Humbling and melancholy: Acting out and passage to the act in The Humbling by Philip Roth
Meyer zum Wischen, Michael
Humbling and melancholy: Acting out and passage to the act in The Humbling by Philip Roth - 2022.
3
Since a novel is not a patient, Franz Kaltenbeck advises readers not to search for signs of the author’s nor the character’s pathology in literary texts. Likewise, I would like to consider what Roth’s novel The Humbling teaches us about the importance of “acting out” and the passage to the act in melancholia. Roth depicts the decline of a stage actor, Axler, who suddenly loses his capacity to act, perform, and symbolically play out the traumas of his life, in particular his advancing age and vanishing sexual life. After a severe melancholic episode, he develops and acts out a sexual fantasy in order to combat a death drive. However, this attempt to work through one of his symptoms fails, and after a phase of acting out, the character commits suicide. Humbling aims to transform the subject into an objet petit a, the leftover resulting from symbolization.
Humbling and melancholy: Acting out and passage to the act in The Humbling by Philip Roth - 2022.
3
Since a novel is not a patient, Franz Kaltenbeck advises readers not to search for signs of the author’s nor the character’s pathology in literary texts. Likewise, I would like to consider what Roth’s novel The Humbling teaches us about the importance of “acting out” and the passage to the act in melancholia. Roth depicts the decline of a stage actor, Axler, who suddenly loses his capacity to act, perform, and symbolically play out the traumas of his life, in particular his advancing age and vanishing sexual life. After a severe melancholic episode, he develops and acts out a sexual fantasy in order to combat a death drive. However, this attempt to work through one of his symptoms fails, and after a phase of acting out, the character commits suicide. Humbling aims to transform the subject into an objet petit a, the leftover resulting from symbolization.
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