Abstract
Amnesiac, dysmorphic, and otherwise duplicitous character conditions broach an embodied philosophy of “inessentialism,” embracing the self as something that is written. Golub’s cancer narrates some of its origin story, even as it practices decreation, “de-selfing” that usurps and subverts the subject’s role in his own neurotic narrative. Hallucinated, mainly Jewish lives and counter-lives append to the struggle between the physical body and its metaphoric embodiments. (Roth’s) “Anne Frank” returns as her own fictional character and as a testimony not to survivor guilt but to survivor fear. The cowbird arrives to give a name to a species of subject that curates some other species’ eggs (history, origins). Cowbirdman enters the ranks of self-canceling superheroes who will recur in the book’s narrative as the author’s alternative selves.
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Notes
- 1.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (Cambridge: Exact Chance, 1991), 10.
- 2.
Performed at St. Anne’s Warehouse, New York City, January 2005. A DVD of this performance was provided to me by the author, who is my former student.
- 3.
David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 7 and 32.
- 4.
Romain Gary, writing as Emile Ajar, Hocus Bogus, trans. David Bellos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 57 and 58.
- 5.
Gary, Hocus Bogus, 3, 33, 46, and 47.
- 6.
To a hotel clerk’s checking-in question, “Is this your first time staying with us?” in The Memory of a Killer (dir. Erik Van Looy, 2003), a hitman who is losing his self to Alzheimer’s Disease responds, “I speak Dutch.”
- 7.
Gary, Hocus Bogus, 5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 27, and 55.
- 8.
“Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkhi said: Once I was walking along the road and I encountered a man who was gathering wood. I spoke to him, but he did not reply. Then he came up to me and said: ‘Rabbi, I am not alive. I am dead.’ I said to him: ‘If you are dead, then what need have you of wood?’” Thus, begins a story that tells of the invention of the mourner’s kaddish, ending as it does with the wood-man, in life a great sinner who is burning in hell, being saved by the son he abandoned when the latter (once schooled in reading Scripture) proclaims, ‘Bless God, who is blessed!’” It is tempting to read the wood-man of this story as being a possible prototype for the perpetual mourner Mickey Sabbath who sees himself as unable to be released from his personal hell of being dead but unable to die, to give up on the life he hates. Philosophically, there is Schrödinger’s cat in a box (see Chapter 6) which may be alive or dead or both until we know by opening the box. Psychologically, there are Capgras and Cotard’s syndromes in which the lives of others and of the self are regarded as forms of imposture. In Cotard’s, the individual believes that he, the self, is really dead. (See my discussion of Charlie Kaufman’s Synechdoche, New York in Chapter 6 in which both of these conditions present). More mundanely, Roth adapted The Cherry Orchard for a production at the Chichester Festival in England in which his then wife Claire Bloom played the role of Madame Ranevskaya. Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish (New York: Vintage, 2000), 130; Claudia Roth Pierpont, Philip Roth: A Writer and His Books (New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2013), 142; Roth, Sabbath’s Theater, 9, 20, and 21.
- 9.
Wieseltier, 27.
- 10.
“Belonging was never what we were good at anyway. Being a stranger is what we do. It’s the diaspora, they are at pains to assure me, that brings out the best in us.” Note here the speaker’s (the modern Jew Strulovitch seeking counsel from Shylock) attributing this belief to “they,” meaning to the Christian world who view Jews in this way. Jacobson, Shylock Is My Name, 62. Contrast this with Mamet speaking for himself as a Jew: “To me, real life consists in belonging.” Mamet includes in this the “hermetic groups” in theater and film to which he has belonged. David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 2006), 110, 112, 13, 114, 115–16, and 135.
- 11.
Brett Zehner, unpublished essay, Brown University, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, November 14, 2016.
- 12.
Carson Kreitzer, The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2006), 61.
- 13.
Laurence A. Rickels, I Think I Am Philip K. Dick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 3.
- 14.
Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 10 and 13.
- 15.
Rickels, 3.
- 16.
Roth, Sabbath’s Theater, 424.
- 17.
Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (New York: Routledge, 1997), 238; Louise Hay, Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them (London: Eden Grove, 1989), 22.
- 18.
Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, 198.
- 19.
E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 13.
- 20.
Ibid., 3.
- 21.
Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (New York: Viking, 2008); Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York: Viking, 1996).
- 22.
Stacey, Teratologies, 177.
- 23.
“It also seemed [from the autopsy report] that the radiation treatment had completely eradicated Oppenheimer’s throat cancer—in which case he died as a result of the chemotherapy.” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage, 2006), 683, n. 587; Kreitzer, The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 92.
- 24.
Stacey, 178.
- 25.
Ibid., 195, 196, and 197.
- 26.
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Vintage, 1994), 160; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright and trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 405.
- 27.
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (New York: Vintage, 2002), 118.
- 28.
Richard Foreman, Strong Medicine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42zRkya9yn4.
- 29.
Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 131.
- 30.
Ronell, The Test Drive, 10.
- 31.
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Vintage, 1979), 11, 14, 25, 41, 56, 64, 118, 124, 135, and 154; Sontag, Aids and Its Metaphors, 100.
- 32.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 4; Stacey, 63.
- 33.
Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Vintage, 1994).
- 34.
Ronell, The Test Drive, 10 and 18.
- 35.
Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Art: Space,” in Constantin V. Boundas, ed., The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 170.
- 36.
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon C. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 227 and 229–30.
- 37.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1989), 15 and 161.
- 38.
“Language is a virus.” William S. Burroughs quoted in Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, 156.
- 39.
Kristeva, Black Sun, 234, 235, 236, and 238.
- 40.
Ibid., 223.
- 41.
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 19.
- 42.
Stacey, 13.
- 43.
Duras, 98.
- 44.
Ibid., 25.
- 45.
Stacey, 11.
- 46.
Ibid., 174, 176, and 192.
- 47.
http://nestwatch.org/learn/general-bird-nest-info/brown-headed-cowbirds/; Alasdair Wilkins, “Nest Stealing Cuckoo Birds Are Locked in Evolutionary War with Their Would-Be Victims.” io9.gizmodo.com/5785233/nest-stealing-cuckoo-birds-are-locked-in-evolutionary-war-with-their-would-be-victims.
- 48.
Frances Wilson, Guilty One: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 50.
- 49.
Spalding Gray, Impossible Vacation (New York: Vintage, 1992), 47; Interview with Edward Vilga, in Vilga, Acting Now: Conversations on Craft and Career (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
- 50.
The reference here is to the Wooster Group’s treatment of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…), 1984. By this point, Gray had already left the company.
- 51.
Philip Roth, The Humbling (New York: Vintage, 2010), 2, 5, 7, 38–39, and 140.
- 52.
Publication of The Humbling actually antedated the accident-prone 2010 Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark by one year.
- 53.
When Batman voluntarily unmasks himself to Catwoman at the end of Batman Returns (dir. Tim Burton, 1992) and villain Max Shreck wonders aloud, “Why is Bruce Wayne dressed as Batman?” this “dressed as” speaks to a transference of celebrity of one fiction to that of another, and of the mock-surprise at the lack of authenticity that attends to only one.
- 54.
Austin Campion was the student who did the project. Jim Starlin, Mary Wolfman, Jim Aparo, and George Perez, BATMAN: A Death in the Family (New York: D.C. Comics, 2011).
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Golub, S. (2019). Cowbird. In: A Philosophical Autofiction. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05612-4_4
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