"The Whole Content of My Being Shrieks in Contradiction against Itself": Uncanny Selves in Sayed Kashua and Philip Roth

Abstract

The proliferation of doppelgängers and other doubles in Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular (2010) and Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) suggests that the demands and expectations of national identity threaten the subjectivity of those who try to resist it. In both novels, paranoia and the abject unsettle the boundaries of subjectivity and contribute to the disequilibrium of the mind and the fragmentation of the body. Damaged bodies signify the disintegrating selves of characters who try in vain to overcome the limitations imposed on them by ideological paradigms of identity itself; paranoia is the psychological expression of the seemingly stable "I." Paranoia and abjection—simultaneously the reason for and the consequence of the doublings and splits in these novels—indicate identity's encroachment on subjectivity. As such, these novels, though divergent in some aspects of their confrontation with identity, invoke similar phenomena to mount a scathing critique of nationalist logic.