HOW LONG WAS IT SINCE KARENIN AND ANNA HAD stopped making love? What about Vronsky? Was he good at bringing her to climax? And Anna? Was she possibly frigid? Did they make love in the dark, in the light, in bed, on the carpet, for three minutes, for three hours, with romantic talk or obscenities, in silence? We don’t know a thing about it. In the novels of that time, love stretched over the vast terrain from first encounter to the brink of coitus; that brink was a frontier not to be crossed.
In the twentieth century the novel discovered sexuality, gradually and in all its dimensions. In America the novel heralded and then accompanied the great upheaval in moral custom that was to proceed at dizzying speed: in the 1950s people were still stifling in an unyielding puritanism, and then over a single decade everything changed: that long span from early romance to the act of love vanished. A person was no longer shielded from sex by the no-man’s-land of sentiment; now he came into direct, implacable confrontation with it.
In D. H. Lawrence sexual freedom has the feel of a dramatic or tragic revolt. A short time later, in Henry Miller, it is surrounded by lyrical euphoria. Thirty years later, in Philip Roth, it is simply a given, taken for granted, achieved, collective, commonplace, inevitable, codified: neither dramatic, nor tragic, nor lyrical.
Now we are approaching the limit. There is no “farther.” Now it is not laws, or parents, or conventions that oppose desire; everything is permitted, and the only enemy is our own body, denuded, disenchanted, dismasked. Philip Roth is a great historian of American eroticism. He is also the poet of that strange solitude of man left alone to face his body.
However, over these last decades, history has moved so fast that the characters in The Professor of Desire cannot help but retain some memory of an earlier time, the time of their parents, who lived their loves more like Tolstoy’s characters than Roth’s. The nostalgia that suffuses the atmosphere when Kepesh’s father and mother appear on the scene is not only the parents’ own nostalgia, it is nostalgia for love as such, for the love between father and mother, for that moving, old-fashioned love that seems gone from the world today. (Without the memory of how it used to be, what would remain of love, of the very notion of love?) That strange nostalgia (strange in that it is not bound up with particular characters but set farther off, beyond their own lives, in the background) lends this (seemingly cynical) novel a touching tenderness.
The acceleration of history has profoundly transformed individual lives that, in centuries past, used to proceed from birth to death within a single historical period; today a life straddles two such periods, sometimes more. Whereas history used to advance far more slowly than human life, nowadays it is history that moves fast, it tears ahead, it slips from a man’s grasp, and the continuity, the identity, of a life is in danger of cracking apart. So the novelist feels the need to keep within reach, alongside our own way of life, the memory of the bashful and half forgotten one our predecessors lived.
This is the meaning of the intellectualism of Roth’s heroes, all of them professors of literature or writers, constantly meditating on Chekhov or Henry James or Kafka. This is no pointless intellectual display of a self-absorbed literature. It is the yearning to keep past times on the novel’s horizon, and not leave the characters in a void where the ancestors’ voices would cease to be audible.