PARTISAN REVIEW
417
Now: did he fuck between those luscious legs the gentile cashier from
the office, or have I eaten my sister's chocolate pudding?" This confu–
sion never does get resolved.
In
the infantile moral system of this
household, shared by parents and children alike, pudding and pussy
may be equally taboo and proscribed with equal ferocity: Food, of
course, is the first medium of love and authority for all of us, and
where it retains its primal power, as it does for the Portnoys, young
sinners may be heard to confess: ''I'm eight years old and chocolate
pudding happens to get me hot."
It
is understandable then that the
table is the battlefield on which Alex 's bid for manhood is fought and
lost. The toilet and the bed are also put to military uses but they are
later and secondary weapons and by the time Alex has understood their
potential, the war is over. Rearguard actions still rage, however, and
Alex's prime weapons are all the tricks in his stubborn oral trade:
"having a mouth on him," refusing to eat, eating
chazerai
(or lobster
or pussy), feeding his parents in turn, or, and herein shines forth his
desperate genius, fucking his family's dinner. All strategies naturally
fail since the field of battle has been chosen in advance and it favors
whoever has got the ammunition.
Hunger striking fails as dismally for Purtnoy as it does for Kafka's
hunger artist. " I always wanted you
to
admire my fasting," confesses
the dying hunger artist to a bored overseer. Portnoy, a tougher sort,
would have survived such boredom, but in a household in which food
is mistaken for love, hunger artistry is merely being a bad eater and
earns not disinterest but a brandished breadknife and a perverse mater–
nal appeal to a son 's future manhood: which does he want
to
be, weak
or strong, a man or a mouse?
The politics of food and guilt at the Jewish table have given rise to
a unique taboo:
chazerai. Chazerai
is not necessarily unkosher food,
unblessed or formally proscribed by the laws; neither the hot dog nor
the cupcake is mentioned by name in Leviticus. But
chazerai,
while
not unkosher de jure is certainly so de facto.
It
is cheap, processed,
mass-produced snack food, gotten outside the home, behind one's
mother's back. Its true purpose, as every Jewish mother knows, is to
ruin her son 's appetite for dinner-her dinner. Thus the eating of
snacks after school is a betrayal, and the boy who stops for a burger
and fries at fourteen will, at thirty,
be
stopping after work for a
shikse,
thus ruining his appetite.
For the son, naturally,
chazerai
symbolizes freedom, sexual free-
