Here is a short excerpt from
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST, PORTRAIT OF A SON AND BROTHER :
SOME ASPECTS OF PHILIP ROTH'S ZUCKERMAN BOUND
by
Viviane SERFATY
(1989)
Introduction
Originally published separately, the three novels now joined under the title Zuckerman Bound form a discontinuous whole which might loosely be characterized as an account of Nathan Zuckerman's progress, from budding artist in The Ghost Writer to literary eminence in The Prague Orgy, the epilogue.
The adventure inherent to the artist's struggle for his identity and specificity is closely interwoven with the creative adventure of the writing process itself and no less importantly, of its breakdown. Philip Roth may thus be said to have given dramatic form to a cluster of perceptions concerning the making of fiction and the ambiguously reciprocal relationship between reality and art which, taken together, amount to the outline of a theory of fiction.
The second large cluster of themes concerns Jewishness and within that, having parents, being a son, a brother, husband, lover. The articulation of these relationships, the obsessive dwelling upon their inner workings make of Philip Roth one of the most perceptive, accurate, luminous, enlightening and finally one of the most pleasurable of the modern writers who have delved into family life.
The Ghost Writer
A staple of fiction and poetry ever since the advent of Romanticism, the artist-hero's
fumbling beginnings, growth and ultimate development are ordered in a familiar pattern.
The individual private creative act as well as a discussion of aesthetic concepts are the
climactic events, as in as in James Joyce's Portrait , the mythic landmark for this
whole category of novels. Hardly a stranger to that tradition, Philip Roth self-consciously
appropriates the well-known Portrait form as a literary device to bring about either
the shock of surprise or the pleasure of recognition. Thus Chapter 2 of The Ghost Writer
is entitled " Nathan Dedalus " ; similarly, Stephen's famous epiphany is echoed early on in
the novel : " a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul's smithy " (46 ; italics in
the text). The amused identification is here compounded by the shock of the flaming formula
being applied to a sexual characterization of the artist (" a man with autumn in his heart and
spectacles on his nose . . . and blood in his penis " - 46), so blatantly removed from Stephen's
Thomistic aesthetics.
The whole of The Ghost Writer thus evolves its own structure from the Portrait framework, itself
part of the Bildungsroman or novel of education - essentially a rite of passage, a painful
progress towards the young artist's aethetic and social identity. That this framework is taken
ironically is firmly established in the novel's opening lines :
I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first stories, and like many a
Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman. (7)
The formal parody creates a distance between artist and text, between reader and text
designed to prompt cautiousness in the interpretation of the novel's ethos : is the hero's
education to be taken at face value or is it to be a farcical rendition of the whole process ?
No clues are given at this point ; the only thing made clear by the gentle fun poked at Nathan
Zuckerman is that his conception of himself as a Bildungsroman hero is self-deluded and
sentimental.
What remains of the novel of education is primarily a pattern of aesthetic growth entailing
the rejection of outgrown models of artistic and social bahavior. For Stephen Dedalus as well as
for Nathan Zuckerman, four climactic or, in Joyce-an terminology, epiphanic events highlight
the hero's progress. One is the discussion of Lonoff's writing practice, reminiscent of Stephen's
conversation with the dean ; the second is Hope Lonoff's outburst at dinner, watched in awe by
Nathan, echoing Dante's tantrum during the Christmas dinner, silently witnessed by Stephen.
The third is the complex web of incidents whereby Nathan fantasizes about falling in love with
Amy Bellette, which may be indirectly related to Stephen's infatuation with E.C., especially
as both sets of events lead up directly to in one case, the writing of " Femme Fatale " and in
the other, the writing of the villanelle.
Linda Hutcheon suggests that whenever a well-established form is parodied, it is a strong
indication that the genre is spent or undergoing transformation. Just as Don Quixote made fun
of chivalry romances or Smollet's Peregrine Pickle mocked picaresque novels, The Ghost
Writer rails at the Bildungsroman, which has for so long been a staple of modernist fiction
that it can hardly be relevant now, at least in its traditional guise. Through heavy use of
allusions to previous literary works, Philip Roth warns us about his ironical intentions and
at the same time compounds our awareness of a variety of elements which would otherwise have
had to be painstakingly delineated. The various texts quoted arouse, in Julia Kristeva's words,
" the infinite memory of significance -- the swarming plural significance " .
Far from being destructive, then, parody is dynamic : based on a deep knowledge of as well
as unmistakable affection for the very form being parodied, it keeps the Bildungsroman themes
from becoming stale, oversimplified convention : the irony makes it necessary to re-assess their
meaning and their function, resulting in a renewed though subtly modified appropriation of their
significance. As shown by Patrick O'Donnell , the complex intertextuality of The Ghost
Writer subverts the literalness and authority of the texts quoted within the novel ;
the ironic quotations of these texts thus provide protection to the beginning writer, and enable
him to exist despite the awesome stature of his predecessors, those gigantic, father-like figures
named Henry James, Chekhov, Kafka.
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