「再現的蜃影」與「敘事的深淵」：論菲力普・羅斯《夏洛克行動》與《安息日劇場》中之敘事美學

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(1)Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. “A Mirage of Representation” and “An Abyss of Narratives”: The Aesthetic of Narrative in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater. Advisor: Dr. Ioana, Luca. 108. 11. November 2019.

(2) 1967. Philippe Lejeune. James Olney. Jacques Derrida. 1980. Jacques Rancière. Wayne Booth the implied author Jerome Bruner. i.

(3) Abstract. The first chapter of my thesis traces the early reception of the Jewish American writer, Philip Roth. Taking into consideration the controversies following the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1967, the first chapter examines the polemics about Roth’s writings with an emphasis on how Roth navigates between different literary genres and narrative styles. In fact, Roth is known for incorporating different ontological levels and the interplay between them in his work. The interplay between different ontological levels are often manifested through Roth’s apposition of autobiographical and fictional elements. In view of the important role the autobiographical element plays in Roth’s oeuvre, the second chapter reviews scholarly debates in autobiography studies. Taking Philippe Lejeune’s “The Autobiographical Pact” (1975) as a starting point, the second section traces the evolvement of autobiographical studies and highlights the “post-structural turn” that Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson observe in the transition from “autobiography” to “autobiographical narratives” in life writing studies. The “post-structural turn” in life writing studies leads me to discuss the debate between Jacques Derrida and Jacaques Rancière about whether literary genres should exist or not. The third chapter starts with a short overview of the idea of the “mirage of representation.” My understanding of the term enables me to read Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) beyond the dichotomy of autobiography and fiction. My reading will highlight “the aesthetic regime of art” in Operation Shylock and demonstrate how such aesthetics mediate between the written world and the material world. Chapter four continues the discussion on the aesthetics of narrative strategy and brings in Wayne Booth’s idea of “the. ii.

(4) implied author” to help elucidate my reading of Sabbath’s Theater (1995) as an agglomeration of literary genres and styles. The concluding chapter focuses on how Roth’s narrative strategies in the two works discussed above engender a more emancipated understanding of both personal identity and the aesthetic of narratives.. Keywords: Philip Roth, Jacques Rancière, autobiographical fiction, narrative aesthetic. iii.

(5) Acknowledgements. I have to express my foremost gratitude toward and sincere respect for my supervisor, Professor Ioana, Luca, who patiently listened to my sermonic rants about the two novels and still managed to navigate me out of the labyrinth I conjured up during the process of completing this thesis. My gratitude also goes to Professor Sun-Chieh, Liang, and Professor John Michael Corrigan, whose participation in my thesis defense means a lot for me and whose comments and criticisms I sincerely treasure. Without doubt, I am also in serious debt to the late Philip Roth (1933-2018), whose works I hope will remain “still and still moving.” Their power to excite, to challenge, and to touch upon the subtlest stimulus on the readers’ end are themselves exemplary of Roth’s genius in narrative and language. Lastly, I would like to thank L. and C., without which the completion of this thesis will never be possible.. iv.

(6) Table of Contents. Chapter One: Early Reception of Philip Roth. 1. Chapter Two: Roth, Autobiography, and the Post-Structural Turn. 9. Chapter Three: Operation Shylock: A “Mirage of Representation”. 27. Chapter Four: Sabbath’s Theater: An Abyss of Narratives. 49. Conclusion. 73. Works Cited. 75. v.

(7) I: Early Reception of Philip Roth. Scholarship positioned at the crossroad of Philip Roth Studies, narratology, and life writing can perhaps be categorized into two major groups: first, the more conventional studies tend to view Roth’s early writings as “betrayals” that humiliate the Jewish-American identity which the author himself is famously known for. No sooner than Portony’s Complaint was published in 1967 that attacks against Roth began to rise. Terms such as “unfocused hostility, self-hatred,” “provoking anti-Semitism,” “scandal,” “betrayal,” or what Irving Howe—who passionately praised Roth’s Goodbye Columbus in 1959—bashed as “a vulgar book” are attached to the novel (129). In his “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Irvin Howe suggested that Portnoy appears to him as such a distasteful book that it would be cruel for readers to read it twice: “The talent that went into Portnoy’s Complaint and portions of Goodbye, Columbus is real enough, but it has been put to the service of a creative vision deeply marred by vulgarity” (Howe 1972). Read carefully, Howe’s remark is not just a onesided lashing out at the novel: although he vehemently attacked the book, he still managed to point out “the talent” that went in it. Namely, the effect of Roth’s narrative excites the reader and make them laugh: “it [Portnoy’s] demands little more from the reader than a nightclub performer demands … were it not for the solemn ecstasies the book has elicited” (1972). Howe’s reluctant attitude towards Portnoy comes in line with other critics, though their dissatisfaction for the book may come from different perspectives. While Howe detested the book for its sheer vulgarity—that the whole work is dedicated to exciting a reduced and flat emotion, in this case Alex Portnoy’s desire for promiscuity— Jewish readers accused Roth of “exploiting Jewish-American culture in order to gain. 1.

(8) acceptance as an ‘American’ author” (Parrish 1). If Howe’s leans more toward an aesthetic attack, the criticism made by Roth’s Jewish readers is perhaps more of a political one for it attacks not “how the work is written” but “what is written in the work.” In other words, the reception of Portnoy in the U.S. is often filled with detest because most readers of Jewish descent tend to see the book as the giving-in of Jewish tradition to American culture. For many Jewish/Jewish-American audiences, Roth’s portrait of the coming of age of an adolescent Jew sells out his own ethnic community, an exchange for literary reputation and fame at the cost of mocking Jewish tradition. What drew their anger was how Roth undermines Jewish ‘essence’ in his own favor to become a popular writer in the American market. Either via the more aesthetical approach or taking the more political perspective, it is quite clear that Roth’s writings have drawn heated controversies and discussions ever since the late 1960s. As Timothy Parrish succinctly observes, the dissent filed against Roth were targeted to excavate the sense of tension that permeates Roth’s writings: “The tension between holding to a historically grounded identity yet suspecting that identity is something that can only be known through its reinvention has animated Roth’s works” (2). Whether it is the tension between artistic creation or vulgarity, between the “historically grounded identity” or the selfreinvention of identity/identities, Roth’s writings are explicitly characterized by these stylistic “splits” within the texts. These splits that permeate Roth’s texts, while marked as artistic or political assaults in more early studies, are nevertheless what highlight Roth’s narrative genius in a more postmodern context.1 The turn from reading Roth’s works as mouthpiece for his Jewish-American identity 1. For discussions on Roth and postmodern aesthetics, see “Roth, Literary Influence, and Postmodernism” by Derek Parker Royal, pp. 25-27.. 2.

(9) to treating Roth’s woks as postmodern “texts” that are independent from a stable origin of reference triggered even more rigorous debates in the public domain. These mixed discussions, and reviews seem to have prodded Roth to address the intertwined relationship between his writing and his life in one of his interviews with his fellow colleague, Maria McCarthy, in 1987. When Shop Talk: A Writer and his Colleagues and their Work was published (2001), Roth had already been established as a widely-read, yet also widely criticized, writer and was therefore more willing to speak about his own works in public. Explaining to Maria McCarthy the reason why he comically portraits Zuckerman as a “nonbelieving Jew” when he goes to Judea near the end of The Counterlife, Roth suggests that he is less concerned about political correctness than aesthetic freedom for he is far more a novelist than a Jew (118). This split between aesthetic autonomy (being a novelist) and political responsibility (representing the Jews in writing) is precisely what excites the debates that seem to pivot around large portions of Roth’s works. While political responsibility demands Roth to portray Jewish-Americans in accordance with a certain “decorum,” Roth’s rebellious protagonists, Alex Portnoy, Nathan Zuckerman, Mickey Sabbath, or his alter ego, the novelist “Philip Roth,” just to name a few, serve as aesthetic flights from the fixture of political responsibility by deliberately and constantly reinventing the protagonists’ political, ethnic, or religious identity.2 In his 1974 interview with Walter Mauro, Roth provided a possible answer to the question of politics versus aesthetics: “whatever serious acts of rebelliousness I may have engaged in as a novelist have been directed far more at my own imagination’s system of 2. For example, see pp. 53-55 of “Roth and the Holocaust” in which Michael Rothberg argues that Roth, far from marginalizing the presence of the Shoah, actually addresses it through distancing it from the life of a Jewish-American. This approach to the genocide naturally spurred critical reactions against Roth since many believed his style to be satirizing identity politics.. 3.

(10) constraints and habits of expression than at the powers that vie for control in the world” (12). If Roth’s works are seen as rebellions against a certain “system of constraints” or “habits of expression,” it is less the political practicality than the aesthetic novelty that entices Roth. However, if it is Roth’s genuine belief that his work is shy of political power, why is the interview titled “Writing and the Power That Be” (emphasis mine) when it was collected as the opening chapter of Reading Myself and Others? What exactly is this “power” that Roth sees as distinctly and essentially related to the act of writing? Hana Wirth-Nesher’s essay “Roth’s Autobiographical Writings” offers a balancing perspective regarding the tension between art and politics in Roth’s writings. Starting also from the controversy surrounding the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, Wirth-Nesher suggests that the reason to such turmoil boils down to the readers’ presupposed insistence on reading Roth’s work as autobiographical rather than fictional: “Jewish-American readers have insisted on reading his satires as autobiographical works that betray his community by exposing Jewish warts to gentile eyes” (159). By reading Portnoy as neither wholly personal nor completely untrue, Wirth-Nesher brings into discussion the idea of oscillating between autobiographical writing and fictional imagination into the discussion on Portnoy’s Complaint. Wirth-Nesher’s approach is in its most basic sense a deconstructive one in the sense that the oscillation between autobiography and fiction can be seen as the deconstruction of literary genres, a rather radical argument forwarded by Jacques Derrida in 1980.3 According to Derrida, the establishment of any sorts of genre is but a limitation forced upon artistic autonomy since genre implicates norm, order, and a sense of purity (55-56). The 3. Such sliding in between genres is not peculiar to Portnoy. Roth’s eulogy for his father, Patrimony: A True Story, as well does not fit closely with the genre of memoir or fiction. For more philosophical discussions on the topic, see “The Law of Genre” by Derrida, Translated by Avital Ronell, in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 5581.. 4.

(11) autonomy Derrida refers to as the gist of the aesthetic is exactly what Wirth-Nesher elaborates on in her assessment of Roth’s writing. Reluctant to categorize Roth’s writing as wholly autobiographical or fictional, Wirth-Nesher’s approach takes for granted neither the presupposed categorization of “autobiography” versus “fiction” nor the restrictive nature of genre elaborated in Derrida’s essay. Such a post-structural stance leads Wirth-Nesher beyond the discussions of Roth’s intermingling of different genres to another post-structural trait prevalent in Roth’s writings. Focusing on how the metafictional aspect in Roth’s works juggles up and brings together both the formative style and thematic content of Roth’s writings, Wirth-Nesher engages in an analytic approach that aims to deconstruct “the act of writing” itself: “the fierce repudiation of his work by many Jewish readers would be transformed into a major theme in his writing—the role of Jewish self-definition and allegiance in the dialogue between art and society, aesthetics and morality, the facts and their literary representation” (162). Transformed from public vehemence to comical lashon horas4, “the fierce repudiation” that Roth’s Jewish readers filed against the novelist appears as metafictional devices that highlight the aesthetics of narrative once Roth incorporates his literary rendition and representation of those repudiations into the text. Scenes in which Roth himself, as the narrator, reads something derogatory about himself are not uncommon metafictional scenes in Roth works. Ironically mentioning the “acclaimed” Portnoy, Roth writes in near the end of Patrimony (1991) where he is having a conversation with his dying father: “We were still. 4. Jewish gossip, often derogatory and defamatory, is however tethered to the core of Jewish tradition on rhetoric and speech. In fact, “loshon hora” has been mentioned sparingly in Roth’s texts. For further studies on the topic, see Safer, Elain B. Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth, 2006, which provides extremely informative readings of how humor and the act of speech, speaking, forms part of Roth’s Jewish identity in his later novels. . 5.

(12) laughing when my father said, ‘Maybe it’ll be a best-seller like Portnoy,” to which Roth ironically replies: “Of course, A pornographic best-seller about the Holocaust” (221). This section then ended with Roth asking his father the rhetorical question: “Who knows? Maybe he’s just writing a book” (222). Such self-reflexive writing that presents the author speaking about his own works or exposes the scenes in which the author of the book foregrounds his act of writing the book, is one of the many characteristic styles of meta-fiction. In Patricia Waugh’s definition, meta-fiction refers to a “narrative form that is highly self-reflexive … a mode of writing wherein texts are aware of and refer to themselves as constructed narratives—and as such, are usually considered an expression of postmodern writing” (26). In this light, the inclusion of “the fierce repudiation” in Roth’s later works not only stands out as metafictional practice, but also lays bare the fact that both Roth’s narrative and the criticism against that narrative are constructed texts. Missing verb in the second part of the parallelism. Revealing that the author’s narrative is but a construction, Roth’s metafictional practices in his later works problematize the identity of “the author” and underline the contention between the author’s personae and the other narrative voices that occupy the text. On the one hand, by transforming the critiques from his Jewish readers into loshon-horo in his works, Roth manages to create comical yet self-satirical, or perhaps even self-critical situations in which the metafictional writer dramatizes the tension between the opinion of “Philip Roth” and those who criticize him. Roth’s metafictional devices, on the other hand, serve as indicators that undermine the omnipresence of the author by levelling the voice of the narrator with other voices. Scenes in which “Philip Roth” the writer and the imposter Roth fiercely scramble for the right to speech are aplenty in Operation Shylock. These literal. 6.

(13) scrambles often tangle around the question of authenticity; that is, whose version of the narrative is true. In fact, the constant pressing question of “whose story is true?” arches over most of Roth’s texts. As Elaine B. Safer observes: In his later novels Roth devotes increasing attention to the comic handling of fictional systems themselves. No longer is it enough to present readers with a novel; they now have to be involved in the creative process itself. Roth thus adopts an eminently postmodern metafictional mode … Roth toys and experiments with narrators’ comic consciousness of their own artful skills. [I]n American Pastoral Zuckerman tells readers that he is obtaining the information for his narration from those involved in it—the Swede’s brother and the Swede himself. But then he acknowledges that his own imagination has also contributed so that the Swede of his narrative differs from the Swede “in the flesh.” But whether he has created “an outright fantastical creature, lacking entirely the unique substantiality of the real thing…well, who knows? Who can know?” (Safer 9) Foregrounding the existence of multiple narrative personas and exposing that the text becomes a battlefield of not merely different but veraciously combating voices, Roth’s metafictional practices problematize the idea of authenticity as well as its relation to the authoritative voice. By complicating the relation between authorship, writing, and narrative, Roth indulges in his literary enterprise where different versions of a story or contrasting narratives may be “reconciled,” or at least may “contribute together” in Roth’s signature “sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness” (Safer 1). The sheer playfulness can be demonstrated in various typical Rothian scenes where Roth fictionalizes or dramatizes events to make them ludicrous, ridiculous, or in most cases, even absurd. The deadly seriousness reflects in the prominent theme of memory in Roth’s works. To a certain extent, life-writing for Roth is memory-writing, especially memory writing that expands into delusions, imagination, and perhaps eventually, fiction. As Safer observes, demonstrations of such “sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness” through the. 7.

(14) impact of “excessive memory” form major parts of Sabbath’s Theater. One need only revisit the passage in which Mickey Sabbath mourns over his recently dead lover, Drenka (Sabbath’s Theater, 77-80) to grasp how Roth’s narrative merges seriousness and playfulness. In the passage, the presence of excessive memory appears explicitly, the playfulness of the narrative tone almost overwhelming, and all the while the “deadly seriousness” cries out frantically. All these combinations of intense contradictory emotions are woven in Roth’s narratives which dangle in between different genres, styles, and tones of speech. The different literary genres Roth often engages with include memoir, autobiography, fiction, confession, and even “a true story,” while the traits of Roth’s styles range from the Joycean free-flowing prose in Sabbath’s Theater to the almost dry dialogues between Philip and Herman Roth in Patrimony which at the same time carry formidable emotion.5 Addressing the overall body of his work, Roth writes in the preface of Reading Myself and Others that “together these pieces reveal to me a continuing preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world” (xiii). Looking at his writing career from hindsight, Roth’s has followed a recurring thematic exploration of how the written world and the lived world affect, condition, and infiltrate one another. Following Roth’s own reflection on his works as oscillations between lived life and written texts, the following section will dismantle the relationship between Roth’s attitude toward writing and the poststructural turn in life-writing studies which came in bloom during the 60s.. 5. As Pritchard H. Williams writes in his review of the book on The New York Time: “This stream of thought is of the sort Joyce invented for Leopold Bloom, and Sabbath often makes us think of that resourceful monologuist” (1995).. 8.

(15) II. Roth, Autobiography, and the Post-Structural Turn. One of the most obvious manifestations of envisioning how the written and the lived worlds infiltrate one another can be seen in the literary genre of autobiography, given that autobiography as a particular style of writing is concerned with “transforming life … into a text” (James Olney 5). If in the previous chapter I have mentioned how literary genres and styles begin to “split” in Roth’s mischievous narratives, this section will further focus on the most intense thematic “split” in Roth’s writings—that is, the ambiguous split between autobiography and fiction. Roth’s writings are often marked by his deliberate endeavor in writing on the border of autobiography and fiction. This stylistic trait of Roth is best personified by the character Nathan Zuckerman as well as “Philip Roth” the narrator when the text is written in the first-person point of view. There is unfortunately no decisive verdict on whether Roth’s works may be read as autobiographical or fictional since the novelist’s death in 2018. Even if Roth had been alive, whatever he might have said on his work would become what Gérard Genette terms “paratexts,” which according to Genette are “more than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold” (Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation 1-2). A threshold implies that something has to come, a threshold is a welcoming gesture, a liminal pathway through which interpretations of the text may flourish. Especially after Roland Barthes’ famous declaration of “The Death of the Author” in 1967, the author of the text thereafter acquires partial, but never definitive authority over the text. Still, documentation recorded before Roth’s passing away may trigger new ways to revisit the novelist’s works and perhaps even provide readers a peek into the bewildering, mischievous, cunning narratives of Roth through the artist’s own words. In a documentary. 9.

(16) produced by the BBC in which Roth himself participated after he had announced that he would retire from writing in 2012,6 the novelist—whether feeling finally able to comment on his own work after retiring or attempting to leave the position as a spotlight novelist with a solid declaration—speaks quite explicitly to Alan Yentob about how he manages to maintain the precarious balance between fiction and autobiography: “fiction must be based on reality, but we also don’t want it to be too decorous” (Literary Documentaries, 2004). It is precisely this desire to distance himself from a certain “decorum” that characterizes Roth’s writings as postmodern fictions—fictions constantly striving to overthrow the linguistic system from which they stem. Postmodern fictions, a term that immediately implies multiple facades façades and facets, is dissected etymologically in Brian McHale’s now canonical study, Postmodernist Fiction. As McHale puts it: POSTmodernISM This ISM (to begin at the end) does double duty. It announces that the referent here is not merely a chronological division but an organized system—a poetics, in fact—while at the same time properly identifying ... Postmodernism is not post modern, whatever that might mean, but post modernism; it does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement. Thus, the term postmodernism if we take it literally enough, a letter, signifies a Poetics, which is the successor or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future. (McHale 5) Roth’s capricious narratives that swerve between facts and fiction stand out as precisely the “the successor or possibly a reaction against” the conventional narrative that either borders on the realistic biography or fiction. The ventriloquist behind Roth’s narratives revels in 6. To prevent confusion, the 2012 interview in which Roth declares his retirement from the literary scene is not identical with the BBC interview mentioned here. Both interviews are among the most authentic materials of attempting to capture, present, or even reveal Roth’s thoughts. The 2012 interview was conducted by Le Monde with Josyane Savigneau to whom Roth confesses: “I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.” The interviewer of the 2014 interview conducted by BBC was Alan Yentob, to whom Roth declares: “this is my last appearance on television, my absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere.”. 10.

(17) complicating the plot with plural voices to excite, on the end of the reader, bewilderment, and confusion. A reader of Roth’s “autobiographical-fiction” will inevitably be met with the disturbing question about which “version” of the story spoken by which speaker is the more authentic, or at least the more believable one. Roth’s postmodern narratives designed to stimulate bewilderment and sometimes even absurdity, in this sense, challenge radically the more conventional principles of auto-fiction writing. Roth’s most evident disruption between the boundary of autobiography and fiction may be demonstrated by his violation of the “autobiographical pact,” a decisive term proposed by Philippe Lejeune in 1975. Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” examines existing critical assessments on autobiographical writings at the time and establishes a set of qualifiers through which autobiographical writings can be assessed. Lejeune’s definition of the pact is based on Georges Gusdorf’s revelation of the “modern autobiographical consciousness and selfconsciousness” in 1956 (Olney, 8).7 Following Gusdorf’s emphasis on the contractual nature of autobiographical writings, Lejeune evolved Gusdorf’s thoughts on the autobiographical genre into a systematic analysis that he calls “the autobiographical pact.” Lejeune’s pact lays out a certain condition according to which the reader may “distinguish some sort of order within a mass of published texts, whose common subject is that they recount someone’s life” (34). The study is not only a definitive work on autobiographical texts, but also a close examination of the diversity, differences, and possibilities within this body of work. One of the most significant contributions established by Lejeune’s study is the qualifiers by which autobiographical texts can be distinguished from other texts. Such characteristics include the 7. Gusdorf’s argument is quite straightforward: he suggests that autobiography should not be taken as record of a specific period during reality but a revelation of “the effort of a creator to give the meaning of his own mythic tale” (30). For more precise understanding of what Olney terms as “the autobiographical consciousness and selfconsciousness,” see “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” by Georges Gusdorf.. 11.

(18) “form of language,” whether it is written in prosaic or written as narrative, “the subject treated,” whether it is an individual life worth remembering or a representative of a collective history that has hitherto scarcely been recorded, and more importantly, “the situation of the author” and “the position of the narrator” (5). The third and the fourth point, according to Lejeune, are essential in distinguishing autobiographical texts from others: “the situation of the author” requires that the author and the narrator are identical, and “the position of the narrator” demands the narrator to be identical with the principal character and that the narrative is told retrospectively (5). Despite laying out the preliminaries of judging autobiography, Lejeune also suggests that certain principles may appear unequally restrictive (4). Take Roth’s memoir/record/confession, Patrimony, for example; the narrative is indeed constructed in retrospection but the narrator and the main character do not seem to coincide. While it is indeed “Philip Roth” who is behind the narrative, indisputably signing on the cover and narrative arc of the book, the main character of the text is Herman Roth rather than Philip Roth. From the first sentence to the last page of the book, Herman Roth’s figure infiltrates the narrator’s voice; it is as if Herman Roth’s figurative speech impedes the narrator’s recount of how he faced his father’s last days as the narrator is constantly reminded by his father that “You must not forget anything” (Patrimony, 238). As Lejeune observes, there are numerous possibilities for textual exceptions and transgressions in autobiography, each following yet distancing itself from the four primers mentioned above; these literary transgressions, according to Lejeune, include memoir, biography, personal novel, journal/diary, and epistolary texts (4-5). Given the multifarious metamorphosis that autobiographical texts are potentially. 12.

(19) likely to undergo, the endeavor to distinguish a text as autobiographical by judging “from the inside” of the text seems in vain (Lejeune 5). Namely, the verisimilitude of the events described in a text between lived reality is contingent on whether the text itself is autobiographical or not. Rather, the autobiographical perspective comes from the “outside” of the text: “If autobiography is defined by something outside the text, it is not on this side, by an unverifiable resemblance to a real person, but on the other side, by the type of reading it engenders, the credence it exudes, and the qualities that are manifested in the critical response to autobiographies” (30). As Lejeune concludes, the autobiographical stance seems less concerned with the verisimilitude between what is inscribed in the text and what lays concrete in reality than the “historically variable contractual effect” on which autobiographical discourses prosper. Detaching autobiographical texts from the ultimate referent of reality, Lejeune also points to the significance of acknowledging the contractual nature of autobiographical texts. This new direction in autobiographical studies leads to a perspective pervading the 80s and 90s. This new perspective on the field sees autobiography as less a recount of reality than a receptive strategy, a mode of reading that indicates the critical distance between life and writing. Writing almost at the same time with Lejeune, James Olney also highlights the selfreflexive quality that distinctly marks texts as autobiographical. For Olney, a texts is autobiographical not because its content renders it inherently so, but because reading that particular text as autobiography enriches its meanings and informs its contexts. In his “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction,” Olney positions the generic significance of autobiography as the backdrop against which numerous texts have been defined:. 13.

(20) this special quality of autobiography—that is, that autobiography renders in a particular direct and faithful way the experience and vision of a people, which is the same experience and same vision lying behind and informing all the literature of that people—is one of the reasons why autobiography has lately become such a popular, even fashionable, study in the academic world where traditional ways of organizing literature by period or school have tended to give way to a different sort of organization (or disorganization). (8) Drawing connections between the cultural exposure and the “disorganizing” potential of autobiographical texts, Olney addresses the autobiographical boom during the 80s and 90s through a critical lens. For Olney, the term “autobiography” is but a descriptive anchor, a “defining center” providing only for a convenient way to refer to “a literature that is very rich and highly various, heterogeneous in its composition—a literature so diverse that it cries out for some defining center” (8). For scholars that are yet to enter the field of autobiography or life narrative, Olney’s claim marks the post-structural turn in autobiographical studies. This post-structural turn in autobiography studies opens up the term “autobiography” to the extent that the autobiographical genre is judged precisely and distinctively by its diverse mode of writing instead of its verisimilitude to realistic figures. For Olney, there should be no “inside” or “outside” in autobiographical texts since they are always already written at the border between the writer/reader, text/life, present/past, and even between the autobiographical act itself and the theoretical approach to it. This is why Olney believes that autobiography appears inseparable from open-endedness: The open-endedness of autobiography that requires readers to continue the experience into their own lives thus becomes a virtue for recent critics rather than the defect that the New Critics would have felt to be … If the student of autobiography is, as I believe, a vicarious autobiographer, he does not want, indeed cannot allow, the work to be whole, complete, finished, and closed. (13-14) Olney’s conclusion to the essay suggests that all autobiographical “works” should be treated. 14.

(21) as “texts” since the former presupposes the central referent of the author while “texts” simply stand on their own ground. Moreover, if we accept Olney’s point of view, the autobiographical text has more to do with the reader instead of the autobiographer since the continuation of the autobiographer’s experience into the reader’s own live is the parameters of autobiographical texts. Such evolvement in autobiography studies summons up immediately in one’s mind Roland Barthes famous essay, “From Work to Text.” Written four years after his groundbreaking essay “The Death of the Author,” the 1971 text demonstrates more clearly how “the author” plays different roles in two varying perspective on literature: “It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest.’ If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters … his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” (161). As a guest, the author, or in our case the autobiographer, appears irrelevant to the final verdict—if there is one—of his “work” should it be read as a “text” that knows no master. Such an “epistemological slide” from work to text renders autobiographical texts orphans that are deprived of a “Father.” Such excursive quality in texts is laid bare in its potential to subvert “a final vindication”: “What constitutes the Text … is its subversive force in respect of the old classifications” (Barthes 157). If we follow Barthes’ argument, it seems that “autobiography” no longer refers necessarily to what Lejeune defined in his pact—that the narrator of autobiography should be identical with the author. Moreover, the void that Barthes carved out by removing the authoritative voice resonates the “open-endedness” so valued by Olney in his discussion. This void welcomes the reader to take on a transgressive act that involves the crossing from the dimension of reality to that of “literality.” As Olney. 15.

(22) aptly puts it, “the open-endedness of autobiography that requires readers to continue the experience into their own lives thus becomes a virtue” (13). It is nevertheless more than virtue when autobiographical texts enter the living experience of the reader, or even when autobiographical texts enter the living experience of the autobiographer him/herself. For more political critics such as Hannah Arendt or Jacques Rancière, this close connection between writing and the actual living experience exist as a “political force.” For Rancière particularly, the political force of literature depends on its power to “open up the world” for the reader. To point out a crack into “an ontological equality that is truer, more profound than the equality demanded by the poor and the workers” (The Flesh of Words, 158). For Rancière, the continuation of the autobiographer’s life on the reader’s end changes, or more radically, revolutionizes, the reading subject. This political dimension in literature that hovers over the field of autobiography was opened up by James Olney’s discussion on the topic, as we have demonstrated. This political dimension, or rather, this political force of autobiography will later be further expanded by Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith when they trace the evolvement from “autobiography” to “autobiographical narratives.” Theories and literary works written after the 80s have been suffused with the spirit of emancipation and revolution, and so was the field of autobiography studies. One of the most important work is by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson who markedly trace the turn from “autobiography” to “autobiographical discourse” and then further to “autobiographical narratives” (Reading, 3-4). For Smith and Watson, the transition from “autobiography” to “autobiographical discourse” revises “earlier studies” on autobiography.8 The term 8. For some example for earlier studies of autobiography, see works by Georges Gusdorf and Joachim Weintraub. The purpose of brining up this topic is not to attack earlier studies on autobiography. On the contrast, pointing out the evolution of how autobiography(ies) have been assessed is to reinforce the significance of those earlier writers who pioneered the field. This thesis explores, for example, George Misch’s thought on. 16.

(23) “autobiographical discourse” removes from “autobiography” the “politics of exclusion” which, as Smith and Watson argue, “privileges the autonomous individual and the universalizing life story as the definitive achievement of life writing” (3). From seeing autobiography as a literary genre to reading it as a form of discourse, the evolution of critical assessment on the subject underwent turbulent evolutions since “the sovereign self” has been challenged by more post-modern criticisms (Smith and Watson 3-4). As Smith and Watson succinctly put, early critical assessments of autobiography tend to be complicit with the politics of exclusion which renders “the representative life of the great man” the only appropriate autobiographical subject (196-97). The potential defect in the assessment of autobiography can be slightly detected in Georg Misch’s work. As one of the writers who pioneered the field of autobiography studies, Misch wrote in his definitive A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1950) that “among the special relationships in life it is chiefly the self-assertion of the political will and the relation of the author to his work and to the public that show themselves to be normative in the history of autobiography” (14). Markedly influenced by the Hegelian tradition of Geistesgeschichte (“the spirit of the historical moment”), Misch’s work displays “the politics of exclusion” in the sense that it excludes “other kinds of life narrative practiced for much of human history—letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, and other autobiographical modes of everyday and private life” (Smith and Watson 196). For Misch, autobiography should serve the function of “self-assertion of the political will” and illuminate “the relation of the author to his work and to the public.” Other forms of autobiographical narratives are considered inappropriate not only for their narrative mode, but also for the subject under scrutiny. autobiography and his intellectual background of the Hegelian Geistesgeschichte.. 17.

(24) Marking certain texts as inappropriate while establishing certain “canons” in autobiography, Misch’s work, if read partly as autobiography, ironically reveals itself as the “public presence” of Misch in his historical period. In other words, Misch’s work, if read as a “text,” presents exactly the intellectual context out of which Misch comes up with this particular argument in A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. The underlying ideology of Misch’s work, according to Smith and Watson, implies “an important historical use ... of ‘autobiography’ … as a master narrative of Western rationality, progress, and superiority” (194). Here one can sense the stratifying meanings engendered by different approaches to autobiographical narratives: one can read “autobiographically” criticisms of autobiographical narrative to identify the cultural/historical undercurrents that run through the arguments presented; when autobiography appears, through re-reading and critical revisions, as less a literary genre than an interpretive strategy, the epistemological slide from “work” to “text” manifests itself in the sense that the autobiographical narratives detach themselves from the referential origin and exclusive politics which pervades the term autobiography. If the subjects of autobiographical narrative are no longer reserved for “the representatives of history,” can we say that autobiographical narratives have hence been rid of all limitations? For James Olney as well as for other scholars who attended the topic after the 1960s, the polemics of autobiographical narrative lies not part and parcel in the autobiographical subject but perhaps more significantly in the “autos,” or in Olney’s words, “the ‘I’ that coming awake to its own being shapes and determines the nature of the autobiography and in so doing half discovers, half creates itself” (12). For Olney, the ‘I,’ who through the act of writing starts to recognize and make sense of him/herself points toward a. 18.

(25) correlation between the writing subject ‘I’ and the act of writing per se (12). In fact, the shift of focus from the bios to autos in autobiographical studies not only draws significant attention to the act of writing but also implicates a split in the genre. For refocusing on the autos implies that “autobiography” can be split into “the I who is writing” and “the life that is being written down.” The autobiographer emerges as a subject for scrutiny since the separation of “the ‘I’ who is writing” from “the life that is been written” shifted scholars’ attention from the written content to the writing subject of autobiographical texts. Of course, it would appear rather naïve to insist that the ‘I’ and the writing are two wholly separate subjects. As Olney points out, “neither the autos nor the bios is there in the beginning, a completed entity, a defined, known self or a history to be had for the taking” (12). The shift of attention from bios to autos cannot therefore be taken as the same as the refocusing on the act of writing from the ‘I.’ Rather, it is the reaffirmation of autobiography as literature, a solid recognition of autobiography as a form of layered text that involves conjugations between the subject written, the act of writing—half-creating and half-discovering—and the ‘I’ who is doing the writing. It is critical that the relationship between the subject written and “the ‘I’ who is doing the writing” remains elusive: the narration and the narrating act, the personae that the autobiographical narratives attempts to summon and the personae that digests memory and makes it speak through the act of writing. The separation and connection between these two dimensions in autobiography studies came into attention after the post-structural turn renders the subject written—that is, the text—different vis-à-vis the ‘I’ who is writing. This space—carved out from the narrative by the act of writing—lies in between the writing subject and the textual version of him/herself. This is precisely where the aesthetic. 19.

(26) approach relates to autobiographical studies.9 This elusive space between the written and writing subject marks the aesthetic dimension of autobiographical texts for it involves the discussion the matter of style, voice, and the use of language. It is also this elusive space that marks the significance of narratology in autobiographical studies, for narratology, to a certain extent, can be seen as the transitive bridge between the ‘I’ and the text. Together the threefold dynamic between the text, the ‘I,’ and ‘the I’s narratology’ sparks a reading that sees the text as a translated ‘I’ no more than seeing the ‘I’ being a translated text. Or perhaps, as poststructuralism reveals, both the ‘I’ and the ‘text’ are but translations? James Olney’s reply to this paradoxical question, though full of playfulness and sarcasm, reveals a possible route out of the logical mire between the ‘I’ and the text: “as French critics tell us … the text takes on a life of its own, and the self that was not really in existence in the beginning is in the end merely a matter of text and has nothing whatever to do with an authorizing author. The self, then, is a fiction and so is life” (12). It is perhaps too convenient to cast the shadow of “fiction” over the multifarious complexities between translating life to text and vice versa, but Olney’s observation still presents an important notion regarding the understanding of the dynamic between the ‘I’ and the ‘text.’ The “self”—which belongs to the writing ‘I’ but only manifested through the act of writing in the ‘text’—in this case rises as the hinge of Olney’s answer to the paradox of life and fiction. If life and text are both fiction for the post-structuralists, the “self” stands out as the ground on which fiction and life compliment one another. Essentially, for Olney, the study of autobiography is a study of how “self” comes into consciousness, or in other words, how the 9. In other words, while texts like Patrimony and The Facts—which are thought to be Roth’s more autobiographical works—demonstrate that writing can be a powerful way to record and remember the past, texts like Operation Shylock demonstrates that writing can disrupt the stability of facts through fictive narrative strategies.. 20.

(27) “self” manifests itself through writing: “this is the crux of the matter, the heart of the explanation for the special appeal of autobiography to students of literature in recent times: it is a fascination with the self and its profound, its endless mysteries and, accompanying that fascination, and anxiety about the self, an anxiety about the dimness and the vulnerability of that entity that no one has ever seen or touched or tasted” (12). Interestingly, this sense of “self” only comes into being after the text is bereft of its author. We seem to be led to an understanding of autobiography as a literature of the self, which includes not only the productive part where the ‘I’ spells out the self but also the act of interpreting on the receptive end, as I have demonstrated in my “autobiographical reading” of Misch’s critical assessment on autobiography. Functioning both on the productive and receptive end of literature, autobiography seems to take on a more flexible generic guise when infused with perspectives from post-structuralism. Naturally, as anything beginning with “post” may suggests, the post-structuralist turn in autobiographical studies suggests that the field of autobiographical studies has hence moved beyond a fixed “structure,” that a previously presupposed “structure” appears obsolete after the boom of critical attention to autobiographical studies after the 60s. This ‘structure,” as we have discussed above, may refer to various limitations that attempt to contain autobiography in vicarious ways: for instance, the urge for an appropriate subject to occupy the front stage of autobiographical narratives or the insistence on the “representational regime of art” which results in the generic expectation of an autobiographical text to converge with realistic representation of history.10 10. The term “representational regime of art” will be discussed in the following sections. At this stage I understand the idea as a restrictive force that demands writing to certain conformity. For Rancière’s original exposition on the term, see The Politics of Aesthetics, pp. 19-24.. 21.

(28) We have now discussed matters regarding the content and the act of writing involved in autobiographical narratives. However, there is still a more general structure resisting emancipation that lies behind our affirmation of autobiography as literature. This is the structure of literary genres. The function of literary genres is both illuminating and restrictive: the use of genre is illuminating in the sense that a genre summons up prefiguration in the reader’s mind even before they read the text. Namely, since the text fits the literary genre of “autobiography,” one will be informed beforehand by one’s knowledge of the author and therefore conjures up a presumption of the text before actually reading the text. Informative as they are, such generic codes are nevertheless also restrictive because they may function as shackles that keep the text from speaking for itself. A demonstration of the restrictive aspect of generic codes can be found in Smith and Watson’s discussion on how “autobiography” becomes “autobiographical narratives.” Circumventing the “politics of exclusion” in “autobiography,” “autobiographical narratives” incorporates life discourses from minority groups into the genre. Such incorporation of previously unaccepted or ignored voices, while revising old definitive codes, reveals the restrictive nature of literary genres. Isn’t this the start of the new paragraph, since it opens a new conceptual argument? While certain critics value the illuminative aspect over the restrictive side, post-structural French critics were fast to discover the fact that such dichotomy between illumination and restriction originates from the tension between reality and fiction. One of the most radical arguments that discusses how the dichotomy of “reality versus fiction” is established as a “structure” is Derrida’s “The Law of Genre,” which appears five years after Lejeune’s publication of “Le Pacte Autobiographique.” The main argument of Derrida’s essay is that not merely the autobiographical genre, but. 22.

(29) the general idea of “literary genre” as a whole, cannot exist. Derrida starts his essay by asking his readers to muse upon a scenario in which one utters the sentence “Genres are not to be mixed” twice. For Derrida, the proposition itself, namely, the two series of utterances we recognize as ‘sentences,’ can be subject to at least two modes of interpretation. The first mode of interpretation refers to “a fragmentary utterance, the sense of a practice, an act or event” (56). Treating the proposition as a contingent utterance, the first mode of interpretation suggests that the subject of speech is merely descriptive of a prescriptive claim: that genres, any out of all the genres in all kind of practices, are not to be mixed. The second mode of interpretation sees the utterance as “a sharp order.” Once grasped as an “order,” the presence of an authoritative immediately emerges out of this proposition, therefore stretching the proposition from a contingent utterance to a “law,” a mechanism which implicates the establishment of restrictions. According to Derrida, “as soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind” (56). The limiting effect of “genre” originates from the simple implication that immediately comes into being when someone says “genres are not to be mixed.” Thus is the conception of “purity” within the genre; pure in the sense that “genre” demands a norm which is not necessarily “natural” but nevertheless imposed and followed by practitioners: “as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (57). What Derrida demonstrates here is that a sense of purity has often been carelessly attached to the utterance of “genre” and that a self-disruptive dynamic is generated simultaneously when one says “Genres are not to be mixed.” Derrida’s thoughts seem to invalidate, if not nullify, the. 23.

(30) concept of genre, since art[s] are supposed to transcend and revolutionize restrictions and limitations rather than following them. Derrida’s line of argument, often taken as “deconstruction,” is distinctly known for its dynamic to undermine the underlying structures within existing systems or structures. Arguing against Derrida’s point on the significance of literary genres, Rancière writes in Mute Speech (2001): “A fiction belongs to a genre. A genre is defined by the subject represented. The subject represented takes place in a scale of values that defines the hierarchy of genres … Determined by the subject represented, the genre defines the specific mode of its representation. The generic principle thus implies a third principle, which we will call the principle of decorum” (45). Quite different from Derrida’s radical claim that literary genres should be torn down entirely for the absolute emancipation of reading and writing, Rancière’s stance seems more inclusive as well as elusive. For Rancière, literary genres can and must exist; and the conventions tied to a particular genre function as the formative “representational regime of arts.” It must be emphasized, nevertheless, that literary genres exist not because they are convenient labels to classify texts but because they are supplements, guides and roadmaps for the reader. More importantly, as Thomas G. Couser points out, genres should be taken “not as matters of rule but as matters of convention, implicit agreements between producers and consumers of culture … These conventions may be violated, of course. But that does not mean that they don’t matter. On the contrary: the flouting of a convention can register only if the convention is recognized” (34). For Rancière, the “aesthetic regime of art” occurs only on the premise that a certain “representational regime of art” exists as a limiting “structure” which should be “deconstructed.” Nevertheless, this “aesthetic regime of art” becomes obsolete and turns into yet. 24.

(31) another “representational regime of arts.” This is when a new “aesthetic regime of arts” creates a crack within the overall “structure” and by so doing engenders both the political and aesthetic aspect of literature. The meandering or excursive dynamic underlying Rancière’s thought implicates as well a sense of movement and mobility within literature. In its core, Rancière’s thoughts on the relationship between “the representational regime” and “the aesthetical regime of art” is that the former serves as a norm—a norm that requires certain “art” to retain traits of the world we experience—while the latter serves as a series of disruptions, struggling to expand and push afore the limits and strictures of the previous “representational regime of art.” When this new regime of art, in time, becomes obsolete, a new contingent event carrying “the aesthetical regimes of art” will start to shake the onceaesthetical, but now-representational, regime of art. This process goes on and on, new regimes folding over and over again old strictures that no longer cohere to its social/political context. Other than these important sets of terms which are crucial to understand Rancière’s thoughts, the other distinguished debates between the Deleuzean “anti-representational” and the Rancierian “post-representational” also illustrate how Rancière’s thoughts on literature and the world manifest themselves in Roth’s writings. Taken from Rancière’s The Flesh of Words (1998), “post-representational” writings aim to undermine the conventional idea of representing the world through language, that the text is but a literary transcript of the realistic world (151-58).11 To read literary texts from a “post-representational” perspective, 11. Rancière seems reluctant to go so far as Deleuze in terms of the thoughts on how reading can do. As he further elucidates in The Flesh of Words, “It is this anti fraternal equality that Deleuze rejects. The people literature invents cannot be reduced to the population of local affections of universal substances” (158). Although both Rancière and Deleuze exhibit certain individualist view—the former by seeing reading people as participants of politics and the latter by perceiving the world through quantum lenses, in which matters become free molecules that disrupt and penetrate boundaries—the marked difference between their thoughts on literature persists. Discussing Bartleby, the Scrivener, Rancière suggests that Deleuze’s analysis leads only to a. 25.

(32) as Rancière intricately argues, does not mean that the representational function of writing should disappear in the face of the “aesthetic regime of art;” instead, Rancière tries to preserve both the privilege of literary excursions in the text and what I term the “mirage of representation” which language conjures (159).. dead end, if not sheer chaos: “Under the mask of Bartleby, Deleuze opens to us the open road of comrades, the great drunkenness of joyous multitudes freed from the law of the Father … this road leads us to contradiction: the wall of loose stones, the wall of non-passage. We do not go on, from the multitudinous incantation of Being, toward any political justice. Literature opens no passage to a Deleuzian politics. There is no Dionysian politics. And this wall, as free as its stone may be, is one before which the joyous expansions of the philosopher-children of Dionysus comes to a stop” (The Flesh of Words, 164). For more discussions, please refer to The Flesh of Words, pp. 150-166.. 26.

(33) III: Operation Shylock: A “Mirage of Representation”. Perhaps none of Roth’s fiction can bear the term “a mirage of representation” better than Operation Shylock. The term “a mirage of representation” indicates a political connotation as well as an aesthetic one. One the one hand, the political connotation of the term refers to Rancière’s critique of the “buffooneries of representation” pervading the French political scene after the 1848 revolution (381). As Rancière writes in his insightful yet relatively less-read essay, “How to Use Lire le Capital,” the 1850s was a time “when men of power wore the costumes of a different political play in order to represent interests directly opposed to those they were supposed to represent” (380).12 As a critique, “a mirage of representation” bears the dynamic of resisting and disrupting existing regimes and systems. On the other hand, the aesthetic connotation of the term refers to the metafictional aspect that Rancière observes in the act of representation: “the divergence is no longer between reality and the illusions of ideologues, but between a scene whose reality is that of representation and the device which sustains it” (380-81, emphasis original). My appropriation of “a mirage of representation” refers to the mirage of narratives conjured up by Roth in Operation Shylock. These “mirages” includes the uncanny “double Roths,” the contradictory peritexts of the text, and the mirage-like narratives implemented by Roth to complicate the idea of expressing personal identity/ies. Through these “mirage of representations,” Roth presents precisely in Operation Shylock the divergence between “a scene whose reality in that of representation and the device which sustains it” through transgressing literary genres, playing with metafictional narratives and problematizing the relation between the form and content of 12. As Jim Kincaid writes in “A Critique of Value-Form Marxism,” Rancière’s 1976 article, “How to Use Lire le Capital,” appears to be a “scintillating but neglected paper” (107) in view of recent Marxist studies.. 27.

(34) a text. Published in 1993, Operation Shylock seems to be a fiction, although the first-person narrative adopted throughout the text, as well as the subtitle suggest its confessional nature. More precisely, this “confession” tells the story of how Philip Roth the writer meets his imposter while both of them are in Israel attending the trial of John Demjanjuk—or according to the Holocaust survivors, “Ivan the Terrible,” who acted as a guard in the Treblinka camp during WWII. In fact, Demjanjuk has been on trial multiple times in Israel, and verdicts were repeatedly overthrown and appeals unwaveringly filed. One of the most notable trials convicted Demjanjuk in 1988, but the verdict was later overturned in 1993, which is what will be “attended and described” in Operation Shylock (Roth 13). Paralleling the ambiguity over the true identity of John Demjanjuk—whether he is indeed “Ivan the Terrible”—is the even more bewildering identity crisis of the multiple “Philip Roths” in the text. As Roth in the text “confesses,” knowing the existence of Moishe Pipik, the imposter, haunts him for he thinks that “a person’s identity is his private property” and this private realm cannot “be appropriated by somebody else” (75). Moreover, as Josh Cohen observes, characters that are subject to the dynamic of “doubles” also include the “inner Roth” and the “external Roth”: “Even if he[Roth] should never again meet the double … the very thought of his presence in the world condemns him to ‘insufferable sieges of confusion’” (84). Following Cohen’s thought, I read these sets of characters, which function as sets of doubles, as Roth’s problematization of personal identity as whole and united entity. By creating these sets of similar yet different characters, Roth demonstrates how complicated the idea of personal identity can be and the difficulties of narrating one’s identity. As Smilesburger, Roth’s Mossad handler, says to Roth near the end of Operation. 28.

(35) Shylock, “[t]he divisiveness is not just between Jew and Jew—it is within the individual Jew … inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews. The good Jew, the bad Jew. The new Jew, the old Jew. The lovers of Jews, the hater of Jews” (334). The performativity of personal as well as ethnic identity, the representation and mis-representation of the self, the representation of other self(ves) are all related to the identity crisis that sits at the core of Operation Shylock. Together, these “Roths” form “a mirage of representation” that manifests Roth’s attempt to write on the border of realistic confession and fictional inventions in Operation Shylock. For instance, the characters in Operation Shylock, while involving realistic people around Roth, also include fictional inventions which ironically declare themselves to be authentic, or to be “truer than real.” Consider the following episode in which Moishe Pipik tries to convince Roth that he the imposter is the “real” Roth: ‘You go around pretending to be me.’ This brought the smile back—‘You go around pretending to be me,’ he loathsomely replied. ‘You exploit the physical resemblance,’ I went on, ‘by telling people that you are the writer, the author of my books.’ ‘I don’t have to tell them anything. They take me for the author of those books right off. It happens all the time.’ (72) According to Pipik’s line of thought, he is by no means responsible for the identity crisis of Roth, since it is “they”—namely, the general mass who read the news about him—that take him for “the author of those books.” This logic of defense suggests that the recognition of the self lies not in the immanence of the subject but rather in how others perceive him/her. The more conventional understanding of the self is hitherto challenged by this breaking of the “law,” as in Roth’s reply to Pipik’s defense: “the law … says a person’s identity is his private property and can’t be appropriated by somebody else” (75). In this conversation, the law that. 29.

(36) requires the unity and the particularity of one’s personal identity is problematized, challenged, and perhaps even transgressed. As Debra Shostak suggests, “the reader is displaced from identification with the narrating voice when the author seems to hold the position of the subject. The novel resists the imaginative act that every reader engages in when confronted by a work of fiction” (33). Applying the “narrating voice” of a “confession” in Operation Shylock, Roth drastically problematizes the question of literary genre and narrative. The resistance of the imaginative act pointed out by Shostak, further contributes to another level of “a mirage of representation” by involving Roth “the author” in the text. First, we have Roth the author who wrote the novel Operation Shylock, and secondly, we also have the Roth in the text who seems to provide the confessional narrative that carries out the plot of the novel. In other words, while Debra Shostak reads the authoritative voice of Philip Roth as the displacement from identification on the reader’s end, I read the authoritative voice as yet another guise, another representation that gathers into a “mirage of representation” that further complicates the narrative aesthetic of Operation Shylock. There is, moreover, a third Roth that presides in this mirage of representation. This Roth is an imposter who advocates a radical counter-Zionist ideology called “Diasporism.” He is later referred as “Moishe Pipik” by Roth the narrator. The fourth Roth appears in the episode where the real Philip Roth in the text pretends to be Pierre Roget, a French columnist who is interviewing Philip Roth—played by Moishe Pipik—on the cause and effect of the “diasporist” movement taking place in Israel at that moment. This Roth, who avoids being exposed while trying to interview his own imposter, can be seen as another representation of the entangled identities, another pressing identity crisis of the personae “Philip Roth.” An. 30.

(37) interesting scene, which I will discuss below, appears emblematically and characteristically Rothian: intense yet humorous, absurd yet nakedly sharp, all topped off with a sly treat of confusion. The deliberate confusion of narrative voices and authorial personae present in Operation Shylock has attracted scholars who work in the fields of autobiography, fiction, and Jewish American literature. Derek Parker Royal notes for instance that the paratexts of Operation Shylock render the factuality of the text extremely ambiguous (32-33). Although written in confessional, first-person narrative, the content of the book—especially the paratexts—indicates conversely its fictionality. Paratexts, referred to as “a guiding sets of directions,” for Gérard Genette appear to be what surround and extend the text “precisely in order to present it” (1-2, emphasis original). According to Gérard, paratexts can be further divided into peritexts and epitexts with the former referring to the paratext within a text, such as the preface, the title of the text and chapters, and the author’s name, while the latter referring to the paratexts that came into being since the publication of the text, such as interviews, reviews, as well as public acclaims.13 While the epitext of Operation Shylock renders it a work of fiction, the peritext of Operation Shylock seems to complicate the verisimilitude of this “confession” even more. While the Preface declares the text as “an accurate account” that presents the “actual occurrences that I [Roth] lived through during [his] middle fifties and that culminated, early in 1988” (13), the ending “Note to the Reader” suggests that “this book is a work of fiction” which consists of “products of the author’s imagination” (399). According to the ending “Note to the reader,” “any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, 13. For further discussions on paratexts and autobiographical writings, see Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gérard Genette (1997).. 31.

(38) is entirely coincidental,” and that the confession is indeed “false” (399). Nevertheless, the episode in which Roth’s interviews Aharon Appelfeld, the famous Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor, in Israel is later collected as a non-fictional piece in Roth’s Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001). Moreover, some passages from the interview appear in Operation Shylock without even the tiniest amendment.14 If so, how should Roth’s readers apprehend the peritexts of the “confession”? Immediately we get a sense of how Roth’s paratexts go beyond the text they caption and involve other texts. According to Parker Royal, the exact meaning of the peritexts in Operation Shylock is rather irrelevant to the overall reading of the text, as Royal suggests, “Roth does not require that we ultimately distinguish fact from fiction” (32). For Royal, Roth’s ‘operation’ is a probing into the “comfortable differentiation” between what is fabricated and what is true (31-32). In this case, Operation Shylock, as well as most of Roth’s works, can be seen as the novelist’s attempt to write in between fiction and autobiography. Complicating the understanding/reading of peritexts even more, Royal points out the plural indication of the final admission: “Is it the ‘confession,’ of fiction as expressed in the Note is false, or is the entire text itself, one that professes verisimilitude and whose subtitle bears the word ‘confession,’ that is false?” (32). Royal’s question concerns two emphatically contrasting readings of the text: if “the ‘confession,’ of fiction as expressed in the Note is false,” then the reader can confirm that the peritext of Operation Shylock declares itself autobiographical. However, if the Note to Reader suggests that “the entire text itself, one that professes verisimilitude and whose subtitle bears the word ‘confession’” is false, the peritexts of 14. For instance, see pages 85-86 in Operation Shylock and page 27-28 in Shop Talk. The section in Operation Shylock which contains Roth interviewing Aaron Appelfeld appears as well in Shop Talk without the tiniest amendments. The non-fictionality of Shoptalk therefore adds to the overall verisimilitude of Operation Shylock.. 32.