This is E. I. Lonoff (dead), speaking through his mistress Amy Bellette (brain cancer), speaking through Nathan Zuckerman (senile dementia), speaking through Philip Roth:
If I had something like Stalin’s power… I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grad school, high school, college, and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter… I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own. (Exit Ghost, 184.)
Seriously, Roth? Internet book chatter?
Lonoff dies in 1960; Bellette is impoverished and out of touch with the digital present; Zuckerman curmudges his way through a page or two complaining about cell phones and revels in his insularity from the world. The only one who cares about internet book chatter is Roth, but it’s impossible to tell what he means: are only the blind authors who refuse to let their works into the world—Roth’s characters—concerned with litblogging? Or does Roth feel some sympathy for their position? Should we polloi blog about shoes and politics but leave authors uncontestedly in control of their works?
Whatever the role of bloggers, the big fight in Exit is between the author and his biographers. How can an author vanish, leaving no biographical ghost to haunt him?
As Roth gets tangled up in the history and ambiguity of literary biography he seems to lose track of the more difficult question: how should readers read books if not grounded in biographical context? Zuckerman at one point quips that readers rarely read a book. This is new criticism, or something like it: the reader alone with the book.
Roth might argue that this attack on lit crit is simply a metaphor to bring Zuckerman’s insularity into relief, but I can’t help feel that he’s trudged up this old problem and refused to resolve it: authors want tyrannical control over their works; readers want their tyrannies toppled.
There’s an astonishing passage where Zuckerman compares literary critics to the Nazis: “Kliman [the biographer] would pursue Lonoff’s secret with all his crude intensity, and Amy Bellette would be as powerless to stop him as she’d been as a girl to prevent the murder of her mother, her father, and her brother,” Norwegian Jews who died in the holocaust (280).
I’m not a big fan of Roth’s. I read the Zuckerman books years ago and recall liking them and PORTNOY was funny as hell but awhile back I heard the buzz about PLOT AGAINST AMERICA and picked it up. Bor-ing! I could name a number of SF works that handled the alternate history notion with far more adeptness and originality. He’s a curmudgeon, rarely gives interviews and even at his advanced age sticks with the daily practice of writing. For that I doff my hat to him. But I also get the sense that he’s one of those writers who’s more admired than read…
Cliff, I agree that Roth has stopped giving much attention to plot, with perhaps the exception of American Pastoral. I was particularly baffled by the awkward shape of The Plot Against America, part bildungsroman and part fantasist timeline, but in an odd way I loved it: the obsession with stamps, the attention to the hierarchies of childhood, the banality of tyranny. I will give Roth this credit: I’d rather read a 300-page fantasy about a Nazi-controlled America in his prose than in Philip K. Dick’s. Whatever his faults, the man has an ear.
Roth’s a literary writer, no question. And Phil Dick never escaped his pulp roots and sensibilities. THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE is actually one of my least favorite PKD offerings–I very much prefer UBIK, THREE STIGMATA and, especially, A SCANNER DARKLY. They are terrific reads, well worth seeking out…
Sometime around the summer of 1998 I read maybe a half dozen Henry James novels in a row and became a horrid snob; I’ve had trouble enjoying fantasy and scifi ever since. A few years ago I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and maybe a dozen of PKD’s short stories, but could get only 10 pages into Ubik, even though dozens of the readers I most admire have told me to read it. I’ll try again this summer.
Is this an area of your expertise, Phil? Could you recommend some literary writers among the science fiction crowd? I adored Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan, and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, but haven’t found much else.