Philip Roth - The dying animal

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.

-         W.B. Yeats

Philip Roth is, with the likes of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, among the handful of modern writers in English, particularly of the American tradition, that stands at the rarified, sunlit mountaintop of literary immortals. This is an impressive achievement indeed, especially given Roth is still alive and kicking.

His novel, or really a novella, The Dying Animal, has been made into a fairly decent film, retitled Elegy, starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz. The novel, however, is far superior. Its superiority highlights the uniqueness of the written words – that while often a picture can speak a thousand words, sometimes the well-arranged sentence can paint a thousand pictures.

The entire novel is a largely one-sided conversation where the protagonist, David Kapesh, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan professor in his twilight years, recounts an on-going and particularly obsessive love affair, to you, the other conversationalist. The lascivious and energetic propagator of the sexual revolution ideals often bedded his students but has always maintained an aesthetic and cool distance. Until he met Consuela, a beautiful daughter of Cuban immigrants who, in her early 20’s, was so overpowering in her sensual powers that it utterly broke through Kapesh’s principle of a lifetime, dragging him into a vortex of emotions.

As the title suggests, the theme of the novel is the old one rehashed many times in arts, that of the relationship between Eros and Thanatos. In this case, the isolation and analysis of the male’s libidinous desire for the female. While some see the novel as misogynist in its treatment of females, they miss the subtle irony of its thesis – that it is an in depth study of a proto-male mind and it unfolds the pitifully ridiculous state caused by the reduction of the male-female relationship to the satisfaction of lust, and show that it is a poor substitute for love.

The cleverness of Roth is to give the narrative force such eloquence, sophistication and savoir faire. The analysis Kapesh gives to the various permutations of attraction, lust, balance of power and jealousy are very keenly observant and persuasively phrased. For example, pulling apart the reasons why Consuela might be attracted to a much older man, Kapesh suggested that:

The erotic oddness is all most people register, and they register it as repugnance, as repugnant farce. But the age I am has great significance for Consuela. These girls with old gents don’t do it despite the age – they’re drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela’s case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery. A boy submitting to her power, what does that amount to in a creature so patently desirable? But t have this man of the world submitting solely because of the force of her youth and her beauty? To have gained the total interest, to have become the consuming passion of a man inaccessible in every other arena, to enter a life she admires that would otherwise be closed to her – that’s power, and it’s the power she wants.

His subsequent deepening feelings, manifesting in jealousy and pining, unbalances the life-philosophy of the man forged in the pure sybaritic spirit of the 60’s. Kapesh found he was unable to be satisfied with pure hedonism when it came to Consuela. In the eloquence of a sophisticate professor in his 60’s, and pushed on with his increasing awareness of mortality, he goes through the pangs of a teenage boy, surrendering to love for the first time.

While it is true that many mistakenly or unthinkingly assign to love (or Eros, as the Greeks more exactingly put it, as opposed to agape) other qualities such as faithfulness, honesty and kindness, Roth punctures the façade from the other direction to show that gratuitous sexual gratification cannot stand alone, cannot be sufficient and is not indeed without its price. It plays on the intersection of a smorgasbord of passions that make up the cocktail that is love and how the inevitably pungent mixture is the honest toll paid for the concoction that is often bitter sweet. Whatever love might be, the ‘molecular’ approach of one-sided indulgence without recompense is a road to purgatory.

George Bernard-Shaw wrote that “there are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” Kapesh found himself simultaneously suffering from the pains of both these calamities. What Roth does is to elevate the man ‘sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal’ to its strongest advocacy and still to show the cracks emerging on the façade of an ideology that tries to have it both ways.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.