Roth, Ethics and the Carnival

A carnival is usually seen as a comic event: it is of course a display of fantasy, freedom and joyful invention. But it is rather a two-faced phenomenon: this comic celebration has a very savage side—and in this sense it is much like Roth’s fiction in which, as in carnival, a wind of madness and frenzy is sometimes blowing, allowing a strange disorder to sneak in. Very often indeed, at the end of the novels the world seems to be running amok. This is the reason why I argue that it is not only Roth’s great talent but above all his very conception of literature—and conception of its effects on readers—that commands his creation of a world of fiction whose ethics are those of carnival. To do so, I first examine the actual presence of carnival in Roth’s fiction, then the peculiar ethics of carnival, to finally reflect on the possibility of carnival as literary poetics.