Zuckerman's choice of his identity : a study of Philip Roth's The ghost writer
著者（英） Yo Tabayashi
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 34
page range 17‑30
year 1990‑03‑10
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014750
ZUCKERMAN'S CHOICE OF HIS IDENTITY:
A STUDY OF PHILIP ROTH'S
THE GHOST WRITER
YO T ABA YASHI
I
Problems of identity seems universal all over the world these days.
However, the problems are especially serious for immigrants. Jews as well as other minority groups in the United States have to struggle to understand what they, Jewish-Americans, are. Allen Guttmann maintains that Orthodox Jews haven't suffered much because they have little doubt about who they are. They can easily tell "who is and who is not a Jew" according to the Law of Judaism.1 On the contrary, it has been hard for secular Jews to define themselves as Jews or not Jews. Guttmann comments on this as follows:
Among secular Jews, definitions and conceptions of Jewish identity have proliferated, until a Jew is alleged to be anyone born of Jewish parents, anyone converted to Judaism, anyone who considers himself a Jew, anyone who is thought by others to be a Jew.2
Quoting Sidney Hook's idea of Jewish identity helps us to understand Guttmann's thesis:
If individuals exist, they must exist as something. This is an analytic statement. But that they must continue to exist in the same social and cultural status in which they are born is a piece of antidemocratic presumption. The democrat wants to give all individuals the right to freely determine themselves as Jews or Gentiles, as citizens of one country or anoth~r, as cultural heirs of Socrates or Aquinas . . . . 3
[17)
18
Agreeing with Hook, Guttmann insists that one can choose or emphasize one's own identity whether it is racial, vocational, national, sexual, political.
This means that in our life we can decide which aspects of our own we want to stress. The idea is striking, for we are apt to think that there exists a "real"
identity somewhere else and that we must look for it.
Nevertheless, it is not easy for us to determine which aspects to emphasize.
In many cases, we fail to choose them for our identity, or others do not accept us as we wish to be. For Jewish-Americans, this problem is deeply related to questions of "assimilation" and "acculturation" as Guttmann points out.4 A question-"Am I a Jew? Or am I an American?"-has been one of the most important and recurring themes in Jewish-American literature. For example, Abraham Cahan succeeds in portraying the difficulty of immigrants from Russia to adjust themselves to life in the United States in such works as Yekl (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky(1917). Philip Roth, of a much younger generation, also focuses on the question of becoming Americanized in the story "Goodbye, Columbus" (1959).
Roth's interest, however, seems to move away from the problem of Americanization in his later works. In Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985), Roth does not present Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist, as a man who wishes to be American. Rather he concentrates on the relationship between life and art, unfolding Zuckerman's conflict between his Jewishness and his artistic purpose and eventually his decision for his identity through the whole story.
Throughout the trilogy, Zuckerman's identity is examined agalll and again. Accompanied with the examination, his concern for his identity changes. However, in The Ghost Writer (1979), the first novel of the trilogy, we find the most archetypal conflict in making decisions for his identity.
This is because the novel is supposed to have been written more than twenty years later than his experience with Lonoff, a renowned Jewish writer, in
1956, and the time of his writing the novel is actually after Zuckerman's visit to Prague in 1976 which appears in Epilogue: The Prague Orgy. Therefore, it is rewarding for us to scrutinize his identity problems in The Ghost Writer in order to understand one of the themes not only in the novel but also in the whole trilogy.
II
Hermione Lee interprets Roth's works as follows:
In all his works so far, Roth's Jewish families, like the Dedalus family in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, are the material for, and the obstacles to, the fully adult writer who can master and describe himself and his world. In order to be a writer one must cease to be a son.5 This explains Zuckerman's problems when he comes to the Berkshires to meet Lonoff whom he admires. He is no longer a good Jewish son to his family. He thinks that he must reject the way his parents live in order to be a real writer because his loving parents do not accept him as he is. The short story titled "Higher Education" made his father angry, since to him the story was about "Kikes and their love of money.,,6 This is because his father's main concern was over what gentiles might think of Jews by reading it. The conversation between Zucketman and his father-"I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story'" "You're not" (95)-informs the protagonist that he cannot be accepted as he is and that he hurts people he loves by going his own way. He cannot help feeling himself a son rejected by his loving father.
Later Zuckerman received a letter from Judge Wapter, "the city's most admired Jew" (96), whom his father consulted about "Higher Education."
The judge's view on the artist in the letter reads:
... the artist has always considered himself beyond the mores of the
20
community in which he lived. Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated, 'who do not understand that the artist is a special individual with a unique contribution to make to mankind .... On the other hand, I do believe that, like all men, the artist has a responsibility to his fellow man, to the society in which he lives, and to the cause of truth and justice. (101)
Despite the understanding of art shown above, the judge sympathized with Nathan's father and enclosed "TEN QUESTIONS FOR NATHAN ZUCK- ERMAN" to awaken Zuckerman's "conscience to the responsibilities of [his]
calling" (102). Among the questions the last one had the strongest impact on him: "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?"
(103-104). It was natural that he could not answer such questions, for the 'judge considered him an enemy, persecutor, and, anti-Semitic propagandist against not only his family but also all Jews. He was rejected by the Jewish community as well as by his own father.
His father and the judge of "the mores of the community" expected Zuckerman to live by their norms, but he could not help renouncing them in order to be himself. Rejectingand being rejected by his own Jewishness, he had to choose a way according to his own artistic criteria. Now his identity as a Jewish son was shattered.
However, Zuckerman is not completely released from his Jewishness.
Feeling his "inexplicable betrayal" (96), he unconsciously fosters a hope to satisfy and be forgiven by the Jewish community. The subconscious hope is revealed in his daydream of marrying Amy Bellette, an attractive girl who seems intimate with LonoH. The fantasy is rather concrete; he imagines of introducing Amy, whom he believes to be Anne Frank, to his family and relatives. Here we find his desire to have validation as a good Jewish son by
marrying Anne who is a Jewish saint and having a child with her. He also discloses his concerns about how the Jewish community will react to his future finest work of art to be created out of "the originality and excitement of what actually goes on" (121) as follows:
But if I ever did [approach the originality and excitement], what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would my elders hold up against that? And if they couldn't, if the blow to their sentiments was finally too wounding, just how well would I hold up against being hated and reviled and disowned? (121)
Thus, trying to renounce his Jewishness as he was renounced by it, he still suffers from ambivalent feelings of being a Jew.
III
Zuckerman, with his identity shattered as a good Jewish son, must commit himself to something for his identity. His dangling identity is projected on three people in the novel-Amy, who is Anne Frank in his' imagination, Dr.
Hugh in "The Middle Years," and Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. They all serve as mirrors to reflect the protagonist's anxieties and desires.
Inspired by Amy's beauty, her skill of writing (mentioned by LonoH), and her enigmatic relationship with her mentor, Zuckerman creates a short story
"Femme Fatale" where she confesses to LOJilOH that she is originally Anne Frank. This Amyl Anne projects Zuckerman's inner self. Jonathan Brent considers her "the girl who incorporates his own suppressed longings and struggles for identity.,,7 Joseph
c.
Voelker, too, calls her "a fictional mirror for himself, one that rewards scrutiny."s Then, what does she reflect for Zuckerman's inner self?First of all, as we notice easily, Amyl Anne discloses the difficulty to be
zz
what she IS. Today, when everybody reads The Diary of Anne Frank and believes that she is a dead Jewish saint, she cannot publish the fact that she is alive. She is afraid to embarrass her father, now sixty, and to hurt people who believe her to be dead. Her statements "I have to be dead to everyone"
(124) and "It is too late to be alive now" (150) reveal the impossibility for her to be accepted as the person she really is9 Thus, her shattered identity magnifies Zuckerman's anxieties concerning what he is.
Secondly, Amy I Anne represents a composite of conflicting selves in Zuckerman. Being a Jewish saint, she is a contrast to him, because he wants to reject his Jewishness. Nevertheless, as I mentioned earlier, he embraces ambivalent feelings toward being a Jew. In other words, he has never wanted to be anti-Semitic. He wishes to be accepted as a good Jew by his father and the Jewish community, only if he is allowed to write whatever he wants. He longs for "admiration and praise" (80) from the Jewish milieu just as Amyl Anne gets them as a Jewish saint without striving for them. This longing is illustrated by his daydream of marrying her discussed before.
Therefore, Amy/Anne embodies his complex feelings toward his Jewish- ness.
Lastly, Amyl Anne symbolizes Zuckerman's desire for determined deci- sion. Divided by his own ambivalent feelings, he cannot make any decision yet. On the other hand, Amy I Anne chooses to become Lonoff's femme fatale.
She insists, " ... I want to be your Anne Frank. I'd like at last to be my own.
Child Martyr and Holy Saint isn't a position I'm really qualified for any more" (154), pleading with her mentor to go to Europe with her. She decides to be what she is. She wishes to be a wife, mistress, or daughter of the man she loves and admires. Her choice is to establish her identity not as a Jewish saint but as a seductress of the great man. Giving up the position admired by
"the mores of the community," she is determined to be herself in order to be alive again. However, her wish does not come true, for Lonoff won't desert
his wife to run off with her. Here we see that her desperate decision does not work. Her identity remains as problematic as Zuckerman's.
It is worth noting that Amyl Anne works as femme fatale in a twofold structure. First, within the fiction "Femme Fatale," we, readers, are led to think that she is a femme fatale for Lonoff. Second, however, in the whole novel, we come to notice that she is one for Zuckerman, for, outside Chapter 3, she does not disturb the great writer's life at all-Lonoff is always calm even when seduced by her. It is Zuckerman whom Amyl Anne excites in a way she does not know. Eventually, in The Ghost Writer, she is shown to be Zuckerman's femme fatale who stimulates his imagination to create a story about her.
Dr. Hugh, a young physician in "The Middle Years" written by Henry
J
ames, reflects Zuckerman's desire for decision, too. The doctor deserts a rich English countess in consequence of his "infatuation" (114) for Dencombe, his ideal writer. Asked by the writer if the countess cursed him, the doctor replies, "[She cursed me] [f]or giving her up. I gave her up for you. I had to choose .... "lOHere Dr. Hugh corresponds to Zuckerman, the countess to the protagonist's father, and Dencombe, the artist, to Lonoff. Confirming himself that "the loving father who must be relinquished for the sake of his child's art was not hers [Amy's]; he was mine" (168), he realizes that he must"choose" one thing at the cost of another. Nevertheless, it is hard for him to give up his father, for he feels far more attached to his father than the doctor to the countess. Although he is anxious for decision, he is still vacillating.
"The Middle Years" not only reveals Zuckerman's longing for decision but also makes him ponder and experience the mystery of art in two ways. First, the content of the story offers him a chance to deliberate over art and life.
Second, an "unaccountable" use "of art" (117) is actualized in a comical manner; eavesdropping on the conversation between Lonoff and Amy upstairs, standing on the volume, stimulates his imagination, which will
24
demonstrate "the madness of art" twenty years later.
Dencombe's dying words which are typed out in LonoH's study read: "We work in the dark;--:-we do w,hat we can-we give what we have. Our doubt is ..
QUT passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art" (116).
Zuckerman wonders, "What does Henry
J
ames mean by 'the madness of art'?"(77) because, he has regarded art as sane so far. Nevertheless, the story exemplifies "the madness ·of art" by depicting Dr. Hugh who lets "a fortune go," (n4) to serve the writer he adores. As Dencombe tells the doctor, "You happen tobe crazy ... " (115~16), the latter's decision.is mad according to the norms of "the mores of the community." The doctor, however, seems self-confident about his choice to accept the consequences of his infatuation for Dencombe. Zuckerman, still confused, comes nearer to the decision to choose art, to take the consequences of his infatuation for Lonoff even though he should suffer from "the madness of art." And he is to demonstrate
"the madness of art" by inserting "Femme Fatale," his fantastic story, into The Ghost Writer.
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reflects Zuckerman's interest in art more intensely than Dr. Hugh. Unlike Dr. Hugh, who is a literary amateur, young Stephen wants to be an artist. He represents Zuckerman's desire to be an artist and this is illustrated by the fact that the protagonist gives the title "N athan Dedalus" to Chapter 2. He accomplishes the hero's longing to strive for what his soul sincerely needs despite the opposition from people around him. As the epigraph in the novel-"Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188" (And inspire life ~o unknown art)-shows, Stephen decides to go his own way, to be an artist rather than a monk or businessman. Stephen unfolds his will to one of his friends as follows:
I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I ~ill not serve that
25 in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunningY Stephen Dedalus, with the name of the legendary artist, manifests his will to serve art at the end of the novel: "Welcome, 0 life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reaiity of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."12 Zuckerman is eager to follow Stephen in search of "a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite [his] soul's smithy" (49), for he is anxious to be another heir of Deda:lus. Calling himself Nathan Dedalus, he shows his understanding of "the madness of art" which drives Dedalus and Icarus to fly toward the sun at the cost of their lives.
IV
Zuckerman's purpose to become an artist is shown in his desires and anxieties mirrored in Amyl Anne, Dr. Hugh, and Stephen. Eager to be an artist, he is not yet independent enough. His wish to be an artist overlaps his longing to be a "son" of artists.
Renounced by his own father, Zuckerman is no longer a good Jewish son.
This is the reason why he needs a spiritual father who will guide him to be an artist. In order to be a "son" of artists, he must be recognized as a writer by literary figures he respects.
However, it is not easy for Zuckerman to become a "son" of artists. About three years earlier than the visit to the Berkshires, he had an opportunity to meet Felix Abravanel, another renowned Jewish writer. "[O]vercome" (57) by the writer's talented speech, the protagonist applied to become a "son" of the writer though his application was not accepted by the established writer.
Zuckerman's expectation Was betrayed and his "boundless adoration ... was doomed to go unrequited" (57). Having failed to become a literary son of
26
Abravanel, he needs to search for another artist as his spiritual father. His understanding of the event was that "All of this was why, from Quahsay, I had mailed my four published stories to Lonoff. F elix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son" (66).
Zuckerman confirms for himself the motive for visiting Lonoff as follows:
F or I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E. 1. 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. (9)
His admiration for Lonoff, "[Isaac] Babel's American cousin" (47), is not betrayed but intensified by the way the revered writer lives. As he exclaims,
"Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one's concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling .... This is how I will live" (5) [emphasis added]; it seems to Zuckerman an ideal life. Told by the writer, at the dinner-table with a glass of wine to toast, "To a wonderful new writer" (29), the protagonist announces, "I could live like that forever" (30), meaning the life in Quahsay. And he swears to himself that he will "struggle for the rest of [his] life to deserve" the toast (47). Here he re confirms his purpose to live, that is, to be a "son" of the great writer.
At the end of the novel, Zuckerman is given his "rites of confirmation"
(180) by Lonoff. Lonoff suggests that Zuckerman write a story from the experience in the Berkshires, saying, "You had an earful this morning .... I'll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story" (180). Here Zuckerman comes to believe that he is recognized as a spiritual heir by the great writer. At last his desire to be a "son" of artists is fulfilled.
However, Zuckerman admits something inexplicable at Lonoff's. First, he
is perplexed by Lonoff's monotonous way of living-repeating a routine of writing and turning sentences around-though, at the same time, it sounds like "paradise" (18). Second, the relationship between Lonoff, his wife Hope, and Amy confuses Zuckerman. The relationship between the writer and his student, both of whom Zuckerman is "in awe of" (27), seems implicit and inspires his imagination. However, Hope's attitude toward her husband and the young girl implies something distressful with the Lonoffs. Surprised by Hope's look "so worn down from living alongside E. 1. Lonoff" (31), he just cannot believe in her debility because the writer, living so calmly, should be an ideal husband for Hope, too. At the dinner-table, throwing a wineglass against the wall, she cries:
" ... I'd rather live and die alone, I'd rather endure that than another moment of your bravery'" . . .
"Take her [Amy], Manny. If you want her, take her .... Tell her to accept that job, tell her to stay! She should' And I'll move away!
Because I cannot live another moment as your jailer! Your nobility is eating away the last thing that is left!" (42-43)
The following morning, Hope begins to talk to Amy, expresslllg her dissatisfaction with her husband again as follows:
"Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up, their friends must stay away until four -There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of' And you will now be the person he is not living with'" (174-75)
After Amy has gone, Hope attempts to make her way through the snow on foot and her husband follows her. Zuckerman does not clarify his idea about the quarrel, but obviously he feels disappointed at the act of his spiritual father because the ideal writer follows his fleeing wife just as common
28
husbands do. This is illustrated by his statement, "he [Lonoff] started off after the runaway spouse ... into her doomed journey in search of a less noble calling" (180). By this statement, he discloses his judgment that Hope seeks a "less noble calling" than sacrificing herself for her husband's art, for he values art more than lifeY Therefore he feels more perplexed than when he cam.e to the house the evening before, for he is unable to understand why the great artist should follow his wife who represents a "less noble calling"
and troublesome life itself. Now he is sure of being a "son" of the great writer but becomes unsure of what his father IS.
v
Zuckerman chooses to be a "son" of Lonoff and is accepted by the writer.
His desire to be a "son" of artists is fulfilled. Nevertheless, his identity does not seem completely settled at the end of the story because he is not certain of what his father is, that is, what art is.
In Lonoff's private life, Zuckerman finds the same sufferings as his own.
Lonoff, too, hurts his wife by going his way to create art. It is true that the writer does not want to mortify his wife, which is shown by his act of following her. But it is certain that his only way to serve art-repeating the routine of turning sentences around-distresses her just as the Russian novelist, Tolstoy, made his family miserable by becoming ascetic. Here in the great writer, Zuckerman sees not the glorified Artist but a human being who suffers from conflicts.
The experience with Lonoff teaches Zuckerman "the originality and . excitement" of actuality, which makes him realize "the thinness of [his]
imagination and what that [promises] for the future" (121). Overwhelmed by
"original and exciting" reality, Zuckerman still staggers. His identity as a
"son" of Lonoff is established but it does not automatically ensure his identity as an artist. He is left puzzled over what art and life are.
Nevertheless, the experience in the Berkshites is to guide Zuckerman to create his art. This is the reason why he quotes Lonoff, "Let Nathan see what it is to be lifted from obscurity. Let him not come hammering at our door to tell us that he wasn't warned" (162) as an epigraph of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), the second novel of the trilogy, where he becomes a famous writer at about thirty-six. When The Ghost Writer is written some twenty years later than the experience at Lonoff's, Zuckerman seems more stable. By writing the story, he objectifies the hitherto confusing experience and comes to grasp what it means to him. He now evaluates it affirmatively: Lonoff is "the ghost writer" who lives simultaneously in imagination and reality and can influence people with his works even after his death or the day people see him last;14 Lonoff is still influential as the "maestro" for him whether the writer is alive or not. Now he no longer calls the writer father because he neither needs nor continues to be a "son." Here Zuckerman's identity as a son of someone, whether it be his own father or Lonoff, matters less than in 1956.
His choice of being a "son" of artists is accepted and now he decides to be an artist himself by telling with his "most compelling voice" (72) the story about his "Higher Education" in art and life.
Notes
1 AlIen Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 11.
2 Guttrnann, p. 11.
3 Guttmann, p. 14.
4 Guttmann unfolds a definition of "assimilation" and "acculturation" as follows:
["Assimilation"] refers to an entire process by which one group, usually a minority within a society, is absorbed into another group. The logical extreme of the process is the complete disappearance of the absorbed group, which may or may not contribute to the characteristics of the resultant amalgam.
"Acculturation" is the adoption of the values and behavioral patterns of the
30
"host" society. It is logically the first step. In GordoN's model, accl:llturation (or
"cultural assimilation") is followed logically, but not always socially, by structural assimilation and marital assimilation. Structural assimilation con- cerns entrance by the outsiders into the political, economic, and social institutions of the "host" society, i. e., into political parties, business and professions, schools, cliques, and clubs of the dominant group. Marital assimilation is usually known as intermarriage (Guttmann, p. 8).
5 Hermione Lee, Philip Roth, CONtemporary Writers Series (London: Methuen &
Co., 1982), p. 34.
6 Philip Roth, Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (N ew York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), p. 94. All quotations from the novel refer to this edition; hereafter, all page references will be noted in parentheses after the quotation.
7 Jonathan Brent, "The Unspeakable Self: Philip Roth and the Imagination,"
Reading Philip Roth, ed. Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1988), p. 18l.
8 Joseph C. Voelker, "Dedalian Shades: Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer," Critical Essays on Philip Roth, ed. Sanford Pinsker (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982), p. 94.
9 Voelker states: "Outside the mirror 'Anne Frank' stands Nathan, wondering if he must be dead to his own father to be free to write about Jews" (Voelker, p. 94).
10 Henry James, "The Middle Years," The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed.
Frank Kermode, Penguin Classics Series (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 257.
11 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 25l.
12 Joyce, p. 257.
13 However, we should realize Zuckerman's irony and humor in the statement, too.
We are assured that he uses the expression "a less noble calling," Nostalgically making fun of all the romantic notions of his younger self some twenty years later.
14 The title of the novel suggests many things. For example, we may think that Zuckerman is the ghost writer for "Anne Frank" who is a kind of a ghost, too.
