“There's No Remaking Reality”: Roth and the Embodied Human Condition in <em>Everyman</em>

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: SALVATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITIONYou're on Earth, there's no cure for that!-Beckett 37The title of Roth's Everyman refers to fifteenth-century morality play of same name. Commenting on play, Roth has stated the theme is always salvation [...]. The moral was always 'Work hard get into Heaven.' 'Be a good Christian or go to hell' (Krasnik 28). Despite Roth's tongue-in-cheek terseness, his comment accords with following, more measured critical response to play:Despite its several severe warnings, Everyman is essentially reassuring in its estimation of man's chances for salvation. [. . .] The universe of Everyman in general is one thoroughly under control of a benevolent deity who sees to it that normal, repentant sinner has more than a fair chance to save himself [...]. (Kaula 10-11)Importantly, Roth's caustic summation of play hints that his version of Everyman will deviate from thematic motif of Christian salvation. Thus, although Roth's unnamed protagonist (from here on called Everyman) is a strident atheist,1 it is desolate poignancy of Roth's prose that best intimates that Everyman's world lacks any religious consolation. This pathos is brought into sharp relief in novel's opening pages, during Everyman's sparsely attended funeral, in which dazed bewilderment of his ex-wife (Phoebe), abject recruitment duties which are forced upon his daughter (Nancy), opaque, spasmodic rage of his estranged son (Lonny), form a nexus of human relations which attest to sadness, irresolution messiness of human existence:When asked by Nancy if she wanted to say anything, Phoebe shook her head but then went ahead to speak in a soft voice, her speech faintly slurred. It's just so hard to believe, I keep thinking of him swimming bay-that's all. I just keep seeing him swimming bay. [. . .] Nancy [. . .] placed phone calls to those who'd showed up so that mourners wouldn't consist of just her mother, herself, his brother sister-in-law. (1-2)Lonny [. . .] stepped up to grave first. But once he'd taken a clod of dirt in hand, his entire body began to tremble quake, it looked as though he were on edge of violently regurgitating. He was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn't antagonism but that his antagonism denied him means to release. (13)In Everyman, human lives seem to end pitifully, inspiring neither comfort nor resolution for bereaved. Indeed, psychological ambience of whole novel suggests that people have an implicit awareness that they are stranded in a world without a metaphysical horizon-a world, in other words, that is paradigmatically separated from salvation God (the dilapidated Jewish cemetery in which funeral takes place arguably symbolizes decay of this religious sentiment [1]). Unsurprisingly, then, after Everyman's funeral, reader is given yet another distinct impression of an irresolute anticlimactic world, in which even most significant events end with a bang but a whimper (The Hollow Men 5.98 82): That was end. No special point had been made. [. . .] In a matter of minutes, everybody had walked away-wearily tearfully walked away from our species' least favorite activity-and he [Everyman] was left behind (14-15). With wry humor concision, phrase and he was left behind confirms how Roth's atheism is also aligned with a materialistic emphasis upon human body. In Roth's universe, funerals do not end with souls being whisked up to heaven: they instead end with bodies that define our subjectivity being left in isolation to rot underground. The funeral scene in Everyman thus intensifies continues Roth's materialistic reading of religious rites2 by focusing on locus of materiality that, in Roth's view, is constitutive of human subjectivity-the body.3DEATH IN THE BODY: ROTH'S OBJECTION TO A KEATSIAN UNDERSTANDING OF DEATHSo far I've explored how Roth's novel is critical of Christian cosmology expressed in medieval play Everyman. …