Roth/CounterRoth: Postmodernism, the Masculine Subject, and Sabbath's Theater

DEBRA SHOSTAK Roth/CounterRoth: Postmodernism, the Masculine Subject, and Sabbath's Theater In the couNTERLiFE (1986), when Philip Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, raises the question ofwhether there exists an "irreducible self," he concludes that "It's all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through" (320). Since the impersonations Nathan refers to are all aggressively discursive—Roth's characters are nothing if not talkers—it would seem that Roth subscribes to the poststructuralist view of subjectivity summarized, for example, by Kaja Silverman when she writes that "without language,there would be no subjectivity" (45). Throughout his career, Roth's concern has been subjectivity —usually the subjectivity of the Jew, who is usually male, usually a breaker of taboos, and usually both source and target of a comic perspective—a subjectivity constituted and exposed by desires and by embeddedness in linguistic fabrications. Like much of Roth's recent work—Operation Shybck (1993), Deception (1990), the autobiography The Facts (1988), as well as The Counterlife come to mind—Sabbath's Theater (1995) inquires particularly into issues of impersonation and linguistic self-construction. The novel's conclusions, however, diverge from the playful postmodernity of the previous work. Here, Roth confronts the notion ofperformance with the brutal facts ofphysical decay and death, which restore the possibility of an essentialism conceived in relation to the body. By taking to its grotesque limits the exploration of verbally and physically consttucted subjectivity, Roth offers a profound Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 3, Autumn 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 I20DebraShostak critique not only of the postmodern view of the fluid subject, so ably demonstrated in his fiction since the late seventies, but also of the mythology of masculine power, with which his work has at times been identified.1 Roth has consistently inquired into what subjectivity might be. We can find in his fiction the self's efforts to recognize, comprehend, and become reconciled to an embodiment that is puzzling if not painful, and we can hear as well the subject's almost compulsive attempts to speak itself. Roth clearly accepts die psychoanalytic proposition that the place to look for the source of subjectivity is in desire. He has repeatedly represented sexual desire at the root of self-invention—the desire that Freud traces to unconscious incestuous fantasies and diat typically develops around the idea of die phallus as what Jacques Lacan calls the '"signifier of desire'" (Laplanche and Pontalis 314). Embodiment for Roth's male characters is largely focused on their sexuality and, almost inevitably, on the capacity of the penis as literal organ to achieve the symbolic power of the phallus.2 As Laplanche and Pontalis explain, "The Oedipus complex, in Lacan's reformulation of it, consists in a dialectic whose major alternatives are to be or not to be the phallus , and to have it or not to have it" (314). The dialectic is produced when cultural prohibitions against the verbal and physical expression of desire engage the subject in significant acts of repression. Roth consistently unclothes the phallic signifier—most notoriously in die overworked member in Portnoy's Complaint, but also, for example, in the radically transformed genitalia of The Breast (1972), the circumcised penis in The Counterlife, and the penile implant in Operation Shyfock— in ways that point up the central anxiety, comedy, and paradoxes ofdesire and its repressions. In short, he exposes the effort to be and to have the phallus. In tandem widi sexual desire, Roth also represents the desire that Freud controversially theorized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a drive "inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things" (30): it is the drive toward death, toward dissolution and the stasis of the organism . This desire is transgressive precisely because, even as it aims at an "anterior, tensionless state in order to preserve the self" (RaglandSullivan 71), it logically implies the annihilation ofthe self. Roth likes to present his characters in extremis. They feel an urgency to project erotic and thanatic desires through voice and body, to risk selfhood or Rotfi/CounterRoth121 ifs negation...