Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Redemption and Empowerment through Fiction A Comparative Analysis of Metafictional Strategies in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost
Supervisor: Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Nederlands - Engels” by Bram Vercauteren
2010-2011 Vercauteren 1
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Table of contents 1. Introduction and background ...... 3 2. General perception of Philip Roth’s work ...... 5 2.1. Self-reflexivity, metafiction and authorship ...... 6 2.2. Jewish identity ...... 8 2.3. Fact versus fiction ...... 10 3. The Ghost Writer ...... 15 3.1. Introductory remarks ...... 15 3.2. Metafiction and self-reflexivity in The Ghost Writer ...... 16 3.2.1. Overall ...... 16 3.2.2. Authorship and intertextuality ...... 22 3.3. Jewish identity ...... 30 3.3.1. Discussing Jewishness with E.I. Lonoff ...... 30 3.3.2. Jewishness and Higher Education ...... 32 3.3.2.1. Nathan’s father ...... 33 3.3.2.2. Judge Wapter ...... 34 3.3.2.3. Nathan’s mother ...... 35 3.3.3. The Anne Frank fantasy – Femme Fatale ...... 35 4. Exit Ghost ...... 40 4.1. Introductory remarks ...... 40 4.2. Metafiction and self-reflexivity in Exit Ghost ...... 41 4.2.1. Overall ...... 41 4.2.2. Nathan Zuckerman as an unreliable narrator ...... 46 4.2.3. Authorship ...... 47 4.3. Fiction as a strategy to regain control...... 50 5. Conclusion ...... 54 6. Works cited...... 56
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1. Introduction and background
The goal of this dissertation is to provide a comparative analysis of The Ghost Writer (1979) and
Exit Ghost (2007), two novels by the intriguing contemporary Jewish-American author Philip Roth.
These are, respectively, the first and the last novel in Roth’s so-called Zuckerman series, all of which have Roth’s supposed alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as their protagonist and narrator. In total, Roth has written nine such novels, spanning roughly the past thirty years of his career:
The Ghost Writer (1979)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
The Prague Orgy (1985)
The Counterlife (1986)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
Exit Ghost (2007)
Roth’s Zuckerman novels are known for their self-reflexivity and metafictional nature, around which my analysis and comparison of both novels is centered. I have set out to find out how the use of metafictional strategies has evolved in Exit Ghost compared to The Ghost Writer, putting it into connection with themes such as Jewish identity, authorship and using fiction to exert control over reality – hence, metafiction as a form of ‘empowerment’.
First of all, I will attempt to provide a concise overview of how Roth’s work is generally perceived in the field of literary criticism, focusing mainly on the thematic categories which I have just mentioned. In chapters three and four, I provide an analysis of both novels. My analysis focuses Vercauteren 4
mainly on how both novels incorporate more or less the same narrative and metafictional strategies, but with different goals in mind.
I will not thoroughly discuss the other Zuckerman novels, written in the period between the publishing of The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost . I refer shortly to some of them where it is relevant, but the intention of this dissertation is certainly not to analyze all nine novels.
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2. General perception of Philip Roth’s work
To define the nature of Philip Roth’s work in just a few words or to place it under the banner of one or more literary movements is a very difficult task. There are few contemporary writers who have been studied more, yet the topic is still heavily under discussion. Critics have often leaned towards postmodernism when trying to define Roth’s oeuvre, but he has never placed himself under such a denominator – or any other denominator, for that matter. Roth’s works tend to be heavily intertextual, hinting at his literary influences, but as Derek Parker Royal suggests in his essay Roth, literary influence, and postmodernism (2007), with the extensive namedropping of his characters ‘Roth may be suggesting that such efforts to forge links of legacy are inherently problematic’ (Parker Royal 23).
In this chapter, I will attempt to provide a short overview of how Philip Roth’s work has generally been perceived, mainly focusing on his series of Zuckerman novels. This chapter will form the main theoretical basis upon which my analysis of The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost will be based. Due to the substantial amount of available literature on the critical reception of this prolific Jewish-American author, I have had to narrow down the number of secondary sources. I will also include some of
Roth’s own opinions on how his work should be perceived. This overview will mainly center around some of the key terms that seem to return very often when reading about Roth’s work, and is in no way to be seen as an exhaustive summary. These key terms are: self-reflexivity and metafiction, authorship, and the question of Jewishness and cultural identity.
Connected to and intertwined with all of this, there is also the question of autobiography versus fiction, particularly in the Zuckerman novels. Humor and satire, too, are regarded as defining characteristics in Roth’s work. As Tomás Creus (2006) puts it in his essay on Roth and self-reflexivity,
Roth combines all these characteristics while ‘usually treating such themes with a good deal of humor’. Another constant factor is the intertextual nature of the Roth’s works. One of the first points that Parker Royal makes in his essay on Roth’s influences is that ‘one cannot thoroughly read Roth without taking issues of intertextuality into account’ (Parker Royal 25). This degree of intertextuality Vercauteren 6
should not be interpreted as a mere juggling and playing around with literary references. According to
Parker Royal, what distinguishes Roth’s intertextual play from more customary notions of literary influence is that he ‘integrates both “high” and “low” textual references that not only decenter any notions of authority (…), but draw our attention to the ways in which texts are constructed’ (Parker
Royal 26). In other words, intertextuality effectively becomes another way of reinforcing a metafictional reading of Roth’s fiction. Paker Royal speaks of the many examples of metafiction throughout Roth’s oeuvre as ‘complementing’ the aforementioned readings of intertextuality. I would rather put it the other way around, seeing Roth’s intertextual play as one of his many metafictional
‘tools’. I will discuss this correlation of intertextuality and metafiction more thoroughly in the analyses of The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost .
These are the areas I have chosen as the focus of my analysis and comparison of The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost . They will be further discussed in the following subchapters. On a side note: I do realize that many of the author’s recurring themes and narrative strategies are generally perceived as postmodernist traits, but I will not discuss them under that particular heading. As Parker Royal summarizes it in the final words of his essay, ‘Roth has spent the better part of his career helping to show us how we structure our texts, how we construct our truths, and how we formulate our identities.
Such concerns, postmodern as they are, seem considerably more vital than any question of literary patrimony’ (Parker Royal 33).
2.1. Self-reflexivity, metafiction and authorship
‘Metafiction’ can be defined as a fictional narrative that in some way comments on its own process of creation (Creus 266). Such works can be read on two different levels. Firstly, there is the conventional account of fictional events with its fictional characters, the ‘main’ narrative. Secondly, on the metafictional level, the author may choose to draw our attention to the fictional nature of the story he or she is telling, making the reader aware of its structure. As Patricia Waugh points out in
Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (2002), ‘although the term Vercauteren 7
“metafiction” might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself’ (Waugh 5). This is part of the reason why I do not wish to discuss Roth’s work in the light of ‘postmodernism’: I agree with Waugh in saying that ‘metafiction’ is probably more a new way of reading than it is actually a brand new literary tool. It was already used, for example, in famous classics like Don Quixote , or probably more famously in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , containing a play-within-a-play in which the central argument is repeated (Creus 266).
The use of metafiction or metafictional elements is widely considered to be a major aspect of
Philip Roth’s oeuvre – albeit less in his earlier works. Tomás Creus makes the point that ‘[a]lthough his earlier novels were mostly realist fiction, (…) and although he never completely abandoned a certain “realistic” view of characters and events, he soon evolved to an extremely self-reflective style, more concerned with the reproduction of events in literary form than with the events themselves’
(Creus 269). The Ghost Writer is, in this respect, an important turning point, as it is the first novel in with Roth’s supposed alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as its protagonist. As we will see in later chapters,
Zuckerman quickly became, more than just a character, a tool for metafictional reflection. Having a novelist as a protagonist allows Roth to bring forward literary creation and the artistic process in itself as a major subject of his novels. The Counterlife (1987), another Zuckerman novel, is probably Roth’s most drastic experiment with metafiction: each chapter tells us an alternative story, or rather an alternative version of the same story. In one version Nathan’s brother Henry dies, in another version he does not, and so on. The characters are given alternative lives or ‘counterlives’ in each of the chapters. So-called ‘fact’ and fiction, ‘real events’ and imagination, become completely intertwined and leave the reader to guess which one is Nathan’s ‘real’ story, a question which in the end appears to have no real answer. In Roth’s own words, The Counterlife is a novel that ‘undermines its own fictional assumptions’ (qtd. In Milbauer and Watson 1988, 11). In several other works, such as
American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000), Nathan Zuckerman literally writes the lives of others – imagining for them fictional biographies, mixing fact with fiction as he goes along. This is something, as we will see in later chapters, which Nathan also does in The Ghost Writer .
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Even though The Ghost Writer can be seen as a turning point, as I mentioned above, it is certainly not Roth’s first experiment with metafiction. As Parker Royal also argues, a kind of metafictional resonance can be felt throughout most of Roth’s writing (Parker Royal 26). One of his first and most noteworthy metafictional endeavors was My Life as a Man (1974), published five years before The
Ghost Writer . My Life as a Man is the first novel in which the character Nathan Zuckerman is introduced, albeit not as the protagonist of the novel. This suggests the possible assumption that
Zuckerman was from the beginning in many respects a tool that Roth created for metafictional self- reflexivion, a point that I will further illustrate when analyzing the Zuckerman novels.
The issue of authorship is automatically raised when talking about Philip Roth and metafiction.
Having a novelist as a protagonist obviously allows for Roth to extensively reflect upon the question of authorship and the process of writing. This is not only the case for the Zuckerman novels, although these have probably been the clearest examples until now.
2.2. Jewish identity
Philip Roth was raised in a Jewish family. He grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the city of Newark, New Jersey, which at the time was home to a large Jewish community. Roth is often discussed in the context of studies on Jewish-American literature, and is seen as one of its most emblematic writers. Talking about ‘Jewish-American literature’ may be problematic as a generalization, though. As Philippe Codde summarizes it in his work The Jewish
American Novel (2007), ‘[h]ow does one define the Jewish American novel or novelist when even its major representatives – Bellow, Malamud, and Roth – all objected to the appellation, rather considering themselves US-American novelists who happened to be Jews?’ All of the above have,
Codde argues, time and again argued that ‘there is no such thing as a school or movement of Jewish
American writing’. According to fellow author Cynthia Ozick such a label is far from desirable as it
‘reduces art and ideas to ethnic commodities’ (qtd. in Codde 6).
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I will not go much further into the questions raised above, but it is useful to keep them in mind whenever speaking about ‘Jewish-American literature’ or its representatives. Despite all of these nuances and questions, to most of which there seems to be no clear-cut answer, it is impossible to deny that his Jewish background has greatly influenced Philip Roth’s oeuvre, whether we call him a Jewish-
American author or not. Roth himself has indicated this on several occasions. In a 1984 interview with
The London Sunday Times , for example, he inextricably links his writing to his Jewish identity. When asked to comment on the word ‘Holocaust’, written by Zuckerman’s dying mother on a piece of paper in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Roth responds that Zuckerman is ‘carrying it [the Holocaust] with him all the time, whether he knows it or not. Without this word there would be no Nathan Zuckerman. (…)
If you take away that word – and with it the fact – none of these Zuckerman books would exist’ (qtd. in Roth 1985, 136). In the same interview, the author also makes a distinction between the way in which, according to him, Jewish Americans and Christian Americans handle this Jewish history and the theme of the Holocaust – despite his argument that there is no ‘movement’ of Jewish writing. ‘I think for a Jewish American writer there’s not the same impetus (…) to take the Holocaust up so nakedly as a subject, to unleash upon it so much moral and philosophical speculation, so much harrowing, furious invention. It works through Jewish lives less visibly and in less spectacular ways.
And that’s the way I prefer to deal with it in fiction’ (Roth 136). As discussed under 3.3., Roth demonstrates this in The Ghost Writer by, through Nathan, reinventing the biography of Anne Frank.
When reading about or discussing the theme of Jewishness in Roth’s fiction, it is impossible not to mention some of his earlier novels, such as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). As Hana Wirth-
Nesher puts it in her essay From Newark to Prague: Roth’s Place in the American-Jewish Literary
Tradition (1988), many Jewish readers have from the beginning of his career seen Roth as an enfant terrible among Jewish writers. Roth’s writings ‘have been called vulgar, vicious, and stereotypical of anti-Semitic lore’ and he has been ‘accused of unfocused hostility and self-hatred’ (Wirth-Nesher 20).
Critics, and also Roth himself, have argued that his career as an author has largely been defined by his
‘creative and cultural conflict with his Jewish audience’ (Parrish 2). The author, feeling misunderstood by many of his readers, has always defended himself against such accusations, discharging them as Vercauteren 10
misinterpretations based on a lack of eye for the irony in his work. As we will see in the analysis of
The Ghost Writer , this is the same predicament in which the main character, Nathan Zuckerman, finds himself after having published one of his first short stories, based on a family feud concerning money.
Wirth-Nesher places also points out that despite his resistance to being labeled as a Jewish-American author, Roth has himself talked about his own oeuvre in relation to other authors who are generally included in that corpus (Wirth-Nesher 20), comparing Portnoy’s Complaint with the works of Bellow and Malamud.
Finally, it is important to note that the theme of Jewishness is generally very closely intertwined with the metafictional nature of Roth’s work. As Timothy Parrish remarks in his essay
Roth and ethnic identity , ‘Roth never lets the reader forget that the ethnic group history he tells, even if
“true” in some historical sense, is also invented, just as his fictional characters Philip Roth, Nathan
Zuckerman, or Alexander Portnoy are invented’ (Parrish 128).
The theme of Jewishness will, in my analysis, mainly come up when discussing the falling-out that Nathan Zuckerman has with his family after publishing a story about his –Jewish – family, and how he partly uses a – completely fictional – fantasy about Anne Frank to deal with that situation. All of that will be discussed in subchapter 3.3.
2.3. Fact versus fiction
Constantly intertwined with all of the previous elements is the correlation between life and fiction, or ‘facts’ and fiction, which seems to be up for discussion in most of the studies on Roth’s work. I realize that this issue is also a form of metafiction, but it plays such a significant role in Roth’s oeuvre that it is worth discussing separately.
It would be easy to – mistakenly – take Roth for a largely ‘autobiographic’ writer, merely taking facts from his own life and putting them on paper. As Brian Finney states in his essay Roth’s Vercauteren 11
Counterlife: Destabilizing ‘The Facts’ , Roth ‘has been plagued by readers who believe that his success in giving the appearance of life to what are ultimately just textual constructs is proof that his art is mimetic and that all he has done is to brilliantly reproduce the circumstances of his life in fictional disguise.’ Roth has on several occasions expressed his disagreement and a certain agitation with these kinds of readings of his work. In the aforementioned interview with The London Sunday Times , when the interviewer asks Roth whether his own father was or was not like Zuckerman’s dying father in
Zuckerman Unbound (1981), he seems rather annoyed with the question, answering: ‘You’re confusing me with all those astute book reviewers who are sure that I am the only novelist in the history of literature who has never made anything up’ (Roth 135).
Some of the issues concerning Roth and his audience’s struggle with the question of autobiography versus fictional invention are partly cleared up by the author himself in his 1988 book
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography 1. It is largely an autobiographical work, but the most significant and useful parts of the entire book – for this dissertation, that is – are the non- autobiographical passages. I am referring to the two letters, one at the beginning and one at the end of the book, which accompany the autobiography. The first one is a letter in which Roth addresses his own character, Nathan Zuckerman, raising doubts about whether he should publish the book or not.
The second, closing the book, is Zuckerman’s response to that letter. This unique interaction between the author and his supposed alter ego, between a character and his own creator, gives us a rare insight into some of Roth’s own ideas about the correlation between fact and fiction.
Roth’s abovementioned rejection of the idea of being an author ‘who has never made anything up’ does not take away the fact that the ‘facts’ of ‘real life’ have usually been the starting point for his fiction. This is what the author makes clear when addressing Zuckerman in the opening letter of The
Facts . He describes these facts, or the so-called ‘prefictionalized factuality’, as ‘my way of springing into fiction’ (Facts 3). To Roth, ‘every genuine imaginative event begins down there, with the facts, with the specific, and not with the philosophical, the ideological, or the abstract,’ he writes. When
1 Whenever referring to passages from The Facts , I shall use the notation (Facts + page number) Vercauteren 12
coming to the question whether he should publish his autobiographical text or not, Roth wonders why he should appear nakedly and ‘untransformed’ in front of his readers ‘when, by and large, in the unimagined world, I’ve refrained from nakedly divulging my personal life to (…) a serious audience?’
(Facts, 4). With this statement, Roth effectively undermines the assumption that he would be merely an autobiographical writer. The so-called facts are simply what the author takes as a starting point and then transforms into fiction. Roth confirms this, writing that ‘until now I have always used the past as the basis for transformation, for, among other things, a kind of intricate explanation of myself to the world’ (Facts 4). So, despite rejecting an autobiographical reading of his work and emphasizing the importance of fictional invention, the author is still very much present in his novels. Roland Barthes’
‘death of the author’, arguing that author and narrative are unrelated, therefore does not seem to apply to Roth’s writing process. The author, in his letter, seems to struggle with that very question himself:
‘So why claim biographical visibility now, especially as I was educated to believe that the independent reality of the fiction is all there is of importance and that writers should remain in the shadows’ (Facts
4). Roth has, up until The Facts , always, as we have seen, used the facts as the basis for transformation, making them less ordinary, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. The facts were, according to Roth, altered, or placed into a different context. The character to whom this letter is addressed, is a perfect example of that, bearing many resemblances to the author, but not being an autobiographical character. In The Facts, Roth literally indicates that Zuckerman is a fictionalized version of himself. As a reason for writing the autobiographical work, he claims being ‘sick of fictionalizing myself further, worn out with coaxing into existence a being whose experience was comparable to my own and yet registered a more powerful valence, a life more highly charged and energized, more entertaining than my own (…)’ (Facts 6). With this he also confirms my earlier statement about making the facts less ordinary, more interesting, as opposed to his own life, which he claims to ‘have been largely spent, quite unentertainingly, alone in a room with a typewriter’ (Facts 6).
It also needs mentioning that, as Roth points out, ‘facts’, is in itself a problematic term. What do we mean when using this word, is there such a thing as ‘the’ undisputed facts? Roth informs us that
‘[o]bviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is Vercauteren 13
formed by your previous experience’. In fact, he goes on to explain, memories of the past ‘are not memories of facts but memories of your imagining of the facts. There is something naïve about a novelist like myself talking about presenting himself “undisguised” and depicting “a life without the fiction”’ (Facts 8). With this Roth makes the correlation between facts, fiction and literature even more complex. He is more or less saying the same thing about memories as what he claims his own fiction to be: a re-imagining of the facts. He does in his letter what he does in his fiction: blurring the boundaries.
In the closing pages of The Facts , Roth lets Zuckerman voice his opinion about the questions that were raised in the first letter. In this letter, the author answers some of his own questions indirectly through his alter ego. They are presented as Nathan Zuckerman’s opinions, but, Zuckerman himself indicates, ‘to speak of “my” anything would be ridiculous, however much there has been established in me the illusion of an independent existence’ (Facts 161). With this, Roth again points out to the readers the thin line between himself and Zuckerman. About the question whether or not to publish The Facts , Zuckerman’s answer is very clear: ‘Don’t publish – you are far better off writing about me than “accurately” reporting your own life.’ By skeptically putting the word ‘accurately’ in between quotation marks, we are reminded of Roth’s words in the opening letter, saying that when writing down memories, you are only writing down ‘memories of your imagining of the facts’ (Facts
161). Zuckerman again confirms his doubts about Roth’s autobiography with what seems an indirect confession of Roth, suggesting that even this might be an unconscious work of fiction: ‘Think of the exclusions, the selective nature of it, the very pose of the fact-facer. Is all this manipulation truly unconscious or is it pretending to be unconscious?’ (Facts 164). By, through his alter ego, voicing these doubts about his own autobiography, Roth even further complicates the fact – fiction correlation, which has already been the source of so much speculation.
Evidently, by publishing The Facts , Roth has not followed his alter ego’s advice. That does not stop him from listing, through the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, some objections to publishing an autobiography. ‘I am your permission, your indiscretion, the key to disclosure’, Zuckerman describes Vercauteren 14
himself to tells Roth. He then goes on to voice what sounds almost like a plea not to drop him as an intermediary, pointing out how he is very useful to Roth: ‘What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you’re permitted to tell when nothing’s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best: kind, discreet, careful – changing people’s names because you’re worried about hurting their feelings – no, this isn’t you at your most interesting’ (Facts
162). The character Nathan Zuckerman gives Roth a certain freedom, he argues, that he would not have in an autobiography. He reverses the usual view that autobiographies are more truthful than fiction, claiming that in fiction ‘you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain’ (Facts 162). Without the cover of fiction and himself as an intermediary,
Zuckerman finds, the inhibitions of autobiographical writing cause a disappointing ‘slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment’ (Facts, 162). Despite inextricably linking his own existence to that of Roth, Zuckerman goes on to point out that he and Roth are certainly not the same person. He clearly rejects the idea of Roth being an autobiographical writer. ‘Your gift is not to personalize your experience but to personify it, to embody it in the representation of a person who is not yourself. You are not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator’ (Facts 162).
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3. The Ghost Writer
3.1. Introductory remarks
When reading The Ghost Writer (1979) 2, one does not have to look very far to find some of the
‘Rothian’ characteristics which I have mentioned in the previous chapter. In fact, some clues are already to be found even before starting to read the novel: in the title, and in the titles of the chapters.
‘The Ghost Writer ’ seems already to be a metafictional reference, certainly keeping in mind that both the main character, Nathan Zuckerman, and the character he visits, E.I. Lonoff are authors. It evokes an association with the writing process, with questions involving authorship, and so on. Next, the four chapters of the novel are called Maestro, Nathan Dedalus, Femme Fatale and Married to Tolstoy .
Again, it is not very hard to connect these to a novel in which, as will see in this chapter, literary creation and authorship are some of the major themes. The second chapter’s title is immediately a clear example of Roth’s predilection for intertextuality. Nathan Dedalus seems to be, at first sight, a clear reference to another literary ‘alter ego’. Stehpen Dedalus is the protagonist of the Irish writer
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man (1917), and an important character in the same author’s magnum opus, Ulysses (1922). The second chapter, Femme Fatale , reminds us of a certain character type which has long been a much used archetype in literature and other art forms. Jennifer
Hedgecock describes the femme fatale as follows: ‘[h]er socioeconomic class is often obscure; she transgresses social boundaries and overtly – even mockingly – rebels against conformist attitudes.’
(Hedgecock 1). In addition, Hedgecock continues, she ‘scares, threatens, but never wearies the reader, arousing an increased curiosity about her, to untangle her mystery, to have power over her, as she becomes more of an enigma.’ As we will see in the further analysis of this chapter, Hedgecock’s description of the femme fatale is very applicable to one of the main characters in The Ghost Writer,
Amy Bellette. The last chapter, too, is an obvious literary reference; Married to Tolstoy . As for the theme of Jewishness and cultural identity, the title and chapter titles do not seem to contain any ‘clues’ yet. I will discuss this under a separate heading.
2 Whenever referring to passages from The Ghost Writer , I shall use the notation (GW + page number) Vercauteren 16
3.2. Metafiction and self-reflexivity in The Ghost Writer
3.2.1. Overall
‘(…)I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a
Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman (…)’ (GW 3).
This is how Nathan Zuckerman, acting both as the central character and the narrator of the novel, describes himself in the opening lines of The Ghost Writer . With this, the novel’s first sentence immediately pulls the reader into the metafictional universe that Roth has created in The Ghost Writer .
It is the first of many instances where the author plays with and draws attention to the fictional nature of his work. In this example, he does that by immediately describing Zuckerman, or Zuckerman describing himself, as a hero or fictional character. The opening sentence reads almost like an indication, saying to the reader: ‘this is a story, it is fiction.’ Sentences like these appear several times throughout the novel. When recalling a conversation with an admired writer, for example, Nathan points out that he cannot ‘remember having myself ever felt like such a round character before’ (GW
39). Not only in de description of himself, but also when describing some of the other characters does
Zuckerman – or Roth – invoke metafictional associations, not only with literature but also with other arts. In the first twenty-two pages alone, for example, we can find two examples of characters who are being compared to paintings upon their introduction to the reader. The first one is Amy Bellette. The first flash of an impression of Amy which Zuckerman gets is when Hope, Lonoff’s wife, opens the door to the study and Zuckerman sees Amy sitting there on the floor, amid piles of papers and folders.
‘Where had I seen that severe dark beauty before? Where but in a portrait by Velázquez?’, he wonders
(GW 11). After describing some of the unusual associations he makes when looking at her and talking of the ‘drama’ of her face – she makes quite a strong impression on him – Zuckerman restrains himself, remarking that he should ‘not exaggerate the pathos and originality of my first impressions’.
Zuckerman here draws the attention to himself as a narrator. Furthermore, Velázquez isn’t the only artist to enter Zuckerman’s thoughts in these few seconds, as he also remarks Amy’s ‘high prominent Vercauteren 17
oval forehead that looked like Shakespeare’s’ (GW 11). Continuing his train of thought, he also remarks that her face ‘must have been worked into alignment by a less guileless sculptor than nature’.
An association with the visual arts is again made when Zuckerman mentions his history with Betsy, the young woman with whom he has recently ended a relationship. When describing her to the readers, he speaks of ‘the large painted gypsy-girl eyes and the small unpainted she-monkey face and those elegant, charming tableaux she could achieve even when engaged in something so aesthetically unpromising as, half asleep in the middle of the night, taking a lonely pee in the bathroom’ (GW 22).
In this sentence, it is also interesting to note how Roth mixes references to high culture with the most mundane actions or, as described here, something ‘so aesthetically unpromising,’ which would normally never be associated with or be the subject of ‘high art’.
As I have mentioned before, the novel’s third chapter, in which Zuckerman spins out his fiction about Amy Bellette being Anne Frank, is titled Femme Fatale , referring to a well-known literary archetype. I have listed the characteristics of that archetype based on Jennifer Hedgecock’s description: enigmatic, rebelling against conformist attitudes, transgressing social boundaries, often having an undefined socioeconomic class; slightly scaring, threatening the readers, leaving them curiously trying to untangle her mystery in order to gain some form of power over her. In
Zuckerman’s portrayal and characterization of Amy Bellette, however shortly he comes into contact with her that first evening, many of these characteristics are reflected; in fact, at times it seems like an almost literal recounting of the abovementioned traits and effects. Zuckerman’s very first assumption, that Amy is E.I. Lonoff’s daughter, is immediately followed by his being further intrigued: ‘I assumed more than that. Mrs. Lonoff had not even sat the tray down on the carpet beside her before I saw myself married to the infanta and living in a little farmhouse of our own not that far away’ (GW 11).
He then goes on trying to figure out Amy’s age, not being able to let go of the thought of marrying her. When Lonoff later remarks that he does not have any more children living under his roof,
Nathan’s thoughts immediately return to Amy: ‘So the girl isn’t his daughter. Who is she then being served snacks by his wife on the floor of his study? His concubine?’ Despite commenting on his own thoughts as being ridiculous, he can’t stop thinking of this possibility, ‘obscuring all other reasonable Vercauteren 18
and worthy thoughts’ (GW 13). She starts popping up in his mind in the middle of his further conversation with Lonoff. ‘[H]ow can I arrange to to see her again by myself? I must see you again ’, he thinks as soon as his host leaves the room to answer the telephone. When Amy finally emerges from the study into the living room, she even becomes more of an enigma: ‘(…) what had seemed from a distance like beauty, pure and severe and simple, was more of a puzzle up close.’ When Lonoff returns after his phone call, Nathan is ‘still trying to explain some oddness in her that [he] couldn’t identify’ (GW 15). He is also intrigued by her ‘faint foreign accent’ (GW 16). The enigma surrounding
Amy is even enlarged by her dress sense: ‘The costume, now that she had it on, seemed like a little girl’s. That she could act so wise and dress up so young mystified me. (…) I was now in awe of two people in this house’ (GW 17). As the evening advances and Nathan plans to leave, he dreads not seeing her again: ‘I also hated calling a taxi because of Amy Bellette. I was hoping, a little crazily,
(…) she would offer to drive me through the storm to my bus’ (GW 33). Meanwhile, Lonoff has already unknowingly planted the seed for Nathan’s ensuing fiction about Amy being Anne Frank, by disclosing to him that she came to the United States as a refugee: ‘I wondered if the dark refugee girl with the curious name Bellette could be Jewish, and in Europe had suffered from worse than starvation’ (GW 33). I will discuss the significance of the Anne Frank passage later, mainly under the topic of Jewish identity.
After Nathan has decided to stay the night and is getting ready for bed in Lonoff’s study, he overhears a conversation between Amy and Lonoff in the room above him – ironically standing on a volume of Henry James stories to get closer to the ceiling: ‘Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccounted uses of art!’ (GW 71). Amy begs ‘the master’ –but he rejects – for them to go off to
Florence together, or to kiss her breasts, all the while calling him ‘dad-da’. As we have seen, this transgressing of social boundaries also contributes to the archetypical image of a femme fatale.
Finally, the chapter Femme Fatale , in which Nathan unfolds his elaborate fiction of Amy Bellette as
Anne Frank, ends with the first and only literal reference to the literary archetype. After all of the aforementioned subtle hinting, Nathan confirms the image, concluding from his own made-up story that Amy must have wanted to enchant Lonoff, ‘to bewitch him, to break through the scrupulosity and Vercauteren 19
the wisdom and the virtue into his imagination, and there, as Anne Frank, to become E.I. Lonoff’s femme fatale ’ (GW 93). This literal description of Amy as a femme fatale, even before Nathan reveals to the reader that the Anne Frank story has sprung from his own fantasy, again makes us conceive of
Amy Bellette as a character rather than a person .
In the conversation between Amy and Lonoff which Nathan overhears, Roth introduces another subtle hint at metafiction. Upon Amy showing herself naked to Lonoff, he responds,
‘Melodrama, Amy. Cover up.’ Amy then answers with the question: ‘You prefer tragedy?’ (GW 72).
Much of the novel is rife with similar references to theatre and drama, combined with other art forms.
During Nathan’s fantasy about Amy as Anne Frank, for example, when he imagines her sitting on a bus, her surroundings appear to turn into something very much like the setting of a stage play, with
‘outside the window the most outlandish El Greco stage effects, outside a Biblical thunder storm complete with baroque trimmings’ (GW 85). Several metafictional remarks are also made when
Nathan, in the last chapter, admits to the reader that the entire third chapter, namely the Anne Frank fantasy, has been a sheer fictional creation.
Many further (both implicit and explicit) references are made, throughout the novel, to the fact that we are being told a story. This is what happens, for example, when in the middle of a sentence, we suddenly see the addition ‘(I mean this without satire)’ (GW 35), reminding us that behind the story there is a narrator, presenting his own version of ‘the facts’. Sometimes the references are rather subtle, for instance when the Bildungsroman image that I have mentioned before, returns later in the novel, with Nathan calling his briefcase a ‘ Bildungsroman briefcase’ (GW 48). Roth at times also uses some more explicitly metafictional methods, though. When lying in bed in Lonoff’s study, Nathan replays in his head a conversation with his father, about a short story which the young author has written and which has enraged his entire family. The conversation ends with Nathan angrily getting onto a bus, leaving his father behind alone at the bus stop. When he does this, ‘the pneumatic door, with its hard rubber edge, swung shut with what I took to be an overly appropriate thump, a symbol of the kind you leave out in fiction’ (GW 58). With this, the attention is again drawn to the fact that Vercauteren 20
Nathan is our narrator, and consciously chooses to incorporate this detail into the story as a significant symbol.
Probably the clearest and most explicit example is to be found further into the second chapter, though. At a very personal, intimate moment in the story, Nathan suddenly directly addresses the readers, almost apologetically explaining his own behavior: ‘Virtuous reader, if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E.I. Lonoff’s study and see how you feel when it’s over’ (GW 68). Here too, Henry James appears to be a great help: ‘To expiate my sense of utter shabbiness, I immediately took the high road and drew from Lonoff’s bookshelves the volume of Henry James stories (…). And there where I had indulged myself in this most un-Jamesian lapse from the amenities, I read the story two times through’ (GW 68). We shall see after further analysis that this use of literature to, more or less, get things back under control, is a defining characteristic of
Nathan Zuckerman, and a recurring theme in Roth’s Zuckerman novels.
Finally, less explicit but certainly noticeable, much of the novel’s last chapter too reads almost like a play-in-a-novel. This is the chapter where the Lonoffs, Amy, and Nathan have breakfast together, ending with Hope Lonoff storming out of the house, telling her husband that he can have
Amy and live with her for the rest of his life. She just can’t take ‘not living life’ any longer with
Lonoff, who is so completely devoted to the sole purpose of his art that it drives her mad. The effect of a play-in-a-novel is again partly achieved by subtle references here and there to acting and theatre.
Nathan uses the the words ‘that was the act’ when describing Amy’s behavior during a conversation at the breakfast table (GW 99). When his wife Hope gets angry at Lonoff and the fight breaks out, he responds by saying ‘Hope, this is playacting’ (GW 104). These loose examples don’t seem very significant when presented separately, but together with many other examples they clearly form a systematic structure. More than that, though, it is the general theatricality, the at times overly dramatic dialogue, and the very visual sketches with their often slightly comical effect that give the novel’s ending the same feel as a piece of drama being performed in front of the reader. As Zuckerman – or
Roth – describes the fight, the text is permeated with dramatic exclamations (‘oh!’) and exclamation Vercauteren 21
marks, the conversation turns into crying and shouting. The novel ends with Hope leaving. She rushes out into to snow, falling over, still shouting, hurling her bag angrily at her husband, not managing to start the car, bobbing around through the snow a for bit longer, and finally taking off, with Lonoff going after her. When reading the scene, despite the subject being a marriage breaking up, it becomes impossible for the reader not to find it theatrical and comical. Even Lonoff himself cannot resist laughing: ‘”Oh, Hopie,” he said, laughing a little, “that’s overdoing things”’ (GW 107-108). Before leaving to start chasing Hope through the snow, Lonoff then literally encourages Nathan to turn what he has just seen into a story: ‘(…) And you must have things to write down. There’s paper on my desk’ (GW 108). When Nathan asks him what he means, Lonoff explains: ‘I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction.
(…) You’re a different person.’ This remark seems to remind us of what Nathan Zuckerman also claims in his letter to Philip Roth in The Facts , asserting that in fiction ‘you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain’ (Facts 162).
This abundance of metafictional hints and references already indicates that literature, art and the process of writing and literary creation are some of the major themes of The Ghost Writer . The fiction in this novel appears to be very self-conscious, constantly hinting at its own fictionality. This becomes much clearer when looking at the combination of these metafictional elements with the numerous reflections on authorship and the strongly intertextual nature of the novel, which I will now discuss. Intertextuality and authorship in The Ghost Writer are very much intertwined, so they are here handled under one single heading. With the discussion of authorship, I will also touch upon the questions around facts versus fiction which were raised in the previous chapter. Of course I realize that the same goes for the theme of authorship – speaking about authorship is in itself metafictional – so I will regularly refer back to the metafictional elements that I have discussed above.
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3.2.2. Authorship and intertextuality
Authorship seems from the very beginning of The Ghost Writer to announce itself as being a major theme of the novel. As I have pointed out in the previous subchapter, the novel opens with
Roth’s protagonist, a budding writer who is ‘writing and publishing [his] first short stories’, embarking upon a visit to his apparent literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. Nathan is looking to become Lonoff’s artistic protégé, or as he puts it, ‘to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E.I. Lonoff’s spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and his love’ (GW 6-7). Of course Nathan has a good and caring father of his own, he reminds us, upon whom he can count at any time. But he cannot find the artistic and literary ‘sponsorship’ which he is looking for in this father. At the time of his visit to Lonoff, Nathan has not been speaking to his own father for nearly five weeks. This falling-out was caused by the reaction of Nathan’s family to a story that he has written. The story is based on a family feud and, according to Nathan’s father, portrays the family and the Jewish community in a way that is seriously damaging. Because of all this,
Nathan is ‘off and seeking patriarchal validation elsewhere’ (GW 7). He is eager to meet Lonoff, whose stories have very much impressed him, and who is himself apparently sufficiently impressed with Nathan’s story to invite the young writer over to his house in the rural Berkshires. What follows is a chapter full of conversations and reflections on the art of writing, what is means to be an author, and the nature of the two authors’ own fiction. Or, as summarized by Baumgarten and Gottfried in
Understanding Philip Roth (1990), ‘[b]oth writers seek to explore the connections between art and life, and to find out if personal acquaintance will yield greater insights into their art’ (Baumgarten and
Gottfried 157).
One of the traits that Nathan appears to admire the most about E.I. Lonoff is the complete and utter devotion to his art. The elder writer lives in a seemingly very desolate and excluded rural retreat in the New England Berkshires, a mountainous area in the northeast of the United States. ‘All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling.
I looked around and though, this is how I will live’, Nathan thinks to himself (GW 4). ‘Lonoff seemed Vercauteren 23
really to have nothing to worry about from the outside world’, he concludes later during their conversation (GW 17). Having himself just spent several weeks in a secluded writer’s colony to be able to fully concentrate on his writing, Nathan seems willing to lead the same life. He also admires
Lonoff’s restraint from appearing in public as an author, ‘as though to associate his face with his fiction were a ridiculous irrelevancy’ (GW 7). This last remark gives us a glimpse of Nathan’s dislike of autobiographical readings.
Lonoff himself is less lyrical about this secluded lifestyle of artistic devotion, though. He describes his life to Nathan, with a good dose of self-satire, as being nothing more than ‘turning around sentences, only occasionally interrupted by a cup of tea, a meal, or a walk in the hills, under the pressure of his wife, Hope Lonoff. ‘I turn sentences around. That’s my life (…) And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste’ (GW 11). Lonoff dreads the obligatory walks and the rare social occasions to which his wife makes him go, ‘haunted by the loss of all that good time. (…) And I ask myself, Why is there no way for me but this [writing] for me to fill my hours?’ (GW 12). When Nathan tells Lonoff about his temporary job as a door-to-door magazine salesman, which he has only taken on to get around financially, he responds, self- deprecatingly, ‘I wish I knew that much about selling magazines. (…) I wish I knew that much about anything. I’ve written fantasy for thirty years. Nothing happens to me’ (GW 10). Nathan, not sure how to respond to these seemingly sardonic self-deprecating remarks – wondering if Lonoff is being serieous, or delivering an example of his ‘mordant Lonovian comedy’ – cannot help but be completely overwhelmed with awe for the writer and his life. ‘The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature’ (GW 12). Nathan, in his idolization of
Lonoff, keeps wondering how this – in his eyes – canonical writer cannot see the greatness of his own life and work: ‘(…) if he meant it and was as depressed as he sounded, oughtn’t I to remind him just who he was and how much he mattered to literate mankind? But how could he not know that?’ (GW
12). Lonoff’s dedication to his literature appears to stem from motives that are far less grand than what
Nathan had imagined: ‘I wouldn’t even try to write after my tea any more if I knew what to do with Vercauteren 24
myself for the rest of the afternoon. (…) But what else is there?’ (GW 12). The one thing which
Lonoff seems to see as his curse, having nothing else – not being able to think of anything but the turning around of sentences – is just that which Nathan appears to envy the most. Lonoff’s wife, on the other hand, seems to be highly frustrated with her husband’s lifestyle and sole devotion to his writing.
It is that which causes her to leave the writer in the last chapter, combined with the fact that she knows of his affair with Amy Bellette.
The kind of restraint that Lonoff show in his life towards anything other than literature, than reading and writing, is also reflected in the protagonists of his stories. In fact, as Nathan indicates, these kinds of characters are one of the reasons why the young writer greatly appreciates Lonoff’s stories, making it all the harder for him to understand the condescension with which Lonoff speaks about his own life. Despite Roth’s warnings against confusing the author with his fiction, and against wondering too much about how the author’s background may have played a role in his work, Roth has
Nathan guessing about the link between Lonoff’s own life (and restraint) and that of his characters
(because, Nathan later claims, ‘[w]hen you admire a writer, you become curious. You look for his secret. The clues to his puzzle.’ (GW 31)). Rather than cheering him up, Nathan thinks to himself,
Lonoff’s eminence seems to ‘strengthen his dourest imaginings, confirming for him visions of terminal restraint (…). Only when it became altogether clear just how stupefyingly unsuited he was to have and hold anything other than his art - was he inspired to write that brilliant cycle of comic parables (…) in which the hero does not move to act at all ’ (GW 10). Nathan is full of admiration for
Lonoff’s minimalist stories, ‘granting authority to all that is prohibitive in life’ (Baumgarten and
Gottfried 157).
Many questions of authorship and facts versus fiction are raised in the second chapter. In this chapter, Nathan recalls the falling out he has had with his family, and particularly with his father, a few weeks before his visit to Lonoff (as this passage also provokes many questions about Jewishness and Jewish identity, it will be discussed under that heading, too). Nathan sits down at the desk in
Lonoff’s study, where he is to spend the night, with a pad of paper, ‘struggling to explain to my father Vercauteren 25
– the foot-doctor father, the first of my fathers – the “voice” that, according to no less a vocalist than
E.I. Lonoff, started back of my knees and reached above my head’ (GW 48). With this, Nathan refers to a remark which Lonoff has made earlier that evening about the budding writer’s short stories, instantly filling him with pride. What Nathan tries to do in this letter is to explain to his father the literary relevance of his story, the artistic value of it. This artistic value stands opposed to the autobiographical interpretation; namely that Nathan has written a story about a feud in his family and, according to the relatives involved, publicly shaming the family and the Jewish community. Nathan finds himself uncapable of convincing his family to look at his story as a feat of literature rather than an exhibitionistic piece of autobiography. ‘The letter was overdue’, he admits to the reader (GW 48).
When publishing the story, Nathan had been proud of it, describing it as ‘the most ambitious I had written’. He had no other motives than the benign wish for his parents to recognize his artistic achievement, ‘looking for admiration and praise’, wanting to ‘please them and make them proud’ (GW
49). Nathan now wonders why he ‘was naïve enough to expect nothing more than the usual encouragement’ for a story which, he indicates, ‘borrowed from our family history instances of what my exemplary father took to be the most shameful and disreputable transgressions of family denency and trust’ (GW 49). Feeling like a flash-forward to the title of Roth’s aforementioned autobiography,
Nathan refers to this family history as ‘the facts’.
The issues raised by Nathan’s story and the ensuing disagreements are highly reminiscent of what I have discussed under the heading ‘fact versus fiction’. Nathan struggles with some of the same issues which Roth himself has already raised. He has used the so-called ‘prefictionalized factuality’, as his ways of springing into fiction; he has fictionalized a real-life episode. This is, as we have seen, where every genuine imaginative begins according to Roth. Nathan also opposes the way his story is being read, namely as an autobiography rather than a fiction, as if he is an ‘author who has never made anything up’ (Facts 3). We can very clearly see how Roth uses his protagonist in this chapter to touch upon the questions of authorship, mimesis and facts versus fiction. This is one of the clearest examples of what I meant before, when describing Nathan Zuckerman as a tool for metafictional reflection. Roth here provides us with an example of what he, in The Facts , describes as his methodology: using Vercauteren 26
elements from his own life – trouble caused by his writing – as the basis for transformation into fiction.
In the ensuing passages, Nathan recounts the conversations he has had with his parents about the particular short story, titled Higher Education . ‘Well, you certainly didn’t leave anything out, did you?’ – these are the opening words by Nathan’s father of a discussion elaborating on artistic liberties and the restraints to which an author should or should not adhere (GW 51). Much of the abovementioned issues surrounding authorship are touched upon during the argument between the father and his son. Nathan starts off by trying to carefully counter his father’s implicated accusation:
‘”I left a lot of things out.” I pretended to be innocent of what he meant, as innocent as when I’d sent him the story’ (GW 52). His father then specifies his objections: ‘”I mean,” he said sadly, “you didn’t leave anything disgusting out. (…) You made everybody seem awfully greedy, Nathan.”’ Then, after some further arguments he gets to the heart of the matter. Nathan’s father directly addresses the problematic relation between an author and his readers, which seems to frustrate both Roth and Nathan
Zuckerman. The problem with many of the readers is, he argues, that they ‘don’t think about how it’s a great work of art (…) People don’t read art. They read about people. And they judge them as such’
(GW 56). In addition to this, it is necessary to point out that Nathan, throughout the whole conversation, never denies having portrayed ‘the facts’ in his story, despite his objection to being read as an autobiographer. He confirms that he has actually depicted real family members in the story, ‘who actually existed, Dad – and no better than I depict him’ (GW 56). Despite looking at it as fiction,
Nathan still prides himself on the truthfulness of his story. When his father claims that Nathan is ‘not somebody who writes this kind of story and then pretends it’s the truth’, he responds by arguing that he in fact is that kind of person (GW 57-58).
Nathan’s father is not the only one to lecture him about the restraints and discretion which he should show as a writer. Judge Wapter, a highly respected man within the Jewish community in which
Nathan has grown up, also contacts him about the story, having been informed by the family. ‘I do believe that, like all men, the artist has a responsibility to his fellow man, to the society in which he Vercauteren 27
lives, and to the cause of truth and justice’, the judge writes (GW 61), also adding that ‘with great talent come great responsibilities’ (GW 62). Nathan, aggravated by this lesson on the supposed responsibilities that come with being a writer, is gravely frustrated by all this refusal to accept his story as a work of art. In Lonoff’s study, he finally tears up the letter he has been writing to his father. In the letter he has been trying to acquire artistic validation by repeating E.I. Lonoff’s praise for his work
(for which he swears to ‘struggle for the rest of my life to deserve it’), but after all he concludes that he owes no explanations. His father would not understand the literary value of his work: ‘Because my voice started back of my knees and reached above my head wasn’t going to make him any happier about my informing on those unsavory family miscreants who were nobody’s business but our own’
(GW 66). Instead, Nathan puts his mind to rest by seeing the whole situation as part of what it entails to be an artist. This is how it has to be, he concludes: ‘Hadn’t Joyce, hadn’t Flaubert, hadn’t Thomas
Wolfe, the romantic genius of my high-school reading list, all been commended for disloyalty or treachery or immorality by those who saw themselves as slandered in their works?’ (GW 66-67). We see this realization growing in Nathan’s mind; being the bildungsroman hero he called himself in the first chapter, we can see his literary consciousness evolving. He seemingly accepts his predicament and imagines himself becoming part of literary history, which is, he remarks, ‘part in the history of novelists infuriating fellow countrymen, family and friends’ (GW 67). He sees it as a necessary step towards true authorship, as ‘writers weren’t writers, I told myself, if they didn’t have the strength to face the insolubility of that conflict and go on’ (GW 67). Inspired by Lonoff’s exclusive devotion to his writing, he decides it is worth sacrificing the luxuries of a normal life in favor of his work: the transcendent calling of literature.
Seeing this occasion as sort of job interview as E.I. Lonoff’s ‘spiritual son’, Nathan does everything he can to show the seriousness of his own artistic devotion. During the weeks before his visit, he has already sent Lonoff his short stories, along with a letter in which he has put a huge amount of effort to show ‘just how serious a literary fellow I was’, telling Lonoff how much he means to him and mentioning his ‘kinsmen’ Chekov and Gogol (GW 6). This is the first of many literary references to occur in the highly intertextual first chapter. Most of these references come up during the Vercauteren 28
conversation between Nathan and Lonoff as they discuss their art. As I have mentioned before, this intertextuality seems to serve multiple purposes. On one hand, it is a useful tool for Roth to discuss matters of authorship through E.I. Lonoff and Nathan Zuckerman. On the other hand, the many literary references are also utilized as another form of metafiction. If we were already reminded of the fact that we are reading fiction by the elements discussed above, intertextuality reinforces this feeling even more. We are pulled into a fictional universe; the novel is a fiction firmly embedded into a web of other works of fiction. I will not go deeply into the exact significance and symbolism of the specific works and authors which are mentioned in The Ghost Writer , as that would take me too far away from the topic which I wish to discuss in this chapter: metafictionality.
Intertextuality in The Ghost Writer can be seen on different levels. Firstly, there are the actual
‘real-life’ literary references to existing works and authors, some of which I have already mentioned.
Apart from that, there are the references to an author that is himself a part of Roth’s, or Nathan’s, fictional universe: Felix Abravanel. Abravanel is another author whom Nathan greatly admires, and the first author from whom Nathan has sought the ‘patriarchal validation’ for which he is now looking with Lonoff. The attempt was unsuccessful with Abravanel, who was ‘clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son’ (GW 40). Abravanel seems to be very much connected to real-life authors, despite being fictional. By Nathan, Abravanel is first of all compared to the Jewish Russian author
Isaac Babel. Nathan refuses to speak of ‘influence’, though: ‘Well, “connected” of course isn’t the right word. Neither is “influence.” It’s family resemblance that I’m talking about. It’s as though, as I see it, you are Babel’s American cousin – and Felix Abravanel is the other’ (GW 29). Abravanel also seems to bear resemblance to other famous authors. Several critics have described him as a fictionalized version of the Jewish-American author Saul Bellow, or sometimes even as ‘a mixture of
Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer’ (Baumgarten and Gottfried 162). Abravanel is in this respect – as a character – similar to Lonoff: a fictional author, but strongly connected to real authors by the many intertextual references. According to Baumgarten and Gottfried, Lonoff’s ‘literary portrait draws on elements of Bernard Malamud and the Yiddish American writers, the Singer brothers, Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis’. Not only the narrative of The Ghost Writer but also the characters in it feel like Vercauteren 29
intertextual constructions. As I have pointed out before, the same goes for Nathan – being compared to the antagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the second chapter’s title.
This explains what I stated before, namely that intertextuality in this novel serves as a metafictional tool, again drawing our attention to the subtle divide between facts and fiction. Another example of this is the aforementioned passage, where Nathan compares his artistic calling to that of Joyce,
Flaubert and Wolfe; references to other authors are used in metafictional reflections upon the question of authorship.
Finally, a major intertextual reference, also employed to reflect upon the calling of the artist and the nature of art, is that to the story The Middle Years by Henry James. This key figure in
American literary history has often been, most Roth critics agree, regarded as one of the important precursors of Roth’s fiction (Kartiganer 35). In The Ghost Writer , James’ words appear typed on a little card which Nathan finds while spending the night in Lonoff’s study. It reads: ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art’. Immediately, Nathan is fascinated by this quote, and at the same time puzzled: ‘But “the madness of art”? I would have thought the madness of everything but art. The art was what was sane, no?’ (GW 47). Illustrating this conviction, he recounts the history of his family’s reaction to his own story, which I have discussed before. Later that evening, he can’t help but looking up The Middle Years in Lonoff’s library to read the entire story. We get a summarized version of the story, told to us by Nathan. The reader is told a Henry James story through Nathan Zuckerman, who, in turn, sees the story filtered through Lonoff’s own notations and underlinings in the book.
Nathan pays close attention to Lonoff’s additions, drawing our attention to his own way of reading.
Roth again utilizes another text in his metafictional play with literary conventions by, in this case, adding multiple narrative layers to the novel.
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3.3. Jewish identity
If Jewishness is generally considered to be a major theme in the oeuvre of Philip Roth (cfr. chapter one), The Ghost Writer certainly fits the description. Issues connected to Jewish identity are played out in three ways in the novel – each time, as we will see, intertwined with the abovementioned metafictional elements. In the first chapter, Maestro , Nathan raises the issue when discussing some of his – Jewish – literary role models with E.I. Lonoff. In the second chapter, Nathan Dedalus , Nathan tells us about the reaction of his family and the Jewish community to his short story, Higher
Education . The themes Jewishness and authorship are again closely intertwined here. Thirdly, in the chapter Femme Fatale , Nathan spins out his elaborate fantasy about Amy Bellette as Anne Frank, which, as we will see in the following analysis, is largely a way to cope with issues connected to his
Jewish background. The final chapter, Married to Tolstoy , partly serves as an explanation of Nathan’s motives to the reader.
3.3.1. Discussing Jewishness with E.I. Lonoff
During Nathan’s discussion with E.I. Lonoff on the connections between art and life, authorship, and the nature of their own work, Jewishness is also a theme that is touched upon by the two writers. Roth systematically interweaves the whole conversation between these two characters with reflections on the connection between the authors’ Jewish identity and their art.
Initially, the strong connection of Lonoff with his Jewish identity is made clear to the reader by Nathan’s thoughts, prior to the dialogue between the two writers. The first mention of Lonoff’s
Jewish identity already appears on the novel’s first page. Nathan is thinking about a publisher’s party he has attended in new York, where Lonoff was disposed of by the literary partygoers ‘as though it were comical that a Jew of his generation, an immigrant child to begin with, should have married the scion of an old New England family and lived all these years “in the country” – that is to say, in the goyish wilderness of birds and trees were America began and long ago had ended’ (GW 3-4). Apart Vercauteren 31
from illustrating how Lonoff defies the Jewish traditions of his parents’ generation, this consideration feels like an implicit rejection of the idea that authors are being judged by their Jewish background.
This idea is further elaborated when Nathan goes on to inform the reader that this literary idol of his has hardly any readership or recognition, and that he ‘invariably would be dismissed, if and when he was even mentioned, as some quaint remnant of the Old World ghetto’, an out-of-touch ‘folklorist’, utterly ignorant when it comes to the major currents of literature and society (GW 7). Nobody knows
Lonoff, Nathan tells us, and ‘[e]ven among his readers there had been some who thought that E.I.
Lonoff’s fantasies about Americans had been written in Yiddish somewhere inside czarist Russia before he supposedly died there (…) from injuries suffered in a pogrom’ (GW 7). With this, Nathan clearly identifies Lonoff’s oeuvre as wearing the stamp of his Jewish identity. Nathan does this without classifying Lonoff under any Jewish-American literary tradition, though, remarking that he has written a series of short stories about wandering Jews ‘unlike anything written before by any Jew who had wandered into America’. Reading Lonoff’s fiction has made Nathan reflect upon his own
Jewish identity, even indicating that ‘Lonoff’s canon (…) had done more to make me realize how much I was still my family’s Jewish offspring’ than anything else (GW 8). He describes Lonoff’s fiction as a response to the ‘burden of exclusion and confinement’ that , he says, still weighs upon the lives of his Jewish family. As an example of this exclusion, he cites the history of his own father, who had to choose a career in chiropody rather than become a ‘real’ doctor because of unfair medical- school quotas. Despite not being a devout follower of Judaism – having lived in New York with a non-
Jewish girl friend for several months – like is parents are, Nathan finds himself fostering certain feelings of kinship with his Jewish ancestors when reading Lonoff. Lonoff’s heroes, Nathan argues, seem to ‘say something new and wrenching to Gentiles about Jews, and to Jews abou themselves’
(GW 9). He carefully keeps these feelings of kinship to himself, though, not mentioning them in his analysis of Lonoff’s work (GW 8-9).
When discussing some of these issues with Lonoff, Nathan tries to figure out the reason for this effect that Lonoff’s writing has on him – without really getting an answer to his question. ‘I think of you as the Jew who got away’, he says to the writer, ‘away from Russia and the pogroms, (…) away Vercauteren 32
from Palestine and the homeland. (…) away from Brookline and the relatives’ (GW 30-31). But, he continues, ‘still all you write about are Jews’ (GW 31), not quite understanding how a story from somebody who got away from all of that is ‘unthinkable’ without a Jew in it. At this point, Lonoff urges Nathan not to look for any hidden meanings or connections to his own life: ‘Nathan, surely by now you get the picture. (…) I don’t know anybody. I turn sentences around, an that’s it’ (GW 32).
Lonoff thus tries to quench Nathan’s curiosity, to curb his attempt to analyze the person behind the fiction.
As a preliminary note after looking at how Jewishness is approached in this chapter, one could say that The Ghost Writer seems to be a sort of bildungsroman on two different levels. As we have seen, Roth literally uses this term in the opening pages of the novel. As I have already mentioned, we can see Nathan’s literary consciousness evolving throughout the novel, as he reflects upon the storm of criticism his short story has caused, ultimately deciding that this is just his way to become part of literary history. In this first chapter, a second evolution seems to have been put in motion: the way in which Nathan’s sense of Jewish cultural identity and kinship is being awakened, or rather influenced, by his reading of Lonoff’s fiction and conversation with the author. Under the two following headings
I shall discuss how the theme of Jewishness is further elaborated.
3.3.2. Jewishness and Higher Education
In the second chapter, Higher Education , Roth clearly illustrates some of the topics which I have touched upon when discussing the general perception of his work. We have already seen how the story of Nathan’s squabble with his family and the Jewish community – caused by his using a family feud as the basis for a story – addresses the issues of authorship, supposed autobiographical writing versus fiction, and so on. But, just as importantly, the incident provokes a thorough discussion on how this Jewish identity is – or ‘should’be – handled in fiction.
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The reason for Nathan’s parents’ aggravation goes beyond the fact that they feel that Nathan has insulted the family’s name. What distresses them even more, is that according to them the story puts the Jews as a people in a bad daylight. It confirms negative stereotypes and, they think, it will only encourage anti-Semitism in a society that they already find to be unfavorable towards the Jews.
Zuckerman’s story stands in stark contrast to the Jewish stories which his parents usually prefer, which is made clear when he mentions them listening ‘on the radio to “The Eternal Light” – great moments from Jewish history in weekly half-hour dramatizations’ (GW 51) .The criticism and concerns are, in this chapter, voiced by three different sources: Nathan’s father, judge Wapter, and Nathan’s mother.
3.3.2.1. Nathan’s father
The first objections to his story which Nathan gets to hear are from his father, in a conversation taking place nearly five week before his visit to Lonoff’s house. After spending a day with the family, during which many family members show up but nobody confronts Nathan, his father takes him aside for a talk. ‘Doc’ Zuckerman, as he is colloquially known in his dominantly Jewish
Newark neighborhood, appears mainly to be concerned by the fact that Nathan ‘didn’t leave anything disgusting out’ and made ‘everybody seem awfully greedy’ (GW 52). ‘[T]here is far more to our family than this. (…) I hope that today reminded you of the kind of people we are’, his father pleads, thereby revealing that much of that day’s family visit had been a show put up for Nathan’s benefit.
Doc Zuckerman goes on to accuse Nathan of, apparently deliberately, leaving out all the positive elements of the story. As the conversation advances, he finally moves towards what worries him the most: ‘But from a lifetime of experience I happen to know what ordinary people will think when they read something like this story. (…) You can’t. You have been sheltered from it all your life. (…) you were always among Jews’ (GW 56). By using the words ‘ordinary people’ to refer no non-Jewish people, Nathan’s father draws a clear line, distinctively portraying the Jewish community as outsiders, similar to the ‘exclusion and confinement’ of which Nathan speaks earlier in the novel. Reminding
Nathan that people don’t read art, but instead read about people , the father goes on to voice his concern, assuring Nathan that as far as ‘Gentiles’ are concerned, his story ‘is about on thing and one Vercauteren 34
thing only. (…) It is about kikes. Kikes and their love of money. That is all our good Christian friends will see, I assure you’ (GW 57). Nathan is highly frustrated and refuses to accept this criticism. He feels that he has simply portrayed the people in his story as he should have: people as they are. For the first time, we can see here how Nathan, too, experiences the ‘confinement’ that his Jewish identity entails, albeit in a different way from his father. Whereas the latter experienced this confinement and exclusion by not being allowed into medical school, Nathan finds himself to be confined in his writing. He cannot write freely as he wishes, with his surroundings trying to contain him into writing
‘nice’ things about fellow Jews. He refuses to accept these limitations and decides to publish the story anyway. On a side note, all of this seems, in a way, similar to what several critics have written about
Philip Roth as an author: ‘He has never idealized the Jew. He has never elevated him to sainthood , never created him faceless; rather he speaks of him as if he is flesh and blood, about his human successes and his human defeats’ (Appelfeld 13-14).
3.3.2.2. Judge Wapter
Some days after that, Nathan’s father decide to seek the council of judge Leopold Wapter, described by Nathan as ‘perhaps the city’s most admired Jew’ (GW 58). As a result, Nathan promptly receives a letter from the judge, in which he expresses more or less the same concerns. Wapter phrases his criticism much more harshly, though, openly accusing Nathan of anti-Semitism. In the letter,
Wapter points out the ‘responsibility’ and ‘obligations’ which, according to him, any artist has towards his community and fellow people. Along with the letter, the judge presents a list of ten questions to
Nathan, all along the same lines. The last question more or less summarizes the tones of the nine previous ones: ‘Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?’ (GW 63). The ‘obligations’ mentioned in the letter show us again the constraints that Nathan feels pressured by. To conclude, the letter also contains what may have been the initial seed of Nathan’s Anne Frank fantasy (which I will discuss in the next subchapter): a suggestion to go and see the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank .
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3.3.2.3. Nathan’s mother
Finally, three weeks after the arrival of Wapter’s letter, Nathan receives a phonecall from his seemingly troubled mother. She informs him that both Nathan’s father and she are ‘beside themselves’ after hearing from the judge that Nathan has refused to answer the accusatory letter. In the ensuing – emotionally charged – discussion, Nathan expresses his anger at the letter and, while doing so, touches upon the issue of the family’s Jewish heritage. As his mother calls upon the horrible history of the Holocaust to defend Wapter’s sharp comments, Nathan responds: ‘In Europe – not in
Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!’ He goes further by sarcastically putting down his mother’s reference to the American Jews’ experience with physical violence: ‘Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed. That’s where the Jewish blood flows in Essex
County’ (GW 64). This passage is an illustration of how Nathan struggles with his Jewish heritage. On the one hand, he indicated earlier the ‘kinship’ that he feels, not only with his family but also with further ancestors, when reading Lonoff’s story. He clearly distinguishes the Holocaust from the
Jewish-American community in which he grew up, though, refusing to be restrained – or to restrain his fiction – based on this cruel episode in Jewish history. Shortly after this statement, his view on the
European heritage seems to be ambiguous, though: ‘[M]aybe then you all shock a little too easily.
Jews are heirs to greater shocks than I can possibly deliver with a story (…). You just said as much’
(GW 65). With this last claim, Nathan does seem to imply that even Jews in America carry the heritage of the Holocaust, which is contradictory to his previous denial of that same theory. ‘I am my own!’ Nathan finally shouts before hanging up the phone, again implying that he refuses to be defined or confined by his Jewish background.
3.3.3. The Anne Frank fantasy – Femme Fatale
The final and most radical passage in which Philip Roth incorporates Jewishness as a theme into The Ghost Writer , is the entire third chapter, titled Femme Fatale . Nathan’s fantasy of Amy Vercauteren 36
Bellette as Anne Frank is preceded by his overhearing the conversation between Amy and Lonoff, which I have already discussed. After listening in on this dialogue, Nathan thinks, wishfully: ‘Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I’d overheard! I only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what goes on!’ (GW 73). From the next page (and chapter) onwards, that is exactly what Nathan attempts to do: he invents a history for Amy Bellette. He does, again, what Roth defines as his method of writing fiction: using the facts as a starting point for springing into fiction. Initially, it is not made clear to the reader that this chapter is set entirely in the imagination of the novel’s protagonist. Nathan just starts off recounting ‘Amy’s history’, leaving the reader wondering if Nathan is still the narrator – because, after all, the first two chapters have made it sufficiently clear that he does not actually know anything about her.
In Nathan’s fiction, Amy, or ‘Anne’, survives the concentration camp of Belsen, contrary to the history as we know it. After being transferred to a makeshift infirmary – a façade for the Allies – she ends up mistakenly being assumed to be dead. The mistake goes unnoticed in the end-of-war administrative chaos. After failing to meet up with her only surviving relative – her father, not knowing he is still alive – she ends up temporarily staying with several foster families, eventually moving to the United States and assuming the pseudonym ‘Amy Bellette’, in an attempt to shake off her past. She cannot take being compassionately seen as a victim, to be defined and, just like Nathan, constrained by her past, which is one of the reasons for changing her name: ‘If she was going to be thought exceptional, it would not be because of Auschwitz and Belsen but because of what she had made of herself since’ (GW 80). After suddenly coming upon a printed version of her own diary in book form – Het Achterhuis – and learning that her father is not dead, her past comes rushing back to her. She reads the book over and over, and goes to see a dramatized stage version of it. Not being able to keep her secret to herself any longer, she rushes to her college professor, E.I. Lonoff, to whom she tells the entire story.
Amy’s refusal to be defined solely by her Jewish background plays a crucial role in the entire
Anne Frank fantasy. This characteristic of her writing, that ‘neither she nor her parents came through Vercauteren 37
in the diary as anything like representative of religious or observant Jews’ (GW 86), appears to bear a resemblance to Nathan’s own short stories. In fact, it is exactly that which his own family and judge
Wapter seem to blame him for. But, in his own Anne Frank fiction, Nathan gives this absence of devout Jewishness an entirely different status: that which gives the entire book its power. Because, he continues, speaking through ‘Amy’, ‘[t]o expect the great callous and indifferent world to care about the child of a pious, bearded father living under the sway of the rabbis and the rituals – that was pure folly’ (GW 87). But with Anne’s diary showing a Jewish family as a family of modern, regular people, in their daily habits not different from anyone else, that would be another matter entirely. Such a book would show to the world ‘what had been done to the Jews just for being Jews . (…) And that was the power of the book’ (GW 87). The fictional Amy/Anne starts to believe that her diary, because of this, has the power to teach, but only if she is believed to be dead. Consequently, she decides not to contact her father and to keep hiding her real identity, as a service to ‘all who had met the fate that she had been spared and was now pretending to’ (GW 89). This passage plays a double role in the novel.
On the surface, within Nathan’s Anne Frank/Amy Bellette fiction-within-a-novel, writing ‘un-Jewish’ characters serves as a strategy to give Anne’s diary the power to teach. It also plays a role when we go up one narrative level, though, to the story of Nathan himself. In his own world, Wapter and his parents criticize Nathan for not showing Jews, according to them, as the good and devout people they actually are, rather than as a family squabbling over money. Nathan’s fictional Anne Frank uses the same strategy – showing her family as it is, including all the negative aspects – to do the Jewish community a favor: gaining the understanding of non-Jews. By making all of this this up, Nathan seems to be seeking redemption through fiction. That makes this passage an excellent example of how metafiction and Jewishness are intertwined in The Ghost Writer , utilizing fiction to cope with issues related to Jewishness; achieving through fiction what cannot be achieved by conventional means.
This motive reappears – or is further elaborated – in the final chapter, Married to Tolstoy .
During breakfast with Amy, Lonoff and Hope, Nathan cannot think of the girl as ‘Amy’ any longer, being ‘continually drawn back into the fiction I had evolved about her and the Lonoffs’ (GW 94; this is actually the first mention of the previous chapter being an invention). Throughout the breakfast table Vercauteren 38
conversation, bouts of his own invention keep popping into Nathan’s head, permeating the text of the final chapter. He imagines coming back to New Jersey and announcing to his parents: ‘”We are getting married.” (…) “But who is she?” “Anne Frank”’ (GW 95). By announcing his marriage to
Anne Frank (and, later, her pregnancy), the ultimate symbol of Jewish suffering, he imagines, his parents would instantly forgive him for his story and realize their mistake: ‘Oh, how I have misunderstood my son. How mistaken we have been!’ (GW 96). Again, Nathan does with fiction what he cannot do in real life: gaining approval. Amy becomes his ‘shield against their charges of defection and betrayal and reckless, heinous informing! (…) Who dares to accuse of such unthinking crimes the husband of Anne Frank!’ (GW 103). In this metafictional universe created by Roth, fiction becomes a tool to try and control reality, to impose one’s own version of the facts upon reality. It becomes more than just a story; or at least, that is what the inventor of that particular fiction hopes to achieve. It seems to remind us of what Zuckerman urges his creator to remember in The Facts : that fiction is more powerful and allows its inventor to do more than when just recounting the mere facts.
This strategy of regaining control by means of fiction ultimately appears to be unsuccessful, though. Nathan finally talks to Amy, telling her what he has been thinking all that time: ‘you bear some resemblance to Anne Frank’ (GW 101). Despite acknowledging that she has heard this before, shy very dryly responds: ‘I’m afraid I’m not she’ (GW 102). Also, Nathan notices that where Anne
Frank would supposedly have had a concentration camp serial number on her arm, Amy’s arm shows no signs of a scar. He abruptly sees his own invention collapsing in front of his own eyes. He realizes that he cannot lift Anne Frank ‘out of her sacred book and make her a character in this life’ (GW 103).
He is confronted with the fact that, however powerful it may seem, his fictional answers to the
Wapters’ questionnaire is just fiction. In addition he realizes that his story, ‘far from acquitting me of their charges and restoring me to my cherished blamelessness, [it is] a fiction that of course would seem to them a desecration even more vile than the one they had read’ (GW 103).
The motive of transformation through fiction as a – failed – attempt to get a grip on reality, is summarized by Sander Gilman in Multiculturalism and the Jews : ‘Philip Roth, who claimed to be Vercauteren 39
most influenced by his reading of Franz Kafka, presents a world in which transformation is by definition a failure of will and identity’ (Gilman 126). This ‘failure of identity’ is in The Ghost Writer materialized in the shape of Nathan’s struggle with his Jewish background and family. What Gilman writes about Roth’s 1959 novel Goodbye, Colombus is largely applicable to The Ghost Writer : ‘art that gives the promise of some type of redemption, a redemption that Roth (and his readers) finds in his own texts. Redemption is to be found is art (…). It is in the act of writing that the “heart” lies’ (Gilman
130). Gilman argues that fiction in Goodbye, Colombus used employed in an attempt to deal with a
‘crisis of conformity’ which lies at the heart of the story. Again, the same claim can also be made about The Ghost Writer , even though Nathan ultimately does not actually achieve the desired redemption.
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4. Exit Ghost
4.1. Introductory remarks
Exit Ghost (2007) 3 continues Nathan’s story at the age of 71. Just as in The Ghost Writer ,
Nathan is the narrator of the entire novel. Exit Ghost bears, as we will see in the analysis below, many resemblances to the first Zuckerman novel. It is also, for example, highly metafictional, and contains many intertextual references. To begin with, there is the title. ‘Exit ghost’ is a stage reference which seems to be borrowed from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . It famously appears in the play’s first act, after the Ghost of Hamlet’s father has spoken to him from beyond the grave. The title of the last chapter, too, is an intertextual reference: Rash moments . In the novel, it is explained by Nathan himself that the words ‘rash moments’ have been borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s story The Shadown-Line – a story which is mentioned several times in this novel.
When leafing through Exit Ghost , it is immediately clear that the title is not the only reference to theatre. Throughout the novel, we can find five different passages which have been written in the form of a play, sometimes accompanied by stage directions.
Despite the fact that Jewish identity has almost completely disappeared as a theme in Exit
Ghost , we can find several similarities to The Ghost Writer when we look at how metafictional elements are used to emphasize certain motives – particularly the motive of fiction as a tool of empowerment. I will discuss the differences, similarities, and how Nathan has evolved as a character under the headings below.
Some issues related to Jewish identity are still touched upon in Exit Ghost , but they are very rare and no longer relevant in relation the use of metafiction, which my analysis focuses on. Thus, I will not devote a separate heading to discussing Jewishness in this novel.
3 Whenever referring to passages from Exit Ghost , I shall use the notation (EG + page number) Vercauteren 41
4.2. Metafiction and self-reflexivity in Exit Ghost
4.2.1. Overall
Similarly to The Ghost Writer , metafictional hints are spread throughout the whole of Exit Ghost, giving the entire novel more or less the same self-conscious feel. To begin with, as I have already mentioned, there are five passages – or scenes – which are written in the form of a theatre script. Each of them is a fictional conversation between Nathan and Jamie – the wife of the couple with whom
Nathan decides to swap homes for a year. From the moment he first meets the couple, Nathan becomes instantly fascinated by Jamie. His obsession with het is reflected in the title of the second chapter: Under the Spell (EG 68). She, in this respect, bears many resemblances to Amy Bellette in
The Ghost Writer ; Jamie as a character, too, has many of the characteristics of the ‘femme fatale’:
‘She had a huge pull on me, a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire’ (EG 66). ‘Ghost’ is, apart from a reference to the novel’s title, a reference to the fact that Nathan thinks of himself of a mere ghost or shadow of what he has once been. He has been left both incontinent and impotent by prostate surgery; sexual desire is for Nathan a relic of a time gone by. Still, ‘femme fatale’ Jamie manages to speak to whatever is left of that desire. The influence of Jamie on Nathan is very similar to that of Amy Bellette in The Ghost Writer : ‘There was nothing Jamie could do or say to which I did not register a disproportionate response (…). I was continuously unstable. There was no repose. I might have been gazing upon womanhood for the very first time. Or the last. All-enveloping either way’ (EG
122).
Just as he did with Amy, Nathan starts making guesses about her background, her history, her nature. He realizes, without telling her this, that he has seen her before, at a literary event ten years before, at which he was a speaker – his last ever public appearance. In the few conversations he has with her, he finds out that she heirs from a rich, conservative family in Texas, whose political views she loathes fiercely. He also finds out that she has been affected by the post-9/11 ‘fear of climate’, Vercauteren 42
which is one of the main reasons she want to leave New York city for a while and exchange houses with Nathan. But, overall, Nathan finds out very little about Jamie as a person; he does not know whether she really is what he imagines her to be and hardly ever gets to talk to her without her husband Billy being present. So, he does to her what he does with Amy Bellette in The Ghost Writer : he writes her. In the five theatre scenes that occur throughout the novel, he makes up private fictional conversations. Initially, he is more straightforward about it than he is in The Ghost Writer (where he only admits afterwards the Anne Frank story was a fiction): ‘When I returned to the hotel, I wrote this little scene:’ (EG 90). In the scene, he asks her what he did not manage to ask her in reality: ‘HE | You didn’t tell me that we met before’ (EG 90). Furthermore, he imagines himself flirting with her. After writing the scene, he finds himself being influenced by his own piece of fiction: ‘If ever there was something that didn’t need doing, it’s this. Now you are taken up with her totally’ (EG 93). Having these five plays-in-a-novel adds a metafictional level, touching upon questions of authorship (which I will discuss under the next heading). It also seems to be, just like the title, another similarity to
Hamlet , which also contains a play-within-a-play. This reminds us of what I have mentioned before about metafiction, namely that it has existed for hundreds of years. The second theatre scene that
Nathan writes, is more elaborate: it includes almost two pages of stage directions before the dialogue actually begins: the setting, the background music, and how the actors should play their roles: ‘To be performed with appropriate pauses, as each will sometimes stop to think before answering the other’s questions’ (EG 124). I will discuss these theater scenes in more detail under the heading of
‘authorship’.
Another similarity to The Ghost Writer is how Roth makes many of his characters feel like fiction characters, by dropping subtle hints here and there, hinting at their fictional nature. The theatre motive is obviously played out in the five abovementioned scenes, but also in the rest of the novel.
The characters, including Nathan himself, are depicted as playing a role. An example of this is provided in the form of Larry, Nathan’s closest neighbor in the rural retreat where has spent the past decade of his life. Larry has taken it upon himself to ‘help’ Nathan, inviting him to dinner every
Sunday and keeping him company. Very soon, Nathan feels that he has ‘fallen into the role that Larry Vercauteren 43
prescribed’ (EG 9). Larry does not only do this to Nathan but also to himself: as a child, he has written the scenario for the rest of his life, which he now follows meticulously. He is ‘an adult whose childhood biography had, by his own estimate, determined every choice he had made (…). An only child, (…) in a boy’s diary of “Things to Do,” he laid out a future for himself that he followed to the letter for the rest of his life’ (EG 5-6). Nathan continues to play a role when he gets back to Ney York, visiting a urologist for treatment of his incontinence. When he visits a restaurant where he used to eat very often, he feels as if he is pretending to be someone he is not, his past self: ‘I felt like an impostor, pretending to be the man Tony had once known and suddenly craving to be him. But (…) I had got rid of him’ (EG 27). Nathan also indirectly refers back to the bildungsroman which The Ghost Writer partly was, when he meets Jamie and he tries to restrain himself: ‘There was no need to learn anything more about Amy Bellette or Jamie Logan, nor was there any need to learn anything about myself. The drama of self-discovery was over’ (EG 42). This stands in opposition to The Ghost Writer , which showed many characteristics of being such a ‘drama of self-discovery’. It is this this drama, this constant pressure to play a role in the theatre of life, that is one of the main reasons why Nathan has been living such a reclusive existence: ‘All in all, being without the need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and disgust (…) I shed the tyranny of my intensity’ (EG 59).
When returning to New York, he experiences the behavior of the people around him, all talking on mobile phones, as a sort of tragicomedy: ‘For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must invariably have a dramatic effect’ (EG 64). When Nathan is following the 2004 elections at Jamie and
Billy’s house, Billy compares George Bush, too, to a character in a play, with another reference to
Shakespeare – ‘There’s a description in Macbeth that’s perfect for him’ (EG 72) – with ‘real life’ again being described as a tragedy, which is repeated later in the novel (EG 82). Nathan’s obsession with Jamie becomes a piece of epic literature, with him embarking ‘on the knightly quest for the Holy
Grail of her attention’ (EG 82-83). The day after the elections, the aforementioned political drama continues. Nathan, while watching the public display of theatricality, is now merely a spectator: ‘I did not intrude on the public drama; the public drama did not intrude on me’ (EG 95). His mind wanders back to the days when he, too, was still playing a role in this ‘public drama’: ‘I was familiar with the Vercauteren 44
theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire. (…) your only balm is to make theater of it. But
I was merely onlooker and outsider now’ (EG 95). Nathan is gradually pulled back into the play of reality, though. He meets up with Kliman, a young writer who is attempting to write a biography of
E.I. Lonoff. Nathan gets extremely agitated, and swears to Kliman that he will do everything he can to sabotage the biographer. He starts ‘playing a role’ again: ‘Back in the drama, back in the moment, back into the turmoil of events! (…) A resuscitating breath of the old contention luring me into the old role’ (EG 103). The acknowledgement of the fact that Kliman is (just like Jamie) forcing Nathan back into playing a role, is subtly anticipated by his question to Kliman: ‘You characterizing me now?’ (EG
102). Nathan later discusses his encounter with Kliman with Jamie, who is a college friend of
Kliman’s. Jamie points out how Nathan in turn also turns Kliman into a character, reducing him to a flat character: ‘You’re not describing him, Mr. Zuckerman – you’re burlesquing him’ (EG 116).
Nathan, after a few days in the city, revises his point about ‘not having to play a role’ anymore at his age: ‘I was learning at seventy-one what it is to be deranged. Proving that self-discovery wasn’t over after all. Proving that the drama that is associated usually with the young (…) can also startle and lay siege to the aged’ (EG 122-123). Nathan finds himself to be, contrary to what he initially thought, still firmly embedded into the drama of life. At the end of the final chapter, he decides to go back to his rural retreat, away from the stage, away from people, where it is not required to be ‘seeking a role in the drama of my times’ (EG 280).
Many more descriptions like these occur further throughout the novel; to list them all here would take several more pages. Standing by themselves, they would go unnoticed and not be very relevant. When they are put together, though, it becomes clear that they systematically return, and come to play an important role in structuring the narrative as a piece of fiction. We are, again, reminded of Shakespeare, having famously written the words ‘All the world’s a stage’ in his play As you like it . This idea, which has become one of Shakespeare’s most frequently quoted lines, seems to permeate the whole of Exit Ghost , maybe even more obviously than it did in The Ghost Writer .
Notably, the fictional world that Nathan creates within the novel with his five scenes, shows some of the same metafictional characteristics as Roth’s prose. The self-conscious feeling of ‘being in a Vercauteren 45
fiction’ penetrates even this fiction-within-a-fiction. We can first notice this when, during one of the fictional conversations with Jamie, ‘HE’ (Nathan) remarks: ‘The fact that I haven’t followed Bush’s lies shouldn’t make me an antagonist’ (EG 139). This suspicion is concerned in the final lines of the scene, when the ‘he’-character is back outside: ‘On the street, starting back on foot to the hotel, thinking of the scene just enacted – and if he feels himself to be an actor, coming from having rehearsed a scene from an unproduced play, (…)’ (EG 145). The relationship between ‘he’ and Nathan seems to be similar to the one between Nathan and Roth: the author writing a character, with the character himself slowly realizing that he is in fact part of a fiction. ‘Roth’ in the previous sentence could also be replaced by Nathan Zuckerman himself, who is, after all, the narrator. After writing this scene of ‘He and She’, Nathan wonders why he has actually composed the fictional dialogue: ‘this scene of dialogue unspoken (…) was an aid to nothing, and yet, just as on election night, it had seems terribly necessary to write the instant I came through the door’ (EG 147). He indicates that ‘she’, just like the conversations he has with her, is becoming more real to him than the actual Jamie, ‘the conversations she and I don’t have more affecting even than the conversations we do have, and the imaginary “She” vividly at the middle of her character as the actual “she” will never be’ (EG 147).
Finally, Nathan realizes, this fiction is becoming more significant to him than real life (which in itself feels like a fiction, anyway): ‘For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most’ (EG 147). Nathan’s definition of fiction as
‘amplification’ again closely resembles Roth’s take on literary creation: enriching the facts, making them more interesting, as a springboard into fiction. Notably, as the story progresses, Nathan’s account of what actually happened begins to resemble his ‘he and she’ scenes; he begins to mix up what has actually happened and what has not, and also his narrative begins to include coveted stage directions.
For instance, at the beginning of a passage in his hotel room: ‘The setting was a standard-issue Hilton hotel room, bland and drained of anything personal’ (EG 150).
Like The Ghost Writer , Exit Ghost is rife with intertextual references. The multitude of literary references seems to serve the same purpose as it does in the first Zuckerman novel: the feeling that we Vercauteren 46
are reading fiction is reinforced by showing how this novel is embedded within countless other works of fiction. I will, again, not go into detail on the exact significance of the particular works and authors which Roth refers too; this would take me too far and is not that relevant in the light of my analysis.
4.2.2. Nathan Zuckerman as an unreliable narrator
Comparable to The Ghost Writer , one of the purest instances of metafiction in Exit Ghost is a passage where Nathan addresses the reader, commenting on is his writing as he is going along. The passage in question, spanning four pages, is a clear identification by Nathan of himself as the narrator of the novel. Nathan in this passage admits to no longer having a reliable memory, which in influencing his writing. As a consequence, the reader is faced with the question: do we still have a reliable narrator in this novel? Nathan gives the answer: no. ‘I discovered that I had to labor every day against the threat of incoherence. (…) I couldn’t tell whether it was the reading of the completed manuscript that was itself marred by a disordered mind or whether my reading was accurate and the disordered mind was what was itself mirrored in the writing’ (EG 160). For readers with a better memory than the 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, it is not very difficult to figure out, towards the end of the novel, that it is mainly the latter. Nathan constantly forgets arrangements, appointments, goes to the wrong places, and in his account of ‘the facts’ he starts to incorporate elements from his works of fiction. When he arranges to meet Amy Bellette (who has contacted him in connection to Kliman’s project), he goes to the wrong restaurant. When Billy and Jamie speak to him about visiting his house, he does not remember having made any such arrangements. And so on.
The clearest example of Nathan’s no longer being able to distinguish facts from his own fiction, occurs during his last ‘real’ conversation with Jamie. In the ‘he and she’ plays prior to this passage, he has imagined Jamie and Kliman being lovers, and has confronted Jamie with this. In the play, she also confirms that this is true. But during Nathan’s last ‘real’ conversation with her, just before returning to his house in the mountains, he appears to think that the Jamie he has written in ‘he and she’ is the real Amy. He confuses the two until the readers come to a point where it is no longer Vercauteren 47
entirely clear whether what they are reading has really happened. The conversation is presented by
Nathan as ‘real’, but his unreliable memory might very well be playing tricks on him – or us. ‘You think I’m combative? Bristling Jamie? Aggressive Jamie’, she asks him. ‘I’m a combative bundle of nerves. You think Richard Kliman is my lover? (…) That I have nothing to do with him sexually should be abundantly clear by now. You’ve imagined a woman who isn’t me’ (EG 277). The incoherence for which Nathan said to be fearing, is very much present in this passage. Nathan has, in real life, never mentioned to Jamie anything about Kliman being her lover. He has also never told her anything about the Jamie that he has dreamed up in ‘he and she’. And yet, she confronts him with his own fiction, and the fact that all of it is untrue. Nathan, instead of using the Rothian method of using facts to spring into fiction, is writing the other way around: he is projecting his own fiction upon reality. Whether he does this consciously or it just a consequence of his mental deterioration, that is left for the reader to decide.
This unreliable narrator, the failing of Nathan to tell or write down a coherent story, is part of a wider, major motive in Exit Ghost : the loss of control. Nathan’s mental deterioration and the ensuing loss of literary control is just one of the many ways in which this is played out. As I will demonstrate further in the analysis (see heading 4.3.), literature and (meta)fiction play a significant role in trying to cope with this loss of control.
4.2.3. Authorship
‘All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling. I looked around and though, this is how I will live’, Nathan thinks to himself in
The Ghost Writer during his visit to Lonoff’s extremely secluded house in the Berkshires (GW 4). The young Nathan admires how Lonoff has only his literature to live for, and nothing else. The opening lines of Exit Ghost suggest that Nathan , as an aged man, has finally adopted the same lifestyle. The first page of Exit Ghost provides an instant flashback to The Ghost Writer : ‘I hadn’t been in New York in eleven years. (…) I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven Vercauteren 48
years (…). I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed’ (EG 1). All that Nathan does is writing and reading, living in the same region where he visited Lonoff almost fifty years earlier.
Authorship only really comes forward as a theme after Nathan arrives in New York, though.
He finds himself being thrown back into the past. At the hospital, he unexpectedly encounters Amy
Bellette. She is hardly recognizable, looks very old, sick and weak, but the voice gives her identity away, being ‘as distinctive as the accent, especially as it wasn’t a voice one would associate with her wraithlike looks but a young person’s voice, incongruously girlish and innocent of hardship’ (EG 17).
Seeing this pathetic reconstitution of Amy Bellette’, Nathan thinks, her existence ‘had obviously gone very wrong’ (EG 18). He follows her, but does not speak to her. Inspired by this encounter, he promptly finds a book shop where he buys E.I. Lonoff’s six volumes of short stories. Retracing the past, Nathan starts wondering: why has Lonoff not written anything during the past five years of his life, after being left by Lonoff and going to live with Amy? ‘What was the story of those five years?
(…) Amy Bellette would know – she was what had happened to him. If somewhere there was the manuscript of a Lonoff novel, finished or unfinished, she’d know about that, too’ ( EG 21-22). It is through the mystery surrounding this supposed novel that authorship really kicks in as a theme. When
Kliman, a young author, contacts Nathan, he claims to know that Lonoff has during those five years been writing a novel. In this novel, Kliman says, he reveals a great secret. After Nathan approaches
Jamie about this, she reveals to him that this secret involves an incestuous relationship between Lonoff and a younger half-sister, during their teenage years. Nathan decides to do everything in his power to stop Kliman from writing his biography and revealing this supposed secret. The whole case becomes the cause of a question that keeps returning throughout the rest of the novel: should an author’s personal biography ever be drawn into any discussion about his works of art?
Nathan, despite his own wondering what has happened to Lonoff during those five years, and despite his guessing about the link between Lonoff’s life and work in The Ghost Writer (crf. supra), certainly seems strongly opposed to the idea. So again, his attitude towards this matter seems slightly Vercauteren 49
ambiguous. He finds himself partly agreeing with Amy Bellette, who is equally concerned about
Lonoff’s heritage: ‘Somebody has to protect Manny [her nickname for Lonoff] from this man. Any biography he writes will be the resentment of an inferior person writ large. The Nietzschean prophecy come true: art killed by resentment’ (EG 177). In a letter which to The New York Times , which she shows to Nathan, Amy voices her concerns, warning against these kinds of ‘ideological simplifications and biographical reductivism’ (EG 182). Amy denounces modern day cultural journalism as ‘tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in “the arts”.’ It is no longer concerned with literature as a serious influence on how life is perceived, but only with questions such as ‘What transgressions has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher or pert?’ (EG 182). These ‘phony ethical issues’, as she calls them, are taken more seriously than the fiction ‘because they’re easier for your cultural journalists to talk about than the fiction’ (EG 183). Any interest in depicting reality is inexistent, Amy claims. Nathan’s stance remains ambiguous: ‘Had I read these pages without knowing Amy, I would have taken the argument at face value and received the outburst not without some sympathy’ (EG
183). But instead, going against the objections raised in Amy’s letters (and even against his own rejections towards digging into a writer’s biography), he keeps wondering if the incest story is true.
‘Could it be that “half-sister” didn’t appear in the list of those transgressed against because she was not fully aware of what was driving her indignation, or was it because she knew very well and monitored her own composition, line by line, to be certain “half-sister” wasn’t furtively smuggled in by the tumor?’ Nathan asks himself. The fact these reflections on authorship and biography versus fiction happen on different narrative levels, makes it even harder to determine what exactly Nathan’s, en certainly Roth’s, views are. This playing with metafiction and obscuring of boundaries appears to be one of the main similarities between The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost .
The issue is discussed further between Nathan and Kliman during their next meeting. Nathan again voices his objection to reading Lonoff’s unfinished novel as an autobiography: ‘There is no
Lonoff and no Frieda in a novel’ – in other words, it is all fiction (EG 267). ‘Spare me the lecture about the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality. (…) This is a tormented confession disguised Vercauteren 50
as a novel’, Kliman reacts. This is an interesting choice of words, because as we have seen, no line is ever impenetrable in the universe of Roth’s fiction. There is no absolute division between fiction and reality; Roth constantly blurs the boundaries. This is partially reflected in Nathan’s aforementioned ambiguous attitude towards Lonoff. This ambiguity is once more reasserted after his last encounter with Kliman: ‘However much the man [Lonoff] had fascinated me (…) I wanted to be rid of the manuscript and completely free of Richard Kliman and everything about him that I could not assess’
(EG 274). He cannot control Kliman, though, which brings us to one of the central motives of the novel: the loss of control.
4.3. Fiction as a strategy to regain control
What is the significance or relevance of all these metafictional strategies? What does Roth, or
Nathan Zuckerman, try to achieve by using different narrative levels, blurring into each other? As we have seen, in The Ghost Writer it was mainly a strategy to deal with Nathan’s Jewish background: he uses fiction to regain the approval of his parents and of the Jewish community. He cannot obtain this goal in real life, so he tries to achieve redemption through writing. This is where one of the main differences lies between the two novels. In Exit Ghost , the theme of Jewishness no longer plays a major role. Fiction is still utilized for a similar purpose, though: to regain control over things that cannot be controlled in real life.
The issue of ‘losing control’ is played out throughout the novel in several ways. Initially, it is symbolized by the physical decay of Nathan Zuckerman and, more specifically, his loss of bladder control. His impotence is the reason why he returns to New York in the first place, hoping a urologist can provide a solution. At the urology department of the Mount Sinai Hospital, Nathan is assured by the urologist that with the right treatment, he will have a chance of ‘exerting somewhat more control over [his] urine flow than an infant’ (EG 3). He initially gains courage, already imagining himself
‘swimming in the college pool at the end of the day, carefree and without fear of embarrassment’ (EG
16). Eventually, the treatment fails, though, and Nathan returns to his home in the Berkshires having Vercauteren 51
given up all hope of being cured. This part of the story line runs parallel with Nathan’s loss of control over his own decisions, actions, over other people, and, maybe most significantly, his memory and writing. The fact that he is losing control over his own decisions is illustrated by the rash decisions which he keeps making time after time. While sitting in the urologist’s waiting room, Nathan thinks:
‘Entirely beside the point. Turn around and go home’ (EG 3). But he stays. Upon seeing Billy and
Jamie’s advertisement for their proposed home exchange, he instinctively calls them, without knowing why: ‘I did what I did – that’s all one knows looking backward’. He goes through with it, despite
‘knowing very well that I shouldn’t be doing it’ (EG 32). Nathan continues undertaking similar rash actions throughout the novel, seemingly ignoring all rational thought. When, in the final chapter, he cannot resist the urge of calling Jamie, he knows that it is not a sensible decision: ‘I should have hung up. I shouldn’t have phoned. I shouldn’t do this and I shouldn’t have done that and now I should do the other thing! But I had no control over my thoughts once I was accosted by the stimulus of her voice’ (EG 276). He admits to having truly lost the capability to influence his own situation, but still refuses to succumb to this faith: ‘Instead of proceeding to extricate myself from the disaster of believing I could alter my condition (…) I did the opposite, my thoughts rooted not in what I was but in what I was not: the thoughts of one still capable of making an onslaught on life’ (EG 276). Nathan also feels, as I have mentioned powerless in front of the people he encounters during his days in New
York. He cannot fully comprehend Jamie, he cannot say to her what he wants to say, and he cannot stop Kliman from writing Lonoff’s biography. When talking to Kliman, he feels that he is standing opposite ‘an unpredictable force bent on dominating me’, realizing that ‘I was not his equal, let alone his superior, and that he was beyond my control’ (EG 253). All of this goes hand in hand with
Nathan’s fading memory. The latter poses a critical concern to the aged writer, as his ‘memory had been a strong resource since earliest childhood’ (EG 193). His deteriorating memory causes him to lose control even of his writing, which, as we noted before, makes him unreliable as a narrator. As I pointed out earlier, Nathan acknowledges this in the passage where he addresses the reader to comment upon himself as the supposed author of this novel: ‘That is why, uncharacteristically, I’m working here as rapidly as I can while I can (…). Nothing is certain any longer except that this will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences and paragraphs Vercauteren 52
of a book’ EG 159). Furthermore, he admits that he is struggling with the aforementioned ‘threat of incoherency’.
Throughout the entire novel, Nathan appears to seek refuge in the world of his imagination, making up one fiction after another. Writing is his weapon of choice to fight his lack of control over just about anything or anyone he encounters. What he cannot say to Jamie in real life, he says to her in his made-up acts of ‘He and She’. He writes her, creating his own version of her. Lonoff, too, becomes the subject of Nathan’s imagination. Refusing to accept his literary idol’s ‘scandalous secret’ – the accusations of incest, Nathan uses his imagination to absolve Lonoff. ‘I cannot write Manny’s biography’, he says to Amy, ‘but I can write the biography of that book. So can you. And that’s what we’re going to do’ (EG 200). He decides – or decides to make himself believe – that Lonoff must have borrowed the story from the life of another famous author from the Berkshires: ‘The source of
Manny’s tale of incest wasn’t his life. It couldn’t have been. The source was the life of Nathanial
Hawthorne’ (EG 199). This fiction, Nathan decides, must replace reality: ‘I’ll make this reality mine,
Amy’s, Kliman’s, everyone’s. And for the next hour I proceeded to, effulgently arguing its logic until
I had come to believe it myself’ (EG 201). Making himself and Kliman believe this fiction is essential to Nathan: ‘I had to master Kliman, of nothing else. Mastering him was my last obligation to literature’ (EG 252). Finally, identifying himself not only as the narrator but also as the author of the novel in the aforementioned passage, Nathan indicates that writing has now become a way of coping with his failing memory. This could be one of the reasons why, at the end of the novel, he starts mixing up his own fiction with ‘the facts’: he falls back on his own writings to remember what has happened (EG 161).
Eventually, Nathan fails to impose his will upon reality and to regain control over his life. His attempt to find redemption in fiction turns out to have been in vain, just like his Anne Frank fantasy in
The Ghost Writer . Frustrated at this realization, Nathan thinks to himself: ‘Why must strength’s abatement be so quick and cruel? Oh, to wish what is into what is not, other than on the page!’ (EG,
273), consequently acknowledging his inability to exert control over anything other than his own Vercauteren 53
fiction. He then reasserts the failed surgery as a symbol for his own failed attempts, concluding that
‘[t]he urologist could change nothing, as I could change nothing’ (EG 275). He gives up on his quest to master Kliman, as he no longer has ‘the fortitude (…) for any further interventions. (…) I may have accumulated over four decades the prestige of writing book after book, but I had reached the end of my effectiveness nonetheless’ (EG 275). The Jamie that he has dreamed up is relentlessly shattered by
Jamie herself: ‘You’ve imagined a woman who isn’t me’ (EG 277) – a statement which is reminiscent of Amy’s ‘I am afraid I’m not she’ in The Ghost Writer . Nathan realizes that his days in the city have consisted mainly out of living his own fiction: ‘All that happened is that things almost happened, yet I returned as though from some massive happening’ (EG 279). Nathan leaves, feeling humbled by the entire experience. The last thing he does, though, despite his disillusion and decision to give up, is writing one last scene of ‘He and She’, a final attempt at taking matters into his own hands and giving the story an ending of his own. The scene serves as a replacement for the actual phone call he has just had with Jamie, in which she has pointed out the foolishness of his idealized fiction about her. In the ending scene, he imagines revealing his obsession to her: ‘I adore you’, three times over (EG 290).
Even in this scene, though, he fails to keep up the pretense. You have ‘entered into a world of unreasonable expectations’, ‘she’ tells him. ‘The only other possible motive you could have to think you adore me is that at the moment you’re a writer without a book. Start another book and get into it and we’ll see how much you adore Jamie Logan’ (EG 291).
( but it all fails and he gives up oa p 253 en 265-275 – in de conclusive aangeven hoe de aanvankelijke ironie die nog aanwezig was in GW omgeslagen is in aanvankelijk frantic despair en uiteindelijk disillusioned surrender )
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5. Conclusion
Exit Ghost seems still to bear many of the same characteristics as The Ghost Writer . Both novels are extremely self-conscious works of fiction, with Roth using a web of metafictional references and techniques to make the reader reflect upon their fictional nature. Both in The Ghost Writer and in Exit
Ghost, many of these references are borrowed from theatre, particularly in the latter novel. The characters all seem to be ‘playing a role’. Some of these ‘roles’ in Exit Ghost bear a significant resemblance to those in The Ghost Writer (Amy and Jamie as the femme fatale , Lonoff and Nathan as the reclusive writer, Nathan and Kliman as the budding, ambitious young writer). In both works, this metafictional feel is partially achieved by an abundance of intertextual references, making them feel not only like a fiction, but a fiction grafted upon other works of fiction. And, finally, fiction – and writing – is in both novels used by Nathan as a way to achieve that which he cannot achieve in real life
– an idea which Roth’s alter ego also expresses in The Facts : with fiction, you can do more than with mere facts. Also, in both novels, Nathan ultimately fails to achieve these goals even through fiction.
There are some considerable differences in how this motive is played out in both of the novels, though. The most significant evolution is the disappearance in Exit Ghost of Jewishness as a major theme. In The Ghost Writer, Nathan’s reasons for seeking redemption in fiction and imaginative creation are all related to his struggling with issues connected to his Jewish identity. Fiction is, among other things, a way of breaking out of the confinement which he experiences as a result of his Jewish background. Through his fictionalization of Amy Bellette as Anne Frank, he searches justification for portraying Jews as he does, and he attempts to prove to his parents and to the Jewish community that he is very much the opposite of an anti-Semitic author; why else would he marry Anne Frank, the penultimate symbol of Jewish suffering? In Exit Ghost , on the other hand, Jewishness is only mentioned occasionally, not playing any significant role in the novel. Trying to impose and project his own fictions upon reality has become an issue of empowerment rather than playing any role in coping with his Jewish identity. This attempt at achieving empowerment is the consequence of the aged
Nathan’s feeling that he is losing control – over his body, his memory, and his entire world. In both Vercauteren 55
novels the attempt at imposing fiction upon reality fails, but this failure is also handled in different ways. The tone at the end of Exit Ghost is one of despair and disillusion, rather than the ironic, even slightly comical atmosphere which permeates the last pages of The Ghost Writer . Philip Roth’s renowned habit of adding an ironic undertone to his fiction, does not appear to apply to Exit Ghost .
Whereas in The Ghost Writer we can see, despite his failure, Nathan’s literary and cultural awareness evolving – making it a sort of ironically underscored Bildungsroman – Exit Ghost does not portray any such evolution. As Nathan puts it, ‘all that happened is that things almost happened’ (EG
279). The only evolution Nathan seems to go through in this last Zuckerman novel, is going in circles; he regains hope of once again being able to ‘assume a role’ in the drama of real life, but ultimately gives up and goes back to his house in the mountains, presumably to never write another novel
(describing this one as probably the last one he will ever be able to write). If fiction was ever a way to gain new insights into reality, as Amy suggests in her letter to The Times , it is no longer that to
Nathan; as the narrator of this novel, he no longer manages to distinguish fact from fiction, and ultimately loses control even over his own fiction.
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