420
MARK SHECKNER
defined by the hopelessly orthodox Spielvogel. That conflict, nurtured
by a Jewish family that doesn't know when
to
call parenthood quits,
can ramify into the alimentary insanity of Alex Portnoy's life. Every
odd libidinal enterprise of his is ah attempt to satisfy those two wishes
and to be a man and a baby at the same time.
Every character of Roth's seems to be stuck with this obligation, to
satisfy deep-seated but contrary needs at once: to grow up
and
to re–
gress; to let go
and
to hold on; to be autonomous
and
dependent.
Totalists that they are, they are unable to find and occupy a human
middle ground on which self-reliance need not be isolation or love
entrapment. Thus Alex Portnoy steers clear of love by laying sexual
traps for himself, insuring that his experiments in love will always end
in defeat. His episodes of sexual boredom and his bouts with impo–
tence are strategically timed.
It
is Peter Tarnopol who, seemingly on
Alex's behalf, tries to break out of the circle of sexual isolation by
geuing married and manages, not unpredictably,
to
marry a woman he
fears and despises. To be sure, Maureen Johnson is a fearsome woman,
but that is why Peter wants her. He marries her
in order to destroy her,
and while any woman will do for that, it is a fine point of conscience
that she should seem to deserve what she eventually gets.
This same dilemma underlies that curious little book,
The Breast,
which Roth wrote some time between
Portnoy
and
My Life
and which
reads like a companion piece
to
both .
In
fact, if speculation about the
book 's origins is of any value, it is my guess that it is an addendum
to
Portnoy 's Complaint
and is perhaps one of those dreams that Alex
must have produced in analysis but somehow failed to report to us. For
its hero, David Alan Kepesh, reads like a primary process version of
Alex, his repressed infant perhaps, his latent content. Kepesh appears
to be the disguised fulfillment of Alex's most repressed wish which we
may now guess is to undo his ill-fated sonhood altogether in favor of a
generational merger, to become, not just an infant, but his own moth–
er. To be more explicit, that is, more clinical, if this is a dream and if
we know the dreamer, as I think we do, then we can say in our cold and
diagnostic way that he has dreamed of becoming his own mother by
way of a psychic retreat
to
that period of his own infancy when the
sensory focus was too primitive and diffuse for him
to
know who was
who. The advantages to such merger are obvious: it is a wa.-y of holding
on and letting go at the same time, allowing you to
have
your mother
without
having to deal
with her. (And the breast, for what this may be
worth, confounds the kosher laws by being
both milchig and fleis-
