Against Representation: Death, Desire, and Art in Philip Roths The Dying Animal

Zo Roth

Philip Roth Studies, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 95-100 (Article)

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Notes
Against Representation: Death, Desire, and Art in Philip Roths The Dying Animal
Zo Roth
ABSTRACT. In Philip Roths The Dying Animal (2001), desire is figured as the revenge of death for the aging libertine David Kepesh. Embodying the object of his desire as a work of art allows him to harmlessly enjoy the volupt of death. The mimesis of art, however, cannot offer protection against the eventual realities of living and dying. The recognition of mortality Consuela Castillo provokes in Kepesh is implicated in a formal stylistic process questioning the verisimilitude of representation and meditating on arts mediation of experiences of death and desire.

In sacrifice, the one being sacrificed identifies with the animal struck with death. Thus he dies watching himself die, and even by his own will, at peace with the weapon of sacrifice. But this is a comedy! Georges Bataille, Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice

At first glance, nothing could appear more incongruous to Philip Roths American landscapes of New Jersey, Vermont, and Connecticut; baseball; Jewish American culture; and race relations than the French surrealist philosopher, writer, and museum curator Georges Bataille. Yet the tensions between individuality, sexuality, and social constraints unite Roth and Bataille in suprising ways, notwithstanding the sardonic title of the much-maligned Delphine Rouxs thesis in The Human Stain, Self-Denial in Georges Bataille (Stain 188). Roth not only persistently returns to the same problems of desire that preoccupied Bataille throughout his life, but he consistently alludes
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to themes in Modernist literature that would have resonated strongly with Batailles oeuvre (Eiland 256). Desire is figured as the revenge of death for Professor David Kepesh in Roths novella, The Dying Animal (2001). By embodying the object of his desire, Consuela, as a work of art, the professor creates a sacrificial scene allowing him to harmlessly enjoy the volupt of death. The mimesis of art, however, does not afford enough protection against the eventual realities of living and dying. The collapse of mimesis questions not only desires relationship to death, but also the system of representation in the novel itself. The destabilization of representation is creative, not destructive. Alongside an engagement with Batailles explorations of death and desire, it distances the novel from hackneyed accusations of misogyny that continue to surface in critical examinations of Roths depiction of women.1 The portrayal of Consuela in The Dying Animal transcends reductionist gender stereotypes. Her embodiment as art and the recognition of mortality she provokes in Kepesh are implicated in a formal stylistic process questioning the verisimilitude of representation. Not only does this demonstrate the truly innovative quality of Roths writing and the originality and force of his corpus, it resists the objectification of women. By analyzing the representation of Consuela, I hope to help move the debate of Roths representations of women away from knee-jerk claims of misogyny and sexism to a more scholarly and literary discussion. Consuela cannot simply be relegated to the dustbin of lovely, submissive, and two-dimensional female characters. The Dying Animal is not only, or not simply, a cri de coeur from an aging and regretful amant; it is a meditation on how art mediates experiences of desire and death: in short, those things that make us human. Georges Bataille begins his work Eroticism (1957) with a formula that characterizes the relationship between death and desire: eroticism is assenting to life even in death (Eroticism 11). For Bataille, human beings are essentially discontinuous and discrete subjects. This is the result of reproduction, which creates one separate subject from another, whereas death represents the possibility of continuity (18-19). Continuity can nevertheless also be achieved through desire, which mimics death, generating a powerful erotic force that destroys the self-contained character of the participants (17). Clearly, most erotic encounters do not end in death, but they always contain some kernel of this unsettling possibility, reminding us constantly that death [] stands there before us more real than life itself (19). No one understands this adage better than the ageing debaucher of The Dying Animal. Kepesh knows only too well that the typical sexual encounter only ends in une petite mort (Bataille, Lrotisme 111). A cultured, licentious libertine for the twenty-first century, as meticulous as Sade in applying his ethics of desire to life, Kepesh has profited from the sexual and cultural revolution of the 60s at the same time that it ended his marriage
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and irreparably damaged his relationship with his son. Now in his sixties, he appears on various cultural programs, gives reviews of books and plays, and continues to teach one paradoxically entitled university seminar, Practical Criticism, which allows him to pursue his hobby of seducing female students. Despite his vigorous capacity for desire, he has begun to feel the passage of time: [o]bserving ones decay all the while (if one is as fortunate as I am), one has, by virtue of ones continuing vitality, considerable distance from ones decayeven feels oneself jauntily independent of it (Dying 35). But he does not deny the unavoidable finale that looms at the end of his carnivalesque cavorting: [i]nevitably, yes, there is a multiplication of the signs leading to the unpleasant conclusion, and yet despite that, you stand outside. And the ferocity of that objectivity is brutal (35). Kepesh recognizes how the continuity of death makes itself subtly felt in the everyday condition, spurring him to avidly pursue his carnal interests: [t]heres a distinction to be made between dying and death. Its not all uninterrupted dying. If ones healthy and feeling well, its invisible dying (35-36). While Bataille is concerned with the symbolic dimension of death and desire, Roths work astutely captures their quotidian expression. Desire is the revenge of death for Kepesh; it reminds him that he is alive. Desire is pleasantly heightened through its proximity to death, [b]ecause the other thing is based in your physical being, in the flesh that is born and the flesh that dies. Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged (Dying 69). At first glance, the flamboyance of his sexual desire seems at odds with his rigorous and economical attention to artistic detail and cultural capital. He nevertheless schematizes his boisterous sexual capers through a sexual ethic that is rationally, almost coldly dependent on artistic representationsmost commonly painting and music. After the end-of-semester party he throws annually, he finds one of his students, Miranda, hiding in the bathroom. Her sexual audaciousness contrasts with her adolescent torso of an incipiently transgressive Balthus virgin (7) and their carnivalesque adventures are straight out of one of the artists paintings:
like a young girl escaped from the perilous melodrama of a Balthus painting into the fun of the class party, Miranda had been on all fours on the floor with her rump raised or lying helplessly prostrate on my sofa or lounging gleefully across the arms of an easy chair seemingly oblivious of the fact that with her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half undressed while fully clothed. (7-8)

Representation allows him to detach himself from the dangers of desire, namely the vulnerability inherent in exposing oneself to another personin short, the possibility of loss. It allows the illusion of intimacy without the pain of contact; it is submission to the pleasures of the erotic without dirtying any hands: [e]verythings hidden and nothings concealed (8). This carefully culRoth Philip Roth Studies 97

tivated detachment to desire begins to crack open, however, when he becomes involved with Consuela, another of his former students. Consuela seems the archetype of the female form, but when the reality of her physical presence irrupts into representation, it becomes increasingly difficult for Kepesh to identify whether it is a case of art imitating life or the reverse. Consuela embodies both the classical female nude, restrained by social conventions, and its progressive, Modernist cousin, emancipated by womens liberation: [S]he has a pale complexion, the mouth is bowlike though the lips are full, and she has a rounded forehead, a polished forehead of a smooth Brancusi elegance (3). She is also the duchess in Velzquezs The Maids of Honor (14), and her presence to Kepesh is consummate of the perfect contours and motionless power of a Grecian statue: she has a D cup, this duchess, really big, beautiful breasts, and skin of a very white color, skin that, the moment that you see it, makes you want to lick it. At the theater, in the dark, the potency of her stillness was enormous (18). If the visual arts contextualize Consuelas body, Kepesh represents her sexual desirability through music. An avid amateur piano player, the intoxication of music naturally accompanies the classicism of Consuelas form: [i]t was all part of the intoxicationfor both of us (21). Sometimes she would pretend to conduct a movement for him, and [w]atching her breasts shift beneath her blouse while she pretended, somewhat like a performing child, to lead the orchestra with her invisible baton was intensely arousing (19). Later, after Consuela leaves him, he masturbates to her image while listening to Mozarts C Minor Sonata. Art is the gateway of his desire, the representation of desire as representation: she is a work of art, the lucky rare woman who is a work of art, classical art, beauty in its classical form, but alive, alive, and the aesthetic response to beauty alive is what, class? Desire (46). The mise-en-scene of desire is captured in Manets Olympia or one of Modiglianis nudes:
A nude whose breasts, full and canting a bit to the side, might well have been modeled on her own. A nude represented with her eyes closed, defended, like Consuela, by nothing other than her erotic power, at once, like Consuela, elemental and elegant. A golden-skinned nude inexplicably asleep over a velvety black abyss that, in my mood, I associated with the grave. One long, undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death. (98)

Figuring Consuelas body as a piece of art, specifically as a representation of the nude, helps contain and manage Kepeshs overabundant desire, the unending agonies of jealousy, and the obsessive quality of his pursuit that tortures him with sleepless nights. But her embodiment as pure representation also serves a further function. Like the choker in Manets Olympia, her body is the perilous line between the visual function of social convention and the disorder of transgression.2 It is both the barrier and representation of the horror of death, which is precisely why Kepesh derives such intense pleasure from her. Like desire, art and representation also have a particular relationship to death, offering us the vicarious spectacle of our own mortality: art, which
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puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, offers us ravishment without death (Bataille, Cruel Practice). Art always performs a destruction, because it is the medium that dissimulates reality from itself. Bataille notes: modern painting prolongs the repeated obsession with the sacrificial image in which the destruction of objects responds (Cruel Practice). In mimicking the mechanics of death, art stages the scene in which the represented object is sacrificed to death. Kepeshs careful codification of Consuelas body within certain generic registers is not only an appreciation of her form, but organizes a sacrificial scene that protects Kepesh from pain, loss, and death. Desire and art, as the prostheses of death, allow Kepesh to experience death vicariously, to separate himself from his own mortality while enjoying the erotic spectacle. Kepeshs association of Consuelas body with Modigliani, Manet, and Brancusi ends when she reveals she has breast cancer. She asks him to take pictures of her body, before it is mutilated, in her words, by surgery and chemotherapy. The paradox of the photographs he takes is that the supposed materialism of photographyits ability to capture reality unmediated and nakedactually documents the beginning of the diseases decay of her body. Instead of recalling a reclining Modigliani nude, the photographs postures evoke Stanley Spencers painting, The Leg of Mutton Nude and the description of Drenkas dying body in the earlier Sabbaths Theater (1995) as carrion (424).3 The photographs reveal the base materialism of her body and the cancer. Recalling Spencers painting, Kepesh admits that [e]very time I think of Consuela, I envision that raw leg of lamb shaped like a primitive club beside the blatantly exhibited bodies of this husband and wife: the meat of the slaughtered, sacrificial animal (Dying 143). Yet as Kepesh shifts from viewing Consuelas body through painting to photography, mimesis as the representation of an external realitythe dissimilation of the realis interrupted, and a significant change in his relation to her takes place. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests that mimesis is at the heart of the Western Christian sacrifice that frames Batailles logic. In the conventional Western sacrifice, the ancient sacrifice is reproducedup to a certain pointin its form or its scheme; but it is reproduced so as to reveal an entirely new content, a truth hitherto hidden or misunderstood, if not perverted. This process is, therefore, above all a mimesis (Nancy 21). The shift from the plastic arts to the medium of photographyfrom a Grecian statue to the meat of a slaughtered animal is also a transition from mimesis to metonymy. Not only does this change suggest that Consuelas embodiment as a sacrificial object is not straightforward, but Kepesh can no longer use photography to distance himself from her and the emotions she inspires in him. Under the sacrificial schema, her approaching death is sacralized through art. But photographythe irruption of the bloody animal into the carefully constructed aesthetics of the nudedisrupts the mimesis of sacrifice, literally revealing the naked recesses of the body: the tenuous boundary between representation and transgression, individuality
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and continuity that Consuela embodies ruptures. As the dissimilating function of mimesis and sacrifice gives way, Kepesh recognizes Consuela as a subject, as fragile and as feeling and as fleeting as himself:
Consuela now knows the wounds of age. Getting old is unimaginable to anyone but the aging, but that is no longer so for Consuela. She no longer measures time like the young, marking backward to when you started. [.. .] Now she measures time counting forward, counting time by the closeness of death. [.. .] Her sense of time is now the same as mine, speeded up and more forlorn even than mine. (148)

Consuelas body no longer delimits the line between death and desire for Kepesh; Kepesh and Consuela begin to coincide. His frantic response to her call before surgery affirms this. Dont go, says an unidentified voice at the end of the book, perhaps vocalizing Kepeshs internal struggle, because if you go, youre finished (156). The dying animal is not, of course, Consuela, but Kepesh. By disrupting representation, Consuela goes from being a sexual object without agencythe reclining nude, the motionless Grecian statueto a subject in all the raw vulnerability of her flesh and the existential reality of her body. Kepesh is not immune to this transformation. By realizing his attachment to Consuela as a living, breathing, mortal person and not a perfect physical specimen, he is finally moved beyond the strictly autonomous boundaries of his previous detachment. The disruption of mimesis interrogates not only the objectification (rhetorical or otherwise) of the female subject, but The Dying Animals ability to represent women as objects at all.
NOTES 1. See Elaine Showalters review of the novel (2001). 2. See ffrench 112-114, for a discussion of Manets painting in relation to the disruption of metaphor by metonymy in Batailles Histoire de lil. 3. Drenkas and Consuelas diseases are also reflected in the death-bed figure of George in The Dying Animal, Kepeshs best friend, partner in crime, and confidante, whose moving death is another kind of elegy that equally disrupts any notion of a stereotypical, heterosexual masculine subject obsessed by virility. WoRKs CIteD
Bataille, Georges. The Cruel Practice of Art. Trans. Supervert 32C Inc. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. <http://supervert.com>. . Eroticism. Trans. Mary Dalwood. London: Boyars, 1987. Print. . Lrotisme. Paris: Minuit, 1957. Print. Eiland, Howard. Philip Roth: The Ambiguities of Desire. Critical Essays on Philip Roth. Ed. Sanford Pinsker. Boston: Hall, 1982. 255-65. Print. ffrench, Patrick. The Cut: Reading Batailles Histoire de lil. Oxford: U of Oxford P, 1999. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Unsacrificeable. Yale French Studies. 79 (1991): 20-38. Print. Roth, Philip. The Dying Animal. New York: Houghton, 2001. Print. . The Human Stain. New York: Houghton, 2000. Print. . Sabbaths Theater. New York: Houghton, 1995. Print. Showalter, Elaine. Tedium of the Grapes of Roth. Times 27 June 2001: 13. Print.

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