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Philip Roth – oblicza pisarza
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Nathan Zuckerman w (kontr)ataku
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character who has appeared as the narrator or protagonist of (and often functions as an alter ego in) many of Philip Roth's works of fiction.
Zuckerman makes his first appearance in the novel My Life As a Man (1974), where he is the product of another fictional Roth creation, the writer Peter Tarnopol (making Zuckerman, in his original form, an "alter-alter-ego"). In later books Zuckerman is given a less indentured form of existence, starting with the 1979 novel The Ghost Writer, where he is the story's writer-apprentice protagonist, on a pilgrimage to cull the wisdom of the reclusive author E. I. Lonoff (perhaps a stand-in for Bernard Malamud). In Zuckerman Unbound (1981) he is an established novelist and must deal with the fall-out from his ribald comedic novel Carnovsky. Though wildly successful (both critically and financially), the novel has brought to Zuckerman unwanted attention both from readers and his family.
The obvious parallels to Roth's own life as a novelist (with the novel Carnovsky a stand-in for Portnoy's Complaint) signaled Roth's burgeoning interest in the relationship between an author and his work. Such meta-fictional concerns would be mined more deeply in Roth's series of 1980s novels, most radically in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. By the mid-1990s, though, Roth would tamp down on the self-referentiality, and reintroduce Zuckerman as witness and narrator in a trilogy of historical novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Zuckerman also makes an appearance in Salman Rushdie's 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where in an alternate universe it is the literary alter-egos (and their novels) that are real.
Actors who have portrayed Nathan Zuckerman include Mark Linn-Baker (in the 1984 television adaptation of The Ghost Writer) and Gary Sinise (in the 2003 film adaptation of The Human Stain).
Philip Roth's novel Exit Ghost is the ninth in the Zuckerman series; the author says it will be his last novel. The book, published in October of 2007, focuses on Zuckerman as an older man, returning to New York City after an extended period of seclusion in the Berkshires.
Alter brain Rotha odsłania się i atakuje...
Cień pisarza
powieść przedstawia Nathana Zuckermana w latach pięćdziesiątych jako początkującego pisarza, zafascynowanego Wielkimi Książkami, odkrywającego konflikt pomiędzy literaturą i doświadczeniem podczas gościny w odciętym od świata wiejskim domu w Nowej Anglii jego pisarskiego idola, E.I. Lonoffa.
Poznajemy tam Bellette, intrygującą młoda kobietę, nie całkiem określonego cudzoziemskiego pochodzenia, która jest byłą studentką Lonoffa, a może jego kochanką. Zaintrygowany tajemniczą kobietą i obdarzony żywą młodzieńczą wyobraźnią Zuckerman zaczyna zastanawiać się nad jej pochodzeniem i rolą w rodzinie gospodarzy? Cień pisarza, pierwszy tom sagi o Zuckermanie, to książka o napięciach między literaturą a życiem, o prawdzie artystycznej i zwykłej przyzwoitości, a także o ludziach nietuzinkowych, którzy żyją, podporządkowując wszystko jednemu celowi.
Praska orgia
Amerykański powieściopisarz Nathan Zuckerman w połowie lat siedemdziesiątych trafia do Pragi, pogrążonej w głębokim cieniu, rzucanym przez wszechwładny w tej części Europy Związek Radziecki, w poszukiwaniu niepublikowanych rękopisów pewnego zamęczonego w latach II wojny światowej pisarza żydowskiego.
W kraju, krępowanym gorsetem totalitarnego komunizmu, odkrywa trudną sytuację pisarzy podlegających zinstytucjonalizowanym prześladowaniom. Jednocześnie u tych prześladowanych pisarzy dostrzega dziwnie perwersyjną odmianę heroizmu.
Praska orgia, składająca się z dziennikarskich zapisków Zuckermana z jego pobytu wśród tych degradowanych przez państwo intelektualistów, to zaskakujące interludium w przemyślnie skomponowanym opus magnum Philipa Rotha o nieprzewidywalnych skutkach uprawiania sztuki.
Przez literaturę amerykańską przetoczyła w przedostatniej dekadzie XX wieku prawdziwa fala utworów, opartych na osobistym najczęściej zetknięciu z problemami Europy Wschodniej, m.in. Praska orgia Philipa Rotha.
Ta krótka powieść stanowi niejako apendyks do obszernej trylogii, której bohaterem jest sławny współczesny pisarz nowojorski, Nathan Zuckerman. Apendyksem i zwieńczeniem, choć - jak pokazała następna powieść, Counterlives - nie zamknięciem całego cyklu. Praska orgia dzięki swej środkowo-europejskiej scenerii pozwala Zuckermanowi spojrzeć na siebie z zewnątrz. Nie jest to spojrzenie całkiem serio, taka już bowiem natura Zuckermana, że - mówiąc słowami Rotha - "jego uwikłanie w komizm wynika z wciąż ponawianych zabiegów o ucieczkę z tegoż uwikłania komicznego".
Największym osiągnięciem Rotha w Praskiej orgii jest prawdopodobnie wplecenie wielu ludzkich losów w tak krótki tekst. Są to przede wszystkim losy Czechów - czy prawdziwe, czy skłamane, nigdy nie wiemy, jak nie może tego wiedzieć kilkudniowy gość. Do tego dodać trzeba losy przyszłe, potencjalne, łącznie z kafkowską nieco, ale przecież z drugiej strony prawdopodobną wizją własnego losu.
Zuckerman wyzwolony
Nathan Zuckerman, niedoszły samotnik po trzydziestce, zakłopotany świeżo zdobytą sławą autora bestselleru, wypuszcza się na ulice Manhattanu w ostatnim roku burzliwej dekady lat sześćdziesiątych.
Nie dość, że wielbiciele utożsamiają go ze stworzonym w książce satyrem, Gilbertem Carnovskym, to na dodatek staje się celem pouczeń i porad domorosłej krytyki literackiej. Niedawne zabójstwa Roberta Kennedy'ego i Martina Luthera Kinga Juniora każą niespokojnemu Zuckermanowi zastanawiać się, czy określenie "cel" nie jest czymś więcej niż przenośnią.
W Zuckermanie wyzwolonym uwiedziony niespodziewanym sukcesem pisarz wpada w pułapkę łatwej sławy i oddala się od najbliższych przyjaciół, zrywa związek z uczciwą kobietą i niszczy pełne ciepła stosunki z młodszym bratem... a wszystko przez wielki sukces, jaki osiągnął!
CO-TEXT
Zuckerman Unbound (1981) was about the moment in the spring of 1969 when Nathan Zuckerman realised he was famous.
He was sitting on a bus going down Fifth Avenue when two girls turned to look at him. "Veronica," said the smaller one, "It's Carnovsky."
Soon the whole bus was straining for a view, but as Zuckerman dryly noted, "they had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to a character who lived in a book".
The confusion of Zuckerman with Carnovsky re-enacts what has happened to Philip Roth since his notorious third novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Nathan Zuckerman has become such an enduring literary impersonation that everybody confuses Roth with the character who first appeared in a short story by another alter-ego in My Life as a Man (1974) and came to tragi-comic life in nine novels.
Roth's reputation now largely rests on three of those novels, a trilogy in which Zuckerman dreamed up the lives of flawed heroes at key moments of post-war American history.
American Pastoral (1997) was set against the Vietnam era, I Married a Communist (1998) explored the McCarthy witch hunts and The Human Stain (2000), the "culture wars" of the 1990s. Surely now the Great American Novelist (and his impersonator) will tackle September 11, 2001 – the new "biggest thing"?
Exit Ghost begins with Zuckerman, after 11 years as a rural recluse, with no distraction from his "task" other than post-prostatectomy thoughts of incontinence, impotence and death, returning to New York, the most "worldly-in-the-world" of cities.
It's a place that offers chance sightings of long-lost loves and small ads for house (and perhaps life) swaps. It's a place where sex and politics happen. The latter is easier to avoid than the former.
Zuckerman briefly contemplates going to Ground Zero, but he doesn't even make it to the subway. Such a pious journey would have been "wholly out of character for the character" he is. Zuckerman describes himself as a kind of Rip Van Winkle and, like Rip, he's not that interested in the great changes that have happened in his absence. He just wants his old self back.
So Zuckerman offers to swap a 71-year-old writing life in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts for the West 71st Street apartment of a couple of young writers. Instantly he's in love with the wife, or a fantasy version of her.
Perhaps "there is no situation that infatuation is unable to feed on", but Jamie Logan seems a particularly banal love object. Swathed in cashmere, she agonises over Kerry's loss to Bush and whether she'll ever publish again in The New Yorker.
Zuckerman imagines a series of desultory dramatic scenes in which he tells her she's charming and corrects her ungainly English, but his "fictional amplification" does not much improve on reality. It's a come-down for a man who could once conjure up an engagement to Anne Frank.
It is not only his penis that seems to be leaking. What "counterforce" can a writer employ against the "imp of amnesia"? What happens when fiction no longer provides "fortification"?
It is tempting to read Exit Ghost as an example of what Edward Said called late style. Lateness, he said, was not about tidying up but "intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction".
But whether imagining counterlives (to adopt the title of Roth's 1986 novel) or counterpunches (as he did in The Human Stain), Zuckerman has thrived on what he likes to call antagonism and often dramatises as boxing.
There have been many fights over the years, life versus work and life versus death being the biggest. Zuckerman's trip to New York is clearly his last round.
But there is one more battle to engage in: the "second death" of biography versus the limited immortality of literature. This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts.
More critical than any piece of plot is Zuckerman's re-reading of the authors he "discovered as a student".
Conrad provides the idea of the "rash moment", T S Eliot the "compound ghost", Keats "posthumous existence" before death. Then come Shakespeare, Melville, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Hemingway, Plimpton, Mailer, Bellow, and, above all, himself and his fictional mentor, I E Lonoff.
The first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (1979), was a portrait of the artist as a young Jew, a young American and a young man. All those things he came to understand by arguing with Lonoff.
Now, 48 years later, 40 years dead, Lonoff's ghost teaches his elderly "son" how to confront his posthumous fate. Things don't look promising, for the same reasons as always. From Portnoy on, as Roth noted in 1974 and again here, readers have mistaken a novel disguised as a confession for a confession disguised as a novel.
In Exit Ghost Lonoff's reputation is threatened by a would-be biographer called Richard Kliman who, after looking at some photographs and an unpublished novel, has decided that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister.
Zuckerman thinks this is nonsense – Lonoff, he argues, stole the plot from the biography of another Berkshires recluse, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The matter is never resolved but the "excitement of taking someone on" (especially a virile, younger version of himself) revives Zuckerman more than his daydreams of Jamie Logan.
The Facts (1988), a book Roth slyly subtitled "a novelist's autobiography", ended with a letter from Zuckerman telling Roth that he had become little more than a "walking text".
"Without my work," Zuckerman reflects here, "what would be left of me?"
Nothing, perhaps. The work is all we need.
(Kasia Boddy, Telegraph.co.uk)
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