Being Zuckerman

 

From Philip Roth's The Counterlife (319-20)

I suppose it can be said that I do sometimes desire, or even require,  a certain role to be rather clearly played that other people aren't always interestd enough to want to perform. I can only say in my defense that I ask no less of myself. Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. In fact, those who most seem to be themselves appear to me people impersonating what they think they might like to be, believe they ought to be, or wish to be taken to be by whoever is setting standards. So in earnest are they that they don't even recognize that being in earnest is the act. For certain self-aware people, however, this is not possible: to imagine themselves being themselves, living their own real, authentic, or genuine life, has for them all the aspects of a hallucination.

I realize that what I am describing, people divided in themselves, is said to characterize mental illness and is the absolute opposite of our idea of emotional integration. The whole Western idea of mental health runs in precisely the opposite direction: what is desirable is congruity between your self-consciousness and your natural being. But there are those whose sanity flows from the conscious separation of those two things. If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation—the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate. I'm talking about recognizing that one is actually a performer, rather than swallowing whole the guise of naturalness and pretending that it isn't a performance but you.

There is no you, Maria, any more than there's a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn't "ourselves" but past performances—we're has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old act. What is the role I demand of you? I couldn't describe it, but I don't have to—you are such a great intuitive actress you do it, almost with no direction at all, an extraordinarily controlled and seductive performance. Is it a role that is foreign to you? Only if you wish to pretend that it is. It's all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through. (....)

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. It certainly does strike me as a joke about my self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actos that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic effects to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

 

 

—oOo—

The Gift for Theatrical Self-Transformation

(from Philip Roth's The Counterlife, p. 210):

"What people envy in the novelist aren't the things that the novelists think are so enviable but the performing selves that the author indulges, the slipping irresponsibly in and out of his skin, the reveling not in 'I' but in escaping 'I', even if it involves—especially if it involves—piling imaginary afflictions upon himself. What's envied is the gift for theatrical self-transformation, the way they are able to loosen and make ambiguous their connection to a real life through the imposition of talent. The exhibitioinism of the superior artist is connected to his imagination, fiction is for him at once playful hypothesis and serious supposition, an imaginative form of inquiry—everything that exhibitionism is not. It is, if anything, closet exhibitionism, exhibitioinism in hiding. Isn't it true that, contrary to the general belief, it is the distance between the writer's life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination?"

Authenticity and Acting

 A passage from Philip Roth's The Counterlife. Zuckerman is shocked at his brother Henry's sudden conversion, his having become a radical Zionist and moving to Israel and sporting a gun:

"I'm sorry, but being skeptical of revolvers is in my nature—as skeptical of revolvers as of the ideologues who wield them."

"Lucky you. Fortunate you Righteous you. Humane you. You're skeptical of just about everything."

"Henry, hen are you going to stop being an apprentice fanatic and start practicing dentistry again?"

"I ought to punch you in the fucking nose for that."

"Why don't you blow my brains out with your gun?" I asked, now that he was unarmed. "That shouldn't be too hard, seeing that you're conflict-free and untainted by doubt. Look, I'm all for authenticity, but it can't begin to hold a candle to the human gift for playacting. That may be the only authentic thing that we ever do."

Somos teatreros (We Playact)

Playing Dentist

From Philip Roth's The Counterlife. Nathan Zuckerman's brother Henry, a dentist, tells him the way his new assistant, Wendy, became his lover:

Nonetheless, a full six weeks passed before he overcame his doubts, not only about crossing the line further than he had at the interview but about keeping her on in the office at all, despite the excellent job she was doing. Everything he'd been saying about her to Carol happened to be true, even if to him it sounded like the most transparent rationalization for why she was there. "She's bright and alert, she's cute and people like her, she can relate to them, and she helps me enormously—because of her, when I walk in, I can get right to it. This girl," he told Carol, and more often than he needed to during those early weeks, "is saving me two, three hours a day."

Then one evening after work, as Wendy was cleaning his tray and he was routinely washing up, he turned to her and, because there simply seemed no way around it any longer, he began to laugh. "Look," he said, "let's pretend. You're the assistant and I'm the dentist." "But I am the assistant," Wendy said. "I know," he replied, "and I'm the dentist—but pretend anyway." "And so," Henry had told Nathan, "that's what we did." "You played Dentist," Zuckerman said. "I guess so," Henry said, "—she pretended she as called 'Wendy,' and I pretended I was called 'Dr. Zuckerman,' and we pretended we were in my dental office. And then we pretended to fuck—and we fucked." "Sounds interesting," Zuckerman said. "It was, it was wild, it made us crazy—it was the strangest thing I'd ever done. We did it for weeks, pretended like that, and she kept saying, 'Why is it so exciting when all we're pretending to be is what we are?' God, was it great! Was she hot!"

 

 

 

 

Identity: A Constantly Changing Performance

THE HUMAN STAIN