Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (2007) reprises the antagonism and confusion that has existed in earlier Zuckerman novels between disinterested notions of authorial self-effacement and forms of autobiographical self-exposure. By examining how this ongoing struggle continues apace in Exit Ghost, I wish to argue that this novel illuminates the frailties of Nathan Zuckerman's conceited belief that he has managed, in later life, to move beyond the personal and professional vagaries associated with “the agitation of the autobiographical.”Footnote 1 The tensions between notions of aesthetic autonomy and experiences of fictional self-exposure that have consistently troubled Zuckerman in the novels in which he appears obviously draw our attention back upon Roth himself as the author of these texts. Zuckerman's failed efforts to remove his personal life from the scene of writing can be looked upon as evidence of Roth's own inability to write at a distance from issues of autobiographical origin. I want to explore how this failure to extricate the authorial self from the body of fiction finds metaphorical expression in Zuckerman's sexual impotence in Exit Ghost.
As I will elaborate, the desire to find in fiction “the means to imaginative release”Footnote 2 from the self has been represented in terms of a yearning for libidinal mastery in the earlier Zuckerman texts, and throughout Roth's ouevre. The inevitable failure of the author to overcome this contradictory impulse to erotically will the self out of the existence of the literary work, by contrast, has found expression in emasculating experiences of impotence and vulnerability. Zuckerman's impotence in later life, I will therefore contend, has not brought about his complete withdrawal from “the sexual caterwaul” that had so dominated his earlier years,Footnote 3 but instead continues to register his struggling and, ultimately, thwarted desire to move his fiction beyond the partially formative experiences of the self and its social origins.
Finally, I want to examine how Exit Ghost acts as a useful appendage to Roth's “American trilogy” inasmuch as the heightened emotional tensions between Zuckerman's private life and his writing in this novel are contextualized by various moments of crisis in the wider national experience since mid-century. I will argue that the Bush/Kerry presidential election that acts as the backdrop to this particular novel signals yet one more, and perhaps final, catastrophe in a series of repeating traumas that have inflicted untold grief and anguish on Zuckerman's once robust sense of American liberal idealism. What Roth's novel shows us, as I will make clear, is that such traumatic experiences have left Zuckerman with a despairingly fractured sense of the self and its wider social milieu, further compounding his failed struggle to write in a fashion that is disinterestedly removed from the personal and historical context of authorship.
Critical Issues
Zuckerman's failed attempt to elude “not just the great world but the present moment” in the later novels is directly related to the problems of the inescapable self that were so evident in earlier texts.Footnote 4 Many Roth scholars have notably neglected this sense of how the author is, paradoxically, drawn back to the personal and historical contexts from which he seeks aesthetic deliverance. For example, I wish to argue that the contradictory sense of being both inside and outside “real” historical life in the last four Zuckerman novels – an experience that finds further resonance in young Philip's frustrated efforts to take flight from history in The Plot Against America – challenges Ross Posnock's assertion that Roth's “flaunted insouciance about the sanctity of the real” (xvi) has meant that he has remained either indifferent or dismissive towards the influence of broader contextual issues upon his fiction. Stressing Roth's straightforward alignment with New Criticism, Posnock argues that “Roth embraces a modernism of Promethean heroism,” in which the primacy of the “individual author” over the deterministic bent of literary historicism and fixed notions of cultural identity prevails.Footnote 5 Posnock is an important forerunner among those critics who argue that aesthetic values completely supersede and make redundant the significance of any aspects of historical content in Roth's later work.Footnote 6 However, as my argument will suggest, the New Critical disdain for life's hardened “facts” that is expressed repeatedly by Roth's author–protagonists marks only one side of his highly divided aesthetic. Inasmuch as his efforts to use fiction as a means of escaping issues of origin and the “real” are partially thwarted for Zuckerman throughout his career, he is ultimately returned in Exit Ghost to the turbulent mixture of personal strife and national malaise from which he has sought reprieve in later life.
Quite contrary to Posnock and others, some scholars have indeed drawn attention to the significance of historical events in Roth's later novels. Anthony Hutchinson's argument finds striking correspondence with my own interest in the liberal political context of these works. He makes the point that Roth's American trilogy explores the “ ‘betrayal’ … of a specific midcentury expression of American liberalism.”Footnote 7 Hutchinson sees these novels as fully supportive of a notion of origins that he describes under the rubric of “paleoliberalism,”Footnote 8 and which he locates in the voice of certain authoritative, paternal figures within the American trilogy. However, it is plain that such issues of paternity and origin find a greater degree of sundering and ambivalence throughout Roth's body of work than Hutchinson allows. Furthermore, this problem of origins and fatherhood is, for Roth, linked inextricably to questions of the self and of literary authorship. Such a key issue in Roth's writing is sidelined by Hutchinson, who fails to adequately treat the relationship of Zuckerman's highly complex aesthetic position with the broader themes of liberal politics within the American trilogy. Elsewhere, Aimee Pozorski's examination of history and trauma in Exit Ghost and other late Roth novels intersects with some of my own interest in how he treats a sense of modern liberal despair in America. However, Pozorski is more interested in the author's treatment of founding national myths than in their twentieth-century expression within Rooseveltian idealism. Furthermore, Pozorski follows Hutchinson in the manner in which she forsakes issues of literary style and the authorial subject in Roth for more grandiose matters of history: “My work … turn[s] away from self-reflective questions of the author and toward a more considered study of the role of traumatic history in Roth's work.”Footnote 9 As I have already begun to set forth, my own analysis of Exit Ghost seeks to achieve a greater balance of discussion between issues of historical content and literary style than such commentators have provided.
Zuckerman: a “biography”
Roth's body of work has provided numerous author – and narrator – protagonists who seek to dismantle and imaginatively reinvent the world that has been handed to them. As Roth himself remarks, fiction serves in this manner as a means “to wield the whip over the facts sufficiently to make real life amazing.”Footnote 10 In the case of Zuckerman, for example, writing involves an “obsessive reinvention of the real” by which he seeks to “sweep away the limits on life.”Footnote 11 Perhaps most pointed of all Zuckerman's conflicts with what passes as “real” has been the manner in which he has sought to overcome, through his art, the stifling restrictions that inherited notions of familial origin and ethnic loyalty have placed upon him as the son of second-generation American Jews. This aesthetic resistance to restrictive notions of autobiographical origin and extra-literary “fact” reflects a certain commitment, shared by both Zuckerman and Roth, to New Critical principles of literary formalism. Put simply, New Critical thought argued that textual meaning derives its origin solely from the internal aesthetic arrangements of literary form, and is not in any way shaped by outside influences of historical or authorial context.Footnote 12 Zuckerman's decision in The Ghost Writer to forsake his paternal origins by prioritizing his allegiance to great literary figures such as Joyce and Flaubert marks a useful example of this formalist dedication to the merits of aesthetic tradition and form over the external influences of biographical or social experience. Zuckerman constantly reiterates his commitment to these aesthetic principles elsewhere. For example, in The Counterlife he boasts of his avowed decision to locate himself among a coterie of “superior artist[s]” who “are able to loosen and make ambiguous their connection to real life through the imposition of talent.”Footnote 13 Roth himself mentions the abiding influence of his own induction into this New Critical way of thinking in The Facts: “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.”Footnote 14
However, this much-vaunted notion of literary fiction as a form in which “what-could-be … always [has] to top what-is” also encounters serious complications in the case of Zuckerman.Footnote 15 Throughout his career, Zuckerman has been constantly faced by impeaching declarations against his position as author over claims that he has betrayed or distorted “real” life for the purposes of fiction. For instance, in The Counterlife, Zuckerman's brother Henry accuses him of being “a pure cannibal” in his insatiable desire to appropriate as material and then contort into fiction the intimate details of other people's private existence: “Everyone buried and mummified in that verbal lava, including finally himself – nothing straightforward, unvarnished, directly alive, nothing faced up to as it actually is.”Footnote 16 Zuckerman is made to continually reassert his highly speculative notion of fiction as a means of exploring “what-could-be” against such assured notions of what life “actually is.” Yet in constantly having to wage this argument about the power of literature to expand outward from actual life and transform it into something new, Zuckerman's writing is ironically drawn back to the moral and aesthetic implications of its relationship to the “facts.” At the heart of Zuckerman's writing, then, lies a nuanced and somewhat circuitous conflict, in which he has had to continually defend his artistic prerogative to modulate the actual experiences of both himself and others against countervailing accusations that he is committing “a ridiculous travesty of the facts.”Footnote 17
Such a self-introverted conflict within Roth's writing is pivotal to Zuckerman's frustrated struggles to liberate himself and his art from his autobiographical circumstances. Although he sees his commitment to formalist principles of literature as an impersonal “winnowing out of the babyish, preening, insatiable self,”Footnote 18 Zuckerman's writing is inexorably forced back inwards upon the contested “facts” of his personal life. In Zuckerman Unbound, for instance, we witness how his position as literary author faces various challenges from the proliferation of competing stories that are produced about both himself and his work by the responses of a mass readership to his bestseller, Carnovsky. Thrust instantly into the role of celebrity by the salacious sexual content of this particular novel – a thinly veiled reference to Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint – Zuckerman is bombarded by the steadfast claims and ribald suggestions of a public determined to confuse the libidinal adventures of his protagonist with the “real” life of the author: “They had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to a character who lived in a book.”Footnote 19 In thus having to challenge and dispel the multitude of “facts”/fictions about himself that are spawned by Carnovsky, Zuckerman is forced to go back over the very subject of personal biography from which he has sought release through the creative act of writing literature.
Zuckerman, as man and writer, is thus doubly bound: his supposedly impersonal mode of writing is tainted by its association with the autobiographical “real,” while the actual circumstances of his personal life are continually made subject to the fluctuating revisions and uncertainties of fictional manipulation. As he realizes in The Prague Orgy, there is no easy means of release “from the narrative encasing me … the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you.”Footnote 20 This sense of entrapment within the self that helps to define Zuckerman's writing is enhanced by the manner in which Roth presents the clash between the literary author and “real” life in terms of the struggle of erotic desire over impotence. Zuckerman's aesthetic urge to redraw limits and escape boundaries has always been linked to notions of Eros and masculine potency in previous novels. Conversely, the failure to achieve full authorial dominance over external “facts” has been presented as a form of impotence and emasculation. For example, having learned in The Counterlife that the failing libido caused by Henry's heart medication has brought about an abrupt and tormenting end to a secret affair with his dental assistant, Zuckerman contemplates how impotence “has cut him off from the simplest form of distance from his predictable life … without the potency he feels condemned to an ironclad life wherein all issues are settled” With his erotic desire to escape the “predictable life” of marriage, home and children vanquished, Henry has “been thrown back on his talent for the prosaic, precisely what he'd been boxed in by all his life.” For Zuckerman, Henry's impotence is compared to being “like an artist's artistic life drying up for good.” By contrast, for Henry, who has eventually given up “chasing erotic daydreams,” such libidinal flights of “fantasy” are indicative of the “[e]xaggeration, falsification, [and] rampant caricature” by which Nathan has mendaciously betrayed the “facts” for fiction.Footnote 21 In his ongoing aesthetic confrontation with the “limits on life,” therefore, Zuckerman has followed an oscillating path between erotic desire and a competing sense of frustration or restriction. Ironically, his titanic efforts to overcome the barriers of the autobiographical and the “real” through the act of writing have drawn him deeper within the ecstatic yearnings and painful eviscerations of the bodily self.
“A book about knowing where to go for your agony and then going there for it”Footnote 22
In the novels of the American trilogy, Zuckerman attempts to escape “the agitation of the autobiographical” by living out a form of hermetic self-denial, in exile from the greater world that exists beyond the pages of literature. Impotent as a result of prostate surgery, Zuckerman's “experiment in radical seclusion” marks a withdrawal from the tumult of desire and the manic improvisations of the self that shaped his ordeals in previous novels.Footnote 23 He attempts to commit an act of self-erasure and disappear as a character from the body of the text in each of the novels of the American trilogy by ignoring his own plight and instead paying attention to the biographies of others. In Exit Ghost, however, Zuckerman temporarily emerges out of the self-imposed exile from social existence that he had endured in the novels of the American trilogy. Visiting New York to undergo a medical procedure that he hopes will cure him of the incontinence suffered as a result of prostate cancer, Zuckerman finds himself “putting a foot back in” to the greater public world that he had turned his back on in these previous works: “I had a moment not unlike Rip Van Winkle's when, after having slept for twenty years, he came out of the mountains and walked back to his village believing he'd merely been gone overnight.”Footnote 24 In New York, he is cast back into the turbulent fray of erotic desire and anguished frustration that had so coloured his life and writing prior to the American trilogy. Inasmuch as his exclusive commitment to the disinterested pursuit of literary goals while living in isolation has afforded him a degree of transcendence from the corporeal and contingent aspects of life outside writing, Zuckerman is “reembodied” by his decision to re-enter the maelstrom of contemporary American life in Exit Ghost.Footnote 25
The figure of E. I. Lonoff assumes an important presence in Exit Ghost as the ascetic literary master who has cast a spectral shadow over Zuckerman's efforts in later life to withdraw from the drama of the self and write in a purely disinterested fashion. In The Ghost Writer, the youthful Zuckerman undertakes what he describes as an important literary pilgrimage to the home of Lonoff. Zuckerman seeks to gain from “the great man” of letters a surrogate form of paternal advocacy for his art, having “betrayed” his own Jewish father by reinventing aspects of family history within his fiction. Living an ascetic life of self-withdrawal from the greater world outside writing, Lonoff espouses an ideal of literature as a “gruelling, exalted, transcendent calling” that is impervious to the prosaic, nonliterary concerns of the self and wider society. The elder artist appears to have ceased living as a material subject in the “real” world, having forgone all notions of corporeal pleasure or distraction for the more elevated rituals of writing. As he explains to his young protégé: “my ‘self’ … happens not to exist in the everyday sense of the word.”Footnote 26
The figure of Richard Kliman brings Lonoff's abiding literary influence upon Zuckerman into particular focus in Exit Ghost. Zuckerman is introduced to Kliman by Jamie Logan and Billy Davidoff, two young literary aspirants and earnest liberal opponents of George W. Bush with whom he has arranged to swap his mountaintop cabin in New England for their Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan. Like Jamie and Billy, Kliman is another ambitious young writer who is seeking to make his mark on the world of American literature by undertaking the difficult and unprecedented task of writing Lonoff's biography. Seeking both Zuckerman's insight and approval, Kliman tells him how he wishes to expose in the proposed biography the unknown fact that “Lonoff kept a great secret from his early years.”Footnote 27 According to Kliman, Lonoff's tautened and highly impersonal style of writing was shaped by a profound desire to conceal the shameful fact of his involvement in an incestuous affair with a half-sister, carried out when he was a very young man. As well as soliciting the support of Zuckerman, Kliman sets out to harass the aged and chronically infirm Amy Bellette – the young Jewish princess who acted as Lonoff's assistant and paramour in The Ghost Writer – in an attempt to wrest from her a copy of Lonoff's unfinished novel, written while the two were living as lovers in Florence. Having got his hands on the first half of the manuscript from Amy, Kliman sets out to prove that the uncharacteristically expansive and uncontrolled narrative shape of Lonoff's unfinished final work can be attributed to his deeply buried knowledge of having committed incest. He postulates how the great tensions between Lonoff's “laconic brand” of short-story writing and the hidden scandal that lay concealed beneath his life of ascetic self-discipline became exacerbated and exposed during his arduous struggle to write in a longer and suppler prose style.Footnote 28
Telling Amy that he is the “biographer's obstacle,”Footnote 29 Zuckerman is determined to protect the aesthetic integrity of Lonoff's impersonal style of literature from the “dirt-seeking snooping” of Kliman.Footnote 30 He comes to view his battle with him in eschatological terms as a struggle to uphold certain high-literary principles of disinterestedness and creative excellence over what he claims are cheap efforts to reduce fiction to some authorial context: “Mastering him was my last obligation to literature.”Footnote 31 Zuckerman seeks to discredit Kliman's biographical reading of Lonoff by making fully clear, in the true fashion of New Criticism, “the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality.”Footnote 32 Yet, ironically, by trying to defend Lonoff's aesthetic principles of “anonymity” in this way,Footnote 33 Zuckerman's narrative focus in the novel is drawn back over that sacral “line” dividing life from literature and returned to the point of conflict between fiction and extraliterary issues of authorial context. In trying to parry Kliman's biographical “fantasies of the author extrapolated from fiction,”Footnote 34 Zuckerman has, once more, become drawn into the confusing and troubling mire of tensions between the “facts” and fiction that he has sought to escape by living and writing oblivious to the world existing beyond the page. In the very act of challenging the mooted biography of Lonoff, therefore, Zuckerman comes to resemble Kliman as one who is engrossed by matters that are extraneous to the inner workings of art. Kliman thus serves as both an antagonist and a double for Zuckerman, highlighting the schizoid quality of the latter's literary style: a mode of fiction that both is tied to and yet seeks to transcend the mutable and prosaic “facts” of daily life.
This ambiguous relationship between Zuckerman and Kliman in Exit Ghost is situated upon a rotating axis of libidinal desire and impotent frustration that is central to Roth's notion of the connection between fact and fiction, the personal and the aesthetic, body and text. Although his impotence is not reversed in any way, what Zuckerman calls “the ghost of my desire” is stirred by the figure of Jamie Logan in Exit Ghost.Footnote 35 This faint sense of sexual revival in the company of Jamie is linked to Zuckerman's renewed longing to confront the overlapping mixture of personal and aesthetic challenges posed by the world of “real” life in New York: “Whatever the force prying me back open at seventy-one – whatever the force that had sent me down to New York … was quickly gathering its strength in the presence of Jamie Logan.”Footnote 36 Wracked by impotent frustration, Zuckerman never gets to enjoy any physical sexual encounter with Jamie in the novel. The “ghost” of his libidinal yearning does, however, find expression through a detached and disembodied act of writing in which Zuckerman dramatizes an imagined intimacy between both of them. An evolving dialogue that he entitles “He and She,” this piece of writing indicates the significant relationship between the erotic drive and the art of fiction for Zuckerman:
this scene of dialogue unspoken recorded what hadn't been done and was an aid to nothing, alleviated nothing, achieved nothing, and yet, just as on election night, it had seemed terribly necessary to write the instant I came through the door, 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.Footnote 37
The endless potential for improvisation and creative reworking that “the imaginary ‘She’ ” holds is intensified by the fact that the “real” Jamie is ultimately unattainable for the impotent and eviscerated old man, Zuckerman. Aware of the agonizing frustrations involved in such inexorable (literary) pursuit of an ever-elusive object of desire, Zuckerman asks, “isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen?” Yet despite his description of “He and She” as “an improvisation best aborted and left to die,” he goes on to appraise it as an example of the life-affirming urge to reinvent and illuminate lived existence that literature so richly nurtures, albeit never fully sates: “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.”Footnote 38
Unlike the purely disinterested literary figure that Lonoff cuts, Zuckerman is both embodied by libidinal desire and yet also an impotent exile from the world of sexual striving. While he is stirred by what he calls the most “worldly in-the-world place” of New York in this novel, Zuckerman also expresses a wish to resume the isolated life of ascetic self-denial through which he had “set out to minimize the loss [suffered from impotence] by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated.”Footnote 39 It is this sense of wanting to be both embodied and disembodied – present in the world and absent from it – that continues to leave Zuckerman's writing and personal life crippled by divisions throughout Exit Ghost.
Nowhere are the personal and aesthetic vagaries caused by his revived determination to be in erotic “collision” with “real” life more evident than in his conflict with Kliman:
I had to find out whether what they were saying about Lonoff was true. Don't ask me why I had to. I didn't know. And the nonsensical character of my quest didn't stop me … Once around with the passions wasn't enough? Once around with the unknowable wasn't enough? Into the mutability again?Footnote 40
While Zuckerman's fictional efforts to imaginatively transform the “facts” surrounding both his and other lives are linked to the “mutability” of “real” life and the desiring body, Lonoff's more immutable aesthetic concept is tied to notions of a “posthumous existence” in Exit Ghost. In a passage from “He and She,” the character of Zuckerman quotes for Jamie a line from Keats's last letter: “‘I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past,’ he said, ‘and that I am leading a posthumous existence’.”Footnote 41 Keats's idea of literature and the literary artist as existing beyond the corpus of “real life” not only encapsulates Lonoff's disinterested mode of writing, but also helps to explain the reasons behind Zuckerman's determination to protect the latter's “posthumous” reputation as a writer from damning discoveries about his lived biography. However, Kliman's claims about the relationship between literature and its authorial context provide a valuable example of the antagonism against which Zuckerman's erotic narrative “intensity” is typically aroused: a “resuscitating breath of the old contention luring me into the old role … rousing the virility in me again.” At the same time, the revived sense of “virility” that his clash with Kliman invokes is foreshadowed by a more vulnerable experience of mutability: “the pain of being in the world.”Footnote 42 Ironically, it is by defending the autonomous space of Lonoff's fiction against the invasive encroachments of Kliman's biography that Zuckerman is lured away from his own isolated life of creative detachment and back toward the chaotic maelstrom of libidinal desire and painful uncertainty which had characterized his autobiographical form of writing in earlier novels.
By way of emphasizing the similarities that cut across the antagonism between both men, the “robustness” and erotic energy that define Zuckerman's efforts to bring a sense of “fictional amplification” to events in Exit Ghost are made comparable,Footnote 43 at certain stages of the novel, to Kliman's (distinctly opposing) attempts to reduce the meaning of Lonoff's spiralling and incomplete last work to some core biographical origin. For example, although fully cognizant that what he is attempting to write is “not fiction,”Footnote 44 Kliman draws comparison between how both he and the more youthful Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer have each sought to use the personal life of Lonoff as a subject for their writing. In response to Zuckerman's accusation that the younger man indulges in “just about the lowest of literary rackets” by “snooping” around in Lonoff's private history, Kliman insists that both of them share the same sense of literary interest in the highly personal details of other, “real” lives: “And the savage snooping calling itself fiction? … I'm not doing anything other than what you do.”Footnote 45 Elsewhere, Zuckerman explains to Jamie his dislike of Kliman as one who lacks the “sobriety” for handling “serious” literary matters and whose obstinate determination to write a sensationalized account of Lonoff's life reflects an impetuous desire for “audacity, defiance, and highjinks.” Yet when Jamie defends Kliman's ambitions to write the controversial biography by suggesting that he is “drawn to daring ventures,” Zuckerman reminisces to himself, “Daring ventures … I had gorged on them.” He also makes comparisons between his younger self and Kliman as examples of “[t]he Jew at his most buoyant, capable of a calm relationship with nothing and no one.”Footnote 46
As one who demonstrates keenly the fierce “resistance of vital beings” (254), Kliman thus embodies memories of the self – before prostate cancer and his withdrawal from the greater social world – that buoy Zuckerman's partially renewed sense of desire in Exit Ghost. Yet, in circular fashion, he also represents a virile young competitor who threatens to pulverize Zuckerman's idea of fiction as an unending and incommensurable desire for reimagining the “real”: “I foresaw only defeat should I persist in colliding with this impostor's aims and the vitality and ambition and tenacity and anger that fuelled them.”Footnote 47 Despite his avowed literary stance, then, Zuckerman's obsession with matters of the “real,” the self and desire renders him ultimately incapable of being more like Lonoff, the self-effacing and asexual aesthete, and less like Kliman, the “snooping” and erotically charged biographer. In self-tortured fashion, Zuckerman is both Lonoff and Kliman – protagonist and antagonist – in Exit Ghost.
Zuckerman ultimately determines to discredit Kliman by finding a source within literary history that will explain the uniquely creative and “unautobiographical” (200) impetus behind Lonoff's unfinished novel. Telling Amy, “I cannot write Manny's biography, but I can write the biography of that book,” Zuckerman proceeds to argue that Lonoff employed the “unprovable conjectures” drawn by “renegade scholars” about an incestuous relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth as the inspiration for his unfinished novel. Zuckerman explains to Amy how Lonoff “laid claim to these conjectures about Hawthorne and his beautiful, enchanting older sister” as a “story” that “opened his predicament out for him and enabled him to leave the personal behind.” Yet, by arguing thus, Zuckerman reveals a complex narrative framing in which he tries to connect himself to Lonoff as a “wholly unautobiographical writer” who exploits, for fictional purposes, the uncertain facts surrounding the “real” lives of others:
“Fiction for him [Lonoff] was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form. He thought, I'll make this my reality.” While, in fact, I was thinking in much the same vein: 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.
Just as he would have Amy believe that Lonoff used the scandal surrounding Hawthorne's private life as his “objective correlative,” Zuckerman himself subjects the drama surrounding Kliman's biographical study to “the fluctuations of the novelist's mind,” by which he “puts everything in motion … [and] makes everything shift and slide.”Footnote 48 In many ways, therefore, his imaginative account of what motivated Lonoff's final work marks Zuckerman's attempt to claim a shared lineage between them both – and Hawthorne, for that matter – as writers for whom fiction does not originate in any positivist notion of experience lying outside the text, but which instead involves a purely literary “rumination” upon what is “real.” However, Zuckerman's unique counterfiction to Kliman's biography involves yet another means of appropriating and reinventing the lived and distinctly private experiences of others. Contrary to Kliman, Zuckerman insists that by “mak[ing] this reality mine” the lives of people such as Amy, Lonoff and Hawthorne are only ever known to him as imagined literary subjects, rather than in terms of biographical truths or facts. At the same time, there is also a sort of admission of guilt in the above passage, by which Zuckerman reveals how he is, in ways that might also resemble Kliman, borrowing for his own authorial benefit from the personal ordeals of others.
A “cluster of extreme historical shocks”
The manner in which the “facts” surrounding his personal life return to test and compromise Zuckerman's “unautobiographical” mode of writing is, as I have already suggested, mirrored by the strange intersection between historical events and the aesthetic imagination within Exit Ghost. I wish to spend the remainder of this essay showing how Zuckerman's fractured experience of wanting to be both engaged by and disengaged from a greater sense of social involvement in this particular novel is contextualized by various moments of crisis that have wreaked havoc upon the wider national experience since mid-century. By making allusions to the American trilogy, I hope to develop a sense of how the older Zuckerman, despite his insistence that he has withdrawn from public life, continues to be enthralled by certain traumatic events and experiences in American history over the past sixty years.
In specific historical terms, the later Zuckerman texts, as well as The Plot Against America, examine various moments of crisis within the liberal brand of American political idealism that emerged under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and which was to dominate national life during the Depression and the Second World War and throughout the early postwar period prior to the 1960s. This particularly modern form of liberal politics derived its influence from certain progressive beliefs about collective social and cultural advancement that had been gaining prominence in America in the early part of the twentieth century, and which helped to distinguish it in many areas from laissez-faire ideas about the capitalist market and competitive individualism that had motivated nineteenth-century liberalism. This Rooseveltian model of American liberalism is deeply tied to Enlightenment values about mankind's ability to ameliorate its own environment and direct historical forces along rationally controlled lines.Footnote 49 Furthermore, the progressive beliefs that prevailed under the New Deal, and which went on to dominate American life until the mid-1960s, were based upon certain democratic aspirations towards achieving a common national culture and an inclusive citizenry, in which notions of exclusion and inequality would eventually be rendered moot.Footnote 50 Such hopeful ideas about a shared and prosperous sense of “American-ness” find particular significance in relation to Roth's ongoing interest in the assimilatory experience of American Jews in the middle to later period of the twentieth century.
In a self-interview that he conducted following the publication of The Great American Novel in 1973, Roth provides us with an early insight into how wider national history has come to inform his writing. He pays particular attention in this piece to the challenges brought by the “demythologizing decade” of the 1960s to the tradition of American political idealism that had appeared to find its apotheosis in the New Deal liberalism of Roosevelt.Footnote 51 Despite the assured and cohesive sense of a heroic national identity that such liberal values appeared to furnish him with, Roth argues that the events of the 1960s gave rise to a situation in which much of “what was imagined to be indestructible, impermeable, in the very nature of American things, yielded and collapsed overnight.”Footnote 52 What emerged powerfully for Roth from this period was “a counter-history, or counter-mythology” that split the postwar American experience in two, creating what he describes as a “struggle between the benign national myth of itself that a great power prefers to perpetuate, and the relentlessly insidious, very nearly demonic reality … that will not give an inch in behalf of that idealized mythology.”Footnote 53
This calamitous experience of reversal in the mid-century “myth” of America as a bastion of progressive liberal values is repeatedly traced in the later novels that I have mentioned. In different ways, each of the main characters in these works is displaced from the democratic endowments of a clearly defined narrative of historical possibility, through which he has come to fashion a heroic idealization of his own life as an emancipated – and deracinated – American subject. As part of these experiences of humbling and loss, each protagonist is cast into the horrifying contingency and mutability of a chaotic “counter-history.” In these particular Roth texts, then, varying forms of cultural and psychic dissonance are brought about by clashes between a particular ideal of a universally shared experience of historical progress in America and “the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything” that comprises “the history that isn't yet history, the history that the clock is now ticking off, the history proliferating as I write, accruing a minute at a time.”Footnote 54 In I Married a Communist, for instance, Ira's Popular Front fervour and Murray's more chastened liberal–moral outlook are both equally impoverished by the realization that “[t]here's only error … [at] the heart of the world.”Footnote 55 In a similar vein to this, Zuckerman describes the social and political unrest of the 1960s in American Pastoral as an embodiment of “the indigenous American berserk” that shatters the happy and ordered procession of events in the Swede's idyllic experience of early postwar America, in which everything “always added up to something whole.”Footnote 56 Likewise, for Philip in The Plot against America, “the unfolding” of certain “unforeseen” catastrophes within the novel has the harrowing effect of disturbing the secure and peaceful sense of historical belonging that he and his Jewish family feel toward the predominantly Gentile nation under Roosevelt's New Deal.Footnote 57
This unexpected displacement from an assured and purposeful sense of historical progress into a bewildering knowledge of the American “real” as chaotic and uncertain can be read in the context of recent studies on the psychological experience of trauma. According to Cathy Caruth, trauma is defined as “the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge.”Footnote 58 Caruth tells us that, as a result of the paradoxical “inaccessibility of its occurrence,”Footnote 59 the moment of trauma is constantly revisited by and repeated for the victim, in an effort to make its difficult “reality” fully known. Trauma, therefore, is experienced as an unending (exactly because it has yet to begin or to be made real) horror that the traumatized cannot easily repress or escape from.Footnote 60 In many of his later publications, various experiences of reversal brought to the liberal narrative of American progress over the past fifty years are dramatized as moments of inconceivable or “unreal” trauma that have left Roth's characters stranded within a world that has become radically estranged and incomprehensible to them. In addition to how Roth's later fiction thus charts the historical evisceration in America of liberal notions of an integrated social body, it also explores the (traumatic) difficulties that his literary corpus has faced in trying to engage meaningfully with any coherent sense of a “real” public life. It is this connection between broader historical experience and aesthetic plight marking Zuckerman's return to New York in Exit Ghost that demands further critical discussion.
It is important to briefly note that the idea of trauma as a highly uncomfortable moment that the victim tries to overcome but is forced to continually revisit applies not just to Zuckerman's experience of American history, but also to those aspects of the self and origins that I have already discussed. Autobiographical “facts” act in this way as a form of trauma that continually disrupts and frustrates Zuckerman's efforts to reinvent “real” life as fiction. Nowhere is this idea of an inerasable experience of trauma in Zuckerman's personal life and career more evident than in his ultimate failure to pass completely beyond his social and familial origins as an American Jew. It is, then, the trauma of his origins – both national and familial – that finds expression in Zuckerman's warring struggle to overcome experiences of emasculation and impotence by imposing his phallic and aesthetic mastery over the given “facts.”
The frustrating, yet at the same time enlivening, clash with extraliterary “facts” at the core of Roth's fiction can be understood in terms of an unruly experience of the “real” in American life that the author had begun to find challenging in the early stages of his career. In an important and much-cited essay that he wrote at the beginning of his career, entitled “Writing American Fiction,” Roth outlines the difficulty for postwar writers in America of engaging with a “social world [that] has ceased to be as suitable or as manageable a subject as it once may have been.”Footnote 61 He explains how the contemporary American author grapples “to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality … The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist” This confused sense of an experiential and extraliterary world that no longer conforms to any recognizable sense of “reality,” but which is instead populated by phenomena whose already fictive or “unreal-seeming” qualities poses a serious challenge to the creative talents of the literary author, has been crucial to the development of Roth's aesthetic and worldview.Footnote 62 In short, what Roth is outlining here is an American life-world in which the unruly “facts” constantly challenge and undermine the writer's efforts to assert authorial control over his material. This sense of an intractable social or cultural scene helps to inform the complex difficulties that Roth's characters face in their efforts to imaginatively transform “real” life. Significantly, the catastrophic view of America's displacement from a liberal ideal of common civic purpose into a diabolical state of cultural disharmony in Roth's later work provides a useful historical context in which to better understand this disorienting experience of an “American reality” that is no longer “manageable” or discernible in palpably “real” terms. Throughout the American trilogy and Exit Ghost, the fractious relationship between fiction writing and the uncertainties of “unknowable life” finds a broader setting for Zuckerman in the succession of defeats and failures that have destroyed the once robust liberal dream of America that grew out of the New Deal.
His decision to withdraw from certain personal experiences of confusion and anguish in the American trilogy marks, in large degree, Zuckerman's effort to suppress or abandon the repeating memories of historical trauma that he has endured. By remaining in the narrative “shadows” and focussing instead on the figures of the Swede, Coleman Silk and the Ringold brothers, Zuckerman conceals evidence of his own personal involvement in the disappointments and chaos of American history. However, Zuckerman has found a refracted means of exploring in these novels the otherwise inadmissible and incomprehensible sense of trauma that has marked his own experience as an American citizen by examining the ways in which his narrative subjects have shared with him certain contrasting moments of national euphoria and disillusionment. The separate failures of the Swede, Ira, Murray and Coleman to find in universalizing political or cultural models a means of abandoning their marginal origins, to cite just one example, directly mirror Zuckerman's frustrated struggle to discover in high-literary tradition a means of escaping the “facts” of his Jewish ancestry. It is Zuckerman's own inescapable experiences of traumatic shock and horror, therefore, that are uncannily revisited through the apparently “unautobiographical” stories that he tells about others in these later works.
Like the famed character of Rip Van Winkle whom he compares himself to, Zuckerman returns from his mountaintop slumber in Exit Ghost to find a scene of active political enthusiasm among the American polity. Arriving back in New York on the eve of the Bush/Kerry Presidential election of 2004, Zuckerman is invited by Jamie and Billy to watch the results of the vote with them at their apartment. The young couple's fervent disdain for the Bush administration and how “[a]ll their intolerance focuses on a liberal society” is contrasted with Zuckerman's apparent indifference to current political events. Much to the incredulity of his earnest young companions, he claims to have no knowledge whatsoever of the recent Presidential race. Explaining how he has “served … [his] tour as exasperated liberal and indignant citizen,” Zuckerman declares a complete sense of personal detachment from the ongoing travails of American politics: “I don't want to register an opinion, I don't want to express myself on the ‘issues’.”Footnote 63
In an attempt to justify his radical disengagement from broader issues of national politics and culture, Zuckerman elaborates upon the mixture of confusion, despair and anger that a “cluster of extreme historical shocks” had previously aroused in him:
I was familiar with the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire. From the 1965 transformation into a Vietnam hawk of the peace candidate Lyndon Johnson until the 1974 resignation of all-but-impeached Richard Nixon, they were a staple in the repertoire of virtually everyone I knew. You're heartbroken and upset and a little hysterical, or you're gleeful and vindicated for the first time in ten years, and your only balm is to make theater of it.Footnote 64
What is clear in this passage is how Zuckerman links the “horrors” of historical events to the ludicrous “theater” of the postwar scene, in which any “real” or knowable sense of a shared public life that was once set forth by the progressive–liberal vision of America has now been completely shattered. This unnerving sense of public life as “theater” is evoked elsewhere by the experience of the “indigenous American berserk” that Zuckerman re-visits in American Pastoral, or the comparably “haywire country” that he struggles to fathom in Zuckerman Unbound.Footnote 65 Much of Zuckerman's personal and professional experiences of longing and pain have arisen from his prior attachments to this cascading realm of public life. As a result, on his arrival back in New York he makes a determined effort “not … to collide with all this indignant, highly emotional crisis-brooding” that is being evoked by the Bush/Kerry election.Footnote 66
The crushing sense of political disillusionment that Zuckerman determines to evade finds an embodiment in the figure of Jamie, who sees the potential of a Bush victory as “the end of the road for a whole way of political life.” In contrast to her expressions of shock and outrage at Bush's eventual reelection, Zuckerman maintains a certain disaffected poise: “I was merely onlooker and outsider now … the public drama did not intrude on me.” Refusing to share her distraught sense of concern over the terminal decline of progressive political values in an America under Republican rule, Zuckerman tries to reassure Jamie by explaining, “It's a flexible instrument we've inherited … It's amazing how much punishment we can take.” In thus considering to himself how he might assuage Jamie's increasing sense of doom over Bush's defeat of Kerry, Zuckerman reveals further how the repeating pattern of historical traumas that he has already lived through has left him seemingly deadened to political dismay or outrage: “I thought to say, It's bad, but not like waking up the morning after Pearl Harbor was bombed … the morning after Kennedy was shot … the morning after Martin Luther King was shot … I thought to say, We have all been through it.”Footnote 67
This self-protective and benumbing attitude of resignation to the ritual shocks of history is juxtaposed with the more raw sense of injury that afflicts the much younger Jamie and Billy. Their difficult arrival at the “hard realization that they could not will this country back into being the Rooseveltian stronghold it had been some forty years before they were born” marks for the aged and world-weary Zuckerman merely one more variation on an increasingly redundant theme of liberal disbelief with the shortcomings of American political and cultural life. As he points out, Jamie and Billy represent a liberal outlook that is becoming increasingly isolated from the American masses. While it might see itself in superior moral and intellectual terms to Bush's Republican Party, such a liberal position functions as a hollow shell of the populist Rooseveltian movement that it wishes to invoke:
For all their sharpness and articulateness and savoir-faire … they'd had no idea who the great mass of Americans were, nor had they seen so clearly before that it was not those educated like themselves who would determine the country's fate but the scores of millions unlike them and unknown to them who had given Bush a second chance, in Billy's words, “to wreck a very great thing.”Footnote 68
This damning image of contemporary liberalism as ineffectual and detached from the wider American public calls to mind contemporary Republican accusations made against liberals for being elitist and patronizing in their overprotective efforts to regulate the lives of the masses.Footnote 69 Jamie and Billy's political beliefs thus appear to represent for Zuckerman the flayed and eviscerated remnants of an older New Deal model for social and cultural progress that had once been so vigorously attuned to the aspirations and needs of common Americans.
Yet despite this suggestion that the younger couple's chagrin with current national events represents a rather toothless brand of liberalism for Zuckerman, there is also an indication in the novel that he continues to share in their particular politics of grief. As I have discussed, Zuckerman appears to view Jamie's horrified reaction to the presidential election results as a redundant and ineffectual cry of liberal outrage. However, there is also a suggestion in the novel that her reaction to Bush's reelection does not necessarily mark a stale rehashing of previous ailments, but may instead form part of a still raw and unfinished cycle of traumatic repetition within the American liberal experience. For instance, when thinking about highlighting to her how the particular form of political disillusionment she is experiencing is not unique but has a long and tiresome lineage, Zuckerman suddenly realises that “[a]ll the things I thought to tell her would likely strike her as cant … She wanted to wake up the morning after George Bush had been shot.” The fervid emotional outpouring with which Jamie bemoans that “this country is a haven of ignorance” in some ways brings to the surface the painful sense of an earlier trauma against which the aged Zuckerman is now determined to remain immunized.Footnote 70 As much as he attempts to ease the traumatic impact of Bush's victory on her by explaining that “[w]e have all been through it,” she, in turn, acts as a fresh reminder of his deeply buried sense of liberal despair.
Using the images of a car crash and a burning building as metaphors, Zuckerman clearly signals this sense of a shared knowledge of trauma through which he and Jamie are connected: “She was looking at me … the way somebody being helped from a burning building or freed from a car crash looks at you, as though as an observer you might have something to say that could account for the catastrophe that's altered everything.”Footnote 71 Although he claims that he is “merely an onlooker,” Zuckerman is in fact reconnected with the “public drama” to which he believes himself to be now invulnerable by his role as witness to the trauma of Jamie's suffering. Caruth suggests that in bearing testimony to another's experience of inexpressible pain, the witness can find a means of confronting the horrific moments of unacknowledged or unassimilated trauma which have plagued his or her own life: “one's own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another … trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another's wound.”Footnote 72 Through this participative act of witnessing, then, the spectator to traumatic events shares somewhat in the victim's traumatized reaction to what has happened. Therefore, as a seemingly impassive bystander to Jamie's anguish and bewilderment, Zuckerman is, paradoxically, reconnected to his own submerged feelings of “rage about how much worse it all was than you thought and the sorrow over how far your country had sunk.”Footnote 73 In this way, his despair over certain events in American history remains part of a trauma that he tries to discard and yet which continues to demand his attention. It is this ambiguous sense of being both within and outside the greater life of American “reality” that defines Zuckerman's tortured self-divisions not just in Exit Ghost, but throughout the series of earlier novels up to and including the American trilogy.
Conclusion: the inerasable trace of authorial context
What I have been outlining here as Zuckerman's unsolicited confrontation with a sense of national trauma that he has so desperately sought to repress finds a parallel in the aesthetic battles that he endures throughout Exit Ghost. His inability to fully detach himself and his writing from the national context mirrors Zuckerman's failed efforts to escape his corporeal self. In fact, his ongoing sense of despair over national events forms an important part of the “agitation of the autobiographical” that continues to plague Zuckerman and his art. In this sense, both the personal and the wider historical aspects of Zuckerman's authorial context form part of the same trauma of the self that obstinately continues to haunt his late efforts to become a purely disinterested literary aesthete.
This sense of a trauma that repeats itself on the historical, personal and aesthetic levels is made apparent as the novel draws to a close. Zuckerman begins to indicate how the dangers posed to Lonoff's legacy by Kliman's biographical claims may potentially foreshadow similar problems of misreading or misappropriation in relation to his own work: “Once I was dead, who could protect the story of my life from Richard Kliman? Wasn't Lonoff his literary steppingstone to me? And what would my “incest” be? How will I have failed to be the model human being?”Footnote 74 It is clear both here and throughout the novel that Zuckerman is trying to protect the aesthetic autonomy of literary fiction from ideas or influences that are extraneous to its internal structures of creativity. However, as I have shown, suggestions made by Kliman that a personal trauma lies concealed at the heart of Lonoff's literature also become a kind of “stepping-stone” through which Zuckerman himself reexplores the excruciating and inescapable conflicts in his own writing between the fictional and the “real”; the impersonal and the biographical; the desiring, decaying body and the “posthumous,” immutable value ascribed to notions of high literature. Just as he finds a means of disinterring older, buried experiences of personal grief through acting as a witness to Jamie's dismay over the state of American political values, Zuckerman's determination to contest Kliman's idea of a hidden trauma beneath Lonoff's life of aesthetic detachment serves, ironically, as a useful way to explore the confusion and pain that has attended his own life as a writer. Whereas he expresses a fear that Kliman will turn his attention next to “[m]y great, unseemly secret,”Footnote 75 Zuckerman is in fact constantly flaunting the autobiographical conflicts that underwrite his work. And by further extension, just as Nathan uses the drama surrounding Lonoff's legacy to examine his own life and writing, Zuckerman serves as Roth's “stepping-stone” for exploring the divisions in his own highly personal, erotically charged and politically engaged aesthetic.
