Abstract
The critical problem surrounding Philip Roth’s recent Exit Ghost (2007), the ninth and projected by the author as the final Zuckerman novel, is how it can function as comedy when one major character is dying of brain cancer and its protagonist is seventy-one years old, beginning to receive an elderly male’s gifts reserved for age –prostate cancer, prostate surgery, impotence, and incontinence – and, despite all, falls in love with a thirty-year-old married woman. A sequel to The Ghost Writer (1979), the first Zuckerman novel, whose character relations it repeats, Exit Ghost has comparatively less humor than its predecessor but there is humor enough. Moreover, and more important, it fits the genre of comedy because of the functions it gives to the classically traditional motifs of the phallus, castration, age versus youth, Eros and Thanatos, and the like. It is from a Lacanian critical perspective that it can be shown how the novel moves toward comedy’s conventional happy ending because of the duality of meanings attached to the matter of castration, the way in which Roth/Zuckerman displaces the object of desire from the young woman and finds it – enjoyment, jouissance – in the very process of writing itself.
Highlights
Published in 2007, it appeared at a timePhilip Roth’s recent Exit Ghost seems symptomatic of our current historical moment.when its author, seventy-five in 2008 and still very active literarily, has advanced into an era of seniorityActa Scientiarum
As had Nathan his cancer and its gifts, Amy, too, had survived all hers, and about her enduring, and going on, Nathan is not above a small pun: “That she had survived [...] was a grave miracle” (ROTH, 2007, p. 167). As it must, Exit Ghost reveals the specific form of the comedic structure Roth means to give it
As Northrop Frye says, fade into each other at the ends of their narrative spectra, Exit Ghost is comedy rather than romance but its form is quite synoptic of the genre
Summary
Philip Roth’s recent Exit Ghost seems symptomatic of our current historical moment. when its author, seventy-five in 2008 and still very active literarily, has advanced into an era of seniority. The central roles include young man, old man, and young woman, but Roth again inverts romantic comedy's conventional relations, with the old man, rather than the youth, cast in the role of hero in Exit Ghost In this novel, Lonoff is long dead (having died of leukemia in 1961), Nathan and Amy Bellette have both grown old, and each has become afflicted by other types of cancer and attendant maladies. In contrast to the earlier novel, where he ceded his interest in the young woman (the living Amy as opposed to the imaginary Anne), here in Exit Ghost Nathan pursues, or appears to pursue, an object of romantic interest found in another beautiful young woman While this object is neither Amy Bellette nor the fantasized Anne Frank, Roth repeats the dual role Amy supports in the text of The Ghost Writer by, in effect, giving Amy another incarnation in Jamie, as suggested by the obvious rhyme in the given names (and the potential for love – aime – in their French connections). As Hemingway’s Jake Barnes says to Lady Brett Ashley, when she opines that the two of them “could have had such a damned good time together”, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (HEMINGWAY, 1954, p. 247)
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