Roth’s doppelganger farce is a device leading into serious doubling territory.

Evidence

Philip Roth has plenty to offer here as well. Operation Shylock, despite all the surface-level ridiculousness, ends up concerned with these broader and far more serious forms of doubling. The book is set in 1988 and unfolds against the backdrop of the real-world trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born autoworker in Cleveland, Ohio, who was arrested, extradited to Israel, and accused of being Ivan the Terrible, the notoriously sadistic Treblinka gas chamber guard who delighted in causing maximum suffering as he gassed hundreds of Jewish captives at a time. As I read the book, the realization slowly dawned on me that Roth’s seemingly silly doppelganger caper is actually just a device to lead us into this more consequential territory. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 701

Categorization

• XREF: This is Klein naming the exact method she herself uses (comic/absurd doubling as entry into consequential politics) — a self-revealing craft confession worth tracking against her own device.