Roth’s explicit passages walk a fine, difficult line between darkness, humor and lust, and somehow the male hero emerges from all the comic clauses breathless, glorified. But are the sex scenes meant to be taken seriously? In “The Counterlife,” Roth’s alter ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, calls himself a “sexual satirist,” and in that book and others Roth’s sex scenes do manage to be both comic and dirty at the same time: “The sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all 5 feet 9 inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen.”
SPECTACLE SYNONYM SERIES
In Philip Roth’s phenomenally successful 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the Jewish hero sleeps his way into mainstream America through the narrow loins of a series of crazy harridans and accommodating lovelies. These young writers - Mailer, Roth, Updike - were taking up the X‑rated subject matter of John O’Hara and Henry Miller, but with a dash of modern journalism splashed in.
They would bring their talent, their analytic insights, their keen writerly observation, to the most intimate, most unspeakable moments, and the exhilaration, the mischief, the crackling energy was in the prose.
SPECTACLE SYNONYM TRIAL
These novelists were writing about the bedrooms of middle-class life with the thrill of the censors at their backs, with the 1960 obscenity trial over “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” fresh in their minds. When “Couples,” John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust set in a small New England town called Tarbox, came out in 1968, a Time magazine cover article declared that “the sexual scenes, and the language that accompanies them, are remarkably explicit, even for this new age of total freedom of expression.” Throughout the ’60s, with books like “An American Dream,” “Herzog,” “Rabbit, Run,” “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Couples,” there was a feeling that their authors were reporting from a new frontier of sexual behavior: adultery, anal sex, oral sex, threesomes - all of it had the thrill of the new, or at least of the newly discussed. In the early novels of Roth and his cohort there was in their dirty passages a sense of novelty, of news, of breaking out. All of which is to say: How is it possible that Philip Roth’s sex scenes are still enraging us? But why, I kept wondering, did she have to throw it out? Did it perhaps retain a little of the provocative fire its author might have hoped for? Dovetailing with this private and admittedly limited anecdote, there is a punitive, vituperative quality in the published reviews that is always revealing of something larger in the culture, something beyond one aging writer’s failure to produce fine enough sentences.
We have internalized the feminist critique pioneered by Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics” so completely that, as one of my students put it, “we can do the math ourselves.” Instead my acquaintance threw the book away on the grounds that the scene was disgusting, dated, redundant. It was not exactly feminist rage that motivated her. Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.Īfter reading a sex scene in Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling,” someone I know threw the book into the trash on a subway platform. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels. For a literary culture that fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century.
0 kommentar(er)
