Freudian and Jungian Tales of Old Men

Reviews the books, Everyman by Philip Roth (see record 2006-10910-000); and Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee (see record 2006-11732-000). In Everyman, Roth the narrative opens at the unnamed protagonist's grave as he is buried. The novel proceeds as a third-person account of the man's recollections while he awaits the surgery that will kill him. For those accustomed to Roth's comedic first-person accounts, this removed voice bears his message as powerfully as any words uttered. Although there are nostalgic recollections of the man's parents and his affair with a middle-aged nurse from his previous surgery, the main content focuses on his previous hospitalizations and experiences with death. Roth's Everyman is portrayed, like all of his men, through a Freudian prism. Conflicts of impulses and social prohibitions predominate and determine the flow of experience; deliberation and choice seem secondary. The search for meaning, transcendence, and spirituality is absent, just as Freud would want it. Life is about sublimating (never enough) and adapting: It is routine (when it is not slapstick comedy); you stumble through, pratfalls and all. Although the title comes from the traditional morality play about death, this is a thoroughly modern, fatalistic retelling. This is dying in our disenchanted, brave new world. In contrast to novels about the midst of a life, this one has a tidy finality that perhaps can only occur in a story with an absolute ending. Coetzee's Slow Man experiences a confusing mix of the real and the fantastic. Coetzee narrates in third-person present tense, as if the author is a faithful reporter of the protagonist's ongoing conscious experience--novelist as silent psychoanalyst. The story opens abruptly as the 60-year-old protagonist, Paul Rayment, is thrown from his bike. His consciousness is restored with a vision or fantasy, like letters being typed on a screen. Paul touches all the bases of the trauma of a serious accident and loss of a leg: outrage that it happened to him, anger at those who mouth the minimizing platitudes, alienation from his familiar conscious personality, regret over his failed generativity, and suicidal mentation. The student of the human condition cannot but find Coetzee's novels compelling, however tragic and bleak they are; in every scene, he raises additional intriguing questions. He presents men who lack understanding of their intuitions, fantasies, distorting schemas, and illusory bases of certainty and security. All