Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right: Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books

Abstract

Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right:Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books Stefan Kjerkegaard (bio) On the basis of readings in several self-fashioning and thought-provoking novels by Philip Roth this article seeks to rethink a limited set of narratological core concepts such as fiction and fictionality in light of their treatment within recent theories on narrative communication by James Phelan (2011) and Richard Walsh (2007). I will argue in favor of a simpler and more rhetorical model than used by these two leading scholars within narratological studies. According to the definition employed in this essay, the self-fashioning novel uses autobiographical material and means with the intention of reaching specific aesthetic ends. These means might include the author’s name, as in autofiction, or other material such as gender and correspondence in history and identity. Autofictional novels use and abuse the autobiographical contract where author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name. Hence, some autofictions try to hide the fact that they are novels by assimilating autobiographical genres such as autobiography, confession, or memoir, while other autofictions are in fact more or less autobiographies, but use rhetoric related to and imported from fiction. I shall read Roth’s novels consecutively, as gradually developing new understandings of reality and identity, and trace the intersections of aesthetics and ethics in Roth’s body of works. For the most part, my focus will [End Page 121] be on The Facts. A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) and Operation Shylock. A Confession (1993), two of the most ambiguous of the Roth Books with regard to their limits as works of art, their genre, and their use of autobiographical material. Employing James Phelan’s distinction between ethics of telling and ethics of the told (Phelan 2007), I will argue that the uncompromising aesthetic of these two works, as well as those published immediately before and after them (The Counterlife [1986] and American Pastoral [1997]) is designed to transcend readers’ initially negative moral judgment and lead them to a deeper kind of ethics, grounded in dialogue, discourse, and sociality as such. I will contrast Phelan’s understanding of narrative ethics, as seen from the viewpoint of the literary work as an artifact, with Judith Butler’s thoughts on ethics and self-narration in Giving an Account of Oneself. Richard Walsh’s understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical rather than ontological quality plays an important part in the above-mentioned enterprise. Walsh argues that whether you read a text as fictive or assume that a statement is fictional depends on relevance (The Rhetoric of Fictionality 7). What he wants to develop is not a theoretical discourse that removes the artistic enunciation from the world or from referentiality altogether. On the contrary, to adopt a fictionality approach in relation to any kind of work or discourse is, in Walsh’s view, to maximize relevance. The novelty of his theory is that it leads literature back to a simpler rhetorical model—simpler than the models developed in classic rhetorical narratology as, for instance, Seymour Chatman’s idea of an implied author and reader—and that it takes into account an always already communicative relationship between a sender and a receiver (empirical author and reader), and disengages the concept of fictionality from specific media and genre questions. The concept of fictionality can therefore be applied to literature as well as to everyday conversations or full-blown fictional narratives. In Walsh’s words: Fictionality is neither a boundary between worlds, nor a frame dissociating the author from the discourse, but a contextual assumption by the reader, prompted by the manifest information that the authorial discourse is offered as fiction. (36) [End Page 122] Walsh’s understanding of fictionality is compatible with a more discursive approach like Butler’s. I will use both to argue that Roth’s innovative late novels are not merely quixotic and playful metafiction, but serious attempts to tell us something about who we are and how reality works. Their innovation, to use Walsh’s words from Novel Arguments, “far from being a refusal of engagement, is an attempt to extend fiction’s capacity for thinking about the world” (18). The second part of...