416
MARK SHECKNER
categories, like most diagnostic labels, are textbookish and preemp–
tive; they substitute the mannerisms of analysis for explanation, and if
the analytic sections of
My Life as a Man
are any indication of what
Srielvogel sounds like when he is under a full head of steam, we, and
Alex Portnoy, should be more appreciative of his enigmatic silences in
the earlier book. Still, he has the right idea: the fictional imitation of
confession
is
confession and we as readers have some duty to make
sense of what we are being so desperately told.
To set the stage for an analysis of our own we have to set the table,
for
Portnoy's Complaint
is an expose, no, a vaudeville, of the Jewish
stomach. Food is to Jewish comedy and Jewish neurosis what drink is
to Irish, though only Roth so far has taken the full anthropological
plunge into the ethnology of the Jewish digestive tract. Roth's Jews
are not a
people,
a
culture, nation, tradition,
or any other noun of
rabbinical piety. They are a
tribe,
which, after its own primitive fash–
ion, observes arbitrary taboos and performs strange sundown rituals
that look like obsessional symptoms. Roth 's particular neurotic style
of observing the world has this virtue: a lucid and unsentimental eye
for styles of irrational behavior, his own included. As he sees it, the
kosher laws are as primitive and irrational as any Australian fetish or
Papuan cult of cargo, and the dietary antagonism of milk and meat in
the Jewish diet is something, not out of Leviticus, but out of Roheim.
Portnoy's morality, not to mention his immorality, begins at the
table. Here is
The Law
according to that Moses of Manhattan, the
Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New
York. "Let the
goyim
sink
their
teeth into whatever lowly creature
crawls and grunts across the face of the dirty earth, we will not con–
taminate our humanity thus." Thus spake Portnoy 'of the superego.
Now let's hear a word from Portnoy of the id. "At least let me eat your
pussy." It is in that spectrum of possibilities between phobic avoid–
ance and insane lapping that the minute moral discriminations of
Jewish life are made. For us, the word
moral
derives etymologically
from the word
oral.
When a sin is committed in the Portnoy home it is more likely to
involve gluttony than lechery, though in the muddled dreamwork of a
complicated and unreliable memory, primal crimes often become con–
fused. "A terrible act has been committed, and it has been committed
by either my father or me. The wrongdoer, in other words, is one of the
two members of the family who owns a penis. Okay. So far so good.
