Abstract
The objective of this essay is to compare the works of novelist Philip Roth and film-maker Woody Allen in what regards their treatment of the highly complex theme of the interrelations between fiction and reality. A comparative analysis of selected Roth’s novels and Allen’s films evinces their recurrent preoccupation with the creation of art and its implications, be it through the choice of writers or artists as main characters, be it through plots that mix real facts with invented ones and imaginary characters with real ones, be it through the use of autobiographical elements in a fictional discourse—all metafictional devices that call attention to the artist’s own process of creation.
Highlights
Writer Philip Roth and film-maker Woody Allen share a curiously similar background
In The Kugelmass Episode, an early short story by Woody Allen which would later become the blueprint for his film The Purple Rose of Cairo, the main character mentions Portnoy’s Complaint
Perhaps Roth’s most ambitious experiment in metafiction is The Counterlife (1987), where several episodes present alternative lives of the main characters, including Nathan Zuckerman, and which ends with the letter of a character, Maria, to Zuckerman, acknowledging her own fictional status
Summary
One of the earliest and most common devices of metafiction, that is, a fictional narrative that somehow comments on its own process of creation, is the superposition of two narrational levels. In a few films this theme of a dreary reality as opposed to a beautiful fantasy is shown as a direct interaction between fictional entities (mainly from the cinema) and the other characters One of such instances was the stage play Play it Again, Sam. One of such instances was the stage play Play it Again, Sam It was adapted for the movies in the seventies, with a screenplay penned by Allen himself (the director was Herbert Ross). Perhaps Roth’s most ambitious experiment in metafiction is The Counterlife (1987), where several episodes present alternative lives of the main characters, including Nathan Zuckerman, and which ends with the letter of a character, Maria, to Zuckerman, acknowledging her own fictional status It is a novel, “that undermines its own fictional assumptions” In a succession of fiction-within-the-fiction episodes, one coming out of the other like those famous Russian matriochka dolls, only that here we never know for sure which one is inside which, what is “reality” and what is “fiction”
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