The problem of speechlessness goes deeper than the continuous abuse that important words are taking in the Mirror World. I think it may also have to do with a creeping uncertainty about the role words play, their basic utility. Words are still useful for practical purposes, like arranging after-school pickups and making grocery lists and writing catchy songs—but for changing the world? My friend Bill McKibben often talks about why he took the leap from writing articles and books to starting the climate change organization 350.org (where we were both board members for a decade). Bill says that when he was young and naïve and writing The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a general readership, he “thought books changed the world.” Then, after a couple of decades of watching policy makers ignore his books and the library of others, not to mention the careful work of thousands upon thousands of increasingly panicked climate scientists, he came to the conclusion that, while words help, it’s “movements of people who change the world.” But here’s the question that has been eating away at me: What if our books, and our movements as they are currently constructed (often in ways that resemble corporate brands), are only changing words? What if words—written on the page or shouted in protest—change only what people and institutions say, and not what they do? … I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS,” Fake Roth announces to Real Roth, touching on the central question of many doppelganger stories: Who is real and what is real? Is the real one whoever claimed the identity first? Or is the real one whoever does the most with it? In Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Fake Golyadkin is so active and gregarious that he easily upstages and replaces the original. In Operation Shylock, Real Roth is a full-time pretender, a writer of stories not a doer of deeds. Fake Roth is an activist and a would-be maker of history. He chides Real Roth for frittering away the cultural power he amassed through literary fame by merely writing more neurotic novels, spilling more words—as opposed to concretely acting to help the Jewish people who are the subjects of his novels.

QUESTION: Roth himself questions whether books and movements only change what people say, not what they do — worth chasing. XREF: Connects to broader debates about performative activism and whether discourse actually drives material change.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 492