528
JACK LUDWIG
the howl is a literary bust out. It explains the noise and shrieking,
springs the imagination from the ballait bags of time, order and
c0-
herence. The psychoanalytic monologue sweeps away all limits - if you
can't tell your own personal private psychoanalyst about mama's men–
struation, papa's
schlang,
the wrinkles in his balls, the tickle in the
wee-wee, dropping a load into a sock, jerking off on the 107 bus from
New York, who's on whom in an
a
trois,
what The Monkey's finger is
doing under the table, who, for godssake,
can
you tell?
Spielvogel, then, humanizes the soliloquy, gives it focus. In his
ranting, Portnoy sometimes screams "Mother!" in such a way as to effect
instant transference, but confounds the issue still further by shouting,
"Doctor, Your Honor, whatever your name is," mocking the possibilities:
"What years of confusion! And when will they be over? Can you give
me a tentative date, please? When will I be cured of what I've got!"
Psychoanalysis is in its own way Portnoy's complaint, merely one
more form of time-deferral which keeps him "still hoping, you see, still
if-onlying, at the age of thirty-three." Huck Finn, thirty-three and
going on sixty, is up the new American creek without a raft : Huck at
thirty-three is a Kafka character writing his "Letter to My Pap," or the
one at the end of "The Judgment," who jumps off a bridge crying
"Mother and father, I have always loved you!"
Portnoy's Complaint,
consequently, devastates psychoanalysis, and,
doing so, beats up on the possibilities of all understanding. During the
course of his monologue Portnoy is able to name
all
the sins, set every–
thing in order, lay blame where he wants it (wrongly and irrelevantly,
perhaps) , reach a lovely state of understanding, and still be, by life's
tough standards, hopeless.
Children should be playing on this earth who look like me!
Why
not?
Why should every
shtunk.
with a picture window and a car–
port have offspring, and not me?
It
don't make sense! Think of it.
half the race is over, and I still stand here at the starting line–
me, the first one out of his swaddling clothes and into his track
suit! a hundred and fifty-eight points of
I.Q.
and still arguing
with
the authorities about the rules and regulations! disputing the course
to be run! calling into question the legitimacy of the track
commission!
What Portnoy laments is his existential unbirth. He is doomed, as
he himself keeps telling us, to be no more than a Kafkaesque "elderly
bachelor."
