Writing himself and others: Philip Roth and the autobiographical tradition in Jewish-American fiction

Philip Roth's parody of autobiography in the Zuckerman series is part of a larger debate concerning the problems of Jewish art. As Roth manipulates personal and personified autobiography, he both underlines and undermines Jewish traditions of reading and writing. To be sure, Zuckerman's struggle for artistic identity articulates a long-standing Jewish concern with the tensions of collective representation. It is from a culture consistently threatened by alienation and extermination that Roth finds his terms of reference. Zuckerman and his creator are subject to a whole discourse of Jewish textuality: to Jewish notions about the relationship between the individual and the group; between fact and fiction and between aesthetics and morality.;However, the Zuckerman books are at once part of a continuum of Jewish culture and a unique response to the pressures of contemporary American Judaism. Through his humorous manipulations of autobiographical fiction, Roth finally counter-turns the very compasses by which he has oriented himself. He offers a potent commentary on the fatuity of Jewish "facts" and on the fictitious nature of the collectivized Jewish voice. For Roth, it is not only the Jew's experience, but his/her imagination, his/her individual frame of understanding, that determines ethnic identity. In the end, Roth challenges the cohesion of the Jewish cultural text. He places himself in a house of mirrors, where life and art, self and group, Jewish reverence and Jewish rebellion, endlessly reflect off one another.