The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre
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Simone Sannio
Simone Sannio is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He was a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at Princeton University in the Academic Year 2022/23 and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in Spring 2022. His dissertation is about unfinishedness and self-reflexivity in the American novel of the 1990s.
Abstract
This essay moves from Philip Roth’s announcement of his retirement from fiction writing in 2012 to offer a retrospective assessment of the author’s construction and continuation of the oeuvre. Ranging from the early stories of Goodbye, Columbus(1959) to his last novel Nemesis(2010), Roth’s body of work reveals a lifelong determination to revise and ‘update’ episodes and situations from his earlier texts in later novels, as well as from a continuous interpolation and satire of the negative responses to his works. The first part of the essay calls attention to Roth’s adoption of a ‘late,’ or even ‘posthumous,’ perspective on his previous works at various stages of his career – a ‘revisionist’ mode of narrative continuation whose basic pattern I trace back to The Ghost Writer(1979). In the second part, having identified Operation Shylock(1993) as a crucial piece in Roth’s canon, I focus on another trademark of this author: his interest in the representation of incomplete ‘manuscripts in the book.’ The recurrence of this trope, perhaps most evident in The Counterlife(1986), underscores Roth’s notion of the novel and the oeuvre as an ‘eternal draft’ and a series of variations on a theme. The essay concludes with a note on the author’s deferral of the ending of his career prompted by a reconsideration of “Juice or Gravy?” (1994).
Abstract
This essay moves from Philip Roth’s announcement of his retirement from fiction writing in 2012 to offer a retrospective assessment of the author’s construction and continuation of the oeuvre. Ranging from the early stories of Goodbye, Columbus(1959) to his last novel Nemesis(2010), Roth’s body of work reveals a lifelong determination to revise and ‘update’ episodes and situations from his earlier texts in later novels, as well as from a continuous interpolation and satire of the negative responses to his works. The first part of the essay calls attention to Roth’s adoption of a ‘late,’ or even ‘posthumous,’ perspective on his previous works at various stages of his career – a ‘revisionist’ mode of narrative continuation whose basic pattern I trace back to The Ghost Writer(1979). In the second part, having identified Operation Shylock(1993) as a crucial piece in Roth’s canon, I focus on another trademark of this author: his interest in the representation of incomplete ‘manuscripts in the book.’ The recurrence of this trope, perhaps most evident in The Counterlife(1986), underscores Roth’s notion of the novel and the oeuvre as an ‘eternal draft’ and a series of variations on a theme. The essay concludes with a note on the author’s deferral of the ending of his career prompted by a reconsideration of “Juice or Gravy?” (1994).
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
