Art and sex in Philip Roth’s ‘The Dying Animal’
In Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001) the hero and narrator David Kepesh uses art to balance and sublimate his obsessive emphasis on sex. Kepesh evokes aesthetic analogies from Andrea Mantegna to Pablo Picasso to teach and seduce his former student Consuela Castillo; to reflect, vivify and enhance his three lovers; and to reveal and relive his sexual fantasies and perversions. Kepesh sees Consuela as an idealized embodiment of Modigliani’s luscious nude. Later on he interprets Stanley Spencer’s double nude in a similarly personal way, and sees it as a frightening image of how he would have looked if he’d remained trapped in a disastrous marriage, instead of enjoying an ecstatic love affair with Consuela.
The novel opens in 1992 when Kepesh, a prominent cultural critic on television, is 62 and Consuela is 24. The beloved daughter of wealthy Cuban immigrants, she has (as Kepesh repeatedly exclaims) exceptionally beautiful breasts, the finest that this connoisseur has ever seen. Beginning at the age of 18, she has had five young Cuban lovers, including two brothers. One boyfriend got wildly excited by watching her “blood run down her thighs and onto the floor.” Kepesh outperforms his rival by falling to his knees and licking it up.
The names of Kepesh, which means a natural leader who’s good at everything, and of Consuela, which means “consolation,” are ironic. He’s not very capable and she fails to provide comfort. Though sex is a revenge on death and Kepesh was “vigorously adulterous throughout his marriage”, there’s a painful gap between his romantic expectations and his adult indignities. While madly in love with Consuela, he’s tortured by jealousy and by the fear that she will leave him for a younger and more desirable man. He’s unfaithful to both his old lover Carolyn and to Consuela. He tells transparent lies to Carolyn about a telltale tampon she finds in his apartment, and tells Consuela that his car has broken down and he cannot attend her precious graduation party. Bitterly disappointed and hurt, she ends their 18-month affair.
Roth enhances the meaning of the novel with allusions to literature as well as to art. Consuela’s kindness during their overwhelming affair prevents him from being “a goner, wrecked entirely by [the pursuit of] my White Whale”. Noting the debilitating signs of old age, he wonders if he will “begin to rouge his cheeks” like the ageing Gustav von Aschenbach, who was fatally infatuated with a beautiful young boy in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Kepesh proudly displays the Kafka manuscript he owns, and says the oppression of college administrators who interfered with the sexual life of students in the 1950s “came from a distant Kafkaesque source.” Hated by and estranged from his 42-year-old son Kenny, whom he abandoned when he was eight, Kepesh compares himself to Dostoyevsky’s evil father Karamazov, who abandoned his children because they “would have gotten in the way of his debaucheries.”
Kepesh’s declaration while caressing Consuela’s buttocks, “my terrible jealousy was born,” echoes W. B. Yeats’ “a terrible beauty was born” in “Easter, 1916.” The title and major theme of Roth’s novel comes from Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.” When Kepesh’s orgasm fails to satisfy him and provokes his fear of death, he cannot concentrate on higher thoughts and longs for oblivion:
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect. . . .
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.
Kepesh’s perceptive evocation of paintings and sculpture also illuminates the characters and themes of the novel. In Balthus’ sexually perverse and sensational Guitar Lesson (1934), an older lesbian’s fingers are about to penetrate the vagina of a bent-over young girl. Kepesh replays this perilous melodrama with the adolescent body of Miranda, “an incipiently transgressive Balthus virgin. . . . With her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half-undressed while fully clothed.” When his old lover Carolyn suddenly reappears, he’s also impressed by her heavier figure and “all that monumentality at the base sustaining her slender torso.” He’s inspired to turn her into a work of art, as if he were the French sculptor Gaston Lachaise.
On his first intimate meeting with Consuela, Kepesh reverts to his role as teacher and uses Velázquez to beguile her. Like Consuela, pampered and adored by her Hispanic family, the five-year-old daughter of the king and queen stands at the dramatic and emotional center of Velázquez’s theatrical painting Las Meninas (1651, Prado, Madrid). Lovingly attended by her two maids of honor and surrounded by courtiers and dwarfs (an ironic allusion to Kepesh), the pretty Infanta of Spain has long blond hair and a pale face, and wears a tight satin bodice and billowing dress. While examining his art books, Consuela finds the Impressionists ravishing, but has to look long and hard to decipher the realistic elements in the labyrinth of Picasso’s Cubism. Soon after, she merely has to undress to become a painting by Picasso “with all the magical influence of a great work of art.”
Las Meninas. Oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Noting two other sculptors, Kepesh compares Consuela’s physical splendor to the idealised forms of Aristide Maillol, and says her round polished forehead has the smooth elegance of Brancusi. In a startling image, he compares the naked bleeding Consuela to the wounded naked body of Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian, eyes raised to heaven and ecstatically pierced by the arrows of his martyrdom.
Roth uses Kepesh’s habit of filtering crude sexual details through high art in order to make his extreme descriptions acceptable to readers. Consuela astonishes and excites Kepesh by her ability to push out her vulva like a creature from the depths of the ocean, “like a bivalve’s soft, unsegmented, bubbling-forth body” with a “slimy, silky swollenness, stimulating to touch and stimulating to see.” The Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, who often portrayed women’s genitals, “would have given his eyeteeth to paint it. Picasso would have turned it into a guitar.” Consuela is first idealised as a figure in a painting, then becomes a work of art. She’s compared to great sculpture, but also becomes weirdly physical, bleeding for Kepesh and exposing the inner lips of her vulva.
Kepesh exalts Consuela as an aesthetic experience, and describes how she actually appears and how he transforms her. Amedeo Modigliani’s Long Nude (1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York)—which is reproduced on the dust jacket of the novel—takes the traditional naked pose to strange extremes. The sleeping figure reclines, with the right hand on her cheek and the left behind her head, on a red divan with a black saddle of blanket crossing it. She has a helmet of dark brown hair parted in the middle, thin painted eyebrows, closed eyes, strong nose, thin lips and small chin. Her swelling hip matches the curves of her high, billowing, pink-tipped breasts and her abnormally extended cylindrical torso punctuated by a curling navel. Her pubic triangle points downward to the sex hidden between her curved hip and ruddy thighs. Asleep—while suspended over and about to fall into a dark chasm–she appears to defy the laws of gravity. Though dormant and withdrawn, she’s completely exposed and sexually available. Like Modigliani’s nude, Consuela “is a tall young woman in a slightly too narrow body”, with gorgeous breasts and a supine pose.
Amedeo Modigliani’s Long Nude
Kepesh clinches the connection between Consuela and her idealised Modigliani image when, years after she’s left him, she sends him a postcard of that nude. Drawn to her, once again and even more intensely, he provides an elaborate description of the painting:
By the cylindrical stalk of a waist, the wide pelvic span, and the gently curving thighs, by the patch of flame that is the hair that marks the spot where she is forked—by the trademark Modigliani nude, [she was] the accessible, elongated dream girl he ritualistically painted. . . . A nude whose breasts, full and canting a bit to the side, might well have been modeled on her own. A nude represented with her eyes closed, defended, like Consuela, by nothing other than her erotic power, at once, like Consuela, elemental and elegant. A golden-skinned nude inexplicably asleep over a velvety black abyss that, in my mood, I associated with the grave. One long, undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death.
Despite its exquisite beauty, for Roth’s Kepesh the painting is a memento mori.
Consuela drifts out of the novel as Carolyn, his old lover, and Kenny, his estranged son, take her place. But she dramatically reappears eight years later at the end of the novel. Though the much older Kepesh had expected to become the dying animal many years before Consuela, she has become dangerously ill in her thirties. She shocks Kepesh by telling him she has breast cancer, and wears an incongruous fez to cover her hair loss from chemotherapy. Trying desperately to comfort her as she unveils her potentially fatal disease, he feels the cancerous lumps under her armpit and touches her pathetic “feathery hair, very short, thin, colorless and meaningless.” He takes photos of her still perfect body (which retains its silky pubic hair) before the surgeon removes her entire breast and extinguishes her sense of security. Kepesh feels guilty about his behaviour and punished by her illness.
The other major painting in the novel, a powerful contrast to Modigliani’s sensual nude, Stanley Spencer’s naked family in Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937, Tate Gallery, London), was influenced by Egon Schiele’s comparatively gentle The Family (1918). Spencer described his painting as “a man sits and contemplates the woman. He is squatting and fills the space between the woman’s arms resting above her head and her raised knees. Both figures are life-size. The uncooked supper is in the foreground and on the right is a Valor oil stove lit.”
The sombre-faced, hairy-chested Spencer, wearing only his spectacles and looking down, squats with knees raised to his armpits, his limp cock resting on his wife’s thigh. Lying below and across from him, she has reddish-blond hair curling around her cheeks, dark eyebrows, sharp nose, thin mouth and severe expression. She lifts her arms to support her head, has flaccid breasts falling to each side of her chest and spikey pubic hair sprouting between her wide-open legs. The husband looks down, the wife stares straight ahead. They touch each other, but are emotionally estranged. Both figures are in their mid-forties, but their bodies have been ravaged by time. Her naked body no longer excites him and the stove provides the fire that has gone out of their marriage. The raw lamb chop and huge leg of lamb, which touches her left breast, match the raw color and texture of their sad flesh and emphasize their mortality.
Kepesh describes Spencer’s painting as the cruel image of a wrecked marriage:
It is the quintessence of directness about cohabitation, about the sexes living together over time. . . . Spencer is seated, squatting, beside the recumbent wife. He is looking ruminatively down at her from close range through his wire-rimmed glasses. We, in turn, are looking at them from close range: two naked bodies right in our faces, the better for us to see how they are no longer young and attractive. Neither is happy.
Kepesh emphasizes the raw meat that “is rendered with physiological meticulousness, with the same uncharitable candor as the sagging breasts and the pendent, unaroused prick displayed only inches back from the uncooked food.” This raw meat cut from the sacrificial lamb and the melancholy resignation of the blatantly exhibited bodies remind him of the mutilated Consuela, and he cannot get those disturbing images out of his mind.
The novel begins as a celebration of sexual joy, but finally becomes the portrayal of transience, decay and loss.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has recently published Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real (2016) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018). His book on his friend James Salter will be out in spring 2024.
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