A Moral Education: in Praise of Filth - Garth Greenwell

20/03/2023, 13:21 The Yale Review | Garth Greenwell: "A Moral Education"
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A Moral Education
In praise of filth
Garth Greenwell
Milena Mihaylova, Silence Creative Commons
H
I: THE DILEMMA
of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the
ERE’S A WAY
other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for,
and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or
politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to
truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite
far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Within the
small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic it has ever
been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter,
our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or
films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience
construed as ever more vulnerable. We have a sense that the most important questions we
can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to
https://yalereview.org/article/garth-greenwell-philip-roth 1/21
what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel
compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be protected from
responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the
artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to
disregard the claims of others. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate,
their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral
judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort
them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. These responses sometimes seem to me
an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind
of paranoia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our personal righteousness
in our response to art.
Such responses can sometimes place me in what seems an antipathetic relationship to my

students as they fail to respond as I wish they would to books that I love. But this is a false
antipathy, or a misplaced one; really my students and I share the most important values, and
our visions of a desirable world, and even of the place of art within it, overlap far more than
they diverge. When I was beginning my literary education in the 1990s, the pendulum
hovered close to the other pole; at least among a certain cadre of poets and literary scholars,
maybe in response to moralistic crusades of the ’70s and ’80s, a doctrine of ars gratia artis
reigned. I chafed against that, too. To treat art as purely aesthetic, a question merely of
formal exploration and sensuous experience, is one way to preempt the claims of moralism,
as is treating art as exclusively play, a stage for invention and virtuosity. (To be clear, I think
art can be all these things, all of them valuable.) Another, more extreme claim for the
freedom of art is articulated in Maggie Nelson’s “Art Song,” which entertains a conception of
art as “a metabolic activity, a ‘way of churning the world.’” In my darker moments I
sometimes think it’s true that art is simply a biological process, shorn of significance; but I’m
not sure it’s a truth I can live with, a story to tell about myself that I can bear. Certainly it’s
not an adequate account of my experience of art, of what I would continue to call “great” art,
though greatness is another idea called into question in our anti-exceptionalist moment.
Maybe it’s a delusion to think that the central activity of my life, art making, has more
significance than digestion; maybe it’s a saving delusion. One reason a particular strain of our
current moralism—the strain that would subject artists to tests of acceptability, that says we
shouldn’t consume art made by bad people—is so dismaying is that it sees works of art as
endlessly fungible, just another commodity on the market. There’s so much art available to
us, this reasoning goes; there’s nothing Lolita or The Enigma of Arrival or Wise Blood might
offer that we can’t find in a writer less problematic than Nabokov or Naipaul or O’Connor.
But a profound experience of art is an experience of something like love, which is to say of
singularity; when you’ve had a profound encounter with Giovanni’s Room, say, or a portrait
by Alice Neel, you can’t imagine swapping it out for something more conveniently affirming
of social values we cherish. This affinity is more mysterious than evaluation or ranking or
canon-formation; it seems to me analogous to other relationships we form. The love I feel for
my partner or my friends isn’t the result of comparative evaluation, it isn’t founded on a
claim that of all candidates I’ve judged them worthiest. The question of comparison doesn’t
enter; they are simply themselves, incommensurate, irreplaceable. My life wouldn’t be my
life without them, as my life wouldn’t be my life without any number of artists who failed, in
various ways large and small, to be excellent outside their art.
The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, we’ve

made a mistake about what moral engagement is, and so
what art’s role in it might be.
The value I find in the art I love seems different from and greater than formal experiment or
technical display, greater than play, certainly greater than “metabolic churning.” Art has a
value that seems to me moral, and, like my students, like much of what we’ve taken to calling
The Discourse, with its purity tests and cancelations, its groupthink and dismissal, I want to
think of art making as an activity with moral implications. More, I want to place it at the
heart of one way of striving toward a moral life, by which I mean at the heart of our attempt
to live flourishingly with others, or at least bearably and with minimal harm. The problem is
that, in much of our discussion of art, I think we’ve made a mistake about what moral
engagement is, and so what art’s role in it might be. In much of our commentary, there’s a
desire for art to be exemplary, to present a world the moral valence of which, whether
positive or negative, is easily legible; there’s a desire for the work of art to provide an index of
judgment clearly predicated on values the reader can approve. We want the work to give us a
place to stand that grants access to righteousness, a place from which to judge a work or its
characters. But more and more I question the role of this kind of judgment in moral life. I
don’t mean the constant, shifting, provisional evaluations we make moment-to-moment, the
moral echolocation by which we position ourselves and our actions. I mean the act of coming
to judgment, to a verdict: of assigning someone a durable or even permanent moral status.
This is sometimes necessary, of course, though maybe less often than we suspect; it’s what
we do, hopefully with some seriousness, in courts of law, and what we do sometimes
flippantly, recklessly, in social media campaigns for de-platforming and cancelation. The
seriousness of our verdicts depends in large part on the density of their contextualization;
and, since the context of a human life is so nearly depthless and made up of such
incommensurable elements, ideally righteous judgment is impossible. To be bearable, to be
plausibly adequate, even our imperfect, sublunary judgments require an immense amount of
work; the idea that we might carry that work out on social media is one of the genuinely
repulsive aspects of our moment. I am immensely grateful, every day, that judging others in
this way is not my job. The best thing about being a novelist, in fact, is that my job is actively
to resist coming to such judgment. Plausibly adequate verdicts may be a necessary feature of
the real world, but they are never necessary in matters of art.
When we place this kind of definitive moral judgment at the heart of our engagement with
others, assigning a person or a work a status as problematic or righteous, we make a mistake
about what a moral relationship to another is, I think. If a moral relationship means to live
with or beside another in such a way as to recognize the value of their life as being equal to
and independent of our own—that impossible, necessary Kantian standard—then passing
judgment is the abrogation of that relationship: it destroys the reciprocity necessary for
moral relation, it establishes a hierarchy utterly corrosive of it. This is another reason to reject
the idea that we should only consume art made by good people: Who am I to judge the
goodness of another? (For all the ravages of Calvinism in America, one misses a sense of the
inscrutability of election.) Coming to judgment in this way is anathema to the novelist

because the task of art isn’t to judge, but to know, to observe, to carry out research into the
human—and passing judgment is a radically impoverished form of knowledge. An important
part of the moral work of art is to teach us how much richer and more capacious our
engagement with others can be.
This essay is an attempt to clarify my sense of what the relationship between art and morality
might be, since the loudest accounts of that relationship in our moment seem to me
inadequate. To help think that through, I want to consider how a book that flouts all our
pieties about decency and responsibility, about sociality and moral uplift, a novel about a
rancidly obscene, sexually voracious, inveterately grieving puppeteer—Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s
Theater, probably the filthiest major American novel I know—seems to me as powerful an
example of morally engaged art as English-language literature can offer. More, I want to test
my intuition that it is precisely the book’s obscenity, its determination to shock and affront,
to “let the repellent in” (“fuck the laudable ideologies,” cries its hero), that, far from
hindering the moral work it does, is central to that work. If the great moral question is how
to live bearably with others, Sabbath’s Theater pursues an answer through the very things that
make the novel’s protagonist morally repulsive—the very things that, by our current
standards of what is acceptable in art, should place the novel beyond our regard. A moral
education depends not on condemning or averting our gaze from filth, the novel suggests,
but on diving wholeheartedly into it.
FILTH 1: AN ETYMOLOGY
AT THE CENTER of Roth’s novel, which chronicles three days in the breakdown of Mickey
Sabbath, a disgraced, arthritic, sixty-four-year-old puppeteer, is Sabbath’s grief for the loss of
Drenka Balich, the married Croatian innkeeper with whom he had a thirteen-year affair until
her death, of a ferociously swift cancer, six months before the novel’s present action begins. If
this present-day timeline pulls the novel forward, however, the bulk of the narrative is
entirely unmoored in time, roaming over Sabbath’s past with special attention to his
relationships with women: the prostitutes who provided his sexual initiation as an adolescent
in the merchant marines; his first wife, whose disappearance haunts him; the undergraduate
whose recording of their phone sex has made him a pariah; his current, despised wife,
Roseanna, a recovering alcoholic who is bracing herself to separate from him. Expelled from
his home, Sabbath returns to the landscapes of his past: New York City and, in the book’s
astonishing final movement, the Jersey Shore, where his idyllic childhood, what he
characterizes as an experience of endlessness, was shattered by his beloved brother’s death in
World War II. The novel is a fulfillment of currents already present in Roth’s work—Sabbath
is a Portnoy without the complaint, all erotic id without any tortured compulsion to be good
—and also it represents something entirely new. It has a formal freedom and linguistic
virtuosity unmatched in his earlier books, and a profundity in grappling with the absolutes
of existence—sex, love, need, the urge to make, the irrevocability of death and the
inescapability of grief—I’m not sure Roth ever achieved again. It is also, maybe it doesn’t
quite go without saying, very, very funny.
A source of both the humor and the profundity is how seriously the book takes obscenity and
the desire that fuels it. Here’s a sentence from very early on:
Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of
exuberant, which is itself ex plus uberare, to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone
in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an
unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as
Juno herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by
the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.
The audacity of the sentence lies in the huge tonal registers it crosses: from the high literary
“uberous,” with the pedantic, scholarly excursus into Latin, and the even higher reference to
myth and Tintoretto, to the vertiginous drop to the carnal in “cunt,” to the truly shocking,
wildly inappropriate exit from scene with the memory of his mother. The exit is given an
amazing adjectival flourish with “late little mother,” swooping from Drenka’s pornographic
exclamation to an affect we conventionally take as the opposite of sexual: that of filial
devotion. The “little” is wonderful: English doesn’t have ready access to diminutives, a
temperature that many other languages can avail themselves of, like Spanish and Bulgarian
and German and Yiddish, which is the immediate referent here; suddenly we are in the
linguistic world of Sabbath’s childhood, hearing an echo of his father’s immigrant past.
Shock is a characteristic aesthetic maneuver in Sabbath’s Theater, but Roth avoids the
deadening effect that usually accompanies repeated shocks by distributing their weight in
unexpected ways. The sudden turn of this sentence—turn is too pale a word: the sudden
whipping of the sentence, the sudden lash—comes not with “cunt” but with the last three
words: bizarrely, it is not “I feel it deep in my cunt” but “late little mother” that seems
obscene. This feels electrically fresh to me. The effect is only strengthened with greater
familiarity with the novel, in which “cunt” appears dozens of times, and so loses its sense of
taboo. It’s a word Roth loves, both for its visceral force and also, I think, for its history. Roth
isn’t often thought of as a writer who lingers over etymologies, but he should be—that’s
another reason this sentence is instructive—and his use of “cunt” is redolent with the history
of the word, a history that goes hand in hand with that of the word quaint, which was its
synonym in Middle English. The word runs through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which Roth
first encountered in high school and lines from which he could still recite late in life. “The
Miller’s Tale” can read like a meditation on queynte, which means, as a noun, “cunt,” and also,
as an adjective, “intricate,” “elegant,” “pleasant”; also “mysterious,” “queer.” This history
encapsulates something important in the relationship between Drenka and Sabbath, which is
predicated on sex, the wilder the better—their shenanigans allow each of them to tolerate
intolerable marriages—and also profoundly affirmative of whatever we might mean by an
ethical relationship with another. It’s hard for me to imagine that Roth didn’t have the
history of cunt/queynte in mind in this very beautiful passage, which Drenka delivers after a
threesome Sabbath has arranged with Christa, a much younger woman:
I find the cunt actually quite beautiful. I never would have thought that looking in the
mirror. You come with your shame to look at yourself and you look at your sexual
organs and they are not acceptable from the aesthetic perspective. But in this setting, I
can see the whole thing, and although it is a mystique that I am a part of, it’s a mystery
to me, a total mystery.
I understand “mystery” here to mean something like “possessed of a significance, a value,

that is bottomless, that can’t be measured.” Through sex, through her erotic life, Drenka
transforms shame—a sense that the meaning of her body is known, fixed, finite—into
mystery, a sense of a surplus of meaning, an uncountable worth. This is an extravagant claim
to make for the work sex can do, in literature and in life; I think Roth means to make it. The
proximity of flesh and spirit is one of the animating paradoxes of sex; it seems plausible that
orgasm, that tiny replicable shattering of self, is the source of all our metaphysics. Any writer
attempting a sex scene has to manage the relationship between the horizontal axis of bodies
in space—the logistics of sexual acts—and the vertical axis sex makes available, an intimation
of something, spirit or soul, that exceeds the body. Roth is a remarkably unmetaphysical
writer, and his treatment of sex is often marked by a resolute refusal to entertain the vertical
axis; this too makes Sabbath’s Theater unique among his books. In the first passage quoted
above, transcendence is all over the sentence: sex is written into myth; Drenka is made a
goddess; she and Sabbath fuck among the stars. Five months after her agonizing death from
cancer, months he has spent in nighttime graveyard masturbation, Sabbath falls prostrate
over Drenka’s grave and cries, “You filthy, wonderful Drenka cunt!” Both the filth and the
wonder are real; the wonder proceeds from the filth. How else should we think of this, if not
as a work of love?
II: DISIDENTIFICATION
a story of moral reform; from beginning to end Sabbath does very

SABBATH’S THEATER IS NOT
bad things. Some of these are played for laughs, as when he deliberately humiliates Drenka’s
husband or spends an entire night and morning ransacking the bedroom of a friend’s
college-age daughter, searching for evidence of her erotic life. Elsewhere Sabbath is less
entertainingly repulsive. An extended sequence early in the novel’s second half concerns
Kathy Goolsbee, an undergraduate in Sabbath’s puppetry workshop, who records (without
his knowledge, as Sabbath also records it without hers) one of several phone sex sessions
they have, a recording that, perhaps accidentally, perhaps by design, makes it to the college’s
administration. (It is then appropriated by a feminist action group and played on a loop for
anyone who calls in to a local phone number, a bit of Rothian satire that raises harrowing
questions about whose exploitation of Kathy is more destructive, and whether, in a context
where everyone claims to be educating her, anyone is concerned for her well-being.) Sabbath
has made dozens of tapes of conversations with the six students with whom, over the years,
he’s had similar relationships, thinking of the recordings as testaments to a pedagogy of
liberation and as works of art. Destroying those tapes, he thinks—they are, after all, evidence
—would be “like defiling a Picasso. Because there was in these tapes a kind of art in the way
that he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of innocence.” As part of his indignant
self-defense, he places his tapes in the lineage of literary filth, alongside Réage, Miller,
Lawrence, Joyce, Cleland, and the Earl of Rochester.
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The episode with Kathy occurs five years before the primary action of Sabbath’s Theater, but it
sets in motion crucial elements of the plot: Sabbath’s disgrace and increasing penury after he
loses his teaching job; his wife Roseanna’s breakdown, subsequent recovery from alcoholism,
and increasing independence. In the book’s single scene between Sabbath and Kathy, we see
Sabbath at his worst, or close to it. Enraged at Kathy, whom he holds responsible for
Roseanna’s breakdown and apparent suicide attempt, he intends—it’s not clear how seriously
—to kill the student, who weepingly denies her guilt and begs to give Sabbath a blow job.
Beneath this scene, in a twenty-one-page footnote, Roth provides a transcript of the call
Kathy recorded, which is decidedly, cannily, not art on the order of Lawrence or Colette. One
of the challenges of writing sex is to create, using the formal resources of the novelist, some
approximation of the atmosphere of desire, in which acts and proclamations that, viewed
dispassionately, might be merely ridiculous can be transfigured by passion. In presenting a
transcript shorn of scene and verbal artfulness, banality (“Oh God. I’m going to come. /
You’re going to come?”) remains simply banal, underscoring Sabbath’s delusion that these
exchanges are either art or education. In the scene that runs above the transcript, Sabbath
alternately suspects Kathy of entrapment and entertains the possibility of accepting her
propositions, imagining the satisfaction of the act:
To peer down at her head cradled in your lap, your cock encircled by her foaming lips,
and to watch her blowing you in tears, to patiently lather that undissipated face with that
sticky confection of spit, semen, and tears, a delicate meringue icing her freckles—could
life bestow any more wonderful last thing?
Sex as vengeance and humiliation: the discomfort of the moment is deepened by the fact that
the passage is addressed (“Maestro, what would you do?”) to the memory of an old
puppeteer Sabbath met while studying in Italy, who interrogated Sabbath about his lovers
and their ages and then, in satisfaction, boasted that his own girlfriend was fifteen, though
“Of course I’ve known her since she’s twelve.” (This becomes even more discomfiting in the
light of Blake Bailey’s 2021 biography of Roth, which recounts an almost verbatim exchange
Roth had with the Czech novelist Jiří Mucha, decades before Sabbath’s Theater was
published.) It’s hard to recuperate anything redemptive—anything even morally complex—
from this vision of eros.
In his many quarrels with Roseanna, Sabbath mocks her devotion both to AA-speak and to
what she calls “the story format”: “‘But what happens with the story format,’ she went on,
oblivious not merely to his sarcasm but to the look in his eyes of someone who had taken too
many sedative pills, ‘is that you can identify.’” The question of identification has a central role
in our current debates about what art is worth our attention and the work that it should do.
The role of literature, these conversations presume, is to show us a certain kind of image of
ourselves, an image often characterized as positive or affirming or empowering. I take the
desire for representation seriously, and I take seriously the consequences of living in a culture
that doesn’t provide bearable images of oneself. My concern is that we take too prescriptive a
view of what constitutes affirmation. None of the books that gave me succor as a gay kid in
the pre-internet American South—novels by Yukio Mishima, James Baldwin, Edmund
White, André Gide—would pass muster if judged by today’s standards of positive
representation. The moral seriousness of those books, it seems to me now, lies in their refusal
of an image one might identify with in any frictionless, any merely self-comforting way.
Roth’s novel does something similar, I think: Sabbath is magnetic, fascinating, irresistible; it
is impossible to look away from him. But he is not, in the simplistic, flat sense often invoked
in our discussions of literature, sympathetic. Roth’s novel stands distinct from much of
recent American narrative practice in its model of narrative as disidentification, in the way
Sabbath constantly rejects our sympathy, throwing up roadblocks to identification, rubbing
his repulsiveness in our face.
But the novel wouldn’t be so discomfiting if this were all it did. Sabbath can reject our
sympathy only once the novel has tempted us into it; Roth invites us to condemn Sabbath
only to push us past our condemnation. Roth’s manipulation of these responses—the way he
shows Sabbath as alternately repulsive and pitiable, entertaining and horrifying, destructive
and grievously wounded—is key to the novel’s moral force. When he first arrives in New
York, angling to be taken in by a friend, Sabbath finds himself weeping uncontrollably over
his various losses, while also telling himself he’s performing grief as an elaborate
manipulation. “Sabbath didn’t believe a word he said and hadn’t for years.…True lives
belonged to others, or so others believed.” And yet, as Sabbath breaks down repeatedly, even
he begins to be convinced: “He was crying now the way anyone cries who has had it. There
was passion in his crying—terror, great sadness, and defeat.” And then, after a paragraph
break: “Or was there?” In the way the scene makes these turns again and again, dizzyingly
convincing us of sincerity and professing insincerity, it is a microcosm of the entire novel.
Finally, Sabbath is as unsure as we are of the moral status of his tears. Perhaps, he thinks, his
weeping is less “to be chalked up to guile than to the fact that the inner reason for his being—
whatever the hell that might be, perhaps guile itself—had ceased to exist.” The story Sabbath
has told about himself, told to himself, proves inadequate; the meaning he had considered
fixed gives way to mystery. If this is a novel of (partial, constantly backsliding) moral
education, it begins and ends in bewilderment.
FILTH 2: DIRTY THOUGHTS
DRENKA IS THE FULLEST,richest realization of one of Roth’s female character types: the eager,
indulgent lover. Roseanna, for the first half of the novel, seems like a strikingly thin
embodiment of another: the long-suffering, long-suffered, shrewish wife. One of the
marvels of the novel is how, over the book’s second half, both the reader’s and Sabbath’s
vision of Roseanna is sharpened, deepened, as she emerges into a complexity the book’s first
half denied her. The catalyst for this transformation—a transformation not of Roseanna, but
of Sabbath’s understanding of her—is a peculiarly charged species of fiction: sexual fantasy.
Sabbath is nominally a puppeteer, but the kind of artist he most resembles is a novelist—a
novelist, it might be said, of a Rothian sort. Like any good writer he’s an alert perceiver, “ever
vigilant to all stimuli”; he’s also equipped with a remarkable ability to use his observations to
construct complex inner lives. Take for example Michelle Cowan, a rich and ambivalent
minor character, electrically vivid though she appears in a single scene. Sabbath is dazzled by
her; as her houseguest he watches her with an attention whetted by appetite but not,
perhaps, reducible to it, observing her so intently that he times her hot flashes. He loves her
laugh, a sound that he endows with a novelistically dense inner life:
The laugh said that she was sick of staying, sick of plotting leaving, sick of unsatisfied
dreams, sick of satisfied dreams, sick of adapting, sick of not adapting, sick of just about
everything except existing. Exulting in existing while being sick of everything—that’s
what was in that laugh! A semidefeated, semiamused, semiaggrieved, semiamazed,
seminegative, hilarious big laugh.
The novel is exquisitely ambivalent on the question of whether Sabbath’s portrait of Michelle
is right. He flirts with her throughout dinner, even playing footsie with her—he thinks—
throughout the meal (the foot turns out to be her husband’s), and later, when she shows up
at his door in a kimono (after Sabbath has gone on a racist tirade against the Japanese, whom
he holds accountable for his brother’s death), it’s not at all clear what she’s after. Sabbath
propositions her, and she puts him off, seeming to make a date for several days later. He
grows increasingly manic until, in a very beautiful moment, anything at all seems possible
between them: “‘Christ…’ she said and allowed her forehead to fall forward onto his. To rest
there. It was a moment unlike any he’d had all day. Week. Month. Year. He calmed down.”
But immediately after this, when Sabbath exposes himself, Roth says that Michelle recoils, a
word that suggests not a willed but a reflexive action, though what it signifies is unclear.
Shock? Alarm? Disgust? We can’t know, just as Sabbath can’t know whether the story he tells
about her is correct.
But then we can never know whether such stories are correct; human life, human relation is
precisely not knowing. Fiction is all we can have. In his next novel, American Pastoral (1997),
Roth goes even further: “Getting people right is not what living is all about anyway,” he
writes there. “It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and
wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.” So maybe it doesn’t
matter if Sabbath is right, or maybe what matters more is the richness with which he
imagines the lives of others, the extent to which what he imagines is excessive is any simply
self-serving fantasy. This is the case with Michelle, I think: he endows her with a complexity,
a self-division (“semidefeated, semiamused, semiaggrieved, semiamazed, seminegative”) that
exceeds, that may in fact impede, any version of her that would merely serve his own
interests. Maybe what matters, in our dealings with others, is not whether what we imagine
is fiction or reality, but whether it is an easy or a demanding fiction, I mean whether it is easy
on ourselves or hard, whether it serves self-flattery or demands self-correction.
For decades Sabbath has been telling himself a self-serving story about his wife. The reader’s
sense of her begins to change in a long flashback of Sabbath visiting her in the hospital,
where she is recovering from her breakdown. She has asked him to bring letters her father
wrote to her when she was a child, in the year he committed suicide. Against her stated
wishes, Sabbath reads these letters, as well as a journal she has left unguarded in her room.
The novel reproduces all of these texts, which are excruciating to read—the father’s letters
especially, with their banality, their cruelty, their terrible need—and which fundamentally
and durably revise our sense of Roseanna, of what she has been through and what resilience
she has required. “She came by her pain honestly,” one of her fellow patients tells Sabbath.
Opening her journals, Sabbath expects to read about himself; in the simplistic, flattening
story he has told himself about her, he is the malignant defining feature of her life, the grand
antagonist. Instead, he finds that he is never mentioned. “What a bother we are to one
another,” he muses, “while actually nonexistent to one another, unreal specters compared to
whoever originally sabotaged the sacred trust.”
Only at the very end of the novel does Sabbath fully realize how profoundly ignorant he is of
his wife; from a story whose meaning he has long exhausted, she becomes an utter mystery.
Having become custodian of a box of his brother’s things, each of them a banal, precious
reminder of a world that seemed whole, Sabbath finds that he cannot kill himself, as he had
imagined doing. Instead, he returns home and sits in his car at the bottom of his driveway,
entertaining the possibility of reconciling with his wife. His thoughts take the form of an
elaborate fantasy, a meticulous imagining of Roseanna masturbating. The equation of
marriage with erotic death is a recurring theme in the novel—marital intercourse is the one
taboo he resists breaking—but now he imagines her in their bed, reading, and then distracted
from her reading as she begins to play with herself. Sabbath’s fiction is precise, methodical,
with the kind of exact logistical description we expect from Roth: “Circular movement of the
fingers, and soon the pelvis in a circular movement, too. Middle finger on the button—not
the tip of the finger, the ball of the finger.” But he doesn’t imagine merely as a voyeur; he
enters into Roseanna’s experience, with intimacy and density of texture: “It changes what she
feels when she introduces her finger into her cunt—on the button it’s very precise, but with
the finger in her cunt the feeling is distributed, and that’s what she wants: the distribution of
the feeling.” A virtuoso performance, Sabbath thinks; still in his car, still at the bottom of the
driveway, he applauds and cheers. “His wife. He’d forgotten all about her. Twelve, fifteen
years since she let me watch. What would it be like to fuck Roseanna?”
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This passage might give us pause. Surely there’s something objectionable here, an
infringement on Roseanna’s privacy, even a violation—a reduction of her to a sexual object,
an appropriation of her experience in a fantasy that must be essentially, if not quite literally,
masturbatory for Sabbath. “What would it be like to fuck Roseanna?” is not exactly, a certain
kind of argument might run, a sign of profound moral engagement with another person. But
what if it is? It seems at least plausible to view it generously, and I find myself wanting to
defend Sabbath, to argue that there’s something morally ample in imagining Roseanna in the
fullness of her sexuality, and in an experience in which she exists for herself, bringing about
her own pleasure, an image of intrinsic, non-instrumental value. There’s something moving,
I want to argue, in seeing Sabbath rediscover his spouse as an erotic being. But defending
Sabbath isn’t the point; it may be as much a trap as condemning him, since it presumes
precisely the idea the experience of the novel contests: that Sabbath possesses a moral status
we can fix. What’s more, Sabbath’s sympathetic or generous view of Roseanna is short-lived.
In a characteristic move, his experience of plenitude—his reawakened interest in his wife, the
prospect of a reconciliation with home—is brutally snatched away: in a baroque, Rothian
fillip of a plot twist, he discovers that Roseanna is having playful, passionate, ecstatic sex
with Christa, the young woman Sabbath and Drenka invited into their bed. Sabbath, after
listening to them make love, turns monstrous, an embodiment of male jealousy and rage.
Roaring, he pounds on the bedroom window until it crashes in on the terrified lovers. So
much for moral education.
III: AN APOPHATIC THEORY
IN 1999, THE ROMANIAN novelist Norman Manea taught a course on Roth’s work at Bard
College. Each week, after a day in which Manea discussed one of Roth’s novels with the
students, Roth would join for questions and further discussion. According to Bailey’s
biography, the final session, on I Married a Communist (1998), was rancorous, with the
students objecting to the novel’s portrayal of women. Roth frequently found himself on the
wrong side of righteousness, hectored early in his career as an anti-Semite, and criticized
later for misogyny. The latter charge has stuck, and not without reason. I’ve argued that
Drenka and Roseanna, while recognizable Rothian feminine types, have a richness and
complexity that render them compellingly human. In certain of Roth’s other novels, female
characters can collapse into stereotype, evacuated of the mystery and depth he frequently
lavishes on his male protagonists—though Roth himself mocked this kind of criticism as
“puritanical feminism.” In I Married a Communist, the book under discussion in Manea’s
class, Eve Frame is a particularly stark example of this flattening approach to female
characters, a transparent caricature of Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, whose memoir Leaving a
Doll’s House (1996) he saw as a betrayal. Anticipating trouble, and perhaps prepared by the
previous week’s discussion of Sabbath’s Theater, Roth arrived at the final session of Manea’s
class armed with the book On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky and Daniel (1967), a collection of
documents relating to the prosecution of two writers by the Soviet regime. Roth produced
the book after a male student offered an “excruciatingly careful” comment in the class, using
it to draw a comparison between what he called the “intimidating atmosphere” of the
undergraduate seminar and the censorship and prosecution carried out by the Communist
state.
The students weren’t having it: “We don’t want to arrest you and put you on trial,” one not
unreasonably retorted. It’s striking how closely this exchange parallels debates we’re having
twenty years later, in which intellectuals committed to the classical values of liberalism, chief
among them free speech, seem as alarmed by the left’s supposed cancel culture as by the
right’s attacks on democratic institutions. How dismaying these debates are, not only because
they serve to fracture possible coalitions among people who to a very great extent share a
vision of a desirable world, but also because there is so much bad faith on all sides.
Assertions that Twitter cancelation campaigns or undergraduate seminars are equivalent to
totalitarian persecution are prima facie absurd; so are claims that cancel culture is a figment
of the right’s imagination, that social media pillorying doesn’t have real, grievous, and often
unjust consequences, or that the specter of those consequences has not had a chilling effect
on cultural life. Every artist I know is conscious of a new and mounting pressure to police
their work for potentially objectionable elements; many have abandoned projects; nearly all
have undergone what I think of as crises of relevance: a sense that the art they want to make
will fail to speak to our moment in a way that can cut through the noise of incessant,
hectoring, social-media-amplified topical debate. One longs for a lessening of that noise, for
space to recognize the validity of competing values, the need to accommodate multiple
claims.
What I want, really, is an escape from argument altogether. We need a way to think without
the kind of untrammeled assertion that characterizes public discourse, especially on social
media, which has, to the detriment of our institutions and ourselves, become public discourse.
Much of the value of art for me lies in its ability to provide a space free of such argument.
Turning from Twitter to Henry James, say—an early and enduring influence on Roth—I’m
amazed by how much more spacious thinking feels in his sentences, not for their length
exactly but for their avoidance of plain assertion, for their endless qualifications and
corrections, their syntax of scruple. We have created a public discourse in which one’s ability
to be heard depends on speaking with a certainty, a lack of nuance, a stridency utterly
inadequate to reality. When I consider debates about the relationship between art and
morality, what I long for is an apophatic theory of that relation—a theory that would allow
us to explore the moral work of art without limiting or prescribing that work, as certain
theologians attempt to develop ways to think about God without defining God in a manner
that would violate God’s freedom. What I want is a kind of syntax, which is to say a kind of
thinking, that appears more and more frequently in the final pages of Sabbath’s Theater, a
syntax of paradox and negation, which gives Roth access to a kind of affirmation utterly
unprecedented in his work—an affirmation, uniquely for this resolutely secular writer, that I
think can properly be called theological.
FILTH 3: PISSING, A THEOLOGY
IF I’M RIGHT that Sabbath’s Theater gains access to a theological dimension, it’s Sabbath’s
devotion to filth, his determination “to affront and affront and affront till there was no one
on earth unaffronted,” that provides it. Religious allusion is everywhere in the novel, much of
it of an ironic, Wildean, transvaluation-of-values kind, at least at first glance. “You must
devote yourself to fucking the way a monk devotes himself to God,” Sabbath muses early on.
The appeal of statements like this is a comedy of transgression, a blasphemous thrill. But
blasphemy is unstable; the circuit it establishes between apparently incompatible terms can
sacralize as easily at it desecrates. Roth’s novel treats sex as a kind of limit-experience, an
ultimate thing; as religious allusions pile up, the comic, ironic application of religious
concepts comes to seem less ironic. Or maybe it’s truer to say that the irony seems less
totalizing, it leaves open the possibility of earnestness. “If anything served Sabbath as an
argument for the existence of God,” the book tells us, musing on the clitoris, “it was the
thousands upon thousands of orgasms dancing on the head of that pin.” Is this an instance of
sex undermining religion, or of religion illuminating sex? As Sabbath listens to Roseanna
and Christa making love, he reaches again for a religious amplitude: “They had taken unto
themselves the task of divinity and were laying bare the rapture with their tongues.” The tone
of this isn’t earnest, exactly: the exaltation (“taken unto themselves”) offers the cover of
irony. But neither is it dismissive; the sacred does seem the proper frame of reference for
what these women are doing. And then there is Sabbath himself: the name, of course, but
also the odd ways in which he comes to seem a holy figure, with his Old-Testament-prophet
beard, his truth-telling (when he isn’t telling lies), his destitution. Sabbath’s transvaluation
of values can be comic and Wildean; it can also be beatitudinal. This is especially clear in his
sense of the moral authority of abjection, which is the only moral authority he claims. “You
have kindhearted liberal comprehension,” Sabbath says to a friend who has attempted to
rescue him, “but I am flowing swiftly along the curbs of life, I am merely debris, in
possession of nothing to interfere with an objective reading of the shit.” Here is something
like a formula for sainthood, wherein abjection and utter powerlessness confer privileged
knowledge. Sabbath, with his fondness for prostitutes, his preference for the homeless and
destitute over the affluent and comfortable, his utter rejection of the secular logic of the
world—what is all of this if not saintly, even Christ-like? I don’t think the novel lets us feel
settled about how seriously we should take this, and Sabbath himself seems unsure: “Can it
be that there is something religious about me?” he wonders. “Has what I’ve done—i.e., failed
to do—been saintly?”
The odd hitch in that sentence, the revision or correction, the flip into negation—“what I’ve
done, i.e., failed to do”—is a feature that appears more and more frequently in the book’s
final pages. Faced with the irresolvable dilemma of his life, Sabbath finds himself
increasingly turning to negative formulations: “There was no bottom to what he did not have
to say about the meaning of his life.” The tactic of using negation to seek a way through
insoluble dilemma has a long tradition, one that, by the end of Sabbath’s Theater, it seems
clear Roth is drawing from. At the heart of this apophatic tradition, the tradition of mystic
thought, is the hope that the relentless pursuit of negativity will somehow arrive at an
experience of affirmation. I’ve never read a better account of how that process might work
than this passage from Roth’s novel, about oral sex with Roseanna:
The swampy scent Roseanna exuded in her twenties, most unique, not at all fishy but
vegetative, rooty, in the muck with the rot. Loved it. Took you right to the edge of
gagging, and then, in its depths something so sinister that, boom-o, beyond repugnance
into the promised land, to where all one’s being resides in one’s nose, where existence
amounts to nothing more or less than the feral, foaming cunt, where the thing that
matters most in the world—is the world—is the frenzy that’s in your face.
“Boom-o”: sex is the key that unlocks the mystic’s logic, releasing some mechanism of grace
that flips the values of the workaday world on their head and delivers one, inexplicably, to an
experience of plenitude and bliss. In the novel’s final scene Sabbath returns to Drenka’s
gravesite, where he has spent so many nights weeping and masturbating, and the book’s
engagement with the negative syntax and paradoxical image repertoire of mysticism reaches
its peak. “Imagine a stone carrying itself,” Roth instructs his reader as he describes Sabbath
climbing the hill to Drenka’s grave. And then, once he reaches the final resting place of the
woman he loved—in many ways the entire book has been a cry of grief for her—he proceeds
to piss on it.
“It’s not hard not to be terrible” is a sentiment I see floating

down my social media feeds with alarming regularity. But I am
a novelist because I think it is hard not to be terrible.
It’s worth pausing to note that Sabbath is a remarkably liquid man, constantly spouting
fluids: his ejaculations and tears, his three-times-nightly trips to piss, not to mention the
words that come, endless, fluent, from an apparently limitless source. And yet now, as he
tries to piss over Drenka, he finds himself dry: “He was fearful at first that he was asking of
himself the impossible and that there was, in him, nothing left of him.” His watering of
Drenka’s grave, which he imagines as an “anointing,” recalls an earlier scene in which Drenka,
on her deathbed, relives with Sabbath an afternoon when they pissed over each other. Roth
considered this scene one of the two greatest he wrote in his career; it’s the most
extraordinary sex scene I know. In remembering, re-narrating, re-experiencing this scene, a
memory of kinky erotic experience—of transgression, of generosity to each other (“Why
not?” Drenka responds to Sabbath’s request, “Life is so crazy anyway.”)—allows them to
mourn together Drenka’s imminent death, and also generates an expansiveness that
transcends their current situation and its limits. “It was like we were forever united in that,”
Drenka says to him. “We were. We are,” Sabbath replies, turning piss-play into a sacrament
—a kind of marriage—that affirms a scale of temporality not typically available in Roth’s
novels: everlastingness. Hoping to commemorate this moment, Sabbath finds himself unable
to piss, literally out of juice. “Perfect metaphor,” he thinks, “empty vessel.” I’m not sure how
to understand this emptiness except as an example of kenosis, the self-emptying necessary
before the aspirant can be filled up in divine union. “There was, in him, nothing left of him.”
And, as is the mystic’s hope, emptiness is followed by plenitude; Sabbath begins not just to
piss but to gush, to overflow, in something that seems like a violation of the natural order of
things—that seems, I mean to say, miraculous. “Sabbath was peeing with a power that
surprised even him, the way strangers to grief can be astounded by the unstoppable
copiousness of their river of tears.” He finds he can’t stop; in another mystically charged
image—Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich both figure Christ as a nursing mother—he
becomes “to urine what a wet nurse is to milk.” He imagines his urine drilling a hole to
Drenka’s lips, reviving her, bringing her miraculously to life—but here the book closes the
door on the transcendence it has courted: “he could never again reach her in any way…
nobody dead can live again.” Again and again in the novel, Roth gives only to take away; he
opens a door and then slams it shut. And yet the very restlessness of the book calls all finality
into question, even the finality of finality itself. Maybe the door isn’t shut forever.
IV: A MORAL EDUCATION
SABBATH ISN’T ALONE at Drenka’s grave, as it turns out: his miraculous flow of urine finally
stops when he is accosted—swung around by his prophet’s beard—by Matthew, Drenka’s
grieving and aggrieved policeman son. To Matthew, locked out of the circuit of desire and
devotion that transforms what looks like an act of degradation into a sacrament, Sabbath can
only be what he seems: an old adulterer pissing on his mother’s grave. “What are you?”
Michael asks when Sabbath refuses to be penitent, refuses even to put his dribbling cock back
in his pants. “This is a religious act,” Sabbath insists, a claim he only somewhat revises a few
pages later: “I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious.”
But Matthew has his own grief and his own devotion; his tears, his forbearance as Sabbath
baits him, wanting to make him his final puppet, the instrument of his suicide, carry a moral
force that make his reading of Sabbath’s act undismissable. The power of this final scene lies
in its presentation of radically incommensurable interpretive frames, and in the novel’s
refusal to reconcile them. We feel the force of both meanings: Sabbath pissing on Drenka’s
grave is a sacred act and an act of desecration, an act of love for Drenka on the part of her
grieving, beloved lover and an act of cruelty against her grieving, beloved son. In a world of
conflicting authoritative interpretive frames there is no final judgment we can pass. Whatever
calculus might make the competing claims of Sabbath and Matthew commensurate, and so
allow us to weigh one against the other, is unavailable to us, in the novel as in life. The novel
forces us to experience both meanings, to live in the dilemma of their conflict.
Confronting us with that dilemma is crucial to the moral education art can offer. How should
one judge Sabbath, who has done so many things that are, by any reasonable standard,
unforgivable? The wonder of Sabbath’s Theater, the measure of its achievement, is that after
450 pages with this intolerable man I don’t want to turn my back on him. I can’t, because I’ve
come to cherish him. This posture, of finding another intolerable and at the same time cher‐
ishing their existence, is deeply uncomfortable and urgently necessary. Because, at least in
part: what’s the alternative? What do we do with people who refuse to act in accordance with
our standards, our sense of decency, who have no interest in being reformed? Lock them all
up? Exterminate them? (People who commit sexual crimes should be locked up forever,
some of my friends believe, who also believe that prisons should be abolished.) I am a
decided atheist, as was Roth, and I also, as perhaps Roth did, feel nostalgia for certain
theological concepts. Chief among these is the idea of the Imago Dei—that no matter what
someone might do, they are still possessed of an inalienable dignity, an infinite value that
derives from the divine image in which they are made. Roth said that Sabbath was his most
autobiographical character, which one can see both as a puckish provocation—Sabbath is 5'5",
fat, destitute, a failed artist, a much less obvious surrogate than Portnoy or Zuckerman or
Kepesh—and also as not entirely untrue. Roth also said that were Sabbath sitting on the
couch next to him, he would kick him out of his house. In life, we bear what we can bear and
risk what we can risk, and make our necessary accommodations. But in art we don’t have to
make those accommodations: we can bear things in art we can’t bear in real life, and so art
can offer us a crucial moral training, placing us in the impossible position, which is also the
only morally defensible position, of cherishing the existence of others we cannot bear. By
repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath and then inviting us past that
judgment, Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts. Had I
turned my back on Sabbath at his first indefensible act, had I canceled him or blocked him or
deplatformed him, had I cast aside the book as terminally problematic, I would have missed
much that has felt useful to me, in the not-quite-articulable way art is useful: the sense of
life, of manic energy, the texture of existence and the terror of the abyss. Our current
obsession with purity, our sense that we cannot associate with others who do not share our
political and social values, our intolerance of disagreement are not just corrosive of civil
society and democratic discourse. They are also impoverishing of ourselves. I feel the appeal
of that intolerance. Sabbath’s Theater helps me to resist it.
The ability of art to do this moral work, the work I think it is uniquely equipped to do,
depends on our acknowledging the power of a frame as a kind of magic circle separating the
world of art from the actual world. I don’t mean to suggest that art is cut off from politics or
history, or that this separation is absolute. I mean that representation has a fundamentally
different moral and existential status from that of reality. This is a point that needs
defending. The moral and political demands currently placed on art, the charge that art has
responsibilities and consequences as grave as actions in the world beyond the frame, the
conflation of art and activism, don’t just mistake the nature of art and art making. They make
it impossible for art to do the moral work proper to it. I can’t imagine a book like Sabbath’s
Theater being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature—and,
since Toni Morrison’s passing, it’s not clear to me that there are any writers of Roth’s stature.
The idea that art should address the monstrous, that much of the moral office of art might lie
in making us identify with the monstrous—identification not as consolation but as indictment
—is entirely foreign to our current thinking. Terence’s famous line, humani nihil a me alienum
puto, nothing human is alien to me, which Hardy’s Jude echoes when he says, “I have the
germs of every human infirmity in me”—well, that seems nearly unsayable now, nearly
unthinkable. These days we’re desperate to claim the opposite: “It’s not hard not to be
terrible” is a sentiment I see floating down my social media feeds with alarming regularity.
But I am a novelist because I think it is hard not to be terrible. I think it’s the work of a life,
and most of us fail at it almost all the time. Certainly I do. The greatness of Sabbath’s Theater
lies in its assertion that the human is ample and impure beyond all codes of conduct, and in
its challenge not to reject or unmake that humanity, but instead to acknowledge it ours.
GARTH GREENWELL is the author of two books of fiction, Cleanness and What Belongs to You. A
2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he received the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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A Moral Education: in Praise of Filth - Garth Greenwell

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20/03/2023, 13:21 The Yale Review | Garth Greenwell: "A Moral Education"

Milena Mihaylova, Silence Creative Commons

Such responses can sometimes place me in what seems an antipathetic relationship to my

The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, we’ve

inscrutability of election.) Coming to judgment in this way is anathema to the novelist

I understand “mystery” here to mean something like “possessed of a significance, a value,

a story of moral reform; from beginning to end Sabbath does very

Enter email address SIGN UP

FILTH 2: DIRTY THOUGHTS

THE YALE REVIEW SPRING FESTIVAL

III: AN APOPHATIC THEORY

FILTH 3: PISSING, A THEOLOGY

“It’s not hard not to be terrible” is a sentiment I see floating

IV: A MORAL EDUCATION

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A Moral Education: in Praise of Filth - Garth Greenwell

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A Moral Education: in Praise of Filth - Garth Greenwell

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Copyright:

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20/03/2023, 13:21 The Yale Review | Garth Greenwell: "A Moral Education"

Milena Mihaylova, Silence Creative Commons

Such responses can sometimes place me in what seems an anti­pathetic relationship to my

The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, we’ve

inscrutability of election.) Coming to judgment in this way is anathema to the nov­elist

I understand “mystery” here to mean something like “possessed of a significance, a value,

a story of moral reform; from beginning to end Sabbath does very

Enter email address SIGN UP

FILTH 2: DIRTY THOUGHTS

THE YALE REVIEW SPRING FESTIVAL

III: AN APOPHATIC THEORY

FILTH 3: PISSING, A THEOLOGY

“It’s not hard not to be terrible” is a sentiment I see floating

IV: A MORAL EDUCATION

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Such responses can sometimes place me in what seems an antipathetic relationship to my

inscrutability of election.) Coming to judgment in this way is anathema to the novelist