PARTISAN REVIEW
419
dildo that happens to be a zucchini. Though funny in its own way, the
scene lacks resonance; the Jews have never been hung up on
vegetables. )
If
Alex is telling the truth, and he must be unless this is the most
opaque lie or deceptive screen memory known to psychoanalysis, his
mother's purposes are plain and sinister. She wants nothing less than
the annexation of her son, the full possession of and control over his
manhood, and she'll have it by stalling his growth at a level of oral
dependence. That is why mealtime is the likeliest occasion for Alex to
make that libidinal leap to the toilet, for as long as he dines at home,
his mouth belongs to mama. When his manhood droops, he seeks ref–
uge in the sure successes of boyhood love, determined to win praise at
least as a good eater. Similarly, in
My Life as a Man,
it is appropriate
that athan Zuckerman tries to face down his "boyish" disgust and
demonstrate to Lydia Ketterer and himself that he is a good man and a
proper lover by eating her. The ability to eat anything is one of the
many false definitions of manhood that Roth's heroes tryon for size.
That food and love should be so consistently mistaken for each
other is no mystery. The connection between them is built into our
mammalian heritage, and the job of learning the difference is an or–
dinary childhood task that we all perform more or less badly. The
terms of that task are named by Roth in two of his titles,
The Breast
and
Letting Go,
and they stand for the primal situations out of which
his characters must negotiate a way of life. For these characters, letting
go is a theme of desperate urgency, for entrapment, in the form either
of captivity or self-repression, is their most abiding condition. Alex
Portnoy 's final scream is a gesture of letting go that is native to the
Roth novel. At the moment of release, the bonds of repression are torn
loose allowing repressed anger to surge peremptorily to the surface.
Thus the tantrum is serious
busin~ss
and sooner or later in these books
one is bound to be thrown. In
My Life,
Peter Tarnopol's tantrum is a
moment of sexual truth: it finds him donning his wife's panties and
bra in order to show her, he later explains, that "I wear the panties in
this family." In
Portnoy,
it constitutes Alex 's final statement, the last
desperate oral demand before Spielvogel interrupts to commence the
analysis.
Holding on and letting go are terrors because they first were
wishes and it is in the struggle between those wishes that Alex is para–
lyzed, not in that starchy tango of id and superego so scrupulously
