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The Resurrection of the Dead Language: Roth’s The Dying Animal as a Pastiche of W.B. Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium

. Ifrah Khan, Muhammad Afzal Faheem & Asrar Hassan


Abstract

Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal revives the dead language, a pastiche of W.B. Yeats' poem Sailing to Byzantium; it draws on Yeats' peculiar stylistic imaginary museum. Roth's work operates on the same principle as Yeats’ artistic poetry, a quest for a meaningful, artistic, and spiritual identity. This research intends to examine Postmodern Pastiche, a literary concept coined by Fredric Jameson, classified as the random cannibalization of all prior styles, the play of stylistic allusion by emulating the original, and the tendency to breathe new life into ancient and classical works. Jameson asserts that the purpose of Pastiche is to glamorize past writings to give them new life. Roth emulates Yeats’ idiosyncratic stylistic technique in depicting his protagonist as a great admirer of art, a true devotee of the female body; cherishing and praising it as a classical embodiment of creative artistry. Through confrontation with nature, examining it as a source of ideas, motifs, and myths, Yeats demystifies his interior state of the ‘postmodern self’ to create art. Roth’s narrative aims to invigorate the old monadic subject of mortality and revive the love for art, stressed by the dead poets, as the only consolation for mortal beings that promises immortality. Roth is resuscitating the oral history, the resurrection of the dead or silenced language, by associating the breast as a symbol of Eros and Thanatos in The Dying Animal; he is taking a retrospective dimension to constitute—what Jameson calls multitudinous photographic simulacrum—of Yeats’ ideals.

Index Terms- Pastiche, Cannibalization, Libidinal historicism, Simulacrum, Asian Stereotypes.

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