Dans le Vrai: Philip Roth and the Shadows of the Real

Abstract

“Writing is le vrai for me. That’s what I conclude!” Philip Roth writes in his notes for The Facts. Since the beginning of his career, Philip Roth has explored how the professional fiction writer makes sense of reality through the process of fictionalization. However, to what extent is this valid for us too? Eversince his mid-career masterpiece, The Counterlife, Philip Roth has delved into the analogies between living and writing. My focus is on how, in his mid and late career, he is interested in the way in which human beings—whether they are authors or not—assimilate the real in narrative form: especially in the perception of ourselves and of other people, we construct sense-making stories that creates a coherence that counterbalances the senselessness and the contradictions of our life. In the first chapter, after introducing my argument through a discussion of the aim of fiction and the role of imagination in our lives, I demonstrates how this interest in Roth’s fiction is developed through the use of writer-protagonists—the characters I call counter-authors. In the second chapter, I explain how the self in its common assumption does not exist, and, as Roth demonstrates, it is a series of impersonations. Our identity is protean and fluid, and can encompass an infinite number of different human roles. Because of its changeable character, the self is accessible to us only in narrative form. Relying also on sociolinguistics, I demonstrate how we are the stories we tell ourselves. In particular, I comment on how these questions are developed in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock. In the third chapter, I demonstrate how an analogous discourse can be done about how we relate to other people. In my analysis of American Pastoral and The Human Stain, I explain how we comprehend others creating stories about them, not necessarily faithful to the real. To sum up, in my work I try to trace the development of Roth’s exploration of fiction-making in its character as human property.