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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
The Dancer and the Dance
In his short prose piece uber das Marionettentheater, Heinrich von Kleist (or H.v.K., as the narrator calls himself) describes his meeting with Herr C., a celebrated opera dancer. The conversation between writer and dancer centers around K.'s unconcealed astonishment over C.'s equally unconcealed admiration for the marionette theater. What baffles K. most of all is that C.'s fondness for the puppet dance cannot be reduced to a personal infatuation with plebeian entertainment. No Romantic love of "primitive" vitality, no weakness for "authentic" folk art, impels C.'s surprising aesthetic judgment, On the contrary, his reasoning is self-assertively elitist. Asked by K. how a distinguished dancer could possibly find anything redeeming in this rather vulgar art form, C. replies that not only does he regard wooden puppets as equal competitors, but that their movements on stage show indeed more "grace" (Grazie) than any real dancer could ever hope to achieve (Kleist 336). Marionettes, he says, are superior practitioners of the art of dance.
Obviously, C.'s enthusiasm for inanimate dancers is anything but an idiosyncrasy; it seeks to prove a philosophical point. In the artistic superiority of mechanical toys, C. finds exemplified an essential truth of human art, if not human existence. The advantage that marionettes enjoy over live dancers, he claims, resides exactly in their ambiguous ontological status as inanimate yet seemingly living artifacts. Puppets, in other words, inhabit a state of existence distressingly suspended between being and nonbeing: they ape life, but not as the living do when they attempt to transcend their finitude by staging a meaningful existence. According to C., the imitation of life to be witnessed in the marionette theater works its charm precisely because it is untainted by an otherwise unavoidable sense of mortality and thus proves itself free from the painful constraints of human self-consciousness. It should be noted that Uber das Marionettentheater here anticipates Yeats's poem "Among School Children," where we can read that dancer and dance are destined to remain separate entities as long as "beauty" is "born out of its own despair" (245). Similarly, C. perplexes K. with the claim that marionettes are better dancers because, as he puts it, they show no "inhibition" (Ziererei). Since their movements are not governed by the need of reflection--since "knowledge" (Erkenntnis) has no part in their physicality--they lack shame (Kleist 339).
The concepts of knowledge and shame are rich in implication. Most importantly, this specific terminology serves to establish a link between C.'s aesthetic theory on the one hand and biblical mythology on the other. In fact, when K. fails to follow C.'s line of argument, he is reprimanded by the dancer for not having read, or at least taken into account, the third chapter of Genesis--the story of humankind's expulsion from paradise. At this point of Kleist's narrative it finally becomes apparent that Herr C. has been talking myth all along. For according to Genesis, the feeling of shame, so detrimental to physical grace, results from nothing else than the human will to (self-)knowledge. Having tasted the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve become aware that human life is an inescapably physical affair; their sinful entrance into the world of blood, sweat, and tears opens their eyes to their being-in-the-body. True, in our post-Freudian age it has become something of a commonplace to read biblical mythology as psychological revelation, but most Romantic myth-critiques openly invite such a reading. According to Kleist, then, the human fall from grace is indeed not only accompanied by the birth of "desire" (the wish to regain, mostly by the possession or creation of an external object, what has been lost or is perceived to be lacking), but also inaugurates the painful certainty that the body of desire, no matter whether we view it as subject or object, is finite (and the desirous search for physical transcendence, therefore, infinite). So when Herr C. states that the mechanical dance is more harmonious, more balanced, and, in all its aspects, more graceful than any merely human motion, what he really means to say is that a marionette performance offers a strikingly persuasive re-presentation of the garden of biblical myth, an artistic creation which, although it is "born out of its own despair," nevertheless seems to be animated by a strangely carefree execution, an ease of movement that all but succeeds in hiding its mortal origin.
Shame and its lack are the main themes also of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater. Reading Roth's novel, one frequently wonders whether its protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a retired puppeteer, would not find something congenial in Kleist's belief that shamelessness supplies the secret telos of all artistic creation. At the same time, Sabbath's understanding of what it means to be "shameless" could not be more different from C.'s idealistic faith in an artistic mechanics able to transcend--or at least render invisible--the physical limitations of human sense-making. At one point, Sabbath seems directly to confront Kleist's Romantic idealism; here is Roth's hero musing on the difference between puppets and marionettes:
Puppets can fly, levitate, twirl, but only people and marionettes are
confined to running and walking. That's why marionettes always bored him:
all that walking they were always doing up and down the tiny stage, as
though, in addition to being the subject of every marionette show, walking
were the major theme of life. And those strings--too visible, too many,
too blatantly metaphorical. And always slavishly imitating human theater.
Whereas puppets.., shoving your hand up a puppet and hiding
your face behind a screen! Nothing like it in the animal kingdom! All the
way back to Petrushka, anything goes, the crazier and uglier the better.
Sabbath's cannibal puppet that won first prize from the maestro in Rome.
Eating his enemies on the stage. Tearing them apart and talking about
them all the while they were chewed and swallowed. The mistake is ever
to think that to act and to speak is the natural domain of anyone other
than a puppet.
(244)
Clearly, Sabbath is not looking for "grace." Using his artistic performances mainly as an occasion for personal, indeed sexual, gratification, Roth's protagonist cannot be expected to muster much admiration for the labored metaphorical machinery of the marionette theater. (Sabbath is once arrested during a "finger" performance for undoing the blouse and bra of a college student in the audience.) Recognizing that aesthetic beauty will never be able to hide or sublimate its unsightly roots in physical desire, Sabbath decides to embrace what he calls "the nasty side of existence"--"the crazier and uglier the better" (247). And with Sabbath, as the reader quickly learns, this is not an empty promise.
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. Nevertheless, it is a topos that stubbornly refuses to become cliched. Sabbath's particular version, while in opposition to Kleist's quasi-Kantian thanatology, is obviously indebted to the Marquis de Sade's philosophie dans le boudoir, whose subversive call has been answered in our century by writers as diverse as Guillaume Apollinaire, Henry Miller, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze. In contemporary American literature, the Sadean theme has received probably its most sophisticated treatment (cum critique) in the work of John Updike. Especially noteworthy in this context is the novel Couples (1968)--another explicit variation on the third chapter of Genesis--which paints the death-enchanted eroticism of Sade's supposedly antibourgeois bedroom philosophy as some sort of postidealistic consumerism, smugly transgressive on the surface, but truly in full accordance with the moral values of a capitalist marketplace economy. Since the couples of Tarbox are destined to live in a cultural landscape devoid of "genuine" religious systems of transcendence, Updike claims, Thanatos-driven repetition compulsion is all that's left to them sexually. The "woe that is in marriage" is countered here by a neurotic promiscuity that all too frequently exposes itself as a mirror image of the very deadness it wishes to escape. Updike's couples go about their carnal salvation religiously, it is true, but their religiosity, Updike wants us to believe, is an inauthentic one.
By contrast, Philip Roth's heroes--with the exception of Lucy Nelson (in When She Was Good) an all-male set of dedicated heterosexuals--can detect nothing inauthentic about the religious pursuit of promiscuity. In this, they are refreshingly free from Updike's didacticism. At the same time, it cannot be denied that their ostentatious libertinism tends to become rather tiresome after a while. The profligate adventures of Alexander Portnoy, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, and Nathan Zuckerman are saved from the notorious monotony of Sadean eroticism only by Roth's self-irony and his apparently limitless inventiveness in matters sexual, his "deep resources of obscenity," as Frank Kermode puts it (20). But if sixty-four-year-old Mickey Sabbath strikes a different key in the old pornographic song, this is not only because Sabbath is by far the most outrageously offensive member of the group, but also because with him, Roth's never uncritical representation of holy Eros reaches an altogether new level of reflection, which sets his novel alongside Updike's Couples as one of this century's most extraordinary works on the rather ordinary topic of sex and death. In this essay, I want to delineate the most prominent thanatological themes of Sabbath's Theater. The dialectical tension between a sexually defined understanding of death on the one hand and the thanatological production of ideological violence on the other will be my main concern.
Another Life
Sabbath's unabashed sensuality owes much of its appeal to one of modernity's most deeply ingrained cultural assumptions: the belief that bourgeois society is founded on the repression of instinctual urges and that therefore any sexual act, even if domesticated in the service of familial and hence societal continuity, carries with it a forceful reminder of our forgotten animal past. Thus accompanied by radically antisocial promises, the act of sex indeed seems to imply an ultimate transgression--a violent thrust beyond the bounds of social organization into a realm of existence that not only emancipates the sexual body from societal constraints but actually endangers all ideological and institutional securities on which the health and continuity of bourgeois society is said to depend. It is probably not too much of a generalization to say that this discourse of repression and liberation (which emerged in the eighteenth century as both a consequence and a critique of the Enlightenment's sweeping redefinition of the concept of "nature") in one form or another still dominates our contemporary representation of sexuality and, indeed, much of the contemporary experience of sex. According to Michel Foucault, if the identification of physical desire with subversion has proven a historically successful one, this is "owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold" (5). An inevitable sense of gratification--a "speaker's benefit"--seems involved in defining the relationship between sexuality and social organization in terms of repression:
we [find] it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different
pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice
shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure
away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by
the contribution we believe we are making. Something that smacks of revolt,
of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily
into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions
of prophecy are reactivated therein.
(7)
Nothing less than a "longing for the garden of earthly delights" (7) can thus be traced behind the Sadean ethos of erotic transgression. It should be noted that neither Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater nor Updike's Couples seems averse to such salvational desires. In fact, both texts explicitly concern themselves with the question of regaining paradisiacal "grace"--an endeavor which in both cases is defined in terms of a rejection of bourgeois orthodoxies (mainly the doctrines of knowledge, reflection, and self-consciousness). In this respect, a chaste text like Uber das Marionettentheater stages no less of a transgressive scene than a skeptical one like Couples--or Sabbath's scandalous "Indecent Theater." If there is a contention between Kleist's and Roth's apotheosis of shamelessness, or Roth's and Updike's affirmation of human sexuality, it concerns the question of which breaking of the taboo, which liberation from bourgeois consciousness can be called authentic. To put it differently, the texts named above do not argue about the question of whether "transgression" can be seen as a liberating principle or not, but rather about the question of what specific "transgression" is required if the transgressive act is not to reproduce the order of things it has set out to disrupt.
Thus Sabbath's sexual escapades ultimately try to answer the same question that animates Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater and Updike's Couples (or, for that matter, the third chapter of Genesis). It is the question of how to lead what Sabbath himself calls "a real human life" (247): a life unaffected by the deadening impact of its coming end, a life worthy of its name because it presents the opposite of--indeed an opposition to--certain death. This search for another (rather than simply a longer or easier or happier) life is obviously impelled by what Henry David Thoreau once called the fear of "liv[ing] what [is] not life," the fear of living death. ("I wished to live deliberately," Thoreau writes in Walden, "and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" [61].) The only difference between Thoreau's emphatic self-relocation and Sabbath's attempt to become a "real-lifer" (Roth 142) is that the first project of redemption seeks to save the mortal body by isolating it from company and sending it into "the woods," while Roth's protagonist chooses to go out and explore "the worldwide world of whoredom" (81). As far as Sabbath is concerned, unbounded (and literally "extroverted',) phallic energy comes to stand for authentic being itself: "Nothing more faithful in all of life than the lurid cravings of the morning hard-on," he enthuses. "No deceit in it. No simulation. All hail to that driving force! Human living with a capital L!" (154).
To put it at its simplest, what distinguishes Roth's celebration of carnality from Kleist's Romantic aesthetics or Updike's critique of Sadean eroticism is the particular version of spiritual transcendence proposed. While Kleist and Updike proclaim the return to animalistic shamelessness impossible, Sabbath is...
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