Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Blog only! How does Roth maintain the reader's sympathetic identification with Nathan, despite his faults?

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Chris Groeger said...

The Ghost of Zuckerman Future

Nathan is not a likeable young man, nor do I think Roth means him to be. Neither is Lanoff, nor really anyone in the story, although they are often funny. What redeems them for the reader, I would argue, is the warmth and humanity of the older Nathan, who is, after all, the one telling this story, more than 20 years after the fact, something we find out in the very first sentence. Young Nathan, in a misguided search for a father figure and a mentor for his writing, finds a whole host of possibilities: Lonoff's paralysis (even in his writings, his heroes do not "act at all"); Abravanel (the heart-throb, jet-setting, larger-than-life figure); and Anne Frank (the symbol of Jewish historical suffering). But young Nathan doesn't need a mentor. What he needs is to grow up.

Most of the reading group understood the chapter on Amy Bellette/Anne Frank as the young writer Nathan's fantasy, but I totally disagree. For one, Nathan, as he is presented to us in the first chapters is shallow, immature, hormonally-driven, consumed by the idea of future fame, and with a serious Oedipal issue with fathers and authority. For that reason I consider him completely incapable of coming up with the psychological depth and insights of the Anne Frank character. He also is distressingly unable to understand the objections of his family and Judge Wapter to his story, and their emphasis on his responsibility as a writer to take the possible harmful consequences of his writing into account. In contemptuously dismissing those claims, and elevating his freedom of expression above any possible responsibility towards others, he further demonstrates his immaturity. Granted, Roth also makes Judge Wapter a pompous and silly figure, but he (Roth) doesn't take away the power of Wapter's argument about the danger of words and stereotypes ten years after the Holocaust.

If the chapter on Amy/Anne is not the fantasy of young Nathan staying overnight at Lonoff's, then what is it? Clearly, the story wants us to believe that Nathan did have a fantasy about Amy being Anne Frank, since the next morning he is asking her about Anne, saying she looks like her, and checking her arm for a scar where the concentration camp number would have been. But, knowing young Nathan, we can assume his fantasy would have much to do with sex and revenge against his nemesis, Judge Wapter. What we get instead is a moving and profound insight into the mind of a young Holocaust victim trying to come to terms with her suffering and with her role as a writer, torn between being the saintly voice of her people and having a life of her own. There are other clues that signal young Nathan is not the author of the Amy/Anne chapter: long quotations from Anne Frank's diary appear in the text. Nathan tells his mother that he had read the book, like everyone else, but it's doesn't seem likely that he memorized it. Also, the level of detail about Amy/Anne and Lonoff is hard to accept as springing fully formed from young Nathan's musings in Lonoff's study. Amy phones from the Biltmore Hotel in New York; the Dutch title of Anne's book is mentioned; details of the concentration camps are mentioned; her clothes are described in detail; Lonoff's regular invitations to Dr. Boyce's barbecues are mentioned. There are also specific insights that Anne has which Nathan probably isn't capable of: the idea of sacrifice not to the cause of writing, but for her group, or responsibility towards the dead. Awareness of her audience and how they might react to her story (she struggles with the idea of making her character seem more Jewish or less Jewish, assuming that many non-Jewish readers will not identify with strongly Jewish characters). Her expression of a profound sense of anger and need for revenge for the suffering she has gone through, something Nathan couldn't begin to understand. He has hardly suffered, but rather mainly made others suffer, including his girlfriend and his family, with only the tiniest hints of a conscience.

So who rewrote Nathan's fantasy? I would argue that it is the ghostwriter we have been acquainted with all along: the older and wiser Nathan, showing us the writer young Nathan was to become when he matured. Given that Philip Roth wrote The Ghost Writer 20 years after Goodbye Columbus, which was greatly criticized for reinforcing stereotypes about Jews and lead to Roth being called an anti-Semite, this story is clearly partly autobiography as well as a reflection of Roth on his early writings. Clearly in the story it is the older Nathan Zuckerman writing about his younger self -- my claim is that Philip Roth told the story that way in part to make it clear that the older Nathan was a ghostwriter, changing the nature of his past for the reader, and raising questions about the writing process itself, or even the way we reshape our identities in the retelling of our lives.

Does it matter who (re)wrote Nathan's fantasy? I think it does. For one, it might change our interpretation of many of the characters. Nathan's parents and Judge Wapter, while perhaps exaggerated, are warm and concerned people, who understand something about the power of words that young Nathan does not. Lonoff, far from being a possible mentor, is more of a cautionary tale of what awaits Nathan if he continues to pursue the path of writing for the sake of writing. Indeed, Lonoff himself warns Nathan: "If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you'll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years." None of the models of writers and writing perhaps really make sense to Nathan, and that may be the point --he must find his own way, and that way involves recognizing the humanity of his characters and, yes, some responsibility of the writer towards others. In The Prague Orgy, the epilogue to the Zuckerman novels, Nathan ends up in Czechoslovakia in the late 70s, still under Communist rule, and comes to understand something of the situation of writers in totalitarian countries while, at the same time, he is trying to rescue a set of manuscripts of a Jewish writer murdered by the Nazis.

Finally, besides the "ghostwriter" who recreates his own past to make it into fiction which can speak more deeply and meaningfully to his readers, I would make a plea for another kind of ghostwriter--namely the reader him- or herself, who shapes and reshapes the raw material of the text in their mind until it becomes "theirs," matching their own experiences and insights. Since this story is clearly about writers and writing, maybe it is also about what I imagine to be the biggest ghost of all from the writer's point of view -- all those anonymous ghostly readers who, sight unseen, will judge whether the writer's story is also, in some sense, their story, and thus determine whether it lives on forever or is never heard of again.

March 31, 2009 at 12:31 PM

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