"Writing The Memories Of The Past":A Study Of Philip Roth's Fiction

As one of the most prominent writers in contemporary American literary arena,Philip Roth(1933-)has maintained his vigorous literary creativity during the past five decades.Most of Roth's literary characters have a strong sense of the past,which are manifested in their lengthy even dragging narrative of reminiscence.In previous Roth studies,critics tend to connect this unique way of Rothian writing with the genre study of autobiography,ignoring the characteristics and multifacetedness of memory and the social,historical value it bears.By drawing on the related theories of memory,this dissertation explores how the protagonists use various modes of memory to investigate the fashioning and reconstruction of their ethnical,national or personal identity to manifest Roth's political and ethical concerns.Furthermore,it examines the changing of topic and style at Roth's different writing phases so as to have a more profound and thorough understanding of Roth's fiction and his views on fiction writing.This dissertation follows the chronological order of Roth's literary writing career which can be divided into three phases:the Jewish writing phase,the American writing phase and the phase of "late style" writing.Memories displayed in Roth's fiction vary in paradigm and form of representation with the shift of his writing phases.It is largely influenced by the social-historical context,and meanwhile,reflects Roth's switch of topic,technique and style at different periods of his writing process.In this way,these three independent chapters are closely related.Introduction traces the history and development of the concept of memory,and tries to define the term in order to build up a workable framework for the dissertation and a strong connection between Roth's fiction and different modes of memory.Chapter One explores Roth's representation of the American Jews' reactions to the Jewish traumatic memory,such as repression,forgetting,transference and parody,described in�Eli,The Fanatic" and The Ghost Writer at Roth's Jewish writing phase.Along with the gradual disclosure of the truth on the Holocaust,the American Jews' attitudes towards the Holocaust were going through a series of changes.Facing the return of the repressed traumatic memory,they were gradually abandoning their dumbness and repression towards the Holocaust.The Holocaust as a major factor has been participating in the formation of the Jewish identity for the American Jews.In "Eli,The Fanatics," the protagonist Eli ends up with using madness as a strategy of rebellion after swaying between the absence and presence of the Holocaust memory,adrift in a limbo between past and present.Zuckerman's transference imagination of the story of Anne Frank parodizes the Jewish community's increasing attachment to the Holocaust memory.Capturing acutely this changing attitude towards the Holocaust,Roth criticizes the collective aphasia and silence of the American Jews right after World War ?.He is dismayed to find their misuse and overuse of the Holocaust out of some political reasons.Chapter Two dwells upon Roth's interrogation about "the American Dream" as an American cultural nostalgic memory by analyzing novels written at his American writing phase--American Pastoral and The Human Stain--from the perspective of gender and race.According to Roth,"the American Dream" which advocates equality,freedom and upward mobility is in essence a sexist and radicalized myth.After the protagonists are tumbled down in the pursuit of their American dreams,they turn back to their "good old days" and stick tightly to them.The disasters brought by the tumultuous movements in the 1960s are epitomized by the female protagonist Merry Levov.The masculinity of Seymour Levov,the once "American Adam," is put in jeopardy after Merry drops her destructive tomb in 1968.The whole American society at that moment is experiencing a castration and is consequently indulging in a sentimental melancholia.The American people have to falsify and beautify a pastoral past and search for the lost "American Dream."In The Human Stain,Coleman Silk,who passes for a Jew,is disillusioned because of the racial word "spook." Paradoxically,Coleman is a black who is accused of despising the blacks.Then,he resorts to his nostalgic memory to revolt against this racialized dream by repeating and performing his own past.After being constantly amended and altered,"the American Dream" has become part of the cultural memory of the American people,while the American cultural memory enhances the ideal of "the American Dream" conversely.Chapter Three discusses Roth's "late style" and confessional memory."Late style" is a term coined by Theodor W.Adorno and then illustrated by Edward Said,indicating a unique style used by an artist in his/her late period of life.After the millennium,the satirical and poignant elements in Roth's novels have abated,diminished and even faded away in the end.Nevertheless,instead of writing about the cultural memories' influences on the individual,caring for personal memory becomes an important characteristic of Roth's late style.The late Rothian writing pays much attention to the existence of the marginalized individuals,especially the old and the weak,and uses confession as an introspective way of presenting the inner selves.The protagonists in The Dying Animal,Everyman and Nemesis adopt confessional memory to look into their own moral lapses in the past with respect to desire,dying,death and disease,which manifest saliently Roth's own ethical concerns.The fragmental memory of the Holocaust resurges in his last novel,and this can be interpreted as the return of his Jewish identity which Roth tries to get rid of but never succeeds.Roth's half-century literary career undergoes three distinct phases,corresponding to Roth's shifts from a Jewish writer,American writer to an aging writer.These shifts were greatly influenced by the historical contexts,the author's age,health condition and his way of understanding life,but they also reflect Roth's ongoing literary and moral pursuits.Roth's memories in their varying modes embody his serious thinking on Jewish identity,American identity and the personal identity and existence.To investigate Roth's fiction from the perspective of memory can not only shed some light on recent Roth studies and provide a novel way to it,but also supply a new paradigm for analyzing other literary works preoccupied with the past and memory.