Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 1

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 Görg

University of Mainz

July 2013

Tabitha Elkins
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 2

Table of Contents
Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock Titlepage..................................................1
1. Introduction..................................................................................................................................3
2. Ontology......................................................................................................................................4
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.........................................................................................................................10
7. Conclusion.................................................................................................................................11
References......................................................................................................................................12
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 3

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 true—we pretend that our
world is such a world—and 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
writer’s 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 4

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 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. 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, 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).
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 5

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). Is this Roth the author addressing the “false” Roth,
who disguises himself as the author? Or is he 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 puzzle—a 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 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
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 6

confession is false” (399) (Edholm, 2012). This paradoxical statement is inherently a philosophical
Mobius 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, 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 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. Later, 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
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 7

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 Tolstoy’s 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. Käte 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 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.” Aharon's character represents a bridge
between the fictional and non-fictional. Unlike the other characters, 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)

During Roth's excursion with George Zee into the Palestinian territories in Ramallah,
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 8

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)

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).

He realizes that this "double" is a real facsimile of himself. Upon their first meeting, 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)

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 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 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
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 9

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 at the “University of
Metempsychosis” 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 French woman's whose identity
issue- is whether or not she is Jewish. “Is she Jewish because she believes herself to be?” (54) "the
Catholic professor's fantasy of herself". Is identity an illusion? Is the identity of a fictional character
an illusion? If non-fictional people can question the reality of a fictional character's identity, can we
see ourselves 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.

Yet 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”.
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 10

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 conundrum of dual identities, one religious, one secular, reflects 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.

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)

Is the “real” Roth's life also part of a great novel? Is there a great novelist writing our lives?
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)
Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 11

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 knows
God 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 crazy
Jew!” (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 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.” Does Pipik truly have a will of
his own, outside of his author? 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. The desire of a character 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 12

References

Cohen, J. (2007). "Roth's Doubles". In T. Parrish (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to

Philip Roth (p. 82). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Eco, U. (2009). On the ontology of fictional characters: A semiotic approach. Sign

Systems Studies, 37(1/2).

Edholm, R. (2012). The Written and the Unwritten World of Philip Roth : Fiction,

Nonfiction, and Borderline Aesthetics in the Roth Books. Örebro, Sweden: Örebro

universitet, Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap.

Guha, S. (n.d.). The Ontological Status And Characteristics of Fictional Things.

Retrieved July 7, 2013, from http://www.saikatguha.com/metaphysics/the-

ontological-status-and-characteristics-of-fictional-things

Harris, E. (1969). Fundamentals of Philisophy. Old Woking, UK: Unwin Bros., Ltd.

Shostak, D. B. (2004). Philip Roth: Countertexts, counterlives. Columbia: University

of South Carolina Press.

Varzi, A. C. (2013). Fictionalism in Ontology. In From Fictionalism to Realism

(p. 133–151). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Elkins- Phillip Roth, Ontology and the Self in Operation Shylock 13

Versicherung

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

Tabitha Elkins 22 July 2013