PARTISAN REVIEW
529
3
The bad fairy of
Portnoy's Complaint,
as everyone knows by now,
is Sophie "Red" Ginsky Portnoy, except that after Auschwitz, Buchen–
wald, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Roth has a little trouble convincing us the
Jewish mother is the moral equivalent of war. But that is exactly what
the
shrying
is about. With a mother like his, Portnoy has no time for
history, for the massive complexities of his world. He knows he should–
he knows, he knows - but knowing only makes not-doing worse - so
we're back where we began. Lamenting his powerlessness, Portnoy
accounts for it, which reassures him so he may lament the louder. The
violence of his complaint
creates
the power in his mother, locks him
into her system, traps
him
in her generation: "I am impaled again upon
the long ago," he concedes, "what was, what will never be."
It
can't
end, his "endless childhood! Which I won't relinquish - or which won't
relinquish me!"
Thus Sophie is, like Spielvogel, only a necessary prop. Portnoy's
paralysis can't do without her. Political oppressors are different: one
lashes out at them to expose the nature of the tyrant and the torture,
with an end - to effect change. Psychological oppressors are part of
the in-system, part of the same (mathematical) set as the patient. They
oppress but at the same time provide a comforting causality. A political
oppressor may die or be killed; a psychological oppressor dies but never
fades away.
"Doctor," Portnoy shrieks at his usual decibel level, "my psyche,
it's about as difficult to understand as a grade-school primer! ... Who
needs
Freud?
Rose Franzblau of the
New York Post
has enough on the
ball
to
come up with an analysis of somebody like me!" Portnoy himself
has enough on the ball, so in the novel he does his own psychological
processing.
Causes:
Mama, Papa, the Jews.
Effect:
Portnoy.
His "one hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q." are temporarily
filed away so a whiz bang determinism can be accepted as the whole
truth.
The guy whose mind would reject out of hand the simplistic determinisms
- -historical, Marxian, Darwinian, Freudian - locks into an etiology
simple as pie. A recent convert, this boyish St. Paul comes from Antioch
to
write his
Epistle to the Goyim.
What does he expect but gratitude
for his free dissemination of inner temple secrets? That's not what he
gets. To the Gentiles new St. Paul is just old Saul (of Tarsus) Malamud
- "hooknosed, Brillo-haired," how does
that
grab you,
bubi?
