Indecent Hauntings: Bataille, Sabbath, and Erotic Transgression

This essay reads Drenka Balich's haunting of Mickey Sabbath in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater (1995) as productive of a Bataillean "vision of excess," a sacred and transgressive communion between the living Sabbath and the deceased Drenka. A close reading of Sabbath's two visits to Drenka's grave, one toward the beginning and the other at the end of the novel, suggests that Sabbath's transgressive acts on his lover's tomb are manifestations of Bataille's "sovereign communication" between life and death, the possible and the impossible, the knowable and the unknowable. Sabbath's erotic rendezvous break all taboos, questioning the gender binary through a queering of identities.