THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, November 22, 1985
67
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Philip Roth Ends His 25-Year
Jewish Conflict With 'Epilogue'
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BY JOSEPH COHEN
When Philip Roth published
The Anatomy Lesson in 1983,
following The Ghost Writer
(1979) and Zuckerman Unbound
(1981), now issued together as
Zuckerman Bound, a Trilogy &
Epilogue
(Farrar, Straus
Giroux), I found that third novel
patently offensive. In its head-
long rush to offend, it aban-
doned fiction for polemic. In-
veighing in general against
Jewish values and in particular
against several Jewish critics
who had earlier condemned
Roth for his excesses in
Portnoy's Complaint, The
Anatomy Lesson was not so
much Roth's last hurrah against
his enemies as his last haran-
gue. He could not have sunk
any lower in the misuse of his
talent.
Listening in The Anatomy
Lesson to the raging and whin-
ing of Roth's protagonist and
surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, I
was convinced that Zuckerman
was not only a moral reprobate
but a coward as well. He was
great at dishing it out but he
couldn't take it. And since Zuc-
kerman was Roth's surrogate,
obviously reliving in fiction sig-
nificant portions of Roth's life, it
was easy to assume that Zuc-
kerman's arrogance and snivel-
ling grossness was Roth's as
well.
Whether this appraisal was
legitimate or not, I hated to
think of Roth in such negative
terms and it made me uncom-
fortable. Why? Because Philip
Roth, despite his 25 years of
conflict with the Jews, is one of
the most gifted writers of our
time, a comic genius, with
enormous versatility and talent,
properly used, to (mark him for
the ages. But his need to fuel
the flames of his "War with the
Jews" has kept him, in my opin-
ion, from using his gifts to their
best advantage. With every book
over the years things always
seemed to get worse instead of
better. And in the trilogy, the
vindictiveness and the vitupera-
tion reached a crescendo. While
each of these more recent novels
contained some moments of
grace, felicity and superb
hiimor, they each lacked a true
balance. I concluded reluctantly
that nothing would restore that
balance.
To my great surprise, that re-
storation has not only taken
place but it has come im-
mediately upon the heels of The
Anatomy Lesson and is tied to
it. In Epilogue: The Prague
Orgy, Roth not only salvages the
trilogy, he justifies its excesses.
How does such a miracle come
about?
Roth makes the miracle hap-
pen in two ways: through the
use of a literary construct as old
as story-telling itself; and
through a series of startling an-
nouncements which, taken to-
gether, tell us that his "War
with the Jews" is over.
The literary construct is sim-
ply the epic poem, the form of
the Iliad and the Odyssey, the
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Philip Roth:
Salvaging the trilogy.
Divine Comedy and Paradise
Lost. The use of the epic con-
struct did not become apparent,
at least not to me, as the indi-
vidual novels appeared. But in
looking back we can see that
Roth has adapted the epic's
principal conventions to his fic-
tion. We are presented with an
obscure youth from humble ori-
gins who sets out on the journey
of life, testing his powers, mak-
ing his quest into the unknown,
encountering all sorts of obsta-
cles, fighting dragons, ulti-
mately emerging victorious in
terms of fame and fortune but
oftentimes burdened with the
aches of various exploitations or
still far removed from the fam-
ily hearth, so that retribution is
necessary before peace and se-
renity are possible. A journey
into the netherword is inevita-
ble.
In the Zuckerman epic, the
protagonist is unhappy over the
extent to which he has exploited
his own family and rejected the
value system which gave mean-
ing to its dynamics. Cursed by
his father in his dying breath,
Zuckerman is a classic example
of the Jew caught up in inter-
generational conflict. In order to
resolve the violence he has done
to his family, to himself and to
others, he has to underake the
traditional journey of the epic
protagonist into the underworld,
spiraling downward as a rake
into Homer's Hades and Dante's
Inferno, to burn out his rage
and lust, a purification rite that
will allow him to re-emerge as a
true epic hero, that is to say, a
mensch.
Roth has neatly confabulated
Jewish and Hellenic elements,
and the confabulation is appo-
The
site and appealing.
Anatomy Lesson is Zuckerman's
progress through hell. After this
journey, which is plenty hard on
Roth's readers, Zuckerman
comes back in the epilogue, The
Prague Orgy, as a newly
fashioned old-fashioned Jew
headed for Jerusalem, his epic
paradise.
Zuckerman's and, indeed,
Roth's Jerusalem is Prague. A
true paradise it isn't, but for
Zuckerman, and no doubt for
Roth, too, it is his spiritual
home. He literally announces in
a wonderful passage too long to
quote here that Prague is his
spiritual home, and it is to that
ancient city that Zuckerman
must repair in order to make a
number of other significant an-
nouncements.
Among the most revealing of
these is that "Kafka is dead."
Zuckermn doesn't say it, an-
other character does, but in the
pronouncement Roth makes it
clear that he has finally come to
terms with this long-standing
literary father. Until now Roth
always regarded Kafka as his
comic spirit, and he emulated
Kafka's stories by imitating
them too intensely. The Breast,
because of that intense imita-
tion, was Roth's worst book.
Here he has finally broken
the tie that binds, and he is at
last capable of placing between
Kafka and himself the aesthetic
distance that was lacking in The
Breast. Roth demonstrates his
new capability in The Prague
Orgy by having his epic pro-
tagonist, Zuckerman, like
Joseph K in Kafka's The Trial,
arrested without ever having
committed a crime or being told
the nature of the specific
charges against him. This imita-
tion of Kafka is not a matter of
slavish dependency. It is hand-
led lightly, and it is made to fit
in appropriately with Roth's
narrative.
The arrest is the expectd out-
come of Zuckerman's journey to
Prague. He goes to the dreary
Communist city to recover the
unpublished manuscripts, con-
sisting of several hundred
stories, •of an unknown Yiddish
Flaubert, supposedly killed by
the Nazis. He obtains the manu-
scripts only to have them confis-
cated by the police.
In his efforts to get the manu-
scripts he comes into contact
with a number of writers and
artists whose lives have been
reduced by the regime to a
primitivism Zuckerman abhors.
Normal life has disappeared; in
its place are orgies consisting of
the degrading sexual activities
of the disenfranchised resulting
from the obscene political har-
rassment of the di s -
enfranchisers.
In the midst of these orgies, a
now restrained, reformed, decent
Zuckerman tries to accomplish,
at some risk to his own safety,
his self-appointed task of getting
the manuscripts. His conduct in
going about his futile task con-
stitutes one announcement after
another of his new menschleit-
keit: Zuckerman is no longer
selfish! Zuckerman has learned_
compassion! Zuckerman has re-
nounced lust! Zuckerman will no
longer rage or whine. Zucker-
man understands what it is to be
free and to possess human dig-
nity! And Zuckerman comes to a
humble appreciation of his talent
as a writer and is grateful for
his gifts!
All of these announcements
are backed up with convincing
(and highly entertaining)
arguments. They are cleverly
interwoven into a superbly-told
story that is funny, happily pro-
fane, mellow, serious and inspir-
ing all at the same time.
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Copyright 1985 Joseph Cohen.
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