Sabbath's theater

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sabbaths Theater (English original title: Sabbath's Theater ) is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth , which was published in 1995 by the New York publisher Houghton Mifflin . It is about the aging puppeteer Mickey Sabbath, who takes pleasure in provoking other people and playing with them like a doll. The death of his long-time lover plunges him into a life crisis. Roth won the National Book Award for the second time with the novel . The German translation by Werner Schmitz was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1996 .

content

Morris "Mickey" Sabbath grew up in a small town on the New Jersey coast . His father is an immigrant Jew who survived by selling eggs and butter. The focus of the family is the five years older brother Morton, called Morty, until he is killed in the Pacific War in December 1944 . From this moment on, Sabbath's mother sinks into deep depression and does not recover from the stroke of fate until her death. She hardly notices her second son. He left the family at seventeen, went to sea as a sailor and discovered through the prostitutes in the port cities what soon became his main purpose in life: sex.

Returning to New York , he found his artistic calling in street theater . On a street corner of Broadway at the gates of Columbia University , he sets up his lewd theater in which he uses his fingers instead of puppets to perform his provocative and often obscene plays. Of course, he also uses his performance to make contact with women. When he gestured a student to bare her breast during a demonstration, he was fined for obscene behavior. His first wife Nikki Kantarakis also met Sabbath through his puppet theater . The fragile Nikki turns out to be a talented actress, at whose side Sabbath, financed by Lincoln Gelman and Norman Cowan, two art-loving offspring from a wealthy family, succeeds in making the leap onto a real theater stage. Sabbath fails the critics as King Lear , but Nikki shines as Cordelia until she doesn't show up one evening and has since disappeared. Decades later, on his return to New York, Sabbath involuntarily looks for her and harasses a young woman because he thinks she is Nikki's daughter.

Sabbath moves to secluded Madamaska ​​Falls in New England with his second wife, Roseanna . The marriage is unhappy and hatred grows between the spouses. Roseanna consoles herself with alcohol, Sabbath with numerous affairs. When the recording of a telephone sex conversation with one of his students comes to the public, he loses his extraordinary professorship for doll art. Of all people, the Japanese dean Kakizaki is the driving force behind his dismissal, which only increases Sabbath's hatred of everything Japanese, which is rooted in his brother's death. Since arthritis put an end to his own performances and festival appearances long ago, he now lives entirely on his wife's money. After her collapse because of the scandal, she withdrew from alcohol and from then on followed the tracts of Alcoholics Anonymous with devout seriousness , which Sabbath can only comment on with biting derision. But what ultimately drives him out of the house is Roseanna's enthusiasm for a woman who cut off her unfaithful husband one night.

The trigger for Sabbath's crisis at the age of 64 is the cancer death of his long-time lover Drenka Balich, an immigrant from Croatia . With her, he lived the uninhibited sex that he was thirsty for for 15 years. But he has never fully decided in favor of his consanguineous companion, as monogamy is anathema to him . Now he is jealous of all the men she has had next to him and to whom he has added her as a special erotic attraction. On the occasion of Lincoln Gelman's funeral, Sabbath travels to New York again, where he stays at Norman Cowan's house and, in his short stay, manages to desecrate his daughter's underwear, fuss with the landlord and arrange an affair with his wife, until Norman throws him out of the house. Sabbath continues to the New Jersey coast, using the last of his money on a grave site at the local cemetery. The grave inscription should read: "Morris Sabbath /" Mickey "/ Beloved whore-goat, seducer, / Sodomite, molester, / destroyer of morality, spoiler of youth, / spouse murderer, / suicide / 1929-1994".

But Sabbath shies away from the last step, to end his life. Instead, he tracks down a cousin, 100-year-old Fish, where he discovers a package with his brother's estate. He wraps himself in its stars and stripes and cries uncontrollably on the beach. To bring his brother's legacy to safety, he drives back to Madamaska ​​Falls, where he surprises Roseanna while making love with an AA comrade who turns out to be Christa of all people, a young woman whom he once brought to his lover Drenka. Sabbath now has only one refuge, Drenka's grave, on which he urinates in memory of previous sexual acts with which the two of them made their intimate pact. He is surprised by her son Matthew, who has become a police officer, and hopes to be promoted from his life. But Matthew just throws him out of the police car in disgust and leaves him alone with everything he hates and what doesn't let him die.

Position in Roth's work

With Sabbaths Theater , Roth took up a complex of topics that he had explored more deeply for the first time twelve years earlier with Die Anatomiestunde and that for his late work from Das derbende Tier (2001) to Exit Ghost (2007) to the concluding Nemeses Quartet ( Jedermann , Outrage , The humiliation , Nemesis , 2006–2010) remained decisive: aging, illness, pain, transience and death. For Harold Bloom , the novel forms a counterpoint to Portnoy's early scandalous successes (1969). Where this was still a lively comedy , the late novel adds a tragic component in the spirit of Shakespeare and thus becomes a tragic comedy . Sabbath is not just an aged Portnoy, but both hide anger and pain behind their funny outbursts. With the knowledge of the late novel, Portnoy's complaints can be read as a prelude to Sabbath's theater or as a parody of it .

For Roth, however, Sabbath's theater also marked a rediscovery of America. During his relationship with British actress Claire Bloom , he lived in London for half the year . After their divorce, he returned to the United States permanently and experienced a new affiliation with American culture and language. In contrast to Roth's early novels, which were about the difficult identity of a Jewish-American writer , Sabbath feels for the first time unbroken as an American and at the end symbolically wraps himself in the American flag. If for Portnoy the non-Jewish chics symbolized the American dream , now Sabbath for the Croatian Drenka becomes the embodiment of the American man and a dance with him becomes a dance with America. Therefore, Sabbath's theater for Thomas David forms a “powerful prelude to the novels of the American trilogy” ( American Idyll , My Man, the Communist , The Human Blemish , 1997-2000) and “Roth's undivided commitment to his American identity”.

Influences and references

Mickey Sabbath deviates more than other characters from Philip Roth - such as Nathan Zuckerman or David Kepesh - from the biography of its author. He is several years older than him, grew up not in Newark but on the Atlantic coast where Roth's family spent their summer vacations, and he does not have the academic background of other Roth characters. Roth described: " For me, Sabbath's theater was above all a book about a man who was damaged by the death of his brother who had died in the war and was so deeply wounded that he cannot recover." Roth experienced himself at the age of eleven Years ago when the family of a school friend broke up because his brother was shot down in the Philippines.

Roth took Sabbath's further résumé as a young sailor from the stories of RB Kitaj , a painter who became a friend of his during his stays in London . The character Drenka is inspired by two of Roth's lovers, a Scandinavian with whom he had a long extramarital relationship that broke up the year Sabbath's Theater was released , and a former lover named Janet Hobhouse, who died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 42, and whose grave Roth visited regularly like Sabbath that of Drenka. Hobhouse's death prompted Roth to start tending to his own grave site, realizing that this could be an interesting starting point for a character in a novel, especially if she is planning to commit suicide.

With the figure of the dean Kimiko Kakizaki ("the Japanese viper", "the Immaculate Kamizoko [...] Kakizomi. Kazikomi. Who could remember those shitty names. Who wanted that?") Roth fires some broadsides at Michiko Kakutani , the literary critic The New York Times , who had critically reviewed his previous novel Operation Shylock . For her part, Kakutani responded with a scathing review of Sabbath's theater , in which she highlighted, among other things, Sabbath's anti-Japanese outbursts and ended with readers having trouble finishing "this tasteless and insincere book".

reception

Most American literary critics did not agree with Kakutani's criticism. William H. Pritchard warned that some readers might find Sabbath's theater "repulsive and not at all funny", but for him it was not only Roth's longest, but also his "richest, most rewarding novel." He called the Sabbath farewell scene to the dying Drenka “as haunting as literature can be”. Frank Kermode described a “brilliantly evil book” of “ Rabelaisian breadth and lightness”, which he continued to compare with Thomas Mann , Robert Musil and John Milton . Even People Magazine called Sabbath's Theater “Roth's finest, wildest creation”. Harold Bloom considers Sabbath's Theater to be Roth's "outstanding achievement", which is among the best American novels of the second half of the twentieth century.

With the novel, Roth won the National Book Award for the second time - 35 years after his debut Goodbye, Columbus . He was also a finalist in the 1996 Pulitzer Prize , which Richard Ford won on Independence Day that year .

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 126–127.
  2. ↑ Harold Bloom : Introduction. In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 1-3.
  3. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , pp. 204-205.
  4. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 130.
  5. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , p. 191.
  6. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , p. 130.
  7. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , pp. 189-195.
  8. ^ Philip Roth: Sabbaths Theater . Hanser, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-446-25138-0 , item 3709.
  9. ^ Philip Roth: Sabbaths Theater . Hanser, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-446-25138-0 , item 4020.
  10. ↑ Michiko Kakutani : Of a Roth Within a Roth Within a Roth . In: The New York Times . March 4th 1993.
  11. ↑ "this distasteful and disingenuous book". Quoted from: Michiko Kakutani : Mickey Sabbath, You're No Portnoy . In: The New York Times . August 22, 1995.
  12. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , p. 202.
  13. ↑ "certain readers will find it repellent, not funny at all", "Roth's longest and, in my judgment, richest, most rewarding novel", "as powerful as writing can be." Quoted from: William H. Pritchard: Roth Unbound . In: The New York Times Book Review . September 10, 1995.
  14. ↑ "splendidly wicked book", "Rabelaisian range and fluency". Quoted from: Frank Kermode : Howl . In: The New York Review of Books .
  15. ^ "Roth's finest, fiercest creation". Quoted from: Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , p. 202.
  16. ↑ "sublime achievement". Quoted from: Harold Bloom : Introduction. In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 1-2.
  17. ^ National Book Awards - 1995 at the National Book Foundation .
  18. ↑ Fiction at the Pulitzer Prize .