Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: Philip Roth's American trilogy 1 is indeed a poignant description of seminal periods of contemporary America.Reading these three outstanding novels, one feels entitled to use the fictional data included to improve or modify one's knowledge of crucial events such as the Vietnam War, McCarthyism or Clinton's peculiar second term.And this is roughly how this work has been depicted in most reviews, as a powerful "mimetic feast."Today, Roth's talent seems to lie mainly in his ability to create a fictional world which is both fascinating and extremely similar to reality.This may come as a surprise if one remembers that the same author had quite a fling with the postmodern at the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's, particularly in books like The Counterlife or Operation Shylock.Those experiments garnered criticism, but everything seems to have been forgotten since the author is apparently back on the right track, the mimetic track. Zuckerman's narratological autobiography 2There are nevertheless a few things that should be considered, among which is Zuckerman's return.Nathan Zuckerman appeared for the first time in My Life as a Man in 1974.Roth has used him nine times since.Yet his first appearance is worth mentioning: Nathan is not just a simple character but both character and narrator of an "embedded narrative." 2 My Life as a Man is composed of three narratives; the first one is narrated by Zuckerman, who becomes just a simple character in the second one, the narrator of the third part being Tarnopol, who eventually turns out to be the narrator of the primary narrative, 3 and retrospectively the author of the first two pieces.Zuckerman is Tarnopol's creation.Thus, the former didn't seem to have such a great future in Roth's fictional world.In fact, his first biographical outline is slightly hazy:As he did in "Courting Disaster," the second of the "Useful Fictions" in My Life as a Man, Roth again alters aspects of Zuckerman's life and background to offer still a different "legend of the self."In Zuckerman Bound Nathan was born and reared in Zuckerman's "Blah-blah Blah-blah Blah": a blow to mimesis, a key to irony...
DOI: 10.4000/ejas.7353
Author: Arnaud Schmitt
Institution: Université Montesquieu Bordeaux IV
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2034043940