Exit Ghost - Day 3

"But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."

The impressive paragraph that , being  constitutionally lazy, I typed the first five words of into Google hoping to find it already to cut and paste into my blog. (somehow typing all out wasn't an option, though it is a para I would have happily copied out in longhand in my moleskine notebook  if I'd been somewhere warm and sunny like Crete, away from the distractions of computers and the internet). Of course I turn up a whole page of reading blogs and reviews of Exit ghost who have all seized on this paragraph  Going to have to have a look to see if they're saying the same things as me.  Which they probably are, although I can't find many comments from the actual bloggers / tumblrs in the first page of reference.  

Well I have found one, and satisfyingly it's abit bollocks, in that that (that lovely construction again, with a third that only separated from the first two by a bracket) reading doesn't appear to me to be right. Here it is: 

"What Roth seems to be offering here is a defense of the whole Zuckerman project. If the way one conducts one's life is sometimes no more real than fiction, as Maria discovered in The Counterlife, then why shouldn't the "unlived" life be equally as real? And so Zuckerman himself, the "ghost writer" of Roth's fiction, becomes more real to the reader than his creator. The writer need not choose between life and art; he can live just as fully--if not more so- - through his creations."

(quoted from Permananet Groping - a long, and I mean long, review cum essay on the book)

You see I like the original quotation from the book because it says to me how - well no, I'm probably about to say the same thing, and I can't be arsed enough to change ti round enough to make it snottily different. It's not a bad quote about a quote after all. It's just a bit too laden dwon with reference to the "whole Zuckerman project". Whereas I think Roth is writing about the exquisite satisfaction and pain of creating a perfectly imperfect but deeply felt fantasy of what might have happened, what could happen, but never did or does. If that makes sense. It's like dreaming about your anima, wonderfully enveloping and fulfilling in the dream, a sweet memory when you wake, gradually fading as the everyday business of the day occludes your warm fuzzy happiness. You see I take at face value - probably shouldn't.