Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

Seminar: American Literature I - The Intertextual Mode in Jewish American Literature

Summer 2013
Dr. Claudia Grg
University of Mainz
July 2013
Tabitha Elkins

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

Table of Contents
Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock
1. Introduction....................................................................................................................3
2. Ontology.........................................................................................................................3
3. Nature of identity............................................................................................................4
4. Truth, Fiction and Metafiction........................................................................................5
5. Doubles...........................................................................................................................8
5.1 Pipik..............................................................................................................................8
5.2 Other Doubles...............................................................................................................9
6. Reality and God.............................................................................................................11
7. Conclusion.....................................................................................................................12
References..........................................................................................................................13

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

1. Introduction
In Phillip Roth's Operation Shylock, the ontological riddle of reality is revealed in the
riddle of human identity. Roth explores the progressive unmasking of the collective delusion
of reality by allowing characters (some based on real people) to question the absurdity of
their (fictional) reality. As Shostak writes, Roth presents his narrator-protagonist 'Phillip
Roth', with a double, a 'literal' impersonator of himself at the diegetic level of the narrative,
in order to raise epistemological and ontological questions (Shostak, 2004). In this paper, I
will examine the philosophical implications brought about by the author's use of
metafictional and doubles.
2. Ontology
These philosophical questions- about the nature of identity and reality- call into mind
the idea of reality as fiction, and the question of the reality of a fictional world such as a
novel. According to Pascal, our day-to-day existence may actually be a collective fiction. The
skeptical view of ontology holds that in such a fictional world, we agree to the collective
delusion that it is real. As Varsi (2013) puts it: We imagine a possible world where the fiction
holds truewe pretend that our world is such a worldand then we see whether our
sentence, P, holds at that world. (7)
However, in Operation Shylock, the subject of ontology is compounded by the
layering of selves, the real Phillip Roth, Roth the narrator and the false Roth. Intertextual
references to Roth-based characters, such as Zuckerman, compound this epistemological
dilemma. Edholm states:
This compositional principle is reflected in its representation of characters and in
its major themes: the nature of identity and the relationship between subjectivity
and reality, and between the writers words and the life the writer lives. (Edholm,
2012)
As in many of his novels, Roth has long given up on any attempt to differentiate
between himself and his narrator characters, instead exploiting the postmodern implications of
fictional identity, Edholm writes: The name 'Philip Roth' is given functions within a fictional
context. It is used metafictionally in order to underscore and approach the thematic relation
between life and literature, and as a way for the author to create effects of 'realism'.(Edholm,
2012).

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

3. Nature of identity
The Halcion madness episode at the beginning of the novel which Roth refers to as a
bizarre emotional collapse (19) dramatizes and initiates the issues of depersonalization and
the nature of identity. This drug induced 'disaster of self-abandonment' as Shostak puts it
(Shostak, 2004), culminates with Phillip Roth the narrator, asking, Where is Phillip
Roth? . . . Where did he go? (22) The so-called transformation and deformation (27) calls
into question the very stability of his self-image and identity. Later in the book, he states his
existentialist problem:
"Me-itis. Microcosmosis. Drowning in the tiny tub of yourself....
swimming in the sea of the other self- the other self being yours. Instead
there is this me to plague and preoccupy me, a me who is not even me to
obsess me day and night..." (55)
This episode of drug-induced depersonalization is a foreshadowing of what is to come
later in the novel: the splitting of Roth into two Roths: the real Roth and the imposter. The
real Roth,as narrator, and the imposter, which Roth refers to as Moishe Pipik, are within
the novel, while the actual Roth, who may or may not be reflected in either one or both of the
Roths in the novel, is the unseen third Roth. The fictional Roth complains that his "double" is
not him- yet neither of them are the Roth who is writing the novel. This situation hints at yet
another level outside of our level of so-called reality which is writing us.

Roth's designation of his would-be double Moishe Pipik- Moses Bellybutton- a

joke name- to differentiate his imposter from himself, is telling: Pipik, however, is the
designation for the narrator's perception of his double, and in this subjective apprehension
lied the ambiguity of the counterself. (Shostak, 2004). Just who is this Pipik? After the
Halcion madness episode, Roth learns from his friend Aharon Appelfeld and cousin Apter
that a man claiming to be him is giving interviews in Jerusalem about Diasporism. Even
before speaking with and meeting this man, Roth asks if this is reality or fiction:
Although the idea probably originated in Aharon's remark that he felt
that he was reading to me out of a story I'd written, it was nonetheless
another ridiculously subjective attempt to convert into a mental event of
the kind I was professionally all to familiar with what had once again
been established as all to objectively real. It's Zuckerman..... it's Kepesh,

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

it's Tarnopol and Portnoy- it's all of them in one, broken free of print and
mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me.... if it's not
Halcion and it's not a dream, then it's got to be literature (34).
Shoshak writes: Disoriented by the self-mirroring and 'Identity theft' (191), Phillip
doesn't trust the evidence of his senses, and Pipik comes to represent the abyss of identity
(Shostak, 2004).
Later in the novel, Roth says to Pipik: You're a blank to me..... I even get the feeling
that without me around you're a blank to yourself (191). The reader is left to decide for
himself if this is Roth the author addressing the false Roth who disguises himself as the
author or if he is metaphorically addressing Pipik as a stand-in for all of the false Roths that
have populated his novels, including the narrator, claiming to be him.

4. Truth, Fiction and Metafiction

This calls to mind the dilemma of Humean fictionalism. Varsi writes:
We readily suppose that an object may continue numerically the same, in
spite of the fact that it may undergo several qualitative changes and that
for most of the times it is absent from the senses. Bananas ripen, ships
deteriorate, people lose hairs and acquire new body cells. In this world of
flux, persisting things are the only anchor we have, but the source of their
persistence is a genuine puzzlea puzzle that has been with us since the
Presocratics(Varsi, 2013).
The fluctuating nature of reality addressed in a novel form which is in itself a fictional
reality, brings into focus not only the ontological duality of the fictionality of the real world
and the reality of the fictional world, it also brings within it the question of identity. Varsi
writes: The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a
like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore,
have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like
objects (Varsi, 2013).
The overlapping of fiction and non-fiction is one of the central underlying themes of
the novel. As Umberto Eco writes: By definition, fictional texts clearly speak of non-existing
persons and events and from the point of view of truth conditional semantics, a fictional

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

assertion should always tell what is not real-life (Eco, 2009).

Roth's world within the novel, however, curiously overlaps our own. As stated in the
epilogue, the conversation with Aharon Appelfeld found in chapters 3 and 4 appeared in The
New York Times in 1988. Aharon Appelfeld, John Demanjuk, Roth's wife, Claire, and Roth
himself are real people, yet the necessary solipsism of the first-person novel form itself is
called into question by the contradictory epilogue entitled Note to the reader, in which Roth
has the final word, first stating, This book is a work of fiction, then stating, This
confession is false (399) (Edholm, 2012). This paradoxical statement is inherently a
philosophical Mbius Strip of absurdity, bookcased along with the preface which states that
the work is, indeed, a true story.
Cooper (1996) writes: With the last sentence, the disclaimer is possibly
disclaimed.Since the title of the whole work includes the words, A Confession, this last
sentence can be read as saying either that the whole confessional work is false or that the
confessional Note to the Reader is false (and, therefore, the work true) (255). By weaving
intertextual references to Schulz and Kafka into his narrative, he makes this point more
obvious: "Kafka emerges from an inner world and tries to get some grip on reality" (56).
Roth's metafictional musings on his cousin Apter's fantastic, dramatic stories hint at the
question of truthfulness of reality and its connection to fiction:
Are (Apter's) stories accurate and true? I myself never inquire about
their veracity. I think of them instead as fiction that, like so much of
fiction, provides the storyteller with the lie through which to expose the
unspeakable truth (58).
When talking to Appelfeld, Roth quotes him as saying: The things that are most true
are easily falsified... Reality... is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that,
reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion(86). That
Apter's stories are supposedly real while Appelfeld's fiction is merely based on reality has
more to do with the ontological function of words to represent and misrepresent reality.
The question of truth-telling is also hinted at when, during Roth's excursion with
George Zee into the Palestinian territories in Ramallah, Schmuel the defense lawyer say, This
is the Middle East. We all know how to lie with a smile.(...)this idea of taquiya. Generally
called in English 'dissimulation'.(...) The culture doesn't expect that you'll speak in a way that
endangers you and certainly not that you'll be candid and sincere. (145) Roth hints here that
the novel itself is a form of dissimulation.

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

Thus, the thin line between fiction and non-fiction is touched upon when, after Roth
has met his double in Israel and is pondering what to do, he says:
This side of madness and the madhouse, doubles, I thought, figure
mainly in books.... I knew all about these fictions about the fictions of the
self-divided, having decoded them as cleverly as the next clever boy
some four decades earlier in college. But this was no book I was studying
or one I was writing (115)(emphasis mine).
Roth the narrator is supplanted by Roth the author of the narrator in chapter eight,
entitled, The Uncontrollability of Real Things. This meta-narrative recounts the story of the
writer and his imposter, from the omniscient point of view of yet another narrator, who
questions the plausibility of the story:
it would only be natural, to assume that in a narrative contest (in the
realistic mode) the real writer would easily emerge as inventive
champion, scoring overwhelming victories in Sophistication of Means,
Subtlety of Effects but instead the Jerusalem Gold Medal for Vivid
Realism has gone to a narrative klutz... (247)
This metafictional critique on the plot so far, wedged in the midsection of the novel,
gives a winking self-referential aside to the reader, lest he take all of this realism too
seriously.
The contradiction here uncovers the layered roles, as Roth, the narrator, is not writing
a book, but Roth the author. As Edholm writes, The example of Napoleon in Tolstoys classic
novel (War and Peace) can be said to have become an almost canonical example in
discussions on the ontology of the fictional world and the occurrence of real people in fiction
and their relation to the other characters. (Edholm, 188) Roth occupies the precarious
position of a man who is both a native of the fictional world and an immigrant in it, as
well, to use the terminology of Terence Parsons. Kte Hamburger, Edholm notes, treats the
nonfictional character in a fictional novel as a fictive one: According to Hamburger, there is
a process of fictionalization in a novel which renders non-historical all ever so historical raw
material [...] (113), including actual, historical people such as Napoleon Bonaparte (Edholm,
[Hamburger, 1993])
The power of words as symbols and supplanters of truth is a central epistemological
theme. As Josh Cohen (2007) writes: Like so much of Roth's fiction, Operation Shylock is a
masterclass in the seductions of rhetoric. Its contending voices constantly attest to the

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

inventive power of language, its capacity rooted in the essential ambiguity of speech to
produce and perform, rather than merely represent, truth (Cohen, 2007).
The power of words over reality is likened to the mystical powers of Rabbi Liva, who,
according to legend, created a golem out of clay which became animated by the power of
words alone. It is Aharon who points this out to Roth:
Rabbi Liva started out with clay; you begin with sentences. It's perfect...
You are going to rewrite him. (107)

Like Roth, Aharon's character represents a bridge between the fictional and nonfictional. Unlike the other characters, however, he sees Pipik as a literary construct. Is this
because he believes that one person, Roth, is playing both roles? Or is this a metafictional
revelation of the fictionality of their world, in which Aharon (in our real world) is being put
into a fictional situation in the novel? Shostak sees Aharon, as a character, in a pivotal role in
the novel: as a survivor of the Holocaust, Appelfeld is the living proof of a Jewish historical
reality, a history that, for Jews, is an indelible fact and not a construction [...] Appelfeld
provides an interruption of the real into the novel. (Shostak 2004: 149)
5. Doubles
5.1 Pipik
In a way, Pipik represents Roth's submerged desire to escape himself, as Roth hints at when
he writes:
There was nothing I coveted so much after those months of spinning like
a little stick in the subjectivist whirlpool of a breakdown as to be
desubjectified, the emphasis anywhere but on my own plight. Let his
hisness drive him nuts.... With Aharon, I thought, self-obliterations's a
cinch, but to annihilate myself while this other one was running freely
about- well, triumph at that and you will swell in the house of the purely
objective forever (104).
Upon their first meeting, he realizes that this "double" is a real facsimile of himself; he states:
"What is being manufactured here is not a dream, however weightless and
incorporeal life happens to feel at this moment and however alarmingly I
may sense myself as a speck of being embodying nothing but its own
speckness, a tiny existence even more repugnant than his. (78)

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

Pipik himself interprets the meeting as synchronicity: How can I exist, a duplicate of
you? How can you exist, a duplicate of me? You and I defy causal explanation. (79) In his
crazed letter to Roth, Pipik writes: LET ME EXIST... I AM YOUR GOOD NAME. (87)

The situation becomes even more complicated when Roth is mistaken for the other
Roth by both Smilesburger and his old friend George Zee, and does not bother to correct it.
Roth tells Aharon, He gives off none of the aura of a real person, none of the coherence of a
real person to which Aharon tellingly replies that Pipik is a vacuum into which is drawn
your own gift for deceit.
The use of a second Roth is both a metafictional literary device and an exploration of
the epistemological implications of .fictional identity. Roth refers to Pipik's need to
dissimulate, to escape the tyranny of truth and become someone or something else when he
writes:
I could understand the temptation to quash oneself and become imperfect
and a sham in entertainingly new ways- I had succumbed, too, ()more
sweepingly even than in my books.(...) But this was no book,and it
wouldn't do.(180)
That the divided self is seeking personal transformation is echoed in the dream
sequence in chapter 6, His Story. The football game is held at the University of
Metempsychosis, which refers to the Platonic concept of the transmigration of souls, which
is associated with the writings of James Joyce and Nietzsche. This dream is followed by a
cryptic phone call from a stranger: What is the real life of man? ()There is none. There is
only the urge to attain a real life. Everything that is not real is the real life of man. (209)
Ironically, the third person description of Roth's double in chapter eight could just as
easily be used to describe Roth himself: all of it adding up to someone trying to be real
without any idea of how to go about it, someone who knows neither how to be fictitious- and
persuasively pass himself off as someone he is not- nor how to actualize himself in life as he
is. (245)
5.2 Other Doubles
The multiple selves of "Roth" are mirrored by other doubles who are experiencing a
shattering of identity. The first one we are introduced to is the adopted French woman whose
identity issue- is whether or not she is Jewish. Is she Jewish because she believes herself to

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

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be? (54) To Appelfeld, "the Catholic professor's fantasy of herself" as Jewish makes her
Jewish. The illusory quality of identity in this woman is set up. If we can question the reality
of a fictional character's identity, can we see our own identities as (partially) fictional?
Demanjuk, a man accused of living a double life, is also a man struggling with identity.
Is he really Ivan the terrible? Is he both a loving grandfather and mass murderer? Demanjuk
has "...only... lived sequentially the two seemingly antipodal, mutually excluding lives" of dual
identity,both monster and genial family father.(63) The riddle of his true identity is never
resolved, but the deadly certainty that a man could be capable of two opposite identities is
confirmed.
Another character struggling with issues of identity is Wanda Jane Jinx Posseski,
who lives through several serial transformations (244): As unloved Catholic child,
mindless promiscuous hippie waif, chaste fundamentalist, death-poisoned Jew-hating
oncology nurse...into an obedient recovering anti-semite.
Lastly, Roth's own issue of multiple selves(152) is also mirrored by George Ziad,
who was an erudite, elegant professor who enjoyed a comfortable life idealistically resisting
the occupier from the satisfying security of his tenured American professorship(150) and
now lives as a would-be "revolutionary" for the Palestinian cause. Roth wonders aloud if Zee
is a spy:
No, he's a spy for the PLO. No, he's a spy for no one. No one's a spy.
I'm the spy! (149)
Roth sees George as a man who is seeking to merge the many contradictory parts of
himself: He wanted a life that merged with that of others, first as Zee in Chicago, with ours
and now all over again here with theirs. (151) George's Palestinian identity and American
life could not be fully reconciled in America. The Palestinian's conundrum of dual identities,
one religious, one secular, is a mirror image, in many ways, of the identity struggle of the
Jewish characters, whose secular identity drops away as soon as they enter Israel. Roth
muses: Amazing, that something as tiny, really, as a self should contain contending
subselves. (152) That self is not a self-contained unit, but a series of transformations held
loosely together by identity, is at the crux of Roth's dilemma, even more so as he writes
himself a new being in his own novel.

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

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6. Reality and God

If reality within the novel is dependent upon the mind of the author, then the division
of Roths is brought about because the existence of Roth- the- narrator and Pipik, if he is,
indeed, a character of imagination or delusion, are both dependent upon the real Roth,
whose existence itself is both producer and product of his novels. That life inspires art is a
given; that art can warp life in numerous ways is revealed in the plot itself, in which the
author's works inspire both the personal and professional obsessions of Pipik, the political
intrigue of Israeli and Palestinian radicals and the lusts of Jinx Posseski. At various points,
however, Roth questions who is really writing the novel itself: I am not writing this thing.
They are. I don't even exist. (155)
If Roth-the-narrator is not writing this, then the real Roth's must be, unless we are
reading from Roth himself, whose life is perhaps also part of a great novel. The philosophical
quandary of the necessity of an observer has caused philosophers to conclude that the
universe, indeed, needs an omnipotent author:
Berkeley concedes that sensible objects do not depend for their existence
simply on our individual human minds... but because they cannot exist
independent of some mind, they must exist in some other mind...
God's. (Harris, 1969: 219)
That the idea of an omnipotent author of creation is an intrinsically Jewish idea is not
lost on Roth, who puts his theological explanation for the absurdity of existence into the
mouth of Smilesburger, the Holocaust survivor, who explains his view of God, as opposed to
the goyish view of a merciful, good God:
God sent Hitler because God is crazy. A Jew knows God and how he
operates. A Jew knowsGod and how, from the first day He created man,
He has been irritated with him from morning till night.... To appeal to a
crazy, irritated father, that is what it is to be a Jew. To appeal to a crazy,
violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a
crazyJew! (110)

The madness of God is seen in an absurd world full of injustice. God, not man, is
made to blame for the madness and chaos of his creation. Is Roth solely to blame for the

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

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madness of his creation? Or is Pipik a created character gone awry, separate from his creator,
broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me. The
question the reader is left to ponder is whether Pipik truly has a will of his own, outside of
Roth, or if he is merely a delusion of Roth's narrator.
In the Woody Allen film, Deconstructing Harry, a character supposedly based on
Roth, Harry, is confronted by a character he based on himself, who has escaped from print.
(Carl, 1997) The character, Harry Block, is, like Roth, a guy who can't function well in life
but can in art. The desire of a character, even one based on the author himself, to escape from
the world of the printed page is the mirror image of the author's need to escape his reality
into a world of fiction in which his life can be rewritten. Thus, both character and author are
caught in the same existential dilemma: the need to break free from the constrictions of
destiny. Roth calls this the universal urge to be otherwise(180). If God is the author of our
world, his madness lies in having given us the free will to, ourselves, become the authors of
madness.
7. Conclusion
Operation Shylock operates on a multitude of levels, with questions of identity, reality
and meaning left to the reader to decide. By using self-referential metafictional passages,
Roth engages the reader to be complicit in the humor of a book that teeters precariously
between fiction and non-fiction,inviting us to ask ourselves how much of our own lives and
identities are self-made or even fiction.

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

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References
Carl, Adam. "That's Not Woody in 'Harry,' It's Philip." L.A. Times [Los Angeles] 22 Dec. 1997: n. pag.
Web. 20 July 2013. <http://articles.latimes.com/1997/dec/22/entertainment/ca-1137>.
Cohen, J. ""Roth's Doubles"." The Cambridge companion to Philip Roth. Ed. T Parrish. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 82. Print.
comedy. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Judy Davis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Stephanie Roth Haberle, Kirstie
Alley, Woody Allen. 1997. Hollywood Pictures Home Video, 1998. Film.
Eco, Umberto. "On the ontology of fictional characters: A semiotic approach." Sign Systems Studies
37.1/2 (2009): n. pag. Web.
Edholm, Roger. The Written and the Unwritten World of Philip Roth : Fiction, Nonfiction, and
Borderline Aesthetics in the Roth Books. rebro, Sweden: rebro universitet, Institutionen fr
humaniora, utbildnings- och samhllsvetenskap, 2012. Print.
Guha, S. "The Ontological Status And Characteristics of Fictional Things." N.p., Web. 7 July 2013.
<http://www.saikatguha.com/metaphysics/the-ontological-status-and-characteristics-offictional-things>.
Harris, E. Fundamentals of Philosophy. Old Woking, UK: Unwin Bros., Ltd, 1969. Print.
Shostak, D B. Philip Roth: Countertexts, counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2004. Print.
Varzi, A C. "Fictionalism in Ontology." From Fictionalism to Realism. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2013. 133151. Print.

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock

Versicherung
Ich versichere hiermit, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbststndig
verfasst und keine
anderen als die angegebene Hilfsmittel benutzt habe. bernahmen und
Entlehnungen habe
ich uner Angabe der Quellen kenntlich gemacht.

Tabitha Elkins 21 July 2013

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