CHAPTER II
PHILIP ROTH AND ZUCKERMAN NOVELS
‘Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.’
- Philip Roth (Roth, Reading Myself, 111)
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is one of
America’s greatest living novelists born to a first-generation Jewish immigrant
parents. He is a celebrated writer, an essayist, autobiographer, critic, and a memoirist.
Roth started his literary career at the age of twenty-one with his first short story, ‘The
Day It Snowed,’ published by Chicago Review in 1954. He is one of the
contemporary writers who made it in the literary world despite of controversies and is
known for his brilliance in exploring the modern Jewish-American psyche. The major
focus of the writer is on concepts like postmodernism (ideology), Israel, the
Holocaust, alienation, conflict and the search for identity.
Being a second-generation Jewish writer, Roth searches for a post-religious
identity. His books are the most widely anticipated literary events which earned
critical acclaim along with broad popularity. The works of Roth discuss mans tenuous
place in the hostile world. The writer has a tremendous gift of looking into the
perspectives of human nature and his writings reflect pain, suffering, quandary and
catch-22 of the social life. Roth’s success principally depends on the ability to
articulate profound issues like faith, marriage and family, while at the same time
being known as the polemical writer in the literary culture. As a writer, Roth was able
to distinguish between reality and fantasy of American Jewish life and his works aim
at exploring problems of contemporary Jewish life.
Roth is a gifted writer who implements wit with elements of satire and a
nefarious sense of humour. The comic novels bring out the seriousness of life with the
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help of satire and explore moral complexities of the modern world. The protagonists
of Roth physically and psychologically deal with the comic world which may spin out
of control leading to serious consequences. In order to deal with the violent,
tumultuous and the cruel twentieth century, the writer intertwined art, desire, and the
moral imagination in his characters. As the modern culture offers a new hope for
Americans and Jews, Roth’s writings examine and interrogate the modern history.
Psychoanalysis becomes an important tool in his novels to uncover the flaws of
Jewish values and customs. Roth is a leader in the war for freedom and liberation. His
novels energized American fiction, redefining its possibilities with imaginative
daring. The comic fiction, the courage to explore uncomfortable truths, the sense of
analyzing social, political, cultural, and sexual orthodoxies make him one of the
essential writers of our times.
Roth’s affinity to Jewishness is evident in his writings though he seems to
escape from its influence. His Jewishness comes out without any intricacy and he has
immaculately created a gallery of Semitic stereotypes. He is influenced by the culture
and religion in which he lived and grew. The stranger plays a crucial role in Roth’s
fiction as it brings out the Jew in him. As the writer grew up with the Jewish family
intimately, he was able to observe all the entanglements of his mother, the
relationship between father and a son, the burden of the family, the closeness, and the
promising love. The Jewish family appeared unpredictable to the writer, at times as a
warm nest and at times as a nest of lepers. The writer knows the aspirations and
uncertainties of the Jewish family and understood that its texture receives sustenance
from the primordial ghetto. Though the Jewish family appeared to be uncertain, the
writer could observe that the tribe got retained under the shadow of the sacred
covenant that encompasses all. The writer was able to read the heart and mind of the
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tribe and the waves that revitalizes its spirit. Roth was able to decipher that the chosen
tribe of the covenant feeds the present with the past.
Roth’s sensational saga of Zuckerman Novels, have been phenomenal in the
field of literature. It is a unified series of novels due to the recurrence of one character
– Nathan Zuckerman. It has unified structure with thematic diversity and eclecticism.
Roth was able to stabilize himself as a prominent novelist by the end of the
Zuckerman series. The archetypal Zuckerman saga - The Ghost Writer (1979),
Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985),
The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998),
The Human Stain (2000), and Exit Ghost (2007) - made a mark in American-Jewish
literature. The Zuckerman anthology is undoubtedly a significant project taken up by
the writer and it represents the artist’s life with the finest blend of facts with fiction.
The consideration of these books as the finest enterprise is of great
importance. Firstly, the mimetic is greatly illuminated, as the actions of the characters
are better understood and the instabilities are either complicated further or given
necessary resolutions. The portrayal of the protagonist is delineated and the thematic
made to resemble a kaleidoscope. The Zuckerman novels can be divided broadly into
two major series i.e. Zuckerman Bound series and the American Trilogy series, with
two other novels The Counterlife and last novel Exit Ghost. Zuckerman Bound series
deals with the artist’s life – the exploration of the artist’s nature, the growth of the
artist, his triumphs and failures, trials and tribulations. The theme of oedipal conflict
between the father and the son dominates the Zuckerman Bound series and The
Counterlife.
Roth’s works have created an animosity against him, among the Jewish
society and especially among the Rabbis who condemned him as an anti-Semite. He
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defended his writings in many of the essays, interviews, and in his fiction. Roth’s
fiction knits together Realism and Judaism and looks at his own country, the Jewish
life through the wide prism of Jewish assimilation. The confusions that Roth once
decried, later on, brought a beam of hope to look at the American promise of freedom
through the context of Jewishness. Roth’s writing, in terms of Jewishness, goes
beyond the chronicles of the last stages of assimilation. His fiction deals with JewishAmericans struggling with their customs and traditions, in search of reality and truth:
Roth’s characters do not embody the ethos of individualism; rather, the
status of the individual is the central problem in his work. Focusing on
individual figures, he writes about them as particular and specific
embodiments of the general experience of a characteristic American
group (UPR 12-13)
The writings of Roth deal with the Jewish culture and the identity struggle which
invariably received appreciation and criticism simultaneously from across the globe.
In his fiction, the Jew is portrayed as an individual and not the individual as a Jew.
Roth’s works talk about Jewish assimilation, the Jew at urban and suburban level, the
class struggle between the eastern upper-class Jew and the Midwestern middle-class
Jew. As a social realistic writer, though he barely sees the positive aspects of
American life, he is resolute and optimistic in his writings.
Roth became the best-selling novelist after his controversial raunchy hilarious
comedy Portnoy’s Complaint became a bestseller in 1969. The writer gained
commercial and critical success with his controversial magnum opus. It had
unabashedly phallocentric view of the world where male sexuality became his great,
overriding theme. Roth started his literary career with Goodbye, Columbus in the year
1959, which won the prestigious National Book Award. It is a moving story with a
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deep sense, which confronts many issues. Roth deals with the state of Jewish life and
the American ethos where corruption is a part of its culture. His novels became
complex and found a new meaning since the publication of Goodbye, Columbus and
Berman says:
Writing at full force in his late sixties - he could be a poster child for
Social Security or the AARP - his books ooze pain, and yet he hasn’t,
like so many older writers, turned sour on life. Even when he sounds
unbalanced, he’s amazingly there. His work refutes all the clichés
about ‘what fiction used to mean’ but supposedly doesn’t anymore.
Every one of these books matters, every one is a direct challenge to the
way we live and the stories we tell to make our lives mean something.
(Berman 52)
Roth is the renegade artist of the high modernist tradition, wrestling with himself and
his community. The earlier novels of Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short
Stories (1959), Letting Go (1962), and When She Was Good (1967) have traces of
tension. ‘Eli the Fanatic,’ ‘The Defender of the Faith,’ and ‘Epstein,’ reveals the
writers struggle which is later erupted in Portnoy’s Complaint, in 1969. The theme of
romance and erotism dominates from Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 to Sabbaths
Theater in 1995 and later on in some of the other works also. There is a tug of war
and roughhousing between loyalty and independence, romance and erotism in Roth’s
fiction. The source for Roth’s fiction is his great imaginative power and creativity,
which is evident in Portnoy’s Complaint, The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, The
Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater and The American Pastoral. Roth
creates many vivid characters in his novels which appear to be popping out of some
magician’s hat. The writer has been successful in creating many versions of his alter-
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id, Nathan Zuckerman. Apart from Zuckerman the writer has created some of the
interesting characters such as Alex Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath, Lydia and Maureen in
My Life as a Man; the Shiksa, the Pilgrim, the Pumpkin, and the Monkey of Portnoy;
the treacherous Jinx Possesski of Operation Shylock; the polymorphously perverse
Drenka Balich of Sabbaths Theater; Maria of, the Jenny, the Diana, and the Jaga of
The Counterlife; the afflicted Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson; the
beguiling Amy Bellette of The Ghost Writer. Roth has been accused of narcissism and
self-indulgence because of his intense concentration on the Ego, the Id, and the
Superego Third.
Most of Roth’s works contain memoirs of his childhood days spent in the
Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Roth graduated from the Newark’s
Weequahic High School and earned a degree in English in Bucknell University. After
receiving M.A in English literature at the University of Chicago, Roth worked at the
University of Iowa and Princeton University where he taught creative writing and
continued his career at the University of Pennsylvania. He met Saul Bellow, a leading
novelist, and also Margaret Martinson in Chicago. Roth later on married Margaret
Martinson who became his first wife. However, the relationship did not last long and
they had to part ways. The separation with Martinson and her death had a profound
impact on his literary output. Martinson became an inspiration for the female
characters in most of Roth’s works, such as Lucy Nelson in When She was Good, and
Maureen Tarnopol in My Life As a Man.
Roth’s ingenuity reflects in his rich and varied works – the well-crafted stories
in the Goodbye, Columbus collection (1959), the gloomy but realistic Letting Go
(1962) and When She Was Good (1967), the raunchy serio-comic Portnoy’s
Complaint (1969), the magnificent The Breast (1972), the satirical Our Gang (1971),
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The Great American Novel (1973), and the autobiographical My Life As a Man (1974)
– gives an insight into Americas cultural predicament, wherein Roth sees it from his
point of view. Roth has been an expert in describing the destructive elements in the
American life. He was able to unearth the banalities and absurdities that crept into the
land of opportunity and the age of self-fulfillment.
As a writer Roth developed on two significant fronts, one is religion and the
other artistic. The Jewish characters depicted by him bring out the humanistic
elements with flesh and blood. The lives of Zuckerman, Epstein, Kepesh and their
life’s upheavals reflect the writer’s familiarity with the Jewish people. His awareness
of Jewish life makes him observe the movements of the characters and strike a
balance without interference in their lives. Instead of idealizing the Jew or elevating
him to sainthood, Roth talks about the flesh and blood which is the basis for human
existence. The representation of ordinary people with their failures and successes, and
their continuous struggle with faith, reality and imagination makes him a brilliant
writer with humanism.
Roth faced an artistic battle to confront the American society. This
confrontation paved a way to better writing and helped him to discover his artistic
ability. In an essay entitled ‘Writing American Fiction,’ Roth says that there has been
‘a voluntary withdrawal of interest by the writer of fiction from some of the grander
social and political phenomena of our times’ (Bradbury 38). Roth believes that the
writers of America need to take up issues like corruptions, vulgarities, and the
treacheries which are impediments to the society. Speaking of Roth’s concern for
America, John N. McDaniel in Modern Critical Views says:
Roth’s assault on the American experience—his exploration of moral
fantasy, his concern for moral consciousness, his willingness to
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confront the grander social and political phenomena of our time- is, I
think, the most significant aspect of his art. Despite the diversity of
Roth’s fiction, despite the variety of themes, values, and characters that
emerge from his novels and short stories, we see an abiding faith
beneath Roth’s pessimism, a faith that leads him to answer one of his
critics by saying, ‘I find that Mr. Liptzin’s view of the universe is
negative; I think of my own as positive.’ Roth has demonstrated a
willingness to explore the limits of his artistic creed with a deeply felt
concern for man and society, a concern that is detectable beneath his
ponderous realistic novels and his most vitriolic satire. (qtd.in. Bloom
117-118)
Apart from other themes, Roth’s fiction explores ‘promiscuous instincts’ from the
viewpoint of a Jewish-American male. His fiction doesn’t only talk about sexual
promiscuity but also about transgressions of Jewish Americans. Roth’s characters
strive for liberation by ridiculing Judaism, engaging in immoral sexual activities, and
by dating ‘Shiksas’ resulting in emptiness and alienation. The Jewish consciousness is
let loose into the disintegration of the American dream, finding itself homeless and
deracinated. In America, the Jewish immigrants travelled towards peace, liberty,
security, and a decent liberal democracy by the 60’s.
Roth’s fiction was able to depict autobiographical events along with the events
of postwar American life which deals with American idealism, patriotism, political
satire and the American dream. Roth became a literary icon and occupied the centrestage with his prolific writing after the demise of his contemporaries Saul Bellow,
John Updike and Norman Mailer. Roth always faced hurdles in his career as he was
criticized from several quarters. Especially, the Feminists have expressed their
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repugnance at the misogynist protagonists and the narrating voices. Most of the
Jewish critics condemned Roth for representing his own Jewish people as antiSemites. However, most of the critics have backed away by looking at the enormous
response received by Roth in literary grounds. Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio in
‘Playful and Serious: Philip Roth as a Comic Writer’ condemned the critics by saying,
‘Instead of actually criticizing or finding fault with the authors work, it seems that the
standard approach is to discuss the fiction in the most positive light possible and
simply elucidate what the authors intentions are’ (276).
The Jewish American literature emerged as a dominant corpus of work in the
American literary tradition. However, the making into this canon wasn’t without
hurdles. Philip Roth is also one of the writers who started as an enfant terrible and
then matured with great insight to his work. Though his writings have often been
called vicious, vulgar, hostile, self-hating, and stereotypical of anti-Semitic lore, he
has attained commendable success as a writer. Roth portrayed himself in his selfdefences as a victim of incompetent readers, impervious to artistry and irony.
Commenting on Roth’s artistic determination in Reading Philip Roth, it is written:
‘With implicit analogues to Joyce, Roth has depicted himself as an artist rebel,
unfettered by social restraints and collective anxieties’ (20). A good critic always
needs to try and elucidate the intentions of the author in the positive light as the
suppositions may sometimes be incorrect. Philip Roth fought against all the odds and
prevailed against the scathing attacks of the antagonists. Mark Shechner in On the
Road with Philip Roth says:
I was the only person in America who was taken by surprise by the
double-barreled attack on Philip Roth in the December 1972 issue of
Commentary, which featured Norman Podhoretz’s essay ‘Laureate of
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the New Class’ and Irving Howe’s surly and agitated ‘Philip Roth
Reconsidered. (89)
America was facing a crisis with Cultural Revolution in 1960s with the anti-war
protests all around. Shechner observes: ‘I learned that Lionel Trilling called the
cultural revolution ‘modernism in the streets’ and looked upon it as a bad omen for
Western civilization’ (89). Roth had to defend himself on charges of being a willful
writer:
who imposes himself on his characters and denies them any fullness,
contour, or surprise’; of lacking all patience for uncertainties,
mysteries, and doubts, for ‘negative capability’; of being vulgar and
reductive in his thought; of being a literary ‘swinger’ and a slave to
cultural fashion; and of being hampered by a ‘thin personal culture.
(91)
After the incongruous attack on him, Roth wrote in My Life as a Man (1974), ‘that he
also was having a crisis of faith over his own analysis and analyst’ (94). At one point
in time, Roth almost lost his faith in his writing career and was tormented by the fact
that he is regarded as an anti Jewish writer.
Transgression and sex plays an important role in Roth’s fiction as the
characters break their bonds and demonstrate their freedom. When Shechner looks at
My Life as a Man, he talks about liberation where the intimate things haven’t been
treated as taboo anymore. He says:
It is a truism that changes in basic orientation, in paradigm, as they say,
are always experienced as liberations, and it was true that the
encounter with psychoanalysis felt to many of us at first like a
breakthrough into new and exciting vistas and a permission to speak
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candidly of intimate matters that had formerly been taboo. (Shechner
96)
Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) became the touchstone of Roth’s career. The novel was
published during a time where the American Left and a new wave of feminism had
emerged predominantly. This was the time when the men and women fought with
faith and overcame the shackles of misery and desolation. The story and the spirit of
Alex Portnoy, the protagonist of the novel, can be taken as an example for these
people. In order to live a secular and liberal life, Portnoy rejects his own religion. He
strives to get autonomy and freedom through masturbation, sex, and eroticism.
Though he struggles to distance himself from his own culture, he understands that he
cannot escape from it and hence becomes a victim of the very culture. Roth moved to
the echelon where he started writing hot sex scenes with artistic creativity which
created waves in American fiction. He has learnt to identify with the characters and
write about mutual encounters which infuse realistic obsessions. Justice Brennan in
Roth v. United States (1957) says: ‘Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human
life, has indisputably been the subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the
ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest AND PUBLIC CONCERN’
(qtd. in. Berman 47)
There was disarray amongst Stalinist nations as Roth received prominence and
came to be known as editor of the great ‘Writers From the Other Europe’ series in the
1970s and 1980s. The couples in Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath Theater think
about sex frequently and they get a sense of liberation through sex and transgression.
Roth got a reputation of a bad boy with his writings and Berman says ‘Roth had the
rep of a bad boy’ who cared only about sex and was indifferent to higher values, to
politics, to larger human happiness’ (51). Roth’s view about sex is apparently similar
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to Freud’s opinion of sexual love. He gives great importance to the matters of sexual
(genital) love and treats it as the greatest source of satisfaction and happiness.
Sabbaths Theater focuses on a man who puts himself into mayhem with his
selfishness. Roth makes him a loser in a classic New York 1956 obscenity case. The
novel ends with a stunning epiphany. The Human Stain presents a transgressive love
affair of an older established dean and a young janitor leading to serious
consequences.
After a realistic study of Roths works, Shechner expounds by saying that
Roth’s books served him, ‘as windows on the one hand and a home base on the other:
a certain renegade sensibility that answers to my own need for a familiar, reliable, and
above all intelligent rebelliousness’ (Shechner 96). Roth displayed his artistic skills by
portraying his memoirs and nostalgic events in a sophisticated way. His Proustian
capacity to depict nostalgia gracefully makes him an effective writer. The depiction of
his childhood place, his mother’s kitchen, the Jewish family and his romance, the
American radicalism and the popular front, nourished by the immigrant working-class
brings back the life of the sixties. Roth’s father played a vital role in making his
fiction realistic. Roth was able to write about his neighborhood and look into the
identity politics with the help of his father. Roth also speaks about the working class
and the bourgeois who are caught up in their busy schedule. Roth also hopes that the
downtrodden class will be elevated by a new hope:
He is literate, he wears a suit, he writes up policies. But his white
collar confers only the privilege of working to the point of collapse,
with no overtime, without a union to speak for him, and without much
to show for a lifetime on the job, except for his hopes that his son can
go beyond him. It is crucial for us, in 2001, to see this father as part of
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the working class. Alas, in the classic American working-class
romance, only men in boots can qualify; men in suits are classed as
‘bourgeois’ even if they have no property or capital, even if they work
under orders till they drop. (Berman 49)
Roth’s Nostalgia is embedded in a better understanding of his neighborhood and the
cultural transformation of the 1960s. The Jewish characters like Portnoy play a crucial
role in the struggle for civil rights and help to define the American culture. Roth’s
childhood had a remarkable influence on him and the writer sketched all his memoirs
in his writings Patrimony and Portnoy’s Complaint. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth
gives Portnoy the status of the hero amidst chaos. He describes the leftist movement
and its impact on the society, during the great turmoil of 1964 Mississippi ‘Freedom
Summer’. As most of the people sacrifice their lives for the great movement, Portnoy
emerges as an American hero, as a debonair man, working for the poor and the
downtrodden. As a commissioner of the city, working for a WASP radical mayor,
Portnoy defends the oppressed imaginatively and militantly.
American Pastoral (1997) is regarded as the best book of the nineties with
plenty of transgression, even though it doesn’t have much sex according to Rothian
standards. The novel is filled with several overlaying themes of nationalism, Vietnam
War, and the American dream. Roth shifts from nostalgic memories of his Jewish
families and neighborhoods to a wider perspective of an industrial society. The novel
speaks about the decay and ruin of the industrial cities of America. The city that is
imagined as Utopia is seen in bedlam as Rothian characters struggle to overcome the
situation. The voice developed to tell the story can be called Industrial Pastoral. The
writer chronicles the rise and fall of Swede Levov and his fortunes, which is a parable
of innocence and disillusionment of American life. Roth has witnessed the
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complacencies of 50s and the confusions of the 60s, 70s, and 80s: the brutal Vietnam
War, the bloodshed and the chaos. It is evident that these catastrophic events had an
everlasting impression on his thoughts and reflected in his writings. In one of his
interviews with Alan Finkielkraut, in Conversations with Philip Roth, Roth says:
I have no judgment to make of something so colossal as ten years of
world history. As an American citizen I was appalled and mortified by
the war in Vietnam, frightened by the urban violence, sickened by the
assassinations, confused by the student uprisings, sympathetic to the
libertarian pressure groups, delighted by the pervasive theatricality,
disheartened by the rhetoric of the causes, excited by the sexual
display, and enlivened by the general air of confrontation and change.
(124)
Another hallmark in Roth’s fiction is writing autobiographies adeptly. As
Roth-watchers always looked for some kind of evidence of his real life in his writings,
Roth created a surrogate character Nathan Zuckerman to deflect some of the attention.
The psychological and historical aspects helped in the creation of the character.
Similar to Roth, Zuckerman gets fame by the publication of his scandalous novel,
Carnovsky and runs into controversies along with success. Roth created Nathan
Zuckerman, a fictional character which acted as I in between him and the audience.
Zuckerman is undoubtedly Roth’s greatest creation, who sometimes appears as a
protagonist, narrator, and character, but nevertheless plays a vital role. The
relationship between the creator Roth and his fictional alter-id, Nathan Zuckerman is
however to some extent complex. Roth created this character in order to make the
audience believe that Zuckerman himself wrote all the novels. Putting Zuckerman on
the centre-stage or on the side-stage, the writer and persuades a wide variety of
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themes and expounds the relationship between life and art. Through Zuckerman, Roth
brought in semi-autobiographical themes and connected himself as an interlocutor. He
became famous by introducing his alter-id, who lets out his own emotional and
intellectual feelings without engaging in pure autobiography.
Zuckerman, the terrific creation opposes the world without ethical
commitment. He is the product of his creator’s strange imagination. He is not only
exiled from his native place of Newark or his immigrant parents, but also exiled from
the landscape of his own imagination. He is a negated self beneath the sincere,
truthful, polite, comic, and angry character. Zuckerman reaches a great degree of
negativity with his detachment from the social and historical realities. His inability to
fulfill his dream of having a stable love relationship and to have faith in his own
career makes him a negated self. Zuckerman novels work as a device which relieves
pressure for the creator.
Nathan Zuckerman makes his first appearance as an alter ego in the novel My
Life as a Man. Here, Zuckerman appears as an alter ego of an alter ego and acts as a
surrogate novelist for a surrogate novelist for Philip Roth. In this novel Roth through
the device of ‘Useful fictions,’ gives an account of his marital experiences and warns
the reader against similar equivalencies. In Philip Roth Revisited, it’s stated:
In My Life as a Man Roth fictionalizes his marital experience and
attempts, through the device of the ‘Useful fictions,’ to forewarn the
reader against similar equivalencies. To the extent that the reader
observes and registers a point, Roth is successful. Nevertheless, readers
can be notoriously unobservant, and a vulgar curiosity for gossip can
become overwhelming, especially when offered such tantalizing bait as
this novel offers. (140)
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My Life as a Man attempts to unfold the experiential reality through literature. The
novel exhibits Roth’s interest in the depiction of personal experiences through a
creative process and his fascination with the relationship between fact and fiction.
Roth builds a complex structure where a writer creates fiction about a writer and then
in his own voice discusses about the importance of self to the novelist. The irony in
the novel is that behind the artist creating a writer is Roth creating the artist whose
biographical details matches with his own. In one of his interviews to Hermione Lee
in Conversation with Philip Roth, the writer describes what happens when Philip Roth
turns into Nathan Zuckerman:
Nathan Zuckerman is an act. It’s all the art of impersonation, isn’t it?
That’s the fundamental novelist gift. Zuckerman is a writer who wants
to be a doctor impersonating . . . Making fake biography, false history,
concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my
life is my life . . . To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass
oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning
masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice
appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he
weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all.
His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by
simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he ‘is’ once the
curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon
your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It
may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it,
parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it- all to give the
biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life. Millions of
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people do this all the time, of course, and not with the justification of
making literature. They mean it. It’s amazing what lies people can
sustain behind the mask of their real faces. (Searles 166-167)
Roth started to adopt nonfictional writing and made it a strategy for exploring the
issues of subjectivity. He used this strategy effectively in The Facts (1988) and he
wrote some books as a ‘true story,’ or ‘a novelist autobiography,’ or a ‘confession.’
Roth displayed his expertise in intertwining the idea of selfhood with the enterprise of
autobiography. Donald Spence in Narrative Truth and Historical Truth argues that,
‘the linguistic and narrative aspects of an interpretation may well have priority over
its historical truth’ (137).
Jay L. Halio in Philip Roth Revisited says: ‘In The Facts, Roth tries to
distinguish between fiction and autobiography, but resemblances between ‘fact’ and
‘fiction’ not only tantalize the imagination; they also raise questions about why
authors write as and what they do’ (126). In a sense, memories cannot be seen as
factual events. The process of recollection could be understood as a process of mental
construction and a product of invention. The narrative only can give authentic truth,
fiction can mirror the imaginations, and fantasies can be given a free rein only in the
process of writing fiction. Talking about fact and fancy, Zuckerman accuses his
author Roth of stripping his book of life and states at the end of The Facts, ‘The truth
is that the facts are much more refractory and unmanageable and inconclusive, and
can actually kill the very sort of inquiry that imagination opens up’ (TF 166). Philip
Roth retains his credibility by introducing the autobiographical techniques. In a close
contest engaged between Roth and Zuckerman, the latter undoubtedly prevails as it
contains the truth of the author’s autobiography. Going beyond bewildering
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complexities and paradox, the element of autobiographical nature reflects in Roth’s
fiction.
The Counterlife is another masterpiece where the author writes letters to his
character. Roth’s autobiography is framed by the two letters with a debate and it
contradicts the text enclosed. It sets fact against fiction, juxtaposes creator and the
created, and yields one version of the self to another. Donald Spence observes,
‘narrative truth’ and ‘historical truth’ in The Facts, when Roth and Zuckerman
exchange letters with thesis and antithesis statements. According to psychoanalysis,
the historical facts are not evident in observable behavior and so constitute ‘report’
and Roth implements this strategy in The Facts. Speaking about The Facts, Roth says,
‘If this manuscript conveys anything, it’s my exhaustion with masks, disguises,
distortions, and lies’ (TF 6). Roth explains to Zuckerman that the writing is a result of
a ‘breakdown.’ He states that he was trying to retrieve ‘a series of moments’ and then
renders them ‘untransformed’ (5).
Stating their views on the fiction and facts, Kauvar and Roth in their article,
“This Doubly reflected Communication” state: ‘eschewing the mythologizing of
fiction and exchanging its elusive and unstable transformations of self for the clarity
and equilibrium of nonfiction. Having asserted that a ‘distillation of the facts . . . can
unlock meanings’ unavailable to fiction’ (Kauvar 415). Overturning the enterprise of
factual discourse, Roth says that the memories of the past are not memories of facts
but memories of your imaginings of the facts. Speaking of persuasive hypothesis that
can unravel your history’s meaning, he comments, ‘ . . . It isn’t that you subordinate
your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence
of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s
meaning’ (TF 8). Paradoxically, a view shared by psychoanalysts and historians is
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that facts do not necessarily arrive at truth and memories cannot always be factual
events. Memories can be interpretations which individuals construct for their history
and hence, facts and qua-facts which play a crucial role in the autobiographical
writing, haven’t got independent undertone outside interpretation. Freudian theory is
evident in Roth’s novels even when he talks about ‘imagining of facts.’
Roth’s discourse as a tour de force reflects Bakhtin’s dialogism. Roth
constructs a series of stories in order to make the facts of life meaningful. His stories
work unremittingly and reopen the course of memory. In order to bring an order
through memory, Roth implements Sigmund Freud’s psychical reality to create
meaningful sequences and ordered connections. Speaking about memory as the
fragment of the story, Paul Ricoeur says, ‘to speak of the psyche as a text to be
deciphered’ (Kauvar 416), and simultaneously be able to ‘constitute one’s own
existence in the form of a story where a memory as such is only a fragment of the
story’ (416).
Paul Eakin in Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention
observes that we: ‘accept the proposition that fictions and the fiction making process
are a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to
the presentation of that life’ (Eakin 5). Talking about the origin of The Facts, in one
of his interviews with Mervyn Rothstein, Roth comments, that it was very private, and
whatever he says in the book is really all he intends to say. He says that there was a
major disruption in his life that triggered the book, unlike his other books, which
begin in a period of calm, order, and certain peacefulness. He says, ‘. . . a real
disruption to concentration, focus and health initiated the writing here. And I wrote
my way out of a serious depression’ (CPR 226). Here, Roth is speaking about the
influence of the ones psyche which acts as a stimulator and initiates the process of
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thinking. This process seems to be a powerful source in depicting the ideas
instantaneously. The autobiographies of Roth are torn between fact and fiction and
speaking about his autobiography, Roth says that the autobiography consists in part,
in which the point of views of Zuckerman and Roth clash, being torn between the
facts and the fiction, between the autobiographical impulse to understand something
and the fictionalizing impulse to understand something. He says, ‘Which is the way to
understand it - not for the world, not for any other writer, but for me? (227).
The Counterlife as a novel follows Roland Barthes technique where the
contract between the reader and writer is being torn up continuously. Talking about
the reader of The Facts, Philippe Lejeune in On Autobiography notes, ‘an
autobiographical pact, in which an author proposes to the reader a discourse on the
self, but also . . . a particular realization of that discourse, one in which the question
who am I?’ (Lejeune 124). Sharing his views on autobiographical discourse and the
language of privation, Paul De Man, in ‘Autobiography as De-facement,’ says, ‘what
autobiography aspires to—a knowledge of the self and its world—is founded on an
illusion, that rather than provide ‘a discourse of self restoration,’ autobiography
knows only the ‘language of privation’ (De Man 923). Contrarily, James Olney
observes that the self expresses itself by the metaphors it creates and projects, which
we know by those metaphors. He says, ‘but it did not exist as it now does and as it
now is before creating its metaphors . . . and thus we know the self, activity or agent,
represented in the metaphor and the metaphorizing’ (Olney 34). When we look at The
Facts, the double process seems to manifest itself in it. Speaking about the collision
between the author and his character, Roth says that it not only links the novelist’s
autobiography to his previous novel but casts doubt on it, which transforms the
autobiography into a ‘counterbook,’ Roth’s ‘counterlife’ (CPR 228).
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In The Counterlife, the self of the novelist contradicts his own creator and
draws the attention of the reader to identify the intertextuality which exists underneath
the assembled bare facts and in the process penetrates the subtext of the
autobiography. Roth impersonates Zuckerman and makes it a ‘walking text.’ Talking
about the Roth’s personification and the ‘walking text’ in The Facts, Zuckerman says:
Your gift is not to personalize your experience but to personify it, to
embody it in the representation of a person who is not yourself. You
are not an autobiographer, you’re a personificator. You have the
reverse experience of most of your American contemporaries. Your
acquaintance with the facts, your sense of the facts, is much developed
than your understanding, your intuitive weighing and balancing of
fiction. You make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the
world it comes out of. My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses
of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are
or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text. (TF 162)
Zuckerman made some arguments regarding the self and about the autobiography. In
The Counterlife, he says that he had no self and in The Facts, he argues against the
fluidity and falsity of autobiography. He observes that autobiography goes against the
stability and integrity of fiction to some extent. Roth’s autobiographical volumes with
the help of Zuckerman examine the subject and inquire into its existence or
disappearance. A ‘walking text’ incarnates the texts of others and based on
Zuckerman’s analysis on differing powers of revelation possessed by fiction and
autobiography, Roth alludes to a text crucial to his autobiography and to his notion of
self. Sharing his views on judgment of the author in terms of ethical and aesthetic
sense, Zuckerman writes: ‘What one chooses to reveal in fiction is governed by a
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motive fundamentally aesthetic; we judge the author of a novel by how well he or she
tells the story. But we judge morally the author of an autobiography, whose governing
motive is primarily ethical as against aesthetic’ (163).
Roth alludes to the aspect of dichotomy which distinguishes the work of a
writer and he is in accord with the idea of the self. Analogous to Roth’s authorial
motivations, Zuckerman alludes to Soren Kierkegaard’s books, the philosopher of
subjectivity who claims to have authored two kinds of books, those belonging to the
aesthetic realm, and those arising from the ethical. Roth alludes to Kierkegaard in
introduction, with Roth’s letter to Zuckerman, focusing on the essential contradiction
inherent in the author’s entire effort, seizing on the events which are paramount to
them and constructing the point of view around them. Its very structure resembles The
Facts which evolves out of three things according to Zuckerman: Roth’s ‘journey
from Weequahic Jewishness into the bigger American society,’ ‘the terrific upheaval
of the involvement with Josie,’ and finally, the novelists ‘response to the larger world’
(164-65).
In his fiction and especially in Operation Shylock, Roth repeatedly alludes to
Kierkegaard in choosing his Repetition as a major source for the epigraphs. The novel
demonstrates the struggle between the elders and the writers, where fathers dominate
the writer’s worlds and the authors achieve their individuality by overcoming the
supremacy of the established elders, of their communities. However, the entire issue
turns to be futile, as neither of them could actually escape from the agony of
depression, which becomes the central part of their autobiographies. Kierkegaard
resembles Roth in terms of works as he divides them into the aesthetic and the ethical.
In The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History, he says: ‘the
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religious author had developed himself out of the aesthetic disguise’ (Kierkegaard
14).
The pseudonyms of Kierkegaard complement to the pseudonyms of Roth. The
contending voices of Zuckerman and Roth complement in the pseudonyms of
Kierkegaard. The fundamental characteristic feature of the multiplicity of voices
complement in both the texts of Roth and Kierkegaard. The texts appear to be
contradictory with the dialectical twofoldedness making a discourse with the
unresolved ambiguity which dictate every new text written against the earlier.
Speaking about the Symposium in Kierkegaard’s Works, Kierkegaard says: ‘All the
discourses are therefore like sections in a telescope, with the one account terminating
ingeniously in the next’ (2: 42). Stating his views on autobiography and the
countertext Roth says: ‘With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext,
if you will, to the one presented. It’s probably the most manipulative of all literary
forms’ (TF 172).
Kierkegaard considers his aesthetic work as a ‘deception,’ which is a
necessary element in the indirect process of destroying illusion. The argument
between Roth and Kierkegaard regarding the ethical works gave new dimensions to
fiction. Kierkegaard insists that the ethical works progress after a ‘teleological
suspension in relation to the communication of truth (i.e., to suppress something for
the time being in order that truth may become truer)’ (POV 91). Roth argues the
obverse, as Zuckerman tells his creator that his medium for the really merciless selfevisceration and genuine self-confrontation is none other than Zuckerman himself
(The Facts 185). Through the conflict of interpretations, the two writers continuously
make an effort to determine a form, in which the truth is available. Roth attempts to
discover the truth through the realm of fiction and Kierkegaard through the process of
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direct communication. According to Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: A Study in
Moral Theory, Kierkegaard tries to divide up his self in his books to allocate it among
a series of masks and therefore creates a literary genre, where in, the author appears as
himself directly and the author denies his own presence by his partitioning of his self
(MacIntyre 40).
Partitioning in Roth’s fiction confirms the presence of multiform self. It
inhabits a multiple reality, affirming the presence of the novelist many times over.
The proof of psychoanalytic material resides in its capacity to be said to another
person, in the dialogic nature, however, the psyche as Roth conceives of it is more
kaleidoscopic. Roth’s autobiographies reflect complexity in the construction of
experience, and demonstrate how inner and outer worlds impinge subtle, without
monolithic versions of self. The autobiographies explore the hidden reality, a second
and decisive reality. Describing Roth’s multitude of voices, the psychoanalyst, Roy
Schafer in ‘Reading Freud’s Legacies,’ says, ‘a multitude of voices rising from his . . .
own imagined inner world as well as [in] a multitude of inner-world voices,’ projected
onto his characters (Schafer 5).
The autobiographies need to have a narrative voice and as an autobiographical
writer, Roth depicts his personal history and memoirs with creativity. Roth introduces
a narrative context to the facts and unravels his personal history in an
autobiographical form, a memoir, as ‘A True Story.’ Roth employs all the strategies
of fiction in Patrimony to complete the portrait of his father which begun in The
Facts. Roth depicts the significant relationship between father and a son in his novels
The Facts and Patrimony. In The Facts, Roth identifies with his father: ‘It wasn’t
exactly the first time I was hearing these stories. Narrative is the form that his
knowledge takes, and his repertoire has never been large: ‘family, family, family,
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Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine’ (TF 16). The term
‘somewhat’ is a sign of ‘increasing friction’ and growing difference between the
father and the son, which prompts Roth to join a college distancing himself from his
father. Roth writes: ‘ . . . main reason that I wanted to get away from home for my
sophomore year was to protect a hardworking, self-sacrificing father and a devoted
but determined son from a battle that they were equally ill equipped to fight’ (37-38).
He discusses about the struggle between father and son which plays a crucial part in
the growth of one’s emotional and psychological process.
Zuckerman acts as an opposing self in The Facts and as a parricidal driver in
Patrimony. However, the struggle between the father and son which is referred in
Roth’s diagnosis of the driver can neither suffice as an explanation for the growth of
the self nor stand as an account of the self’s vicissitudes. While making a constant
comparison to his father’s life in Patrimony, Roth discusses about his discrepancy
with his father that repudiated his father’s authority, with an oppressive conflict, laden
with grief and scorn: ‘He wasn’t just any father, he was the father, with everything
there is to hate in a father and everything there is to love’ (Patr 180).
Roth’s confessional novel, Operation Shylock adds to the third volume of
nonfictional writings. In the preface, Roth writes that the novel has allegiance to fact:
‘I’ve drawn Operation Shylock from notebook journals. The book is as accurate an
account as I am able to give of actual occurrences that I lived through during my
middle fifties and that culminated, early in 1988’ (OS 13). Operation Shylock is an
interplay of the unconscious and conscious realms, reflecting the vicious debate of
life, with its warring doubles, dialectical strategies and permutations in tone. It is an
interplay between fact, fiction, truth and imagination. Roth creates the characters of
Zuckerman and Apter to meet the above task. Zuckerman of The Facts, a character
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fashioned by the novelists fancy, and Apter of Operation Shylock, a character claimed
to be the novelists relation appears to be identical and match each other. While Roth
addresses his letter to a character he has created, he attributes to the imaginary
character of Zuckerman and by changing his cousins name to alter the identification
details Roth tries to project both of them dubious.
As Zuckerman is perceived as a reflection of Roth himself, Apter also
announces the emergence of ‘another Philip Roth’ (OS 18). The novelist talks about
the disintegration of the self and a phenomenon of a peculiar emotional collapse.
Similar to Apter’s narrative, Roth’s fiction ‘. . . provides the storyteller with the lie
through which to expose his unspeakable truth’ (58). In an interview with Aharon
Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth,
Roth describes why he failed at the project of Operation Shylock:
But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be faithful to reality and to
what really happened. But the chronicle that emerged proved to be a
weak scaffolding. The result was rather meager, an unconvincing
imaginary tale. The things that are most true are easily falsified
(Appelfeld 86).
In order to survive, the novelists like Apter preferred to clothe the deception with
truth. They introduced an indirect method of deceiving ‘a person into the truth’ in
which ‘is to be found the deeper significance of the use of pseudonyms’ (Kierkegaard,
POV 39). In Operation Shylock, Roth creates the multiple doubles and constructs the
human mental life with connections and stratifications, by weaving the psychic fabric
of human subjectivity. The narrative of Roth depicts contradictory impulses which are
inevitable in the psychic history of an individual. At the end of Operation Shylock, the
two enraged doubles face extinction because of the battleground created by Eros and
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Death and its challenging contest. Arab acts as Pipik’s duplicate and Ziad turns out to
be novelists opposite because of his hatred towards Zionism. However, there is
similarity in their views about Zionism. Pipik feels that it is a spent ideology and Ziad
proclaims Zionism, ‘inferior by every measure of civilization’ (OS 134).
Roth visits the home of Ziad as Pipik and his friends son too becomes a replica
of his father, ‘making amends to father . . . hacking through the undergrowth of stale
pathology with the machete of one’s guilt’ (151). The drama of Operation Shylock
excludes Demjanjuks and alludes to Hamlet in many ways and the drama becomes a
reflection of the tragic story of history. Roth shares preoccupation with the repetition
similar to Kierkegaard and Freud. Speaking on ‘Repetition and recollection,’
Constantin Constantius states: ‘are the same movement, except in opposite directions,
for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is
recollected forward’ (KW 6: 131).
The paradoxical aspect of repetition comes to the foreground as Stephen
Dunning explicates recollection as, ‘locates all knowledge and significance in the
realm of the unchanging, while repetition looks for meaning in change, in the
transformation of the old (which has been) into the new’ (106). In Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud formulates a similar paradox for repetition and says, ‘the
aim of all life is death’ (38). He observes that even though life moves ineluctably
towards death, the work of attaining consciousness in life follows a process of
‘Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through.’ Hence, in his view, repetition acts
as a synonym for burden that has to be ultimately borne for liberation and salvation.
The recovery of the self repeats in Operation Shylock, however, as an act which
carries both the instincts of life and death, it itself causes in killing the two aspects of
self. The confessional novel explores the dilemma of every Jew in Israel who search
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for stability and simplicity, but find only ambivalence and conflict as a repetition of
the Diaspora. It speaks of lives and the burdens of the people who are paradoxically
equivalent both at home and in exile.
The texts of Roth acts on reality to which they refer. They clarify, change, and
redescribe the reality by submitting it to the imaginative variations of fiction. In order
to follow the footsteps of Sigmund Freud, one has to undercut fact and restore to
fiction the sovereignty of truth. Though it is problematic to envisage and image the
self, Roth thrives precisely on the multiple forms, because of their clashing encounters
and conflicting impulses. Life exists because of contradiction for Roth and
Kierkegaard. It continually strives to exist between the infinite and the finite, the
eternal and the temporal.
Roth dealt the religious issues with great courage and fought his artistic battle
without any compromise. Jewish society and critics on one hand praised him as a
Jewish moralist and on the other hand condemned him as a self-hating Jew. Roth
faced a cloud of controversies as he spoke about social realism and American reality.
The major concern for his artistic creativity was that the criticism poured on him was
due to the brave portrayal of Jewish reality and not really because of his artistic skills
as a writer. It’s painful to know that the terrific writing of Roth could not be seen from
the artistic point of view and he was undermined as a writer who had subdued
interests towards his religion.
When we look at the Meta-Memoirs Autobiography we can understand that
it’s a mode of telling ‘facts.’ However, most of the times, this strategy of corrective
telling depends on the targeted audience and their awareness about the
autobiographers life. In “Facing the Fictions: Henry Roth's and Philip Roth's MetaMemoirs,” Hana Wirth-Nesher says that autobiography is often an attempt at setting
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the record straight, of telling the ‘facts.’ She says that the form of this corrective
telling will depend in large part on the intended audience and how much information
about the life is already available to that audience before the autobiographer assumes
the authority that comes with being the subject of the story.
However, according to her, this in turn will depend on the extent to which the
autobiographer will present his or her life as representative of a collective identity or
as a unique subject who has been heretofore either unknown or known but
misrepresented (Wirth-Nesher 259). When Roth wrote autobiographies he tried to set
the record straight by telling the facts and his personal record of life. It’s a
complicated task to an autobiographer when his readers start imagining the author’s
life, by the fiction he writes. An author always desires for his autonomy of art and he
ultimately brings in the ‘truth’ when his art and life is misread.
Several writers changed their writing perspectives and started scripting their
personal facts giving a twist to the creative writing. Roth has been enthused to depict
facts so that he can present a record of his life and also set the record straight. The
writings of Roth had great self-exposure, as his art has always been in public debate,
which
in-turn
received
extensive
coverage
of
his
life.
The
perceived
representativeness as a Jewish-American writer was another reason for his critical
reception. The autobiographical element and the metanarrativc technique of Roth
became self-reflexive responses to public discussions of his life and career. The
fiction of Roth which is two generations from immigration deals with the American
Jews recurring theme of split identity caught between the fantasies of American life
and the counterlife to American assimilation. The trilogy of Zuckerman Bound adds a
new dimension of Bildung to the artist and it makes the American Jewish writer
depict his self-created journeys from Newark to Prague, Jerusalem and London. The
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publication of Portnoy’s Complaint marked Roth’s career as an era of scandal and the
Jewish-American readers regarded the autobiographical works as satires that betrayed
their own community by exposing them to gentile eyes.
Hana Wirth-Nesher says: ‘The attacks on him have been vociferous: he has
been accused of unfocused hostility and self-hatred, of provoking anti-Semitism and
jeopardizing the Jews hard-won and tenuous security in the United States’ (260).
Speaking about Roth’s defense, she says: ‘in his repeated self-defenses, Roth has
portrayed himself as a victim of incompetent readers, philistines, impervious to irony
and artistry’ (260). The readers of Roth lack the sophistication to make a distinction
between art, history, fiction and autobiography. Hana Wirth-Nesher says:
Roth has recently added another dimension—two self proclaimed
autobiographies: The Facts: A Novelists Autobiography (1988) and
Patrimony: A True Story (1991). Are we to treat these works as the
product of an aging and exasperated Philip Roth who simply wants to
set the record straight? The brashness of a title like The Facts from an
author who has been masking and unmasking for decades, playing a
fast game of hide-and-seek with his readers, is anything but reassuring.
Both titles inspire suspicion as well as confidence, the first insisting
that the autobiography is both about and by a novelist, and the second
claiming truth for the ‘story.’ (Wirth-Nesher 261)
In The Facts, Roth chronicles his journey with the credo of his childhood and
reiterates about his Jewishness: ‘Hear, O Israel, the family is God, the family is One’
(14). Speaking about the state of Jewish life and family, he says: ‘In our lore, the
Jewish family was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal
isolation to gentile hostility’ (14). The first chapter ‘Safe at Home’ begins with the
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declaration of his American identity: ‘The greatest menace while I was growing up
came from abroad, from the Germans and the Japanese, our enemies because we were
American’ (20). Subsequently, he speaks of his minority position as a Jew in
America: ‘At home the biggest threat came from the Americans who opposed or
resisted us—-or condescended to us or rigorously excluded us—because we were
Jews’ (20). Speaking about the gentiles in America and the hatred he came across in
his own country, Roth says:
Though I knew that we were tolerated and accepted as well - in
publicized individual cases, even specially esteemed—and though I
never doubted that this country was mine (and New Jersey and Newark
as well), I was not unaware of the power to intimidate that emanated
from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America. (20)
Roth ends the novel with a sense of freedom and independence from collective
identity and family. He says: ‘I was determined to be an absolutely independent, selfsufficient man’ (160). The writer gives out his intention and it’s an indication that he
wants to be a self-reliant American hero. The first chapter of The Facts speaks about
the family and the homogenous Jewish communal within an inhospitable gentile
world. Speaking about being Jewish, Roth says:
About being Jewish there was nothing more to say than there was
about having two arms and two legs. It would have seemed to us
strange not to be Jewish—stranger still, to hear someone announce that
he wished he weren’t a Jew or that he intended not to be in the future.
(31)
Roth faces the fury of the American Jewish readers and in of the symposium at
Yeshiva University, the moderator openly asks him: ‘Mr. Roth, would you write the
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same stories you’ve written if you were living in Nazi Germany?’ After being grilled
by the audience for thirty minutes, he realizes that he is not only opposed but hated by
the audience. He says that the debate went beyond interrogation: ‘Thirty minutes later,
I was still being grilled. No response I gave was satisfactory and, when the audience
was allowed to take up the challenge, I realized that I was not just opposed but hated’
(127).
The ‘bruising public exchange’ became a crucial event Roth’s writing career
as he took up the same concepts which were opposed and transformed them into the
main themes. These themes deal with the Jewish allegiance and the Jewish selfdefinition which inspires a series of satires about the relation between aesthetics and
morality, art and society, the facts and their literary representations. The Facts deals
with the counterlives and the dialogues with the readers, in which the text opens up
for public debates.
Roth submits a copy of his text to Nathan Zuckerman in a paratext structured
as an autobiography. In reply, Zuckerman strongly disapproves the text by accusing
him of idealizing the past of his family in order to win favor of the people who have
condemned him of treason: ‘Your Jewish readers are finally going to glean from this
what they’ve wanted to hear from you for three decades . . . that instead of writing
only about Jews at one another’s throats, you have discovered gentile anti-Semitism’
(166). There is a constant conflict in Roth’s views about writing and it is evident
when Zuckerman suggests Roth to express his thoughts with freedom: ‘give up on
giving them, thirty years too late, the speech of the good boy at the synagogue’ (166).
Paratext is an integral part of an autobiography and Roth uses it appropriately
to show his ideas and concerns. His paratext may not be a chronicle of the past which
can be relied, but at the time of writing, it may help the writer to satisfy his needs. In
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order to become a self-reliant American, Roth struggles with his inner self. He is seen
wrestling with his own shadow in his writings and in order to make the reader witness
it, the writer builds an adversarial relationship between his social self and writing self.
The shadow and double created, reflects the voice of the Jewish community.
The criticism and accusations made by the community shaped the writers self
and also the subject of the autobiography. Speaking about the freedom as the
recurring theme of America, Zuckerman’s wife says, ‘Only an American could see the
fate of his freedom as the recurring theme of his life’ (189). The Jewish life and the
historical predicament into which Roth is born play a major role in shaping the novel.
The paratext which has the metafictional dimension is not only an obligatory
pyrotechnics in a postmodern narrative. It is an approach to foreground the crisis of
representativeness in the contemporary American letters and the Jewish writers admit
that the autobiographical writings pose a problem to them. The evolution of
multiculturalism has shaped a contemporary American who doesn’t have belief in the
essential American experience and is skeptical about the racial identity or ethnicity as
a safe haven.
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