Philip Roth and the Fantasies of Authorship

Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself.

-The Counterlife

In an article in the New York Times published shortly after Philip Roth's death in May, Dara Horn disapprovingly quotes Roth's Alexander Portnoy on Jewish-American women like Portnoy's mother: "[T]hink of them as cows, who have been given the twin gifts of speech and mah-jongg." Unlike Shakespeare, Horn says, who "bothered to give the hated Jewish moneylender Shylock a point of view," Roth is marred by the "unempathetic and incurious caricaturing of others that he turned into a virtue — and which now defines much of American public life." For Horn, the objects of Roth's damaging lack of empathy are legion, encompassing, in addition to all women, his "religious characters, his Israeli characters, his non-Jewish characters, his anyone-who-isn't-him characters."1

Right down to the conflation of Roth and Portnoy, Horn's condemnation could have been lifted almost verbatim from Roth's 1986 novel The Counterlife, an ingenious metafiction about its author's limitations (although the implication that Roth's fiction is somehow continuous with Trumpism would have been too fantastic even for Roth). The Counterlife anticipates many of the criticisms lately leveled against him. No novel better stages the formation of fiction out of the self-aggrandizing daydreams and truculent resentments of its author. We begin with the Rothian protagonist and alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, an author famous for the Portnoy-like Carnovsky, writing a eulogy for his brother Henry, a successful dentist, who has died after undergoing a heart operation meant to preserve his sexual potency. This premise is then serially revised: Henry is not dead, but has abandoned his family for a crew of fanatical Israeli settlers, from which Nathan must retrieve him; actually, Nathan is dead (heart operation, sexual potency), and Henry, in a fit of resentment after his funeral, destroys Nathan's manuscripts, which contain the opening narrative about Henry's death; Nathan is married to one Maria, an Englishwoman, but their marriage is damaged by her family's anti-Semitism; or actually, Nathan and Maria were never married — that was just a fantasy entertained by Nathan in a manuscript called "Christendom" that Maria discovers after Nathan's death . . . and so on.

All the alleged Rothian prejudices are there, but ironized, scrutinized, metafictionalized. Anti-Israeli sentiment? "So," an Israeli says to Nathan, "what you are telling us is that we are not so nice as you American-Jewish writers."2 Misogyny? Maria announces in a letter that she's leaving the book he (Zuckerman, Roth) has written her into:

At the point where "Maria" appears to be most her own woman, most resisting you, most saying I cannot live the life you have imposed upon me, not if it's going to be a life of us quarreling about your Jewishness in England, that is impossible — at this point of greatest strength, she is least real, which is to say least her own woman, because she has become again your "character," just one of a series of fictive propositions. This is diabolical of you.3

"[A]l the voices," as Zuckerman himself says toward the end of the novel, are "once again only mine ventriloquizing, all the conflicts germinated by the tedious old clashing of contradictions within." Roth's particular genius was to double down on what Horn thinks is a disadvantage — to make of the narcissistic self-regard at the root of writing fiction his greatest subject.

Roth's fiction is most vital when most restricted — when it juggles a series of closely linked "fictive propositions" whose narrow range and obsessional particularity are compensated for by the manic energy of his voice and an unpretentious intensity about the metaphysics of storytelling. His best work is a gigantic riff on Notes from Underground, had Dostoevsky read John Barth. But the smallness of his range could be irksome. That was even its point. "Unchanged and unchanging," Vivian Gornick writes, "Roth's male protagonist struggles on, book after book, decade after decade, doomed to repeat in language that glows in the dark the increasingly tired narrative of the illness from which he can neither recover nor expire: his solipsism." ⁴

Gornick and Horn both contend that Roth's narrowness — the sexual obsessions, the endlessly mined Newark childhood, the rage, the horniness, the maleness — has ethical consequences. Most often, critics take up these consequences as they relate to his implicit authorial attitude toward women. Roth's alleged sexism remains polarizing. (In college, I saw two middle-aged English professors, both women, nearly come to blows over the subject.) After all, if every Roth narrator suffers from the same moral deficits — if, in Roth, misogyny "was like lava pouring forth from a volcano," as Gornick puts it — then what should we conclude? Literary-critical judgments, like Gornick's sense that Roth's solipsism had exhausted its aesthetic interest, blend, not exactly seamlessly but with a certain plausibility, into judgments of Roth's moral character. "The biographical fallacy," Nathaniel Rich says, "is his main personal tormentor."5

At their crudest and least helpful, such accusations look like the headline to Horn's posthumous hitjob: "What Philip Roth Didn't Know About Women Could Fill a Book." But if the question "Is Roth sexist?" usually reflects an interpretive error, what kind of error is it?

Despite his arch protestations about the non-coincidence of art and life, Roth's response to the morals charge was to head directly into the morass. The enigmatic drama of authorship is unavoidable when reading The Counterlife, the culmination of a series of books in which a Rothian alter ego offers answers to the question posed by a 1974 Roth essay: "How Did You Come to Write That Book, Anyway?" The theme of authorship propels an exploration of fictionality that is far richer, and far more analytically astute, than either moralizing political judgments or those doctrinaire invocations of "the biographical fallacy" meant to protect against them. Rothian metafiction is both a solution to and a baroque variation on the "solipsism" Gornick was sick of.

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Roth's metafictional muse is Freud, whose insights about the relationship between creative writing and daydreaming power The Counterlife. "The author," writes Freud, "softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal — that is, aesthetic — yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies."6 In The Counterlife, the Freudian identification of creative writing and fantasy is most explicitly recognized by Maria. Upon Nathan's death, Maria is dismayed by the discovery of "Christendom," in which Maria and Nathan's marriage is destroyed by the genteel English anti-Semitism of Maria's sister and mother. "The wish-fulfillment aspect is very touching," Maria says.7 But also, "[W]hat he had taken from my sister was so far from what she was that I thought there was something deeply twisted in him that he couldn't help."8 Maria — a fiction writer herself, albeit "in a minor, risk-free league" — cannot escape the conclusion that Nathan's success as a writer ("that's all he was")9 is indissociable from the compulsive need to speak one's fantasies which Freud attributes to the mentally ill. As Freud had it, "there is a class of human beings upon whom, not a god, indeed, but a stern goddess — Necessity — has allotted the task of telling what they suffer and what things give them happiness."10 Two classes, in fact: neurotics — and writers.11

Nathan's envious, bitter brother Henry, with a precision fueled by sibling rivalry, is Roth's acutest mouthpiece of this Freudian theory:

[Nathan] lived as he'd died, died as he'd lived, constructing fantasies of loved ones, fantasies of adversaries, fantasies of conflict and disorder, alone day after day in this peopleless room, continuously seeking through solitary literary contrivance to dominate what, in real life, he was too fearful to confront.12

Unlike mere daydreaming, the wish-fulfilling fantasies of fiction-writing have consequences for people beyond the author. As far as Henry is concerned, Nathan's authorial gratification depends on Henry's, and the rest of the Zuckerman family's, prolonged punishment in the pages of Nathan's fiction. "In his words was our fate — in our mouths were his words!... In his mind it never mattered what actually happened or what anyone actually was — instead everything important distorted, disguised...always this unremittingly dreadful conversion of the facts into something else...."13

Inspired by a self-flattering appreciation of his own conscientious professionalism, Henry establishes a dichotomy between himself and Nathan. His detail-oriented dental practice depends on the rejection of fantasy. "Fantasy is speculation that is characteristically you, the you with your dream of self-overpowering, the you perennially bonded to your prize wish, your pet fear, and distorted by a kind of childish thinking that he'd annihilated from his mental processes."14 These observations ironically disclose Henry's distaste for "fantasy" as rooted in a fantasy of his own, an idealizing exaggeration of the ascetic virtues of his craft: "[H]is imperative was perfection . . . the degree of perfection that might just be possible, humanly and technically, if you pushed yourself to the limit."15

Is Roth mocking Henry, thereby skewering those righteous critics who slur Roth with the sins of Portnoy? Or is Nathan still doing the writing — is Henry still stuck in his brother's novel, in which case Henry's charges must convey an important truth? Both at once? Things get spooky, a not uncommon metafictional effect: "[H]e'd again begun to sense Nathan's presence, to feel himself disoriented inside a dream."16 Henry and Nathan are twin ghosts, haunting one another with accusations of immorality, bad faith, and self-deception.

Henry is both a mouthpiece for Freudian demystification and a metafictional variation on the formal strategies Freud sees modern "psychological" novelists introducing. As Freud puts it, "The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes."17 In The Counterlife, this pseudo-allegorical division of the writer's ego into competing spokespeople transcends its origins in even the most polyvocal psychological novel (The Brothers Karamazov, say) to encompass the problems, metaphysical and ethical, of fictionality itself.

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"Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males," the New York Times wrote in its obituary, "the triumvirate of writers — John Updike and Saul Bellow were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the twentieth century."18 It's worth pausing over this apparently official statement from the paper of record. Roth, Bellow, and Updike were "the last of the great white males" because, the obituary writer thinks, they achieved a consensus of critical approval resting in large part on the putative universality of these ascribed identity categories, a universality we have now learned to see through. As sociology, this is inapt, because Roth was — as the Times writer seems to know elsewhere — famous above all for his agonized, career-long exploration of ethnic difference. But Roth's specificity transcends his exemplary position in the diversifying canon of what Mark, in The Program Era, calls "high cultural pluralism." Beyond the tensions between unmarked universality and ethnic particularism, Roth is always daring us to remember, or refusing to let us forget, that the claims of fiction emanate from an author, a sad and needy figure whose novelizing is nothing other than a peculiarly assertive form of therapy. As Freud puts it:

You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.19

Through a feigned breakdown of authorial control, a studied sloppiness, Rothian reflexivity is dedicated to unraveling the artifice by which such "repulsion" is overcome — or not. As Nathan's editor and eulogist says at his funeral, "Some novelists use style to define the distance between them, the reader, and the material. In Carnovsky Nathan used it to collapse the distance [. . . .] [H]e camouflages his writerliness and the style reproduces accurately the emotional distress [of his characters]."20 Is this good literary criticism, or a self-serving apology for an inelegant style and a narrowly autobiographical bent? "[Nathan] could never figure out," the eulogist goes on, "why people were so eager to prove that he couldn't write fiction."21

But the answer — for Roth if not for Nathan — is that his art consists not in overcoming the feeling of repulsion between reader and writer, ego and ego (as Freud would have it), but in working such repulsion into the weave of his fiction. Critiques of Roth's sexism, or of the narrowness of his range in general, commit an error when they take the universality implied by his canonization as hermeneutically instructive. Such critics fail to gauge Roth's insistent weirdness, the frenzied, self-reflexive particularity of his personae, who, unlike most fictional characters, are disquietingly upfront about their status as authorial symptoms. Universality was the furthest thing from Roth's ambition in novels like The Counterlife, which are as tethered to their author as any patient's neurotic discourse. Portnoy's narration from the analyst's couch is a deeper joke than is usually recognized.22

When David Foster Wallace observed that many readers, particularly women and readers under forty, think of John Updike ("not merely his books" but "the poor man himself") as "Just a penis with a thesaurus," he was putting his finger on an important literary-historical fact: the "repulsive" proximity of any given novelist's work to daydreaming and fantasy will be differently perceived by different readers in different periods.23 Tracking that empirical unevenness is a task for reception theory and for the sociology of literature. "Good" readers will legitimately disagree, because different people will be differently sensitized to the quantum of fantasy in any given work at any given time. But no good reader — no one paying attention — can fail to see that Roth, at least, was maniacally concerned not just with his own fantasies but with the process by which fantasy is transmuted into art.

That such fantasies are unfair — "unsympathetic and incurious caricaturing," in Horn's words, or "Exaggeration, falsification, rampant caricature," in Henry Zuckerman's — is unavoidable.24 There is wisdom in Maria's reduction of Nathan's art to pathological compensation. Roth understood more deeply than any other mainstream American writer of his generation that neurotic fantasy and the fictionalizing impulse are necessarily intertwined — an understanding that led him, in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, to embrace the tactics of the experimental metafictionalists whole hog.

At a moment when the conventions for assessing the relationship between art and life seem newly uncertain — witness the controversies over the revelation of Elena Ferrante's "real" identity — Roth's metafictional solipsism is a useful irritant. "Ferrante's self-erasure," Merve Emre writes, "has had the opposite effect from what she claims. It has resurrected a powerful, almost transcendent myth of the author."25 Modifying the formulation, we might say that Roth's perverse authorial hyperpresence paradoxically vitiates the myth of the author: beset on all sides by so much loud, insistent Rothness, we suffer the impression, thrilling or dispiriting depending on our mood and taste, that art is only a special, supercharged species of personal nattering.

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Len Gutkin is associate editor at The Chronicle Review and author of Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present (UVA, 2020).

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