Before the Law: Operation Shylock: A Confession

Abstract

Operation Shylock: A Confession's play on the confessional form creates a transformative space between fiction and fact, compelling the reader to keep actively searching for its place as a text and simultaneously raising the question of how to write about political and ethical controversy. It at once reiterates and breaches the laws of literary genre, drawing attention to what Jacques Derrida calls its generic being-before-the-law (187) and connecting it with issues of free speech and censorship grounded in the context of postwar Israeli-American relations. It thereby opens the way to Roth's great, historically-rooted literary surge of American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998), Human Stain (2000), and also perhaps to the alternative history of Plot Against America (2004).Operation Shylock purports to confess the improbable events which are said to have resulted in Roth's agreeing to conduct a spying mission on behalf of Israel's secret service, the Mossad. Jerusalem trip, which actually made to interview the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, also sets the narrator (whom I will call Philip) on the trail of a double, who is impersonating him in Jerusalem. second is drawing on Philip's credit as a literary figure-and speaking in his name-to campaign for Diasporism; that is, the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European extraction back within the European Diaspora on the premise that the existence of Israel in its current form is untenable and will lead to worldwide conflict. pursues and eventually confronts his elusive double (nicknaming him Moishe Pipik or Moses Bellybutton), who then mysteriously disappears at a point where Roth, he later confesses, has been recruited by the Israeli agent Smilesburger for the eponymous Operation Shylock, a mission to discover which prominent American Jews are financially supporting Palestinian organizations.Some recent works of literary criticism have focused on Operation Shylock as primarily examining the nature of selfhood or subjectivity, notably Derek Parker Royal's Texts, Lives and Bellybuttons: Roth's Operations Shylock and the Renegotiation of Subjectivity which argues that, through playing with genre concepts of autobiography and fiction, and presenting texts and countertexts of the self, Operation Shylock explores the construction of the self, especially as a writing self. Roth's literary playfulness even led him-initially at least-to claim straightforward autobiographical status for Operation Shylock, sparking a lively debate in the contemporary press on its publication about whether it was fact or fiction.1 asserted that despite bearing all the hallmarks of one of his novels it was a factual account of his activities in Israel in January 1988, saying in a New York Times interview in March 1993, The book is true, I'm not trying to confuse you [...] This happened (Fein). debate over the book's possible factivity lent substance to some critics' assertions that Philip is always writing about Roth as Robert Alter put it in New Republic. Yet by calling Operation Shylock a confession, I would argue, paradoxically succeeds in transcending the writer's self-obsession.Confession, a verbal admission of wrongdoing, is also a primary act of self-recognition inextricably tied to the modern sense of selfhood (Brooks 2); it has become a dominant and supposedly mode of speech in contemporary Western culture. Yet its authentic status is always questionable due to the power relations which directly or indirectly constrain and shape it. wrongful or forced confession is common in law enforcement. realm of psychology, with its often ambiguous motives-not only guilt and shame, but egoism and exhibitionism-along with unreliable memories and false memory syndrome, tends to undermine confessional authenticity. confessant as an unreliable narrator inevitably gives the confession a fictional cast, turning it from a revelation of the secret truth to an uncontrollable proliferation of narratives (Brooks 33) and the production of a fictional self. …