Life-affirming literature?

The concept of "life-affirming literature" seems like a contradiction in terms to me, specially in the world we live in where we are already surrounded by so many phony messages by advertising, homilies of religious gurus, the political propaganda and other such frauds which do the same thing. (Like "Negative things happen to negative people" which I overheard in a conversation today.) What we desperately need instead is a voice of negation and that's what we should look for in art and literature because only in negation we can hope to find truth and freedom. There is a long tradition in philosophy when it comes to pessimism and negation but somehow when we talk of art and literature we (by that I mean the common readers) feel forced to justify and explain - if it is art it must have something positive to say about life.

I was thinking about it and a few other things while watching the recently released Elegy, a very disappointing film based on a moderately interesting book (Philip Roth's The Dying Animal). It was also I think a very personal reaction. More and more I realize that despite being aggressively anti-religious, my views on "the mind-body problem" are actually somewhat theological if not puritanical. I idealise "the life of the mind" which to me feels the same as negating "the life of the body". It is from this perspective that I found the film so depressing (and not in a good enlightening way).

It has actually become almost a cliche in fiction and films - an old man facing death desperate for a last grasp of life reaches out for pleasures of young female flesh - basically the absurd and sordid drama of human condition all over again till the very last moment. And this is even more ironical because the protagonist in the film is a professor of literature - someone who is supposed to be devoted to the life of the mind! Maybe what Roth is doing is a form of negation too - the negation of the idea that the body and the baser aspects of life can be transcended for a higher ideal where one can be genuinely free. I wonder what he thinks of the stages of life as prescribed in Hinduism where old age means "Vanaprastha" (literally, departing to the forests) when one starts to detach oneself from the worldly affairs and prepare for an eventual "sanyas" (complete renunciation). It would be okay with me (even though I do find it very depressing) if Roth thinks that human beings are too weak to leave behind everything and go for Vanaprastha but I doubt it. I think on the other hand he sentimentalizes sex and sees in it something positive and "life-affirming" (at least in principle because all such attempts prove to be futile).

I remember reading Luis Bunuel's autobiography My Last Sigh where he describes his own old age and intimations of his own mortality wonderfully. He says that only in his old age he could feel truly free and truly alive and could see everything clearly. (His last film "Obscure Object of Desire" is, among other things, a hilarious illustration of how sexual desire can blind people to the obvious.) This view of human mortality and old age in general is there in Proust too and that's what makes the last volume of his novel so powerful and moving and puts all the sexual hankerings, jealousies and all sorts of troubles that rest of the volumes document in obsessive detail in context. Personally I am really looking forward to my own old age (even though I already live a life of almost-vanaprastha) and I hope I feel like the narrator in Proust rather than one of those Rothian characters when I get there.