Ethnicity and the Rhetoric of Essentialism in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock

Abstract

Through an analysis of Operation Shylock, this essay explores Philip Roth's engagement with the essentialist perspectives and practices prevalent in the realm of ethnicity. Accordingly, not only does the novelist expose how established power dynamics thrive on the conflicts fueled by these discursive forms of ethnic essentialism, he also tries to foster a non-foundationalist mode of representation that embraces ethnicity in all its complexity and irreducibility.

Keywords::

• Philip Roth
• ethnicity
• essentialism
• Platonism
• Jacques Derrida

Notes

Notes

¹ Roth's view of Jewish ethnicity could easily be distinguished from those of Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, the two American Jewish writers whose fictive sensibilities are often said to align with his own. As Roth himself notes in his essay “Imagining Jews” (1974), Bellow's heroes seldom exhibit any sense of ethnicity, nor are they inclined to investigate the implications of being Jews (225). Malamud's typical protagonist is an authorial alter ego, an American Jewish artist who is torn between his assimilated self and repressed ethnic roots. Although Roth also portrays assimilated Jewish protagonists grappling with the remnants of their ethnic selves, he does not share Malamud's essentialism, which makes the latter depict, in Morris Dickstein's view, “a test of the moral limitations of our assimilated selves, our rational and secular humanity, which has killed off some essential part of who we are” (173).

² Sylvia Fishman, for instance, argues that in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock “Roth transforms issues of Jewish identity into a plotting device by playing with the deconstructionist contention that all perceptions of human personality can be considered works of fiction” (137).

³ Having been influenced by the totalizing narratives of ethnicity he encountered among the right-wing Zionists in Israel, Zuckerman, in the last chapter of The Counterlife, exhibits a paranoiac vision that sees anti-Semitism as a natural property of Anglo-Saxons. Viewing Zuckerman's stance in the novel as Roth's own, Mary McCarthy, in a letter Roth has incorporated in his Shop Talk (2001), loathes the “severe case of anti-anti-semitism” and the idea “that all Gentiles, without exception, were anti-semitic” (114). Roth's reply, however, stresses that Zuckerman at this juncture is an object of “irony” (116) and having experienced anti-Semitism in London, “a phenomenon unknown to him,” he is reverting to his earlier exposure to “a kind of rhetoric” (116). Zuckerman's paranoia turns out to be only a passing phase, an instance of his being “astonished, caught off-balance” (117), in the course of his education.

⁴ Roth's skeptical engagement with the Platonic foundations of contemporary Western culture, especially in the context of subjectivity formation, receives sustained attention in Ansu Louis and Gurumurthy Neelakantan's essay “Two Versions of Oedipus and Philip Roth's The Human Stain.”

⁵ The Counterlife dramatizes how Zuckerman's ethnic self stands on trial in a Hebrew class in Israel when one of the students directs a diatribe against him: “The Jew oblivious to the Jewish state and the Jewish land and the survival of the Jewish people! That is the fanatic—fanatically ignorant, fanatically self-deluded, fanatically full of shame!” (102).

⁶ On the one hand, Lippman in The Counterlife condemns the essentialist thinking of anti-Semites: “It started in the Middle Ages as the demonization of the Jew and now in our age it is the demonization of the Jewish state. But it is always the same, the Jew is always committing the crime” (123). On the other, Lippman deploys the same reductionist logic to privilege Israeli Jews over Diaspora Jews: “He pointed proudly to his handsome young wife. ‘Ask her. Ask Ronit. Her parents weren't even religious Jews. […] Ronit didn't even know what religion was. But still nowhere she lived in America did she feel right. […] Then, in '67, she heard on the radio there was a war, she got on a plane and she came to help”’ (120–21). Clearly, Zuckerman recognizes a similarity between anti-Semites' and the right-wing Zionists' attitude toward Diaspora Jews: “[Such Zionists] display the sort of revulsion for Diaspora ‘abnormalities’ that you can find in the classic anti-Semite they abhor” (145–46).

⁷ Roth is reverting to an idea developed in The Counterlife, which ends with Zuckerman embracing a non-foundationalist view of all identities: “If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation—the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate” (320). Here, Zuckerman posits every identity as an assemblage of fragmented counterselves with only a potential for impersonation as their foundation.

⁸ As Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky explains the fall of the Swede, “[p]erfectly poised to inherit the immigrant legacy, generously endowed to fulfill America's promise, the Swede made the fatal mistake of misunderstanding both, reaching outside himself for something that was not himself, embracing the alien as if it were the genuine, locating value in what was fundamentally valueless” (101).

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Ansu Louis

Ansu Louis is assistant professor of English at Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan. His research interests are in the fields of contemporary American literature and literary and critical theory.