now by an alien tribe” (445). This statement hints at

Zuckerman’s realization that what the Judge Wapters of his community see as a Jewish ideal that Nathan is undermining by his imitations is simply a particular and individual expression of Jewishness. Just as Aristotle defied Plato by allowing for poetry to be seen as a distinguishable artifact separate from Plato’s metaphysical whole, the American

Jewish community (in Zuckerman’s experience, centered on Newark) is not part of one singular ideal, but an individualized and localized experience. In geopolitical terms,

Jewishness is contained in Israel and its ongoing conflict with its nation-state neighbors.

When Zuckerman reproduces that conflict and applies it to Newark by using terms like

“alien tribe” and “his West Bank,” he is highlighting the fact that Newark’s version of these global Jewish conflicts is particular to it and its unique place in the history of

American racial tensions. Jewish Newark is not Jewish in the Platonic sense, just as

Zuckerman is not. Both are individualized artifacts which have complicated relationships with metaphysical Jewishness. Platonic Jewishness, if it ever existed in the material world, would resemble something like King David’s Israel, devoted to and guided by the 64 one true God. The multiplicity of the Diaspora Jews makes a Platonic Jewishness something lost to history.5 This multiplicity is not just an artifact of modernity; it is also consistent with, and reminiscent of the pluralist literary philosophy of the Chicago neo-

Aristotelians. This line of Aristotelian reasoning, which complicates the quest to be a part of a Platonic, idealized republic, as we will see, serves to help deny Zuckerman in his quest to rejoin with his familial and community roots.

The inability of the Newark Jews to provide Nathan with a center to which he can return is exemplified by Zuckerman’s experience with Dr. Charles Kotler, an octogenarian former resident of Newark, and self-proclaimed “dolorologist” (524).

Kotler, as a devoted former resident of Newark, attempts to ease Nathan’s physical pain by offering him a therapeutic pillow on which to rest his head. Just as Zuckerman’s mysterious pain is symbolic of his separation from his culture, however, Kotler’s proposed remedy is symbolic of his attempt to affect reconciliation between Zuckerman and his culture. Kotler, upon recognizing Nathan, proceeds to shower him with praise for his fiction, referring to him as “our writer” (520). This of course is the opposite reaction

Nathan has come to expect from his culture and family, and it once again acts as an attempt, in the novel, at re-connection between Zuckerman and his past.

With one qualification, a complaint that “Frankly the penis I had almost enough of by the five hundredth time,” Kotler expresses his gratitude towards Nathan for the

“floodgate of memories you opened up to those early, youthful days” (521). This episode, in which gratitude for Zuckerman’s imitation temporarily replaces the vitriol that

5 In some sense, however, Jewishness, as a metaphysical identity was preserved in the traditions of the Jewish people. The Hebrew Bible and other Jewish traditions were carried on by Jews before, during, and after the Diaspora, making “Jewishness” a somewhat portable quality, even without the benefit of a homeland per se. In other words, Jewishness has existed between the Roman destruction of the Temple and the establishment of the current state of Israel. 65 has been Nathan’s experience, once again illuminates the cultural gap that results when

Zuckerman’s Aristotelianism clashes with his culture’s Platonism. Kotler, though a member of the generation which has vilified Zuckerman, possesses one distinctive characteristic. In his old age, he has thrown himself into the Holy Scriptures (522).

Logically, it would seem that this pursuit would engender animosity towards Nathan, but his study of his culture and religion has been supplemented with the study of art. This aspect of Kotler’s life bears a striking resemblance to the artistic life that Zuckerman leads. This mixing of pursuits also hints at an Aristotelianism which is similar to

Nathan’s. The traditional writings which, in some ways, codify his culture are to Kotler particular, not universal. For Kotler, the traditional scriptures are not the organizing center of his life. They, along with generally humanistic pursuits like art, are part of the picture, not the entirety of it. In a Platonic Jewish existence, the scriptures which organize society would stand alone. In this Aristotelian vision, traditional scriptures, along with art, are individual artifacts, to be studied individually without regard for how they fit into a totalized society. This is summed up when the old dolorologist makes a strikingly academic observation about the scriptures:

Yet the writing I don’t like. The Jews in the Bible were always involved in highly dramatic moments, but they never learned to write good drama. Not like the Greeks, in my estimation. The Greeks heard a sneeze and they took off. The sneezer becomes the hero, the one who reported the sneeze becomes the messenger, the ones who overheard the sneeze, they became the chorus. Lots of pity, lots of terror, lots of cliff-hanging and suspense. You don’t get that with the Jews in the Bible. There it’s all round-the- clock negotiation with God (523).

This soliloquy recalls Erich Auerbach’s comparison of Greek and Jewish literatures in

“Odysseus’ Scar.” Kotler’s claim that “The Jews in the Bible were always involved in 66 highly dramatic moments” recalls Auerbach’s assertion that the Old Testament is “more obviously pieced together” (Auerbach 14). These pieced together moments, both Kotler and Auerbach claim, do not exemplify the unity of action that Aristotle values in Greek tragedy. What they do show, on the other hand, is what Auerbach refers to as a “vertical connection.” All of the un-dramatized, un-unified episodes of Jewish literature are, in fact, unified in their relationship to the totalizing God. Auerbach explains it as follows:

“Each of the great figures of the Old Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical connection. God chose and formed these men to the end of embodying his essence and will . . .” (14). Zuckerman, as an Aristotelian, refuses to be formed to embody the essence of what has historically defined his cultural heritage; instead, as an artist, he is the one who forms the unified plots which embody great Greek drama. Auerbach writes that “As a composition, the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is more obviously pieced together – but the various components all belong to one concept of universal history and its interpretation” (14).

The one concept to which Auerbach refers is the same all-encompassing world-view which Zuckerman has rebelled against by embracing the Greek (at least in the

Aristotelian tradition) ethic of writing great drama.

Kotler’s speech above contains all the essential parts of the Aristotelianism

Nathan obtained at Chicago. Inherent in this observation is the essential difference between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The Platonic Jewish traditional culture sublimated art to their “negotiation with God,” while the Aristotelian Greeks embellished historical fact into great art. Kotler even borrows Aristotle’s conception of pity and fear and assigns it to the credit of Greek drama. Kotler’s attempt to ease Zuckerman’s pain by 67 bridging the gap between Nathan and his culture, is therefore fundamentally stained by his own conflation of Aristotelian and Platonic value systems; the result of this is the failure of Kotler’s pillow to relieve Zuckerman’s pain.

This failed attempt at reconciliation foreshadows the fate of Zuckerman’s own solution to his physical/spiritual problem. Judith Oster, in her book, Crossing Cultures, is “struck, in reading bicultural narratives, by how often getting back to so often goes together with getting back at” (214). This observation is useful in our understanding of

Nathan’s attempted re-unification with his family and culture. Realizing that his

Aristotelian break from Platonic tradition (though never stated in those terms) is somehow the cause of his pain, Zuckerman attempts to reconnect to the Platonism of his culture. His effort (like that of Oedipus) is doomed from the outset, however, as

Zuckerman himself is by now stained by Aristotelianism, which causes Zuckerman to attempt to fill a Platonic hole with an Aristotelian peg.

Where in Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman attended the death of his father, he is spared (or perhaps denied) a similar opportunity in The Anatomy Lesson, when his mother dies while Nathan is away. Both events, however, have an impact on

Zuckerman’s relationship with his family and culture. Victor Zuckerman, with his dying words, effectively expelled Nathan, in a strikingly Platonic fashion, from his culture and family by rhetorically bastardizing him. Conversely, the death of Selma, Nathan’s mother, represents an opposite movement for Nathan. Selma’s death was the result of a brain tumor, which was “the size of a lemon, and it seemed to have forced out everything except the one word” (447-8). The final bit of Selma’s memory and identity which remained was the word “Holocaust.” It is this term, not “Selma” which Nathan’s mother 68 uses to sign her name near the end of her life, even though, “Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she’d never even spoken the word aloud” (447). Zuckerman’s subsequent deduction that “It must have been there all the time without their even knowing” (448), acknowledges that perhaps an essential Jewishness can exist within an individual. That Selma Zuckerman’s final identity is a term which, in many ways defines the modern Jewish experience indicates an irreducible Jewishness which transcends individual expression. Nathan’s grief, combined with his guilt over his estrangement from his culture and family, lead him to make a step towards reconciliation with that culture.

In the process of settling his mother’s affairs, Zuckerman is given the slip of paper which holds his mother’s “Holocaust” signature. Selma’s neurologist gives Nathan the slip of paper, saying, “I didn’t’ want to throw it away . . . not until you’d seen it”

(465). Zuckerman’s reaction indicates a change in his attitude towards the traditions of his culture and family. We are told that, “Nathan had thanked him and put it in his wallet; now he couldn’t throw it away” (465). This act of retention is a step towards bridging the divide between himself and his culture and family that his Aristotelian poetical philosophy caused. After this symbolic act of cultural acquiescence, Zuckerman sees the value of his mother’s life of self-sacrifice and how that sacrifice was for the good of her Republic. Having allowed his brother’s family to take most of his mother’s material possessions, Zuckerman secretly keeps the signature which contains something essential about the Platonic Jewishness of his family’s culture. This Platonism is demonstrated by the devotion she showed to her family, in the wake of her twin brother’s death, by not completing her Ph.D. (468). This act of selflessness perpetuated the 69 stability of her culture and family by its undermining of her individual will. This self- denial is passed on to Henry, who, though he had wished to pursue a career in the arts and desires to leave his family by running away with his mistress, subjugates his own desires for the greater good of the traditions of his family. Henry’s regret at his mother’s sacrifice is interpreted by Nathan to mean that he regrets his own sacrifice. This is evident when Nathan notes the fervent nature of Henry’s repeated regret, “If only she’d gone on for her Ph.D. . . . She was made for a Ph.D.” (468). Nathan surmises that if his mother had forgone responsibility for her own will, “Henry would somehow be free to disregard the claims of loyalty, habit, duty, and conscience – and his forebodings of social censure and eternal doom – and run away with [his] mistress” (468).

In the Platonic view of Selma’s role in her culture, she was not “made for a

Ph.D.” She was, instead, made for the perpetuation of her culture, which she carries out dutifully. This is evident when Zuckerman finds, among her things, a book called Your

Baby’s Care, which is “a hundred pages of ‘rules’ for raising and training a newborn child” (470). In contrast to the themes and plot of Zuckerman Unbound, where

Zuckerman is symbolically torn from the pages which bind the volume which is his culture, Your Baby’s Care does the reverse, by symbolically “binding” him to the traditions which he will later break from. The physicality of this bond is made apparent by the presence of a footprint made by the newborn Nathan on the inside of the front cover of the book. This footprint, which both symbolically and literally allows

Zuckerman to retrace the steps of his life, is followed by the records of young

Zuckerman’s physical development. The link between Zuckerman’s body, and the “rules for raising and training a newborn child” is one which places Zuckerman physically 70 within a Platonic republic. By safeguarding her book of rules and dedicating herself to the carrying out of those rules, Selma Zuckerman acts as guardian of the Republic; just as

Plato took the training of young citizens, so does Mrs. Zuckerman. It is important to note that her book is not only a guide for the “raising” of children, but also a guide to

“training” them as well. In training her children to be ideal members of the Republic,

Selma is fulfilling her purpose, or what she was “made for.” Henry accepts this training and continually sacrifices his own desires for the perpetuation of those standards, while

Nathan does not. His desire to follow his own individual desires leads to his “unbinding” from the book that is his culture. This process is completed by Victor Zuckerman’s bastardization of Nathan; that is the story of Zuckerman Unbound. The Anatomy Lesson is about Nathan’s attempt at return and the complications to that return which are caused by the nature of Zuckerman’s original break from tradition.

By returning Zuckerman to his origins (a time during which he was at one with the traditions of his culture, before the fall) via his discovery of Your Baby’s Care, The

Anatomy Lesson places Zuckerman in a position where he is located between two philosophical viewpoints. Though he now desires some kind of re-union with his traditional roots (i.e. his “Republic”) he is, in fact, now inseparable from the Aristotelian stain which requires his continued removal from the Republic. This is the tension at work in the Dr. Kotler episode (which is symbolic of the temptation for re-unification that Nathan experiences in the novel), and it is also the driving tension of The Anatomy

Lesson. Convinced (as if by Plato himself) that his career as a writer has not only separated him from his family and culture, but also caused his physical pain, Zuckerman 71 decides to remedy his dilemma by changing his career and becoming a doctor, returning to Chicago to go to medical school at the age of forty.

When confessing his desire to go to medical school to one of his “assistants,”

Diana, Zuckerman chooses the specialization of the obstetrician as his ultimate goal. The humor behind this claim is somewhat lost to the irony, however, as links are immediately made between the writer and the doctor who facilitates birth. Zuckerman asks, “Who quarrels with an obstetrician? Even the obstetrician who delivered Bugsy Siegel goes to bed at night with a clear conscience” (509). Zuckerman’s complaint here is not only that he is being quarreled against because of his literary creation, Carnovsky, but also that he is suffering from a guilty conscience about Carnovsky. Events such as the death of his mother have caused Zuckerman to rethink his assertion that life and art are separate and the relative lack of responsibility that the doctor has in relation to the writer appeals to

Nathan. Even when his efforts fail, the doctor is not responsible for the results. If a patient dies, the doctor moves on to the next one. Conversely, when the writer’s work has a negative outcome, such as in the case of Carnovsky, the effects can undermine the stability of an entire culture and leave the author ostracized.

The choice of medicine is, therefore, a movement away from his current position in society, as an outcast writer. It is simultaneously, however, a movement towards some

Platonic notion of a whole society. Roth, in an interview, attributes Zuckerman’s new career choice to the desire to please his critics, or, as Roth puts it, Zuckerman wishes to establish a respectable career in order to be accepted by “those American Jews who most disapprove of him, the supreme embodiment of professional seriousness” (Conversations

251). By choosing the same general field which his father and brother, both loyal 72 members of the culture, worked in, Zuckerman is symbolically attempting a reunion with the culture that he has been banished from. Just as Henry chose dentistry over a life in the arts to appease his father’s wishes, Nathan is belatedly attempting to acquiesce to

Victor Zuckerman’s wishes. Just as Dr. Kotler’s pillow failed to alleviate Zuckerman’s neck pain, however, Zuckerman’s attempt at reconciliation is doomed. Dr. Kotler’s acceptance of Zuckerman back into the community of Newark Jews, was not a Platonic acceptance, but an Aristotelian one. This resulted in a failure to reunify in the Platonic sense. Similarly, Zuckerman’s own attempt at Platonic reunification is marred by the stain of Aristotelianism that is inherent his choice of Chicago as the place to make this reunification. In The Facts, Roth recounts his feelings about Chicago:

In 1956, at twenty-three, I saw the University of Chicago as the best place to be in America to enjoy maximum personal freedom, to find intellectual liveliness, and to stand, if not necessarily in rebellious opposition, at least at a heartening distance from the prospering society’s engrossment with consuming goods and watching TV (88).

This image of a shelter from the demands and expectations of a larger society and culture makes Chicago a ridiculous choice to act as the catalyst for his re-attachment to his cultural heritage. “Maximum personal freedom” is not the solution to his predicament.

By choosing the site of his “Aristotelianization” to act as the site of his “re-

Platonization,” Zuckerman essentially undermines the possibility for success in his endeavor. Just as Dr. Kotler’s pillow failed to ease Zuckerman’s pain, the return to

Chicago fails to “re-bind” Zuckerman in the book of his culture.

Zuckerman refers to his journey back to Chicago as a “purifying pilgrimage to a sacred place” (549). The pilgrimage, in reality, is not purifying in the ideal, Platonic sense of the word, but it does, in some ways, reinforce, if not purify, Zuckerman’s now- 73 native Aristotelianism. Chicago is sacred to Zuckerman because it was the catalyst for his original break from the restraints of his culture. Therefore, though he may have begun this journey out of a desire to make peace with his culture, the route that he has chosen makes this impossible. Nathan wants to be a part of the Republic, but on his own terms. This attempt to have a foot in each world ultimately thwarts Zuckerman’s pilgrimage. Zuckerman attaches the purpose of his career change to an attempt to please his parents by claiming “Now that his parents were gone he could go ahead and make them happy: from filial outcast to Jewish internist, concluding the quarrel and the scandal” (587). This expression of newly discovered devotion is tainted, however, by the remembered joy that his original break had brought him. As he arrives in Chicago,

Zuckerman recalls “How he’d loved it out there then! Eight hundred miles between him and home: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana – the best friends a boy ever had” (581). In addition, central to the joy of Zuckerman’s freedom from tradition is his discovery of

Aristotle. When recalling the liberation he felt in his Humanities 3 class, the first, and thus the foundational, book he recalls reading is The Poetics (582). Thus for Nathan, the joy of Aristotle’s freedom to individualize casts a permanent shadow on the Platonism of

Zuckerman’s culture. These conflicting feelings undermine the sincerity of Zuckerman’s newly found devotion to the traditions of his people.

In the end, Zuckerman remains exiled, or in Platonic terms, expelled, from the traditions and culture of his family. As his quest to become a doctor becomes more and more unlikely, the familiar image of snow, which establishes the philosophical tension in

The Ghost Writer, also becomes prevalent in The Anatomy Lesson. Just as The Ghost

Writer referenced Joyce’s “The Dead” to symbolize the sterile, unified landscape that 74 represents Plato’s Republic. Zuckerman, while back in Chicago, visits an old college friend, Bobby, who is now a doctor. Striking up an impromptu friendship with Mr.

Freytag, Bobby’s father, Zuckerman agrees to take Freytag to the cemetery, to visit his wife’s grave, “before the snow buried his wife a second time” (637). Just as Joyce’s snow buries the dead, so does Roth’s. In addition to this, the snow is what ultimately thwarts Zuckerman’s attempt at re-unification. The totalizing power of the snow storm which finally overcomes Zuckerman is evident when Mr. Freytag attempts to clean the snow from his front steps. Zuckerman arrives to find that “an old man was trying to sweep away the snow. It was falling heavily now, and as soon as he got to the bottom step, he had to start again at the top. There were four steps and the old man kept going up and down them with his broom” (654). This scene stands in stark contrast with the young

Nathan Zuckerman, in The Ghost Writer, who after a day of writing would go out in a snowplow and push the domineering snow from the roads. As the storm continues,

Zuckerman notes that “The snow was covering everything” (661).

Then, in the novel’s climatic scene, in the midst of the snowstorm, Zuckerman, in a violently drugged and drunken stupor, attacks Mr. Freytag. Freytag, lamenting his adopted grandson’s effect on the purity of his family, incites Nathan to finally unleash his rage against the stifling Platonistic monism of his culture. While strangling Mr. Freytag,

Nathan shouts, “Your sacred genes! What do you see inside your head? Genes with

JEW sewed on them? Is that all you see in that lunatic mind, the unstained natural virtue of Jews?” (668). This is followed by Zuckerman’s complaint that living individuals are stifled by the traditions of the past: “We are the dead! These bones in boxes are the

Jewish living! These are the people running the show!” This scene reveals Nathan’s 75 ultimate unwillingness to accept the traditions of his culture and to yield his own life in the sustainment of those traditions. All of this takes place in a scene in which it was “Just white snow whirling now, all else obliterated but the chiseled stones, and his hands frantically straining to throttle that throat” (668). This image perfectly captures

Zuckerman’s relationship with his culture. In a storm which symbolizes a republic of selfless unity, the only things visible are the remnants of the past and Zuckerman’s violent struggle against those traditions, which are symbolized in the form of another father. In the end, Nathan ‘s violent rebellion is overcome and he slips and falls on one of the headstones, only to wake up in the hospital with broken teeth and other head injuries. Nathan’s attempt at overcoming the totalizing traditions which serve as a monistic republic, symbolized in this case by snow, fails and he remains expelled. A return to an essential center is impossible for Nathan Zuckerman.

Zuckerman ultimately recovers from his injuries, but with the knowledge that he is forever doomed to be neither part of the Republic, nor fully apart from it. As the novel concludes, Zuckerman is in the hospital where he roams the halls, “as though he still believed that he could unchain himself from a future as a man apart and escape the corpus that was his” (697). This is Zuckerman’s eternal torment; to never accept his fate as one who has caused himself to be expelled from the Republic, thus forever doomed to struggle. Nathan’s complicity in his own fate recalls Oedipus’s story, which Aristotle himself, saw as the ultimate tragedy. Zuckerman’s Aristotelianism, in its own way, has indeed doomed him to a classically tragic fate. The corpus that is Zuckerman’s is one with a long tradition, as Nathan himself admits:

Chicago had sprung him from Jewish New Jersey, then fiction took over and boomeranged him right back. He 76

wasn’t the first: they fled Newark, New Jersey, and Camden, Ohio, and Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and Asheville, North Caroline; they couldn’t stand the ignorance, the feuds, the boredom, the righteousness, the bigotry, the repetitious narrow-minded types; they couldn’t endure the smallness; and then they spent the rest of their lives thinking about nothing else. Of all the tens of thousands who flee, those setting the pace for the exodus are the exiles who fail to get away. Not getting away becomes their job – it’s what they do all day (587).

Zuckerman’s references to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas

Wolfe (in addition to the many references to Joyce throughout the Zuckerman trilogy), and their similar relationships with their own versions Platonic monism, indicate an ultimate resignation that the poet, despite Plato’s complaint against him, is never fully expelled from the Republic; the poet’s rebellious imitations place him in a state of perpetual tension with the Republic that is never fully resolved. In an interview, Roth says of Zuckerman’s dilemma, “His comic predicament results from the repeated attempts to escape his comic predicament” (Conversations 250). Partee comes to a similar conclusion about Plato himself. In his book, Plato’s Poetics, Partee argues that

Plato is not always as antithetical to poets as he is in Republic X. A poet himself, Plato recognized the power and seductive beauty of poetry. Partee quotes Carleton L.

Brownson, who wrote of Plato,

. . . he is himself a poet in the truest sense of the word, a dramatic artist of surpassing skill. He has given to his philosophy all the charm and grace of poetry. His dialogues are themselves dramas, in form, in fullness of scenic setting, in characterization, in dignity of expression (Partee 5).

Partee writes that it is only when Plato is thinking of the well-being and stability of the state that he banishes the poet. This solution to the long standing quarrel between poetry 77 and philosophy creates the continuing tension between the sisters. The Anatomy Lesson’s narrative is driven by this perpetual tension and it highlights similar themes running throughout the other Zuckerman books. In the Nathan Zuckerman saga, the poetic battle that pits Platonic monism against Aristotelian pluralism, neither victory nor defeat is possible.

78

Conclusion

The tension between the classical philosophies of Plato and Aristotle that underlies the narratives of The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy

Lesson, is made explicit in the allegory that is The Prague Orgy. In the Zuckerman

Bound collection, The Prague Orgy is billed as an “epilogue,” distinguishing it from the trilogy proper. The novella’s significance is therefore not that it drives the narrative of

Nathan Zuckerman forward, but that it clearly denotes the primary philosophical concern of the Zuckerman trilogy, the relationship that exists between literature and society.

Hermione Lee writes that “Political coercion and obstruction are public versions of family, marital and psychological struggles. The question of who or what shall have influence over the self applies to every area of Roth’s work, and quite as much to narrative modes as to subject-matter” (Lee 62). This statement suggests that though the conflict depicted in The Prague Orgy is political rather than familial, within the thematic framework of the Zuckerman books, the familial and the political are two versions of the same story. I submit that The Prague Orgy, by broadening the scope of the institutions which attempt to control “the self,” brings Zuckerman’s struggle with Plato’s Republic out of the philosophical and into the physical and actual. Roth, in an interview, deliberately drew a parallel between Soviet communism and Plato’s Republic. When comparing the freedom that writers have in America with the restraints placed on them in

Eastern Bloc nations, Roth said, “fortunately we Americans live in Reagan’s and not

Plato’s Republic” (Conversations 184). Prague, therefore, according to Roth, can be seen as a manifestation of the Republic. What The Prague Orgy delivers is an image of a society which has fully implemented the structure of Plato’s Republic, and therefore it 79 highlights the contentious relationship between literature and Plato’s utopia. Specifically, as we shall see, this book articulates the state inclusion/exclusion which Zuckerman experiences in his own trilogy, especially The Anatomy Lesson.

The novella begins in the middle of a conversation between Zuckerman, an expatriate Czech novelist, Zdenek Sisovsky, and his companion, a former actress named

Eva. In this exchange, it is revealed that Sisovsky and Eva were expelled from

Czechoslovakia because their professions made them dangerous to the state. This episode also re-introduces the Platonic concerns which dominate the rest of the

Zuckerman trilogy. When defending her decision to give up acting, Eva defaults to

Platonic terms, explaining “I am tired of imitating all the touching Irinas and Ninas and

Mashas and Sashas. It confuses me and it confuses everyone else” (709). The use of the term “imitating” is a clear reference to Plato’s argument against art and poetry, and her reasoning is also taken straight from The Republic. The confusion of the populace, which results from the imitation of truth by artists, is the reason for the banishment of literature from the Republic.

Having established a general concern with the conflict between an Aristotelian appreciation of art and a Platonic mistrust of it, the opening conversation of The Prague

Orgy subsequently turns to the Platonic/Aristotelian concerns which are specific to the

Zuckerman Bound trilogy, namely the in-between state of inclusion/exclusion that writers like Nathan Zuckerman find themselves trapped in. Sisovsky summarizes the condition as follows:

In Czechoslovakia, if I stay there, yes, I can find some kind of work and at least live in my own country and derive some strength from that. There I can at least be a Czech – but I cannot be a writer. While in the West, I can be a 80

writer, but not a Czech. Here, where as a writer I am totally negligible, I am only a writer. As I no longer have all the other things that gave meaning to life – my country, my language, friends, family, memories, et cetera – here for me making literature is everything. But the only literature I can make is so much about life there that only there can it have the effect I desire (707-8).

Sisovsky’s dilemma, articulated here, is similar to Zuckerman’s. If we substitute

Nathan’s Jewish Newark roots for Czechoslovakia, then Sisovsky is effectively describing the conflict between Zuckerman’s life and art. To remain a part of his cultural community, or in Platonic terms, his Republic, Zuckerman’s family insists on conforming to the traditions of their culture, which explicitly excludes artist endeavors. While Henry chose to conform, Nathan chose to rebel and pursue writing. To re-phrase Sisovsky’s soliloquy then, Zuckerman might say, “There I can at least be a Jew – but I cannot be a writer. While in Chicago, I can be a writer, but not a Jew.” This expresses the exclusionary part of the equation (writers are, for the good of the community, excluded), but this passage also illustrates the relationship that Nathan’s art has with the community which has expelled him. Zuckerman’s literary creation, Carnovsky, and its predecessor,

Higher Education, are so intricately tied to his cultural roots, that though they are the cause of his removal from his culture, they depend upon that culture in order to give them artistic life. If the works in question were to, in turn, provide the culture from which they arose some benefit, we could label the relationship between art and culture symbiotic. In the case of Zuckerman’s artistic production, however, the community of Newark Jews is not strengthened by Zuckerman’s work; it only provides sustenance to that work, thereby making Nathan’s art parasitic, not symbiotic. It is in fact this link, between art and the culture from which it arises, which makes literature so dangerous to a Platonic culture. 81

Just as Sisovsky laments, “the only literature I can make is so much about life there that only there can it have the effect I desire,” Zuckerman is similarly bound to the fact that his art (and therefore he) is caught in a perpetual conflict with his culture and family.

The Prague Orgy is prefaced by the phrase, “… from Zuckerman’s notebooks”

(701), and the major narrative sections are preceded by dates from those notebooks.

Baumgarten and Gottfried correctly note that this device is disorienting and give the novel a fragmentary quality (Baumgarten 195). This curious narrative device, though it still locates Zuckerman as narrator, also places him in a somewhat distant position in the narrative. This distance is also evident in the plot of the novella. Unlike the other

Zuckerman books, where Nathan’s own struggle with and against his family and culture is depicted, in The Prague Orgy, Zuckerman is allowed to be detached from the cultural conflict. Sisovsky tells Zuckerman the story of a brilliant, lost manuscript by Sisovsky’s father, supposedly a Jewish victim of the Holocaust.6 Intrigued by this tale, Zuckerman goes to Prague in order to obtain the manuscript from Sisovsky’s ex-wife.

Zuckerman’s motivation for attempting to rescue this lost, supposedly great novel again illustrates the complicated nature of his position between his art and his culture. As a writer, it would seem natural for Zuckerman to attempt to salvage a great lost work of literature, a gift to the literary world. On the other hand, the lost novel was supposedly written by a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, and saving the manuscript could also be motivated by a desire to regain his position in the Jewish community. The irony of this motivation mirrors the irony of The Anatomy Lesson; Zuckerman’s gesture at

6 This scenario has some resemblance to the life-story of Bruno Schultz, a Polish Jew who was murdered during the Holocaust and was reputed to have written a great novel which has been lost to history. 82 reconciliation with his culture is, in both instances, attempted by means of the original break from that culture; a return to Chicago and the celebration of great literature.

Nonetheless, Zuckerman travels to Communist Czechoslovakia, where he is witness to an actual manifestation of the Platonic state which his own narrative has metaphorically referred to. Baumgarten and Gottfried cannily observe that “In Soviet- occupied Czechoslovakia there is no distance between the self and the roles one plays, whether in the theater or real life. Taking everything literally, everyone who uses words with any serious purpose, with any wit, is at risk” (Baumgarten196). This observation neatly parallels The Prague Orgy with Plato’s Republic. Both the Soviets and Plato refuse to make a distinction between the artistic production of a society and the very soul of that society, thereby making art a dangerous enterprise for the stability of the state. In

Prague, art is an underground occupation and the artists that Nathan meets all gather at a regularly scheduled, decadent party, or the orgy to which the title of the novella refers.

The existence of this underground community of artists explicates two important aspects of the Platonic allegory of Zuckerman’s trilogy. First, as Plato complains, the artists are decadent and immoral. The parties which they hold seem to confirm Plato’s fears about the dangerous passions which are aroused by art and poetry. This of course provides cause for their expulsion from the Republic and this leads to the explication of the second feature of Zuckerman’s Platonic experience. The artist community is at once excluded from and part of the State. Though they do not participate in the official activities of the state, neither have they been expelled. They are distinguished from “normal Czechs” by an agent of the State who has confronted Zuckerman. He claims that “I would have made you realize what the common life is in Czechoslovakia. You would understand that the 83 ordinary Czech citizen does not think like the sort of people you have chosen to meet”

(777). This dichotomy seems to exist for the express purpose of clarifying that same relationship in the experience of Nathan Zuckerman, á la The Anatomy Lesson.

As Zuckerman navigates Prague in search of the lost literary treasure, the parallels with The Republic are revealed to him, thereby magnifying for the reader the vast shadow that Plato casts upon the trilogy proper. When Zuckerman observes that, “Here where the literary culture is held hostage, the art of narration flourishes by mouth” (762), Plato’s preference for oral in lieu of written discourse is recalled, as are the parallels for this in

Alvin Pepler of Zuckerman Unbound and Zuckerman himself in The Anatomy Lesson.

When Zuckerman is finally confronted by the ministers who guard the state against troublemakers (like Plato’s Guardians), he is informed that “In this small country the writers have a great burden to bear: they must not only make the country’s literature, they must be the touchstone for general decency and public conscience” (775). This precisely refers to Plato’s assertion that what poetry should be allowed in the Republic is that which builds the moral character of the citizenry. It also recalls Judge Wapter’s suggestion that young Nathan go see The Diary of Anne Frank.7 To Wapter, and Plato, the right literature can have a positive influence on the young. Finally, Nathan is warned by a young admirer that the authorities consider him “an ideological saboteur” (751).

This effectively sums up the position that Zuckerman finds himself in as an imitator in a

Platonic state, both Czechoslovakia and, metaphorically, his own Jewish culture. The work of his imagination is dangerous to the stability of “the Republic.” The ideological

7 Dean Franco details the irony of Wapter’s use of Anne Frank’s Hollywood story by pointing out how Amy/Anne is herself sickened by this co-option. 84 conflict at work is that between Zuckerman’s individualistic Aristotelianism and the self- sacrificial Platonism of his culture.

In the end, Zuckerman is unable to rescue the lost manuscript from Prague. He is confronted and ultimately expelled from “the Republic,” which perfectly illustrates the

Platonism which has driven the conflict of the Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The epilogue that is The Prague Orgy serves, in some ways, to pull back the curtain and reveal the metaphoric structure which underlies the entire Zuckerman saga. Zuckerman’s Chicago- influenced Aristotelianism is pitted against the Platonism which represents the demands of his Jewish Culture. Zuckerman’s narrative, however, shows the complicated nature of the conflict between an Aristotelian writer and a Platonic culture. Zuckerman is not simply struggling for freedom from the restraints of his culture. The literature that he creates, though it causes him to be cast out from his community, also forever links him with that same community. Pughe observes the irony of Zuckerman’s expulsion from

Prague: “Nathan’s eviction from Prague at the end of the story as, of all things, a Zionist agent represents a kind of reconciliation of his conflict with his paternal culture . . .”

(Pughe 95). This canny observation sheds light on the complicated position, between

Platonic cultural unity and Aristotelian individualism that Zuckerman holds. His expulsion from Plato’s Republic results not simply in exile, but also a new type of connection. This tortuous state, a kind of purgatory in which Zuckerman is neither a part of nor apart from his culture, is what gives the Nathan Zuckerman books their drama and tension.

Roth would of course revive the character of Nathan Zuckerman for four more novels, with still a fifth to be published in the fall of 2007, titled Exit Ghost. This title, 85 though obviously alluding to the famous stage directions in Hamlet, also refers to the first

Nathan Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer, bringing the entire nine-book movement full circle, a feat that was begun in the most recent Zuckerman book, The Human Stain. Part of the so-called “American Trilogy,” The Human Stain joins American Pastoral and I

Married a Communist to portray Roth’s view of the moral state of Twentieth-Century

America. The narrative structure of these novels, which are narrated by an older, impotent Zuckerman, is derived directly from the relationship between imitative literature and society that was established in the Zuckerman Bound books. American Pastoral and

I Married a Communist seem familiar as they are about Jewish figures who are bound to the fate of the times in which they live. Pastoral’s Swede Levov, while trying to create his own identity with a gentile wife in the country, falls victim to the radical politics of the 1960’s. Communist’s Ira Ringold, while building a life as a working class actor, is victim to the McCarthyism of the 1950’s. Zuckerman’s brand of imitation plays a profound role in these books, as much of the narrative is invented by Nathan. Armed with a few facts of the lives of his subjects, Zuckerman invents dialogue and plot in order to create the universal drama of his stories. This, of course, shows a kind of devotion to the Poetics of Aristotle, while the tragedy which befalls the protagonists seems to acknowledge the warnings of Plato against the subversion of tradition.

This tension, taken straight from Zuckerman Bound, is most evident in The

Human Stain, in which Mark Maslan, in his essay “The Faking of the Americans” asserts that Roth makes a conscious effort to replace the narrative focus on the struggle of the individual for a personal identity with the struggle for a national identity. When writing of Coleman Silk’s racial passing, Maslan comments that, “it is the negation of personal 86 history, of which race is an element, that makes passing useful for thinking about nationality” (384). This perspective shift, from an interest in individual freedom to the codification of national identity, exhibits a kind of acknowledgement that the Aristotelian individualism of Zuckerman’s youth must somehow reconcile itself with a Platonic notion of national stability. Maslan writes that,

Paradoxically, although Roth wants American identity to include people with different pasts, he also wants them to have access to the same memories. So he must envision a form of memory that is independent of one’s individual past, a form that is somehow no less one’s memory for having originated outside oneself. Roth calls this faculty imagination . . . (385).

This perfectly illustrates the precarious balance that Zuckerman had struck by the end of the Zuckerman Bound trilogy. Zuckerman, in Maslan’s estimation, is, in his narration of his “American Trilogy,” attempting to combine an Aristotelian notion of individuality with a desire for the unifying predictability that Plato’s Republic offers.

In The Human Stain, Roth inverts his established narrative movement by having his protagonist, Coleman Silk, re-invent himself as a Jew, in order to escape the limitations that he sees in being born African American. One of the effects of having the hero of the novel make the opposite movement in relation to Jewishness, is that the novel seems less about the Jewish experience than any other Zuckerman novel. Instead the novel is dominated by its classicism. Just as The Prague Orgy brought the metaphor of

Plato’s Republic to the forefront by highlighting the classicism inherent throughout

Zuckerman Bound, Roth is, in The Human Stain, showing his hand and allowing the reader to see the classicism which has been driving the Zuckerman narratives from the beginning. 87

As Geoffrey Blakewell notes, in his article “Philip Roth’s Oedipal Stain,” “Like

Oedipus, Coleman is a savior of the community who falls from grace and glory, finding redemption only after death” (31). Blakewell continues, remarking that “His story is even more Oedipal in that his fall is of his own making and rooted in ambiguities about his identity” (31). By drawing the parallel between the culmination of the Nathan

Zuckerman trilogy and what Aristotle considered the culmination of Greek tragedy,

Blakewell offers a useful window through which to view this eighth Zuckerman book.

What was metaphorical in the earlier Zuckerman books has become overt in The Human

Stain. Even the title of the novel indirectly refers to the Oedipus story. The Greek term

“miasma” is often associated with Oedipus. Robert Parker, in his book, “Miasma,” writes that the term, along with the adjective “miaros,” “almost always refer to a condition that has some, and usually all, of the following characteristics: it makes the person affected ritually impure, and thus unfit to enter a temple: it is contagious: it is dangerous . . .” (Parker 4). Silk’s banishment from the Athena College community because of his affair with the supposedly illiterate cleaning woman, Faunia Farley, is evidence of his danger to the community. In addition, Coleman Silk’s occupation is that of a Professor of Classics; the epigraph of the novel is from Oedipus the King; when

Coleman Silk begins his class, he asserts that all of Western literature begins with The

Iliad and Achilles’ rage. Most telling, however, is that the setting of the novel returns to

Athena College, the site of the action of The Ghost Writer and that Roth once again uses the imagery of snow in order to represent the philosophical interests of the novel. The novel ends with Zuckerman looking back at Lester Farley, the man he suspects of killing

Silk and his young lover, ice fishing on a frozen pond. Zuckerman observes: 88

Just facing him I could feel the terror of the auger – even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America (360- 1).

Zuckerman comments that this image offers the whole picture of America, but it also offers the whole picture of the philosophical tension in which Zuckerman is mired, as

Raphael’s famous painting does. Raphael shows us the philosophical distance between

Plato and Aristotle, and Roth applies that conflict to the novelist, exploring the consequences of subsequent tension. Just as the snow became impenetrable to

Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson, here it forms a sheet of ice upon which the isolated man is an imperfection, or a stain. Yet the excluded man’s sustenance is dependant upon the protected world beneath the ice. In The Human Stain, Les Farley is shown fishing through the ice, the purity of which he, as an excluded man, stains. This is also the image of Nathan Zuckerman and his art: forever excluded, yet still perched on the ice, fishing for poetic inspiration.

89

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