Estado: usado.
Editorial: Vintage.
Precio: $70.
Face to Face With His Double
By D. M. THOMAS
In Pushkin’s unfinished story «Egyptian Nights,» Charsky, a gentlemanly poet, is suddenly confronted in his study by his creative double. The ragged, disorderly figure is an improvisatore seeking Charsky’s help. When he has recovered from his astonishment at the rude interruption, Charsky invites the troubadour to improvise on a paradoxical theme: that a writer must choose his own theme and cannot be subject to the public’s diktat. The intruder improvises superbly and later, with Charsky’s help, performs in society to the given topic of «Cleopatra and her lovers.»
In Philip Roth’s new novel, «Operation Shylock: A Confession,» an American Jewish novelist called Philip Roth suffers a breakdown in 1988, probably as a result of using Halcion, a sleeping pill with malign side effects in some. Beginning to recover, he hears that an impostor using his name is in Israel, attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, a former Cleveland auto worker who may or may not have been Ivan the Terrible of the Nazi death camps, and promulgating the nonsensical doctrine of «Diasporism» — the idea that Jews should quit Israel and resettle, in advance of the coming second, Arab-wrought Holocaust, in Europe, «the most authentic Jewish homeland there has ever been.» The outraged novelist telephones the impostor at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. During the conversation he finds his mood changing, lightening:
«My heart was pounding as though I were out on my first big robbery with an accomplice no less brilliant than Jean Genet — this was not merely treacherous, this was interesting. To think that he was pretending at his end of the line to be me while I was pretending at my end not to be me gave me a terrific, unforeseen, Mardi Gras kind of kick, and probably it was this that accounted for the stupid error I immediately made. ‘I am Pierre Roget,’ I said, and only in the instant after uttering a convenient nom de guerre that I’d plucked seemingly out of nowhere did I realize that its initial letters were the same as mine — and the same as his. Worse, it happened also to be the barely transmogrified name of the 19th-century word cataloguer who is known to virtually everyone as the author of the famous thesaurus. I hadn’t realized that either — the author of the definitive book of synonyms!»
But anger returns. This Roth Two has even had a meeting in Gdansk with Lech Walesa, who agrees with him that «Poland needs Jews and Jews need Poland.» Roth One flies to Tel Aviv and eventually meets the impostor, who says he was once a private detective in Chicago. The private detective is very like the eminent novelist in looks and wears identical clothes. Their lives interact to the extent that the novelist briefly shares the detective’s girlfriend. Angry debates take place concerning the State of Israel and the identity of Jews. These scenes also dominate encounters with the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld and an acquaintance of the American novelist from college days, George Ziad, now a Palestinian nationalist. Ziad recounts how a hundred young Palestinians had been rounded up the month before and were sent home deaf, thin, brain-damaged. The novelist attends the Demjanjuk trial, reflecting on the Holocaust, but also attends the Ramallah military court, where Palestinian boys are in the dock: «My second Jewish courtroom in two days. Jewish judges. Jewish laws. Jewish flags. And non-Jewish defendants. Courtrooms such as Jews had envisioned in their fantasies for many hundreds of years, answering longings even more unimaginable than those for an army or a state. One day we will determine justice!»
JUST as Pushkin’s improvisatore represents for Charsky the anarchic and free spirit of creativity, so does Roth’s double permit him to explore territory that, even for a Jewish writer of notable courage and independence, must still seem impermissible. The Petersburg double, Pushkin writes, resembles a brigand, a political conspirator, a charlatan. Of his double Roth writes: «It was impossible ever to say just how much of a charlatan he really was. . . . Within that mouth, how many tongues? Within the man, how many men? How many wounds? How many unendurable wounds!» Roth Two may even have been hired for some purpose by Mossad, as (fictionally one assumes but is never sure) is the author of «Portnoy’s Complaint» during his visit, by an operator called Smilesburger, to help track down Jews who give money to the Palestine Liberation Organization. In an epilogue, Smilesburger, now retired, offers a bribe to Roth to drop from this book an account of the writer’s espionage activity in Athens — an account that indeed does not appear here.
WRITERS, in their lonely struggle with a quill or word processor, are bound to be aware of how many other selves are being excluded from expression; hence their fascination with doubles. The present reviewer should declare a debt of gratitude. After a year of silence and depression, in which he would not read let alone write, he managed slowly to get through «The Ghost Writer.» It was helpfully short, clear and elegant; also, it reassured him that other writers too feel the danger of writing, the perilous closeness of fact and fiction, and the proximity of the edge. In «Operation Shylock,» Roth’s most frightening vision of his double is when he peers out of the doorway of Roth’s hotel bedroom: «His face was the face I remembered seeing in the mirror during the months when I was breaking down. His glasses were off, and I saw in his eyes my own dreadful panic of the summer before, my eyes at their most fearful, back when I could think of little other than how to kill myself. He wore on his face what had so terrified [ my wife ] Claire: my look of perpetual grief.»
That grief is bound up with the fate of being Jewish. There are powerful, self-excoriating passages about anti-Semitism in history and in literature throughout the book. The character of the Jew, we are told, was fixed by a genius in Shylock’s opening line. «To the audiences of the world Shylock is the embodiment of the Jew in the way that Uncle Sam embodies for them the spirit of the United States,» says one Supposnik, an antiquarian-book seller who Ziad says is an agent of the Shin Bet security service (and who slips Roth a volume purporting to be Leon Klinghoffer’s journals). «Only, in Shylock’s case, there is an overwhelming Shakespearean reality, a terrifying Shakespearean aliveness that your pasteboard Uncle Sam cannot begin to possess. I studied those three words by which the savage, repellent and villainous Jew, deformed by hatred and revenge, entered as our doppelganger into the consciousness of the enlightened West. . . . You remember the three words? What Jew can forget them? What Christian can forgive them? ‘ Three thousand ducats. ‘ «
Then there is Roth Two’s argument for Dias porism: Despite Shylock, in Europe and later America, Jews found milieus in which they could express their own genius and their homely values, a tendency to extremism tempered by having to compromise. Only a madman, in 12 short years, swept away that achievement; and in its place was set up a state that to survive runs the risk of being accused of emulating the values of fascism. Either the Arabs will wipe out Israel, or Israel will have to destroy them with nuclear weapons — and so destroy its own moral basis. Jews must leave their mediocre little «Jewish Belgium» and go home: to Warsaw, Prague, Kiev, Berlin. In Europe, the «several tens of millions still powerless before the temptations of traditional anti-Semitism» will be rehabilitated through Anti-Semites Anonymous, an organization Roth Two founded in America, and learn to control «their antipathy to their Jewish compatriots» through its 10 tenets («1. We admit that we are haters prone to prejudice and powerless to control our hatred,» etc.).
The book is throughout an impassioned quarrel within the author’s consciousness. Carefully wrought though it is, it reads improvisationally. At one point, Roth even wishes he could escape from his absurd plot. None of the subordinate characters quite take on an independent existence. Even the obligatory femme fatale, Jinx, the impostor’s mistress, a charter member of A-S.A. who describes herself as a «recovering anti-Semite,» seems only half-fertilized as a character. She comes alive, though, when talking about her work with cancer patients, and is a vehicle for some scabrous sexual humor.
Her lover has had a penile implant, and after his death, at the novel’s end, she recounts to Roth how she enjoyed necrophiliac sex for two whole days. Cleopatra, in Pushkin’s story, condemns her lovers to death after a night with her; Roth’s Liebestod for his double is more perverse still, in a way appropriate to our decadence. Much of the humor is gentler, however; particularly delicious is an account of how Irving Berlin «de-Christs» the major Christian festivals by composing «Easter Parade» and «White Christmas.»
Despite the seriousness of its theme, the book carries the feeling of creative joy. One feels that Roth feels that he’s let rip. He is a shade self-congratulatory, also verbose; yet it is mostly a seductive verbosity, a quality the novelist praises as a Jewish characteristic, even in the cynical Smilesburger, who ends the book leaving a case of money for him, an enticement to delete the espionage chapter and so avoid the character assassination — «Philip, remember what happened to your friend Kosinski!» — that would follow its publication:
«A righteous person, a man of moral rectitude, that is what I have come to understand you to be — and against the disgrace of such a person it is my human obligation to cry out! Philip, pick up the attache case, take it home and put the money in your mattress. Nobody will ever know.»
«And in return?»
«Let your Jewish conscience be your guide.»
Will Roth be impaled on incensed Jewishness once more? The tolerant and cultured Jews whom he celebrates, in the West, must surely enjoy his wit, his daring in both artistry and ideas, at the same time as they may be shaken by his merciless probing of the wounds inflicted by Jews on Arabs — and on Jews. Perhaps in Israel, though, he would be smart to have a double undertake his promotional tour. LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW
So this is how it’s done, I thought. This is how they do it. You just say everything. . . .
I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Dias porist movement, Irving Berlin. «People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ — down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ‘em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It’s like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. . . . Jews don’t want to hear about Jesus. And can you blame them? So — Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and the Jews, the Jews, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?» I took more pride, I told them, in «Easter Parade» than in the victory of the Six Day War. — From «Operation Shylock.»
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