Sacred Transgression: Bataillean Eroticism In Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater

Published in 1995,Sabbath’s Theater won Philip Roth the third National Book Award.However,book viewers and critics respond with ambivalence because of its offensive and excessive eroticism.Many scholars ascribe the protagonist’s outrageous libertinism to his traumatic life history.Yet psychoanalysis is insufficient to account for the distinctiveness of eroticism pervading the novel.This thesis observes that Roth represents Bataillean eroticism,which involves taboo-breaking sex and unproductive consumption of excess desire,in a highly exaggerated and surreal way.Drawing on Bataille’s broad discussion of eroticism while incorporating an archetypal analysis of the main characters,this thesis attempts to offer a thorough analysis of Roth’s erotic depiction in the novel.The thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter briefly introduces Philip Roth and Sabbath’s Theater,offering a literature review and specifying the inadequacy of current studies.Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 examine the manifestations of Bataillean eroticism in this novel.Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 go further to explore the social and psychological implications of Bataillean eroticism.Chapter 2 revolves around Bataille’s return to animality.This chapter begins with an introduction to the relationship between eroticism and the return to animality.The first segment argues that Roth places Sabbath and Drenka’s affair in a primitive setting,which not only works to offer a background for Sabbath’s withdrawal into nature,but to set off a journey of Bataillean returning to animality.The second segment explores the animal imagery Roth employs to bring out Sabbath’s virility and transgressive energy,mainly including the bull,the god Pan and the gorilla.Roth’s allusion to the Jewish religion and ancient Greek mythology implies the religiosity of these bestial imagery,which coheres with Bataille’s dualist approach to animality.Chapter 3 centers upon erotic excess.The first segment argues that the scandalous insatiability Roth highlights throughout the novel is a hyperbolic representation of Bataille’s “excess,” or “exuberance.” Roth portrays Drenka as the incarnation of“exuberance” itself and the incarnation of the goddess of sex.The second segment examines unproductive expenditure of excess desire,which is manifested in Roth’s deep resources of obscenity and his exaggerated narrative of promiscuous adventures that are not reproduction-oriented.Chapter 4 argues that main characters engage in Bataillean eroticism to negate the profane world.This chapter begins with Bataille’s notion of “the profane” and human’s negation of the profane via transgression.The first segment notes that Sabbath and Drenka’s adultery aims at contesting the captivity of utilitarian marriage.The second segment explores Sabbath’s carnivallike career and his sexual carnival at Cowen’s house,which connote his rejection of the bourgeois virtue.The third segment observes Sabbath’s profanity of his epitaph implies a satire on capitalist commodification of death.The fourth segment argues that necrophilia is represented as a mourning ritual to criticize the privatization and rationalization of death in a post-theist world.Chapter 5 explores the main characters’ achievement of inner experience of eroticism.This chapter begins with a distinguishment of Bataille’s “continuity,” “sovereignty,” and“non-knowledge.” The first segment argues that Drenka has experienced continuity by giving herself in transgressive sex.The second segment demonstrates how the Balich couple and Cowan couple are slaved by utility,while Sabbath and Drenka’s devotion to eroticism enables them to live in the present and achieve sovereignty.The third segment contests that Sabbath and Drenka’s erotic acts convey a sense of deconstruction of ideological binary opposites of purity and filth,life and death,allowing them to experience the realm of non-knowledge.Chapter 6 draws the conclusion.Sabbath and Drenka,portrayed as incarnations of ancient divinities,dedicate themselves to Bataillean eroticism to negate the profane world and to achieve sacred inner experience.But Sabbath and Drenka’s tragedy implies that Roth is less a defender of Bataillean eroticism in its real sense than a transgressive writer,who strives to create a literary heterotopia to mirror the limitation of secular life dominated by utilitarianism.