Roth's Falstaff: Transgressive Humor in Sabbath's Theater
2005; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)American Jewish Fiction Analysis
ResumoCome, let us take muster speedily. Doomsday is near. Die all, die merrily. (Hotspur, I Henry IV, 4. 1. 132-33) I like not such grinning honor as Sir Walter hath. Give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honor comes unlooked for, and there's an end. (Falstaff, I Henry IV, 5.3.59-61) Pluck down my officers. Up vanity! For now time is come to mock at form. Harry the Fifth is crowned. Up, vanity! Down, royal state! (King, II Henry IV, 4.5. 117-20) O, what life, what life, muttered Fish. Yeah, was it good, life? Was it good to live, Fish? Sure. Better than being dead. (395) yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything. For pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence. I may not have been matinee idol, but say what you will about me, it's been real human life. (247) He was getting steadily happier by the moment. The incapacity to die. Sitting it out instead. This thought made Sabbath intensely excited: the perverse senselessness of just remaining, of not doing. (384) IN SABBATH'S THEATER, Philip Roth created tragicomedy in which the principal character is explicitly drawn from the two old men in who, respectively, have come to personify the essence of the tragic and comic protagonist: King Lear and Sir John Falstaff. Mickey Sabbath plays at both. He impersonates King Lear in the New York city subways, riding what he calls the Suicide Express, pan-handling for cup of change. Having just the right battered, capsized look, Mickey is Shakespeare in the subway, Lear for the masses (209). But Sabbath made poor king, and even less did he rise to tragic heights. Having survived two wives, numerous mistresses, hundreds of Cuban whores, charges of sexual harassment from his students, arrest for his Indecent Theater of Manhattan, and inexplicably avoiding getting AIDS, Sabbath fully embraces his Falstaffian side and thereafter plays the profane and disorderly old knight. For part of the novel Sabbath is Lear on the brink of suicide blaming, as the old king does, the women in his life. On Mickey's way to the cemetery to choose an affordable but adjacent plot next to his family, he realizes that it is life--even a really trivial, really shitty (143)--he's searching for all along. When Sabbath tries to get young German girl into bed with him and his fifty-two year-old mistress Drenka, the girl tells him, an old I am twenty years old! I do not want to talk to you! Leave me alone! You're nothing but fat old man! Sabbath isn't in the least bit fazed or offended. He knows who his progenitor is: So was Falstaff, kiddo, he replies. So was that huge hill of flesh Sir John Paunch, sweet creator of bombast! 'That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan' (53)! In Falstaff Roth chose the perfect paradigm for Mickey Sabbath, late twentieth-century man who instinctively understands the best way to overpower the mess of life is to choose more of it. Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! (247) Falstaff is funny not merely because he is so intelligently witty, but because every one of his manners and appetites is thumb in the eye of the court of Henry IV. Sir John's lifestyle is satire on the world dominated by all the political conspirators in Shakespeare's play, starting with the king himself. If readers find themselves impressed by the dignity of medieval royalty, starting with Prince Hal who presumably grows into his kingly role, then they may find the fat old knight morally offensive. …
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