PARTISAN REVI EW
421
chig.)
In such a dream of primal merger, the dreamer is at last on his
own, self-contained, androgynous, and pleasantly autoerotic, and can
indulge himself forev.er at the sacred fount of life without two sets of
dishes. But since this dream by Alex is also a story by Roth the fulfill–
ment of this wish is bound to exact a price. It turns out that the dream
of merger is also the dream of regression and the fairy tale of sexual
self-sufficiency can turn into the nightmare of total helplessness. Thus
Alex Portnoy's dream of independence and autonomy becomes David
Kepesh's nightmare of isolation and entrapment.
Such a situation is not propitious for fiction; Kepesh's possibili–
ties are
LOO
limited. He can only lie there and suffer and, in the end,
grow tiresome. That is the condition of the infant after all; its demands
are few, simple, boring, and endless, and since it can't act out its frus–
trated desires, it learns instead to moralize, to develop a superego and
become wise. Kepesh's condition is in fact terrifying and yet the tone of
The Breast
seems askew because Kepesh refuses to be anything but
sensible. Accordingly, while
Portnoy 's Complaint
is protest fiction
and a brief in behalf of letting go,
The Breast
is a conservative moral
fable about the virtues of holding on.
It
hands us the dilemma of civi–
lization and its discontents at the most primitive infantile level and
comes out foursquare for repression. Alex, with his temper, is a tiger of
wrath; Kepesh , with his Shakespeare and his Rilke, is a horse of in–
struction. But he may have no choice; all he can do is want, and want,
and want, and learn how to behave when he doesn't get. Self-repres–
sion and parental control are stultifying annoyances for the likes of
Alex Portnoy, but they are cruel necessities in the moral life of an
infant, or a breast. That may be why
The Breast
is so unsettling a
book, for
to
us, Kepesh's "mature" prescription of a daily anesthetic to
reduce his polymorphous appetities reinforced by therapeutic doses of
Shakespeare seems like a defeatist strategy for a meager endurance. We
want a magical release from breasthood and Kepesh gives us, English
majors all, the fake magic of poetry. We want the primal scream and
he delivers lessons about Mr. Reality. Indeed, he is unique among the
likes of Ozzie Freedman, Gabriel Wallach, Lucy Nelson , Alex Portnoy,
and Peter Tarnopol; he never throws a tantrum.
The Breast
is the Roth–
ian nightmare at its most radical and its most pedantic. Kepesh, hav–
ing become \;lis own mother or at least a part of her, thumps
her
bible;
his tex t on renunciation and endurance may be wisdom but of a famil–
iar Jewish kind . As breasts go he is an overachiever. Nipple and all, he
is learning how to be a good boy-and an English professor.
