Consciousness and the Novel

by David Lodge

  She has black, black hair, glossy but ever so slightly coarse. And she’s big. She’s a big woman. The silk blouse is unbuttoned to the third button, and so you see she has powerful, beautiful breasts. You see the cleavage immediately. And you see she knows it.

  Because, as well as being a professor, David Kepesh enjoys a certain modest celebrity as a cultural critic on public TV and radio, his course attracts a generous quota of nubile young women, but in the era of Political Correctness, and specifically since the Sexual Harassment Hotline number was posted outside his office door by an anonymous hand in the mid-1980s, Kepesh has learned to be cautious. He never makes a pass until the course is over, grades have been awarded, and he is no longer in loco parentis; then he invites the students to a party at his apartment, where by the end of the evening one of them is sure to share his bed, curiosity and the glamour of his status overcoming any queasiness they might feel about his sagging flesh. After all, “many of these girls have been having sex since they were fourteen” and it is no big deal to them. Consuela is sexually experienced, but she is more old-fashioned than the other girls, more mature and more serious, so it takes Kepesh a little longer to get her into bed. Just as she genuinely seeks to learn from him the secret of how to really appreciate high culture, so he makes her conscious of her own beauty by the strength of his desire; he makes her into a work of art for her own enjoyment. Nevertheless the cultural initiation has to precede and legitimise the sexual, as Kepesh cynically notes. She won’t sleep with him until he has shown her his Velázquez reproductions and let her hold his precious Kafka manuscript and taken her to the theatre and played classical music to her.

  All this talk! I show her Kafka, Velázquez . . . why does one do this? Well, you have to do something. These are the veils of the dance. Don’t confuse it with seduction. This is not seduction. What you’re disguising is the thing that got you there, the pure lust . . . You know you want it and you know you’re going to do it and nothing is going to stop you. Nothing is going to be said here that’s going to change anything . . . I want to fuck this girl and yes, I’ll have to put up with some sort of veiling, but it’s a means to an end.

  In spite of this disclaimer, Kepesh’s account of himself often reminds one of arch seducers in earlier literature, like Johannes, the callous but eloquent author of “The Seducer’s Diary” in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, who represents the “aesthetic” attitude to life as against the “ethical,” and the libertine anti-heroes of eighteenth-century fiction, such as Richardson’s Lovelace and Laclos’s Valmont, for whom seduction was a form of resistance to, and critique of, the foundations of orthodox morality Historically the word “libertine” meant a free-thinker as well as a man of loose sexual conduct, and Kepesh expounds a philosophy of life that insistently identifies sexual freedom with personal freedom. “The problem is,” he says, “that emancipated manhood never has had a social spokesman or an educational system.” Kepesh’s heroes are the great mythical and historical philanderers, the lords of misrule: Don Juan, Casanova, Thomas Morton (who presided over the pagan orgies of Merrymount that scandalised the Puritans of New England and excited the imagination of Hawthorne), and, in modern times, Henry Miller.

  “Pleasure is our subject,” he declares, like one of Browning’s expansive monologists. “How to be serious over a lifetime about one’s modest, private pleasures.” He describes the sexual starvation of his adolescence and early adulthood in the 1940s and 1950s, when “sex had to be struggled for, against the values, if not the will of the girl.” All that changed in the sixties, and Kepesh honours the memory of the promiscuous coeds in his classes who helped create the permissive society and welcomed him into it, “a generation drawing their conclusions from their cunts about the nature of experience and the delights of the world.” His wife (he married in his twenties, “marrying and having a child seemed, in ’56, the natural thing even for me to do”) threw him out when she discovered what he was up to with these self-styled Gutter Girls, but he is quite unrepentant about that, because marriage too is the enemy of pleasure: “the nature of ordinary marriage is no less suffocating to the virile heterosexual . . . than it is to the gay or the lesbian.” (Though now even gays and lesbians want to marry, a form of erotic suicide that Kepesh shakes his head over.) He has a son, Kenny, now forty-two, who has never forgiven his father for walking out on the nuclear family, and upbraids him for his selfish, immature behaviour: “Seducing defenseless students, pursuing one’s sexual interests at the expense of everyone else—that’s so very necessary, is it? No, necessity is staying in a difficult marriage and meeting the responsibilities of an adult.” Kepesh can shrug off the criticism because Kenny is tired of his own marriage and is having an affair with another woman. He bores Kepesh with his scruples about deserting his children, and excites his derision by planning to divorce and remarry into an even more suffocating family scene. “Oh boy, the little prison that is his current marriage he is about to hand in for a maximum-security facility. Headed once again straight for the slammer.”

  There is a puzzle about Kenny’s appearance in the story. Kepesh never names his wife in this book, but says that he had just “the one marriage,” so Kenny’s mother must be Helen, whom Kepesh marries in The Professor of Desire. But they don’t have a child in that novel, though they talk about having one and wonder whether it would have saved their marriage. And Helen does not “throw out” Kepesh because of his philandering—she walks out on him, runs off to the Far East where she had lovers in the past, and gets into trouble from which he has to rescue her. He brings her back to America but soon afterwards they divorce, after some three years of marriage. Some years later, when he has been rescued from a long period of depression and loss of libido by a rather saintly woman called Claire, Helen remarries.

  It is hard to know what to make of these anomalies. Roth must be aware of them, and know that many of his readers will notice them. One can see why he wanted to use the “professor of desire” as the mouthpiece for an eloquent, disturbing apologia for the libertine life. David Kepesh, it will be remembered, in that earlier novel dreads the prison-house of marriage, or any monogamous faithful relationship. He silently apostrophises the good, comely, loving Claire, thus: “Oh, innocent beloved, you fail to understand and I can’t tell you. I can’t say it, not tonight, but within a year my passion will be dead. Already it is dying and there is nothing I can do to save it . . . Toward the flesh upon which I have been grafted and nurtured back toward something like mastery over my life, I will be without desire.” He starts to write a lecture, imitating Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” to introduce a course on erotic literature and to “disclose the undisclosable—the story of the professor’s desire.” It is a private exercise; he never gives the course or the lecture. One might say that The Dying Animal is the belated completion of that project. But the discontinuity between the two novels remains a puzzle, on which that amusing hommage to Gogol and Kafka, The Breast, throws no light. Read independently, each novel is written in the code of realistic fiction, creating a consistent illusion of life, with no metafictional frame-breaking. Put together, they generate distracting aporias. Perhaps Roth thought that was a small price to pay for effects that were more important. The character of Kenny was created, one presumes, to offer some resistance to the libertine philosophy of life—though he is made to seem such a weak and ineffectual figure that his criticisms don’t carry much weight. Even the unnamed interlocutor dismisses him. “He doesn’t get anything? He must. He is by no means stupid . . . He is? Well, perhaps so. You’re probably right.” The real challenge to Kepesh’s libertinism (and the source of real tension in the book) is revealed by Kepesh himself as he unfolds the story of his relationship with Consuela.

  That challenge is simply a heightened awareness of his own mortality. It is David Kepesh’s fate, rather than his good fortune, to possess a supremely beautiful young woman when himself on the threshold of old age, so that his enjoyment of her is always troubl
ed by anxiety. It is not an ordinary anxiety about sexual potency, which for the time being he can rely on, but a more existential dread about his ability to continue to possess the object of his desire, and it afflicts him from the very first sexual encounter between them. “The jealousy. The uncertainty. The fear of losing her, even while on top of her. Obsessions that in all my varied experience I had never known before. With Consuela as with no one else, the siphoning off of confidence was almost instantaneous.” Consuela’s vitality and beauty make him feel his own age on his pulses. “You feel excruciatingly how old you are, but in a new way.” He can imagine all too easily how some cocksure young man is going to steal her away from him because he was once such a young man himself.

  Part of Consuela’s fascination for Kepesh is that she is socially and culturally a foreigner to him: bourgeois, Latin, Catholic, devoted to her family, and intending to make a conventional marriage herself one day. The old-fashioned respectability of her social self contrasts excitingly with her limitless capacity for sensuality, just as her conservative tailored outfits cover “nearly pornographic” underwear. There is a comical moment when, on first agreeing to go to bed with this ageing roué, she tells him solemnly “I can never be your wife,” and he says “Agreed” but silently reflects, “Who was asking her to be my wife? Who raised the question? . . . I merely touch her ass and she tells me she can’t be my wife? I didn’t know such girls continued to exist.”

  Their relationship has no ordinary social dimension because they belong to different social worlds. It exists only in the erotic space of his apartment, where she visits him from time to time. She does not like to be seen in public with him for fear of appearing in gossip columns, and he shrinks from confrontation with the virile young Cubans in her circle whom he imagines as her suitors. Indeed, their affair is abruptly terminated by an angry Consuela when, for that very reason, he fails to turn up at her graduation party. To Consuela this signifies an arrogant indifference to her happiness, but really it is a failure of nerve. He is even jealous of her past lovers. When she tells him of the adolescent admirer whose odd and only desire was to watch her menstruating, and how she satisfied it, nothing will satisfy Kepesh but that she grants him the same privilege, and then he out-transgresses his phantom rival by licking the blood from her flesh.

  It is rather shocking to be told that, while this affair was going on, Kepesh was having another sexual relationship of a more comfortable and less intense kind with Carolyn, one of the original Gutter Girls whom he met again by chance—now a successful professional woman, twice divorced, somewhat heavier around the hips but still attractive, and always up for some recreational sex when she flies in from one of her business trips. This convenient arrangement is jeopardised when Carolyn finds Consuela’s bloody tampon in Kepesh’s bathroom trash can. Without guessing exactly what it signifies, she suspects he has been cheating, and furiously upbraids him:

  “You have everything as you want as you want it—fucking like ours outside of domesticity and outside of romance—and then you do this. There aren’t many like me, David. I have an interest in what you’re interested in . . . Harmonious hedonism. I am one in a million, idiot. So how could you possibly do this?”

  The message is clear: Kepesh is betraying his own libertine philosophy by the obsessive nature of his infatuation with Consuela. He does not deny it, but lies his way coolly out of the crisis. Carolyn is appeased. “Fortunately she did not leave me when I most needed her. She left only later, and at my request,” he chillingly comments. Kepesh remarks that his son’s conduct is governed by his fear of being called selfish; he himself has no such qualms.

  Roth illustrates Kepesh’s view of human sexuality with two remarkable descriptions of modern paintings. His contention that marriage, or any exclusive lasting sexual relationship, is incompatible with erotic satisfaction, because passion is by its nature ephemeral, is epitomised for him by Stanley Spencer’s celebrated double nude portrait of himself and his wife, which he saw in London’s Tate Gallery:

  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 . . . Neither is happy. There is a heavy past clinging to the present . . . At the edge of a table, in the immediate foreground of the picture, are two pieces of meat, a large leg of lamb and a single small chop. The raw meat is rendered with the same uncharitable candor as the sagging breasts and the pendant, unaroused prick displayed only inches back from the uncooked food. You could be looking through the butcher’s window, not just at the meat but at the sexual anatomy of the married couple.

  Kepesh is right about the unhappiness but, as it happens, wrong about its cause. The woman in the painting is Spencer’s second wife, Patricia Preece, and it was painted two months before their marriage in 1937, after Spencer had split with his first wife, Hilda, whom he married in 1925. Preece cast a strange and sinister spell over Spencer. She was a lesbian who was in a long-term relationship with another woman when she met him, and remained in it. She refused to have sex with Spencer both before and after their marriage, in spite of taking both money and property from the infatuated artist. The uncooked joint is usually interpreted as a symbol of non-consummation. It certainly doesn’t signify the stale familiarity of marital sex. As there is no textual hint to the contrary, we must assume that it is not only David Kepesh but also his creator who has jumped to the wrong conclusion. The mistake doesn’t really matter in terms of the fictional story, but it is a reminder that there are more ways than one of making oneself sexually miserable.

  The other painting is Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (Le Grand Nu) of 1919, a postcard reproduction of which Consuela sends to Kepesh some time after the end of their affair. It took him three years to get over that separation, three years overshadowed by depression and a raging jealousy that only music and pornographic fantasising could temporarily assuage. Even so the postcard—the picture rather than the banal message scrawled on its back—tempts him to reply,

  which I believed I was being invited to do by the cylindrical stalk of a waist, the wide pelvic span, and the gently curving thighs, by that patch of flame that is the hair that marks the spot where she is forked . . . A nude whose breasts, full and canting a bit to the side, might well have been modelled on [Consuela’s] own . . . 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.

  The painting is reproduced on the dust jacket of The Dying Animal, so readers may appreciate the exactness of Kepesh’s description, especially the brilliantly observed “velvety black abyss” under the model’s hips that reminds him of death.

  Here we come to the heart of the matter. According to Kepesh’s libertine credo:

  “Only when you fuck . . . are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself . . . Sex isn’t just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death. Don’t forget death. Don’t ever forget it. Yes, sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater?”

  The anonymous narratee evidently can’t think of one, for no reply from him is implied. The question remains rhetorical. But one possible answer is of course love, the love of which Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

  Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Love does not come to an end.

  It does not come to an end because, the hope of personal immortality aside, if you give your self to another, unconditionally, in love, then death cannot absolutely take it away. Regarding the carved figures of husband and wife on a medieval tomb, the man’s han
d withdrawn from his gauntlet to grasp his wife’s, Philip Larkin, most agnostic of poets, reflects:

  The stone fidelity

  They hardly meant has come to be

  Their final blazon, and to prove

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  (“An Arundel Tomb”)

  Love in this large sense is agape rather than eros, but the two are not incompatible in romantic love, or even in the kind of obsessive, transgressive fixation Kepesh has on the person of Consuela. His friend George O’Hearn perceives this danger and counsels him not to respond to the postcard. George himself is a libertine, though he has contrived to combine a life of sexual adventure with marriage, thanks to a tolerant or perhaps merely indifferent wife. He acts as Kepesh’s worldly confessor, listens to the latter’s account of his affair with Consuela, and urges him not to renew it. Otherwise, he says, it will destroy him. “‘Look,’ he told me, ‘see it as a critic, see it from a professional point of view. You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalised the aesthetic experience with this girl.’” George tells Kepesh he crossed a dangerous threshold when he licked the girl’s blood: “‘I’m not against it because it’s disgusting. I’m against it because it’s falling in love . . . People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole . . . I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you.’” Kepesh takes his advice, and does not respond to the postcard.

  Some years later, a few months in fact before the time of the story’s telling, George has a stroke and dies. Kepesh watches his last hours of life. Diapered against incontinence, unable to speak, George draws on unsuspected reserves of energy to signify his desire to embrace the people gathered around the hospital bed. He kisses his children on the mouth, and likewise the astonished Kepesh. He kisses his wife, and then begins to fumble with her clothing in a grotesque, yet to Kepesh oddly touching, attempt to undress her. “Yes, that was something, wasn’t it?” his wife comments drily to Kepesh afterwards. “I wonder who it is he thought I was.” Whether George’s deathbed tableau is sublime or ridiculous, a vindication of or a judgement on his life, remains ambiguous.