Week 9- Ageing Bodies - Lola Boorman PDF

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Lola Boorman...

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The Body in Modern American Fiction and Culture Week 9: Ageing Bodies

22/11/2020

Point: The conflict between Nathan Zuckerman and Kliman, about the reputation and legacy of Lonoff is quite striking, as it sort of leads on to the argument about fiction writing, and the differences between fiction, reality and memory. On one of the first encounters between the two characters Nathan accuses Kliman of characterising Lonoff, by discussing the scandalous affair, and continues to suggest that Kliman is characterising Nathan himself, to which Kliman argues that he is “characterising literature” and that “there is something beyond the image you set out to give – call it the truth of the self” (102). Furthermore, towards the end of the novel, Nathan suggests that ‘fiction for [Kliman] was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form’ (200). This contention that we see coursing through the novel, is reminiscent of Husvedt’s argument, looking at the ideas of fiction versus memory in “The Emotional Stories: Reflections on Memory, the Imagination, Narrative, and the Self”, where she argues that “memory and the imagination partake of the same mental processes’. For Nathan, he does not want the image of this great writer tarnished in his own mind, and cannot understand why Kliman wants to capitalise on tainting his legacy. However, for Kliman, he is able to distinguish in Lonoff’s writing, the fact that he is drawing on his own memories, and using that in his writing, similar to the way Husvedt uses her own experiences such as the migraines and her experiences in hospital. It is also quite interesting that Roth himself is drawing upon his own experiences and uses the character of Zuckerman as his alter ego, yet decides to have his character suggest that Lonoff is NOT drawing on his own experiences?

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost Page 1  ‘I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed.’ Page 3  ‘There I was, at the age of seventy-one, back on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not many blocks from where I’d once lived as a vigorous, healthy younger man’  ‘More control over my urine flow than an infant’  ‘I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is.’ Page 4  ‘In my wake I leave a thin, billowing cloud of urine that visibly discolours the surrounding pond waters’ Page 27  ‘You would think that my relationship to all of this could not have shifted one iota, that once I had my drink in my hand and was chewing on a chunk of Italian bread of the kind that I’d eaten here dozens of times before I’d feel pleasantly at home, and yet I didn’t. I felt like an imposter, pretending to be the man Tony had once known and suddenly craving to be him.’  ‘But by living mostly in solitude for eleven years, I had got rid of him.’ Page 35  ‘It was a garment at the other end of the spectrum of female apparel from the hospital gown Amy Bellette had converted into a dress, its colour paler and softer than tan and woven of a thick, soft cashmere.’

Page 39  ‘Think seriously about 4000. Imagine it. In all its dimensions, in all its aspects. The year 4000. Take your time.” After a minute of sober silence, I quietly said to them, “That’s what it’s like to be seventy,” and sat back down.’ Page 52  ‘Old men hate young men? Young men fill them with envy and hatred? Why shouldn’t they?’ Page 63  ‘As if incontinence weren’t indignity enough, one had to be addressed like a churlish eight-year-old balking at taking his cod liver oil.’ Page 69

‘I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child – the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult.’ Page 101  ‘Their intellectual curiosity curiously never extending to anyone younger, unless the younger one was much younger and pretty and a woman.’ Page 102  ‘”I’m characterising literature. It nurtures curiosity too. It says the public life is not the real life. It says there is something beyond the image you set out to give – call it the truth of the self. I’m not doing anything other than what you do. What any thinking person does. Curiosity is nurtured by life.”’ Page 103  ‘Both Kliman and Jamie having the effect of rousing the virility in me again, the virility of mind and spirit and desire and intention and wanting to be with people again and have a fight again and have a woman again and feeling the pleasure of one’s power again. It’s all called back – the virile man called back to life! Only there is no virility.’ Page 109  ‘The once rigid instrument of procreation was now like the end of a pipe you see sticking out of a field somewhere, a meaningless piece of pipe that spurts and gushes intermittently’ Page 122  ‘I was learning at seventy-one what it is to be deranged.’ Page 166  ‘An aging man, his battles behind him, who suddenly feels the urge … to what? Once around with the passions wasn’t enough? Page 185  ‘”You told me before these were the words of a nutty old woman rambling on.’” Page 196  ‘It won’t be that there was once a free and unique imagination loosed upon the world that went by the name of E.I. Lonoff – everything will be seen through the lens of the incest.’ Page 200  ‘Fiction for him was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form.’ Page 230  ‘Oh, my memory. (But she does not hear his three-word lament. She is too busy remembering her fourteenth year. And with such ease).’ Page 264  ‘I couldn’t bear him. I couldn’t bear his outsized boy’s energy and smug self-certainty and the pride he took in being an enthusiast and a raconteur.’ 

Page 265  ‘” A novel is not evidence,” I said, “a novel’s a novel,” and resumed eating.’ Page 267  ‘’Then why did it shatter him to write it?” “Because writers can be shattered by writing. The primacy of the imaginative life can do that, and more.”’ Page 277  ‘You’ve imagined a woman who isn’t me.’ Lecture 24/11 Illness is absent or unspoken within literature Counteracts this by throwing the book at all of this Feeling of illness How much proliferation of literary language that she uses to express the quite mundane pain of the tooth Narratives of illness invite reflection about the purpose and feature of literature How they thought about the arts and literary criticism Could have engendered the field of medical humanities Idea of nerve medicine is a way of using literature and discourses of philosophy to shift attitudes within the medical community to generate empathy Literature to make doctors more empathetic Relationship between autobiographical narratives of illness and idea of authenticity and life...