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The Dying Animal As 'Conte Philosophique'

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The Dying Animal As 'Conte Philosophique' THE DYING ANIMAL AS ‘CONTE PHILOSOPHIQUE’ CRISTINA CHEVEREȘAN West University of Timișoara Abstract: Focusing on Philip Roth’s 2001 The Dying Animal as a disputed creative territory in the constant battle of Eros and Thanatos, life and art, morality and mortality, the article is meant to highlight and dismantle the controversies around the novel’s intentions. It goes beyond the sensationalism and exhibitionism of the provocative narrative surface, into the depths of the psyche that finds itself betrayed by the aging, ailing, alienated body. Relying on contextualization and close reading, it sets out to demonstrate that, despite its brevity and irreverence, one of Roth’s shortest works adds new layers of significance to his thought-provoking meditations on the nature of human existence, its challenges, illusions and inevitable failures. Keywords: art, experiment, death, morality, obsession, sexuality 1. Introduction In her 2013 seminal monograph, Claudia Roth Pierpont (2013: 298-299) suggests that Philip Roth’s short novel, Indignation, “might be classified, with The Dying Animal and Everyman, as a conte philosophique”. My envisaged project will follow up on that particular remark, in an attempt to examine the aforementioned writings as ingenious contemporary flirtations and tamperings with the rigors of morality plays and cautionary tales. In one or several ways, each of these novels, considered ‘minor’, or ‘secondary’ by many reviewers – at least as compared to the size and complexity of works such as American Pastoral, Sabbath’s Theater, or The Human Stain – contains a distilled, provocative, condensed meditation on the human extremes of life and death, as well as on the countless grey territories in between. Moreover, each invites further investigation into the matters which form its background, from history to human rights, from the sexual revolution to artistic prowess, from the clichés of the academia (in the United States and beyond) to the behavioral patterns of the incipient - private and public – Third Millennium. Given the intended length and scope of the present paper, I shall use it to begin my project, by focusing solely on the chronologically first in the announced line of ‘contes philosophiques’, which, at the time of its appearance, succeeded to simultaneously B.A.S., vol. XXIV, 2018 88 appall and fascinate, consolidating its author’s reputation as a methodically controversial rebel of the American literary mainstream. 2. The nature of obsession: an insight Roth’s preoccupation with sexuality and finitude was, evidently, not new, but it reached new heights in The Dying Animal, the atypical coda to The American Trilogy that Roth published in 2001, only one year after his award-winning The Human Stain. The book angered part of his readership, shocked another, causing a series of complaints which were neither unheard of, nor unexpected, as easily illustrated by an overview of both formal and informal, specialist and non-specialist responses. While shame and its absence had already been notoriously identified as themes of the writer’s earlier works, Frank Kelleter (2003: 166) points out that it must be admitted that Roth’s equation of artistic creation and carnal desire, along with the discernment that both share a common source in the thought of physical death, is anything but original. The recognition of a close complicity between Eros and Thanatos is probably as old as literature itself. It is, however, not the philosophy behind the book that has been vividly disputed. On the contrary, the overwhelming tendency amongst those whose reactions were strong has been to ignore it, despite the Yeats-inspired title1, which provides the first important clue in what the true meaning and depth of the sensuality- suffused discourse are concerned. David Kepesh, the Kafkaesque professor who has reached his seventies after the tragic-comical revelations and transformations undergone in his previous literary incarnations (The Professor of Desire and The Breast), now faces yet another essential existential change. After decades of no-strings-attached affairs and sheer enjoyment of what he proclaims and embraces as unadulterated sexuality, he finds himself in the looming proximity of expiation: not ominous and immediate, but constantly lurking in the back of his mind, as well as inevitably coming to the fore of his existence amongst friends and acquaintances with dire fates. To those not yet old, being old means you’ve been. But being old also means that despite, in addition to, and in excess of your beenness, you still are. Your beenness is very much alive. You still are, and one is as haunted by the still-being and its fullness as by the having-already-been, by the pastness. Think of old age this way: it’s just an 1 William Butler Yeats’ 1928 poem, Sailing to Byzantium, includes the following revealing stanza as to the confrontation between the limitations of the finite body and the infinite possibilities of the creative mind: “O sages standing in God's holy fire/ As in the gold mosaic of a wall, / Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,/ And be the singing-masters of my soul./ Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is; and gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity.” 89 ANXIETIES OF OTHERNESS: RELIGION, SEXUALITY, HUMOUR everyday fact that one’s life is at stake. One cannot evade what shortly awaits one. The silence that will surround one forever. Otherwise it’s all the same. Otherwise one is immortal for as long as one lives. (Roth 2007: 24) As if to violently counter the inevitable and affirm such illusory immortality, the explicitness of intimate scenes and the graphicness of their description in the novel are undeniable, and have been deplored by various reviewers, taken aback by what they perceived as the excessive and unnecessary vulgarity of scenes, such as Kepesh’s notorious tasting of his protégée’s menstrual blood. The scandal, however, in terms of the character’s philosophical frame of mind, lies not in the lurid implications of the deed itself, but rather in its betrayal of an existential belief in experimental disconnectedness from genuine emotion. Possessed by the previously unexperienced torment of jealousy, Kepesh finds himself in the thralls of manic speculation: “A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst of her emancipation and prepared her for him” (Roth 2007: 26). As George O’Hearn, his relentless confidante points out, in the emphatic (and, in context, altogether humorous) manner of analytical academic discourses, Kepesh’s abandonment to quasi-ritualistic sexual conduct “constituted the abandonment of an independent critical position […] I’m not against it because it’s unhygienic, I’m not against it because it’s disgusting, I’m against it because it’s falling in love. The only obsession that everyone wants: ‘love’” (Roth 2007: 59). By exposing what Kepesh’s cultivated persona and his inner circle might frown upon as vulnerability, by subjecting the erotic conqueror to a symbolic defeat, wherein it is he who suspends strategic disengagement and willingly agrees to “worship the mystery of the bleeding goddess” (2007: 59), Roth steers the discussion from the mundane to the abstract, forcedly mythological digression. The writer’s penchant for pushing the borders of common acceptability in order to prove points that go beyond the obvious should not come as a surprise. The set-up for the turn-of-the-millennium drama is stereotypical to begin with, and programmatically so: the author foregrounds, once more, a relationship that is inappropriate by social standards, not only in terms of the age difference between its protagonists, but also in terms of the status and power-relationships between teacher and student, mentor and trainee (“She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery” (Roth 2007: 22), says the protagonist, trying to decode and explain his lover’s attraction for him). While morally revolting as a topic (and, thus, all the more exciting and liberating for the fiction-thirsty mind), what happens between Kepesh and Consuela is the starting point for a small and oftentimes (too) light-hearted treatise on the nature of obsession and on the practical jokes real life may choose to play on the rather bookish character: he envisages himself as the total master of his instincts and feelings, but will end up humbled and belittled by his actual powerlessness in the face of the implacable fate. B.A.S., vol. XXIV, 2018 90 Moreover, Roth indulges in an almost limitless experiment with his protagonist’s sexuality and its insatiable drives in order to create narrative suspense and prepare the grand finale that will both contrast and contradict Kepesh’s professed standpoints on relationships and their worth, and expose the true nature of the unfolding drama: not one of meaningless flirtation, but rather one that grows larger than the lives of both the story and its actors. As Elaine B. Safer (2006: 133) aptly notes, The love of an older man for a young woman has been a stock subject of comedy – and sometimes of melancholy – throughout the ages. It is at least as old as Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” and the Renaissance commedia dell’arte and can be found in works as different as Moliere’s The Miser and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and as recently as in Nabokov’s Lolita. In Roth’s Dying Animal, Kepesh’s love for a young woman and the jealousy that goes with it have obsessive aspects that produce a farcical, grotesque humor. However, underlying the comedy is a tragic tone that is caused by the presence of Consuela’s sickness and dying; this makes the humor almost unbearably grim.
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