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186
Philip Roth
many ways, the irritant that produces his fiction” (81), and he irritates
his readers in turn—but he treats the topic of transgression with such
nuance that the reader responds with empathy.
While Sabbath’s Theater is not offensive particularly to his Jewish
readership (however, as Shechner reminds us, it takes an extended jab
at the Japanese, 151), it may take the cake in its sexual explicitness.
Three passages in the novel show Roth on the same path as his hero
Mickey Sabbath, breaking taboos and taking his audience with him:
the (footnoted) transcription of the telephone sex between Kathy
Goolsbee and Sabbath (215–34), a masturbation scene Sabbath
imagines Roseanna engaging in (431–33), and a sexual encounter
Sabbath and Drenka remember on Drenka’s death bed (425–28). All
three scenes might have slid into the territory of pornography, and
taken out of context they certainly are suggestive enough. But as part
of the novel Sabbath’s Theater they function differently: adding one
more turn to the screw, Roth involves his audience on the same level
Sabbath involved Helen Trumbull in the performance of Sabbath’s
Indecent Theater. The sexual content in Sabbath’s performance is
just as integral to his mission as offensiveness, sexual or other, to
Roth’s: by probing the limits of his readers’ tolerance for difference
and explicitness he exposes taboos, offering them up for negotiation
and discussion—or just pleasure: as Shechner delights, “The defiance
simply is!” (147).
WORKS CITED
Greenberg, Robert M. “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth.” Philip
Roth. Ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003. 81–100.
Halio, Jay L. “Eros and Death in Roth’s Later Fiction.” Turning Up the Flame:
Philip Roth’s Later Fiction. Ed. Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2005. 200–06.
Kelleter, Frank. “Portrait of the Sexist as a Dying Man: Death, Ideology, and
the Erotic in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.” Philip Roth. Ed. Harold
Bloom. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003. 163–98.
Mellard, James M. “Death, Mourning, and Besse’s Ghost: From Philip Roth’s
The Facts to Sabbath’s Theater.” Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth’s Later
Novels. Ed. Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 2005. 115–24.