To Invent as Presumptuously as Real Life: Parody and the Cultural Memory of Anne Frank in Roth'sThe Ghost Writer

Abstract

In The G host Writer , Nathan Zuckerman’s literary ambition is so great that he assails the most sacrosanct of later-twentieth-century JewishAmerican culturalmyths—namely, the story of Anne Frank and all its martyrological connotations—with remarkably little compunction about the appropriating reach of his imagination. Philip Roth’s deliberate violation of the cultural typology that had evolved around the Ž gure of Anne Frank Ž nds expression in the novel’s self-conscious exploration of literary form, with the relation of literary text to its antecedent sources standing for the popular transmission of the Holocaust. That Ž ction might act as a distorting lens through which to view history Roth takes as a critical commonplace, but by overstating the distortion to which historical Ž ction is susceptible and by rendering its mediation through the hypothesis of pure invention, Roth makes invention a trope for the very possibility of interpretation. The result is twofold: invention operates loosely as a metonymy for the inevitability of interpretation in the cultural and personal moment of inheriting any story, but it also suggests that only by viewing history subjected to the self-conscious conceits of Ž ction, or the cultural mythmaking in which history is implicated, can we see how and what the Holocaust means through Anne Frank’s story. From the historian’s perspective, the Ž ctional text’s distortion of history may do more harm than the good it does by transmitting history, but whereas the Holocaust historian has especially to worry that much of our poststructuralist insight into the cultural determination of facts according to their ideological and linguistic contexts may rationalize a contrafactualmindset that equates history with what one makes of it, Roth takes precisely this possibility—that Ž ction is whimsically inventive and perhaps