From:
        ANDREW GORDON <[log in to unmask]>

Fri 5:05 PM

                                       WHERE IS PHILIP ROTH?

         Philip Roth's fiction from the 1970s through the 1990s constitutes
a series of thought experiments demonstrating the difficulty of drawing any
boundary lines between reality and fiction or real people and fictional
characters.  These experiments culminate in _Operation Shylock_ (1993), in
which Roth confronts an imposter who bears an uncanny resemblance and also
calls himself Philip Roth.
          Interestingly, Roth wrote this work after he suffered a psychotic
breakdown brought on by the use of the prescription drug halcion after
minor surgery.  "My mind began to disintegrate," he writes.  'Where's
Philip?' I said hollowly to Claire while I stood gripping her hand at the
edge of the pool. . . . in which I was sure to be sucked under for
good.  'Where is Philip Roth?'  I asked aloud.  "Where did he go?'   I was
not speaking histrionically.  I asked because I wanted to
know."  (_Operation Shylock_ 22).
           The novel appears to mix some elements of his real life with
preposterous fiction but he pretended in some interviews that it was all
non-fiction.

                                   Andy Gordon


At 04:10 PM 2/16/01 -0500, you wrote:
>From:
>         Daniel Rancour-Laferriere <[log in to unmask]>
>
>Thu 2:57 PM
>
>15 Feb 01
>
>Dear Norm,
>I like this MIT approach to a very hackneyed question.  But how can I apply
>it to my mother-in-law?  She has Alzheimer's disease, and the question of
>WHERE she is is rapidly becoming irrelevant.  I can tell you where she is
>physically, but the old Charlotte is not "there" any more.
>
>This raises a question which is, I think, more interesting than the one
>originally posed by Dr. Krims, namely: Can real people be treated as if
>they were real?  And the answer I would suggest is this: neither fictional
>characters nor real people are real except insofar as we PERSONIFY
>them.  Good old fashioned Darwinian natural selection has produced a
>PERSONIFICATION MECHANISM in humans (as opposed to, say, Drosophila) which
>permits us to attribute the qualities of a person to various objects in the
>environment - images on a screen, "bundles of words," non-human organisms
>(my cat is not just Nellie, she is "nervous Nellie"), human organisms,
>etc.  Probably the original selection pressure for this personification
>mechanism in early hominids was increased reproductive success in those
>organisms which interacted in certain ways (e.g., reciprocal altruism) with
>fellow-organisms, but then, as a side-effect of the personification
>mechanism non-hominid objects (e.g., "bundles of words") could be
>personified as well.
>
>Just a hypothesis from
>
>Your fellow-hominid,
>Daniel
>
>[log in to unmask]
>
>At 03:12 PM 2/14/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >Dear PSYARTers,
> >
> >I once got an interesting answer to the question of literary characters as
> >real
> >from someone in the Chomsky group--Morris Halle, perhaps.  Anyway, the
> >suggestion was that literary characters are the same as real people except
> >that
> >they do not allow where-phrases.  That is, the question, Where is Bill
> Clinton
> >these days?, makes sense.  The question, Where is Hamlet these days?,
> does not
> >(unless one is referring not to the character but to performances of the
> >play).
> >
> >                         --Best, Norm
> >+-----------------------------------------------------------+
> >| Norman N. Holland, Dept. of English, University of Florida|
> >| Mail:  P. O. Box 7310,  Gainesville FL 32611-7310, USA    |
> >| Tel: (352) 377-0096     Secretary: (352) 392-7332         |
> >| Fax: (352) 378-9318     email: [log in to unmask]           |
> >| Homepage                http://www.normholland.com        |
> >+-----------------------------------------------------------+