Abstract: The article examines Roth's exploitation of his own persona through self-reference in his writing. It argues that throughout his career, has challenged readers' expectations of the truth value of narratives that simultaneously expose, conceal, and rewrite the autobiographical subject-the in the text. has thereby not only explored postmodern epistemologies of identity, but also has offered fresh angles on the problem of writing the self in a variety of genres: from and memoir to dialogue and reflexive fiction. Among Roth's most startling gestures in a career that has not lacked for surprises is his decision in Deception (1990) and Operation Shylock (1993) to refer to his main character as in the former and Philip in the latter, breaking decorum about the illusion of an invented persona who directs and dominates the narratives.1 Each novel advertises itself as a life-history, offering its as both ubiquitous eye and actor, and I think we are to retain awareness of the speaker as simultaneously a conventional narrative mask and the historical Roth. Few writers dare to name themselves at the center of their inventions, which is why it is so arresting to find a work of fiction that pronounces its author's name within the text. Because readers are frequently tempted, from either prurient interest or more impartial motives, to discern in a fictional narrative, most writers of fiction seem to labor out of modesty, a sense of privacy, or a display of imaginative capacities to erase the traces of tiieir own lives from their work. Not so Roth. Especially since his invention of Nathan Zuckerman, has encouraged readers to interpret the narrative voice of his fiction as a self-revealing I, a surrogate who, by the time oi Deception and Operation Shylock, is no longer a surrogate but is Roth himself. is preoccupied with self-performance, with projections of the selfs voice into the other - with, for example, the figure of impersonation that appears in The Counterlife (1987) or of ventriloquism that appears in Sabbath's Theater (1995).2 What I argue here is not that is, strictly, writing autobiographically, but rather that he makes capital out of his readers' inclinations toward biographical interpretations of his work. The Roth in the text must always be read in quotation marks, even when seemingly most unmediated, in order to underscore the indeterminacy of the Roth who appears in each narrative and to distinguish this narrativized Roth from the man who writes the books and lives in Connecticut - a distinction the texts labor to obscure. I would argue further mat there is a recognizable arc to Roth's career in regard to what I call here his fictions of self-exposure. His interest in the place of the autobiographical in fiction can be traced with some precision to show how he arrives at naming himself in the novels of the late 1980s and early 1 990s and then exhausts the need for self-reference to return to the guises of the overtly fictive.3 Along the way, Roth's gestures of self-exposure create peculiar tensions within the novels as well as within the reader-text relationship, allowing inquiry not only into me meaning of autobiography but also more broadly into the relationship between fiction and fact and into the process by which readers interpret evidence. Roth's interest in exploiting autobiographical references - in offering Roth to varying degrees within narrative contexts - seems largely to have emerged from his entanglement with his readers during his first years of publication. Some early readers accused him of mining untransformed material from his life, of writing every time he wrote a novel; he was castigated for doing what in fact his readers mistakenly took him to be doing - for exposing himself and those nearest him. was charged with antisemitism and self-hatred after the appearance of Goodbye, Columbus (1959), and the essay Writing about Jews (1963) attests to the sensitive nerve that his readers hit. …
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 8
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot