PARTISAN REVIEW
415
around the theme of baseball, and
My Life as a Man,
a novel about
marriage in the fifties, Up until the last book, which appears to return
to older modes of writing, Roth's progress throughout this period
seemed
lO
bear an identifiable form: the early books,
pre-Portnoy,
were
the documents of repression, the later writings, witnesses to the return
of the repressed, Where Roth used to give us stoical characters who
bore their misfortunes with the sullen nobility of the truly civilized
until overtaken by sudden, irrational outbursts, he more recently has
turned to showing us literary surfaces that look like primary process
thought. Where repression was we now have rage; in lieu of symptoms
we now get style,
Upon its appearance,
Portnoy's Complaint
was the most spectac–
ular attempt at Freudian fiction in recent American literature, not only
because of the apparent boldness of its confessions, but because of
Spielvogel's summary diagnosis, which challenged us with its crisp
Germanic expertise, And despite the imposing clinical and theoretical
apparatus of the latest book,
My Life as a Man,
the former, I think, is
more successful as psychological fiction, perhaps because Alex man–
ages to achieve with wit what Peter Tarnopol and Spielvogel (who is
his analyst also) do with theory, Alex, to be sure, knows his theory
also: he annotates his complaint with appropriate references to
The
Standard Edition,
though he modestly claims
to
be reading only
The
Collected Papers.
We know that he has read "The Most Prevalent
Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," and that he practices it, and that
he is familiar with
Civilization and Its Discontents,
as both text and
dilemma, His furtive sexuality is supposed to mediate the demands of
a clamorous, infantile id and a vigilant, righteous superego, and fails,
Thus, according to Spielvogel: "Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fe–
tishism, autoeroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence
of the patient's 'morality,' however, neitherfantasy nor act issues in gen–
uine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame
and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration,"
That is a cogent and inclusive sentence and, in fact, the complaint
(here meaning malady, not
geschrei),
stripped of its cultural parapher–
nalia and defensive wit, does make sense as a strategy for negotiating
deep-psychic conflict. Moreover, believes Spielvogel, "many of the
symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child
relationship," The doctor has saved us some research here, though his
,
