My Philip Roth

Abstract

My Philip Roth Debra Shostak (bio) Halfway through a year I was devoting to writing a book about his work, Philip Roth appeared to me for the first time in a dream. He said little; in fact, he seemed interested only in talking to my husband rather than to me. He stayed on the fringes of the dream, looking sternly over at me once or twice, until the dream shifted away, as dreams do, and I was startled awake by the disappearance of my quarry. I was lying at my in-laws' house on a sofa bed, a rather inadequate contraption that slopes lumpily upward from your feet to your head, so you feel as though you should be rising rather than sleeping, restless, and guilty for your sloth. It was a Christmas in Wisconsin without snow, so desperately wished for by my children, like the outline of a story where the plot hasn't been filled in. That's how my dream felt, too. Of course, I knew that it wasn't Philip Roth in the dream, it was me, or so psychoanalytic wisdom tells me, since it was my dream and not the real world in which I very nearly met the man I was spending all my days thinking about. But if Philip Roth was me, then my husband must have been me, too, which confusingly means that I did get to speak to Roth, though really I was talking inaudibly to myself and never heard his side of the conversation. I didn't meet Philip Roth in the dream, couldn't fill in the outlines that my waking imagination could color in just so far. Had I done so, I would have betrayed the fraught work of imagining subjectivities that Roth spent a career exploring, perhaps best captured in that riveting paragraph in American Pastoral in which Zuckerman confesses that "The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again" (Pastoral 35). That, the writer admits, is the work of imaginative writing. It's getting people wrong that is living. It's also the work of imaginative reading. That's what's so vital about reading, getting people wrong in all those ways that are right for us, at the moment and from wherever we are sitting. The experience of a dream is like the experience of reading a book, where [End Page 135] we people the pages with our own resistant, three-dimensional images of the reality we know must exist, just as we know it. The beautiful wrongness of our reading depends on how reality is always slipping away from us, even as we form it into pictures and provocations and things that seem substantial until they aren't. Our subject—and subjectivity—when we read includes not only the "people" within the written world but also the person writing that world, and one of those persons is, well, me the reader, improbably decked out as an impersonation of the writer. Of course, this is exactly what we literary scholars have scorned for years, ever since Wimsatt and Beardsley explained the intentional fallacy, and it is one of the first things we teach our students. Fiction is not autofiction, we assert; how naïve not to assume a stance of distance and detachment from texts that are only constructed storyworlds. Yet one might suggest that Wimsatt and Beardsley had to invent the fallacy because that is exactly what most readers do, and long to do; how else to establish a priesthood of readers? In any case, however obvious it seems when I express the thought, this notion—that we (rightly!) misread texts and others, and that among those texts and others we misread count the authors of our fantasies—has been one of the most intriguing, divertingly frustrating, enduringly pleasurable lessons that three decades of reading and rereading Roth have given to me, and much more forcefully and meaningfully than all the psychoanalytic and reception theories I've encountered to explain this project of intimate...