PARTISAN REVIEW
531
subsidiary - not sister Hannah's mother, not "girl," not "wife," not
"daughter." The one flash of Sophie in pre-Alexandrian freedom - as
"Red" Ginsky in the high school yearbook - startles us as much as it
startles Portnoy. 'Otherwise she is all his. His system needs her. Lament–
ing imprisonment in her world, he tightly locks her into his, that nice
interdependency of tyrant and tyrannized Birdwhistell calls "graymall,"
which allows the two parties in a suffering compact interchangeable roTes.
But since Alex is paying, this is
his
show, prime uninterrupted time
in Spielvogel's Non-Directive Living Theater, performing Oedipal farce.
Perhaps Portnoy's high
I.Q.
is buried here too, or perhaps Roth
himself
is
pushing a little. Farce could be unnecessary; 'Oedipus himself
might be of little help. In the Cousin Heshie episode a way out of the
Freudian trap is indicated, and raged against - powerful Cousin Heshie
wrestled his father and could have whupped him -
why didn't he!
In
his tale which mocks Freudian hope, Portnoy the innocent falls victim
to its central Oedipal myth, which Heshie's refusal dramatically rejects:
it is not
necessary
for sons to kill their fathers. It's not even necessary
for Jack Portnoy to kick his wife in the ass. According to the 'Oedipus
rule he
must,
but in the wider world of imaginative possibility,
who
says so?
The tyranny and fanaticism doesn't stop with Heshie and his
father wrestling. St. Paul has been saving his ultimate revelation, about
what kind of people Jews
really
are.
When Heshie was killed in the war, the
only
[my italics in print but
not in emphasis] thing people could think to say to my Aunt Clara
and my Uncle Hymie, to somehow mitigate the horror, to some–
how console them in their grief, was "At least he didn't leave you
with a
shikse
wife. At least he didn't leave you with
goyische
children."
Not one word about the
nachess
Heshie gave when he was alive,
you see: even this cliche of cliches is denied the sons-of-bitches by the
brilliant prosecuting attorney. But then fanatics are notoriously bad
reporters.
6
Beyond parents, beyond the Jews, the quality of American day-to–
day existence - the
actually
ordinary represented by Jack Portnoy's
constipation, Sophie's housekeeping, jobs, money, education, failure,
success - invites Roth's and Portnoy's rage. The
seemingly
ordinary
occupies a book like
Lolita;
one passes through the distorted American
