The anatomy lesson

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The anatomy lesson (English original title: The Anatomy Lesson ) is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth , which was published in 1983 by the New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux . After The Ghost Writer (1979, German: The Ghost Writer ) and Zuckerman Unbound (1981, German: Zuckerman's Liberation ), the novel closes the trilogy about the Jewish-American writer Nathan Zuckerman. The German translation by Gertrud Baruch was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1986 .

content

One year after his scandalous success Carnovsky and the death of his father, Nathan Zuckerman's mother also died of a brain tumor in 1970. Without a family - his younger brother Henry has also broken off contact - after three failed marriages, the race riots in his hometown of Newark and the controversy that his revealing novel sparked among American Jews, the writer feels uprooted and suffers from writer's block . Three years later, 40-year-old Zuckerman is plagued by chronic pain in the neck, arms and shoulders, which already make it physically impossible for him to write. No conventional or alternative medical therapy gives him relief. Psychologists assume that the writer is an unconscious self-punishment. Only with strong painkillers, alcohol and drugs can he numb the pain, which nevertheless becomes the center of his entire life.

Four women, ironically referred to by Zuckerman as his harem , look after the sick man and take turns sleeping with him, which requires precise coordination of their visiting times. The young college student Diana serves as Zuckerman's part-time secretary, while Gloria is the dissatisfied wife of his financial advisor. Zuckerman shuns a relationship with the down-to-earth painter Jenny because he fears making her as unhappy as his three ex-wives. Jaga, of Polish descent, assistant to a trichologist who treats Zuckerman's hair loss , is already irreparably unhappy. Her life story briefly sparked Zuckerman's interest as a writer, until he realized that he could only write about his own feelings, not about someone else's suffering. A review by the renowned literary critic Milton Appel, who vigorously attacked Zuckerman personally and placed it in the vicinity of anti-Semitism , arouses the wrath of the writer, who recognizes the older Jew as a kind of father figure, against whom he has to rebel just as he once did against his own father. For days he wrestled with armed answers. Finally, he calls Appel, but after venting his pent-up anger, he is no better.

Zuckerman decides to give up writing and study medicine in Chicago , the city where he was a liberating student. He no longer wants to struggle lonely with himself and his doubts, but rather help other people. With medication and drugs, he numbs his pain to the point that he survives the trip. To a passenger and the chauffeur of his rental car, he impulsively pretends to be a pornographer by the name of Milton Appel, reports frankly about filming and swinger clubs and defends the benefits of pornography in fiery speeches . Zuckerman's former fellow student Bobby Freytag, now a professor of anesthesiology , does not want to relieve the writer of his sudden interest in medicine. The following day, the rebellious Zuckermans had an argument with Freytag senior, another old-school Jewish father figure, in a cemetery. Under the influence of drugs and medication, Zuckerman collapses, hits his head on a tombstone and breaks his jaw.

The pain of Zuckerman's treatment at the Chicago hospital dwarfs all the torments of the past few months. Bobby orders the withdrawal from Zuckerman's drugs and wants to have his friend examined until the cause of his chronic pain is found. As soon as Zuckerman is feeling better, he accompanies the interns on their rounds. Their meaningful work and their solidarity with the patients impressed him. He gives himself up to the illusion that his future as a loner is not mapped out.

interpretation

The anatomy of Dr. Tulip by Rembrandt

For the third time, the anatomy lesson accompanies Philip Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman through the stages of a writing career that Roth himself described as stages of "intense transformation or radical change". For the first time in Roth's work, the focus is on the topic of pain, illness and transience, which is later taken up again in Sabbath's Theater (1995), The Dying Animal ( Das dying Animal , 2001) and Exit Ghost (2007) and also the basic theme of the the final Nemeses Quartet (2006-2010). In the novel, Roth dealt with the grief of his mother, who died in May 1981, and contrasted his "very amorphous and blurred self-image" with a fictional autobiography. He reasoned: "You long to look at yourself from the outside [...] But the more you look, the more you see yourself from within."

Zuckerman's initial situation in the anatomy lesson was summed up by Roth: "Put out the door by the family, estranged from his fans and at odds with his own nerve endings". According to Thomas David, Roth continues to “dismantle his protagonist” by paralyzing his creativity and his will to live. In his moral conflict, he tried on the one hand to renew his life by studying medicine and selfless work as an obstetrician. On the other hand, in the figure of a publisher of porn magazines who wants to free America from the shackles of bigoted morality and hypocrisy, he realizes the public identification with his scandalous figure Carnovsky . The attack on Milton Appels in Inquiry , an allusion to a criticism by literary critic Irving Howe in the December 1972 issue of Commentary , had a devastating effect on the already ailing Zuckerman . In addition to Zuckerman's complaints, the title anatomy lesson also refers to Danilo Kiš ' Čas anatomije , in which he dealt with the smear campaign in totalitarian Yugovia against his novel A Tomb for Boris Dawidowitsch .

For the son of Jewish immigrants and Americans of the second generation, the last volume of the Zuckerman trilogy is also an “expulsion” of the “Jewish demons of his fathers”. Zuckerman must reject Appel's demand to purify his conscience through a statement on behalf of Israel against the background of the Yom Kippur War , just as he has rebelled against the paternal loyalty to Judaism many years earlier in The Ghost Writer . While his father's last word in Zuckerman's liberation was “bastard”, a piece of paper left by his mother, which he now carries with him as a legacy, says “ Holocaust ”. The word, which was not in his mother's vocabulary at all, means to Zuckerman an experience beyond his imagination. Roth explained: "Without this word there would be no Nathan Zuckerman, no Zuckerman misery". For most intellectual Jews in America the Holocaust is “simply always present, hidden, submerged, reappearing, disappearing, unforgettable. You don't use it - you are used by it ”.

reception

The Anatomy Lesson reached the finals of the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the National Book Awards in 1983 . John Updike came out as a fan of Philip Roth, but still saw the book as "the least successful in the Zuckerman trio," the least objectified and coherent. Despite the elegantly written action and the exuberant abundance of observations, the book lacks characters the author respects. Instead of characters, it only offers "demons who are vigorously reviled but not exorcised." Harold Bloom described the novel as a " farce that borders on fantasy " and in its spirit and form reminds more of Nathanael West than anything that Roth previously wrote. The entire Zuckerman trilogy including the epilogue deserves “the highest aesthetic praise for tragicomedy ”.

Some critics have shown weariness with the third volume about Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Martin Amis , for example, complained that the author had already written two autobiographical novels about the consequences of writing autobiographical novels and dealing with success: “Such fixation!” No author before Roth had taken self-reflection so far. "What's next? A novel about this novel? A tetralogy of the trilogy? ”Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called The Anatomy Lesson a“ rich, satisfyingly complex conclusion to the Zuckerman trilogy, ”which he compared to James Joyce 's portrait of the artist as a young man and Thomas Mann's Zauberberg . While in later works of the literary models, however, the preoccupation with oneself took a back seat, it remains to be seen with Roth whether The Anatomy Lesson will remain the last of many educational novels in his work.

According to Maxim Biller , Roth delights in the anatomy lesson "in a mixture of sadism and masochism, of wit and melancholy, sharpness and self-irony" in the brotherly quarrel between the Old Testament-harsh Jewish critic Milton Appel and the Freudian nest-dirtying Nathan Zuckerman. In his “not autobiographical, but very self-centered novel” Roth wanted to show the “Jewish panopticon” and make fun of it without being forbidden from laughing by the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Its quality is "that it shows this contradiction in an amusing and intelligent way, without any lack of loyalty, without fear of comical exaggerations and the truest truths."

expenditure

  • Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1983, ISBN 0-374-10492-1 .
  • Philip Roth: The anatomy lesson . From the American by Gertrud Baruch. Hanser, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-446-14212-6 .
  • Philip Roth: The anatomy lesson . From the American by Gertrud Baruch. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, ISBN 3-499-12310-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Rowohlt's monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 112–113, 126–127.
  2. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Rowohlt's monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 108-109, 112, 114. See the article by Morris Dickstein: Jewish for more details on the allusions and the replica to Irvin Howe's criticism of Roth's work -American fiction. In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , published online in July 2017 under [1] . Retrieved on March 9, 2018. Roth, on behalf of this, mocks the figure of Milton Appels as a hypocrite, a pretentious moralist and, in a striking, surprising twist, as an author of pornographic writings.
  3. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth. Rowohlt's monographs . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 113-115.
  4. ^ All Past National Book Critics Circle Award Winners and Finalists at the National Book Critics Circle.
  5. ↑ Philip Roth: 75th Birthay Tribute at the National Book Foundation.
  6. ^ " The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heart-felt book. [...] the least successful of the Zuckerman Trio, the least objectified and coherent. […] Instead of characters The Anatomy Lesson has demons, and these are powerfully agitated but not exorcised. ”Quoted from: John Updike: Yahweh Over Dionysus, in Disputed Deicision. In: The New Yorker . Nov. 7, 1983. Reprinted in: John Updike: Odd Jobs. Essays and Criticism. Random House, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-8129-8379-1 , pp. 399-406.
  7. ↑ "a farce bordering on fantasy", "the highest level of esthetic praise for tragicomedy". Harold Bloom: His Long Ordeal by Laughter . In: The New York Times . May 19, 1985.
  8. ↑ "Such fixity! […] Where next? A novel about this novel? A tetralogy about the trilogy? ”Quoted from: Martin Amis: Song of Himself. In: The Observer . February 26, 1984. Reprinted in: Martin Amis: The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America . Jonathan Cape, London 1986, ISBN 0-224-02385-3 , pp. 46-48.
  9. ↑ "rich, satisfyingly complex conclusion to his Zuckerman trilogy". Quoted from: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: Books of the Times . In: The New York Times . October 19, 1983.
  10. ↑ Maxim Biller: The time of the monsters is over . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1987, pp. 192-198 ( online ).