Abstract
When one reads Operation Shylock as a quest narrative in which the protagonist is engaged in a baffling search for an authentic Jewish identity, the book is not repetitive, or meandering, or a self-indulgent game with mirrors. Instead, [Philip Roth]'s "confession" continues the search, begun in The Counterlife, of an assimilated, highly literate, and intelligent American Jew for the essence of Jewish identity. Whereas The Counterlife juxtaposes four different possible versions of reality, Operation Shylock is kaleidoscopic, presenting shifting and spiraling circles of discovery. Indeed, a revealing entrée to Operation Shylock is found at the conclusion of [Sanford Pinsker]'s useful discussion of The Counterlife: "The alternating rhythms of construction and deconstruction, of text and countertext, of satiric attack and abject confession have been going on for some time, and where a nice Jewish boy's preoccupation with running wild gives every indication of continuing."(20) Displaying differing postmodernist techniques, both novels are mystery quests in which a protagonist becomes EveryJew, traveling toward self-knowledge and toward a final epiphany vis-à-vis his Jewish identity. Roth transforms issues of Jewish identity into a plotting device by playing with the deconstructionist contention that all perceptions of the human personality can be considered works of fiction. In The Counterlife the protagonist declares: "The treacherous imagination is everybody's maker -- we are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors."(21) This is true, Roth reiterates in Operation Shylock, of authors, who pull out of themselves and their own experiences a plethora of characters and experiences diverging from themselves. As Roth explains, these deconstructionist ideas have so thoroughly entered the contemporary American idiom that "even the gullible now have contempt for the idea of objectivity; the latest thing they've swallowed whole is that it's impossible to report anything faithfully other than one's own temperature; everything is allegory."(22) the differences between the ways in which the protagonists symbolize their Jewish identity in Roth's earlier works and his most recent works are instructive. In The Counterlife and Portnoy's Complaint we have gone far beyond the "nervous Jewish bildungsroman" with which Alan Warren Friedman once accurately typified Roth's earlier works, in which "the young Jew's assertion of his own intellect often takes the form of a total rejection of his Jewishness." (37) We have gone beyond Stephen J. Whitfield's incisive definition of Jewish, and Rothian, humor, whose "special animus" derives from the fact that the author is a descendent of "those who had to wear yellow badges on their sleeves" and "grew up even in America with chips on their shoulders. Humor, or more precisely wit, has been not only a shield against the outside world but also a weapon against the goyim." (38) In "[Eli Peck] the Fanatic" and The Ghost Writer, Roth's Jewish solidarity is expressed through identification with the Holocaust. In Portnoy's Complaint he cannot relate at all to Israel and Israeli women, who unman the protagonist. However, in The Counterlife the future of the Jewish people, not its tragic past, takes front and center stage in the prominence of Israel. In The counterlife the protagonist's (imaginary) child must be circumcised, and in Operation Shylock the protagonist (imagines he) is willing to risk all for Israel.