Sabbath's Theater
"Puppets. Out of all fucking callings. Between puppets and whores, he chooses puppets. For that alone he deserves to die. "
Look at your beautiful body—a painted mind—
puppet!
A mass of sores held up by bones.
Wretched, full of cravings, insubstantial, imper—
manent.
The body wears out. It is fragile, a nesting place for
disease.
Soon it will putrefy and dissolve. Life ends in
death.The Buddha
Dhammapada
Wow, what a fucked up masterpiece.
Alexander Portnoy is a parody when compared to Mickey Sabbath. He is a spoiled heir of a Jewish family and feels bad because he is both attracted and repelled by their overbearing love. Portnoy wants to be the good boy and his only rebellion is his sexual proclivities as a result of his and his family’s eccentric and unhinged behaviors. But Portnoy still mostly tries to do and say the right thing even if he has to rant about it and process darker emotions.
But uh….Mickey Sabbath….he’s a real son of a bitch. I can’t help but get the title of Fernando Vallejo’s book Memoirs de un Hijueputa every time I see the name or title of Roth’s book. Love thy neighbors as thyself is asking a whole lot after this one. Roth wrote Sabbath’s Theather when he was sixty-two only two years younger than the titular character Mickey Sabbath.
Roth is an author who is famed for taking intimate unspeakable experiences and then telling them all in the next novel he is writing. His life before Portnoy’s Complaint was the subject of his literature, then his life as the persecuted writer of Portnoy’s Complaint, then his elderly period where he spins his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman almost into the form of a superhero, a detective, the great listener who ghostwrites America’s woes.
Roth is also an author who was immensely concerned with his legacy and as the years went on he had something more to worry about than his betrayals of love and Judaism. It was the question of whether or not he was a misogynist based on his ex-wives, partners, students….Roth actively sought a biographer who could cast him in a good light and by the way, the biographer he found, Blake Bailey, would later go on to have allegations of rape and grooming.
“It is no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Mark Twain
The legacy of Sabbath’s Theater does not help at all. It falls under the same issues that Portnoy’s Complaint does as more and more information about Roth’s life is revealed we wonder how much the content in those books was joking, parody, or fiction.
At sixty-four retired and arthirites ridden Mickey Sabbath only has a couple of questions left for life. Two in actuality. 1) Should I listen to the ghost of my mother who crawls into the cunts of my lovers and tells me to kill myself? 2) If yes, how should I do it for maximum impact?
Sabbath’s art is puppetry, which really means the manipulation of people. The manipulation of people from behind a screen where he can create a stage of hypnosis from which he can lead his audience into acts of indecency. A lone finger behind a curtain beckoning the young girl to come closer. Geez, this sounds oftly familiar to writing and how the author might feel about it.
Unlike Portnoy, Sabbath has no complex feelings about his Judaism. In fact, he loves it. He loves how blunt they are, the Jews truly described their God in the image of man. Their God has all that we have to offer and he is a master at it. Betrayal, treachery, schizophrenia, anger, lust, jealousy, the desire to obliterate all who offend him, the complete power of a totalitarian dictator with the emotional control of a ten-year-old. And his punishments for the limited creatures whose finiteness depends on his infiniteness—are eternal! Geez, this sounds oftly familiar to puppetry.
The outside form of his art may be puppetry, but the inside form is manipulation. Who he wants to manipulate is women into fully enjoying their sensual side without a single moral hiccup.
His greatest apprentice in this field has been Drenka Balich, a Croatian immigrant, and an innkeeper. She was in the words of Sabbath, the most women of women because she was able to 1) Maintain her relationship with her boring work-hard do-good husband while 2) Carrying on her affair with Sabbath and 3) Sleeping with scores of other men to please Sabbath and embrace her pleasure/giving/sensual nature. Men that she slept with continued to send her flower after flower and while she was in the hospital dying of cancer later men would visit her grave to masturbate on it. Tits…tits….tits those men rhythmically stroking their cocks to the beat of their sperm-banked memories as they empty themselves in the wind of the graveyard’s cool breeze.
“Mother, he thought, this can’t be so, first Morty, then you, then Nikki, now Drenka. There’s nothing on this earth that keeps its promise.”
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
The Japanese took Sabbath’s hero of a brother during the war. Depression killed his mother and father; it took their bodies a couple of decades to catch up. Insanity claimed Sabbath and his first wife. Drink and resentment destroyed the second. Arthritis robbed him of his art, his first wife couldn’t deal with how good of an actor she could be, cancer destroyed his partner in perversion Drenka, and finally, old age took his sex appeal which means he can no longer seduce young damaged women, the only thing he was living for. So why doesn’t Sabbath just kill himself?
It couldn't have ended otherwise. Final proof that life is perfect. Knows where it’s going every inch of the way. No human life must not be extinguished. No one could come up with anything like it again.
Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater
Why would he kill himself? Everything he hates is here. Everything that he loves is here. He is using the only ability that the human species is unparalleled at. The ability to play pretend and make-believe. There are some that are lucky, the mystics like Plato who see the vision of the cave and can reverse-engineer it all to make sense. Then there are the logicians like Aristotle who arrive at Plato’s vision through the hard process of deduction and reasoning. Having analyzed his entire family, himself, Jewish everything, and Newark more than anyone as anything (Roth The Author, Roth As An Author in His Books, Roth imitating his alias Nathan Zuckerman who is imitating Roth, Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath) and tearing through all the possible psychological, sociological, financial, historical reasons of why anyone would do anything…..the only answer that can even encompass his probing is that it was all for fun.
The drama that is created through human lives moving through the universe is not a bug but the main feature. This one thing bends on itself it so that it can view itself in all its glory to fucked upness. God asked what am I like and our lives responded and for every Myshkin there must be a Mickey. Since Sabbath sees the world as inhabited by puppets, a perpetual motion machine started by an unmoved mover then why not be like The Judge from Blood Meridian, Mr. Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts or Kali sticking her tongue out and dancing to your heart’s content?
I read a few of his books and liked them. But when I discovered he absconded with a lovers journal and used verbatim- he lost me as a fan - but he still has a wit.