530
JACK LUDWIG
4-
In parts of the novel one hopes Roth is either being ironic, or
putting us rather than himself on. Take the contradiction at the heart
of
Portnoy's Complaint
- Portnoy angrily raging
in
a Freudian tale with
an ostensible happy ending. Programmed by Sophie he could have be–
come a little "fruitcake," a fussy hand-on-hip Fire Islander - "how I
made it into the world of pussy at all," he marvels, "that's the mystery."
Yet cunt-craziness doesn't stop a guy thirty-three from beating his meat,
or howling about his mother or soliciting a psychoanalyst. Portnoy's
prosecutor's brief accuses Sophie Doe and Jack Doe and Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob Doe of some terrible though not quite specified crime-much
out of keeping with happy endings. His own simplemindedness can't
resolve the contradiction, but may, perhaps, explain it.
Portnoy unconsciously seems to recognize that his whacking off and
cunt-craziness are one and the same thing. Cunt-craziness is masturbation
graduated into a softer, wetter, warmer medium. Of course whacking
off with live pussy beats the room temperature liver Portnoy once used,
or even Sophie's highest-grade (but refrigerated) meat! Artistically, too,
a real live genuine talking pussy puts his own fake girl-voice to shame,
or his ventriloquized dialogue begging "Big Boy"
to
give it to
her,
a bra
fished out of the dirty laundry! Compared with "The Brassiere," "The
Monkey" is fabulous, with speech self-generated, capable - both orally
and
vaginally! - of carrying masturbation
to
its miraculous only–
dreamed-of no-hands pitch.
It's when "The Monkey" tries to become more than a masturbation
medium that she's banished. She has broken the secret rule which for–
bids a woman making greater claim on Portnoy than his dong makes
(that is, no claim at all). Whacking off and cunt-craziness offer un–
limited larks, no more. As a medium, as a function of Portnoy, "The
Monkey" has total freedom; as a woman, as a human, none.
This, of course, is the unmentioned crime somebody must be blamed
for. This, of course, is why and what Spielvogel must be told.
5
On
quite another level Portnoy's simplemindedness may be only
Roth's tyranny - over his characters, over their situations. In
Portnoy,
Roth's triumphant
stylistic
liberation, old sophisticated forms of psycho–
logical and sociological rigidity reappear. Roth still refuses to let go:
anyone who speaks a certain way, dresses a certain way,
must
act a
certain way. Sophie Portnoy is not allowed to be
a
Jewish mother but
only Alex's very own Jewish mother, a wholly possessed and monopolized
