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tent to discover a way out. Thus, like
The Breast, My Life
is largely a
discourse on the ambiguities of entrapment, an inquiry into just how
it is that a man can find himself so firmly beyond the pleasure princi–
ple just when he had so much pleasure to anticipate. As Roth conducts
it, the inquiry is not so much philosophical as diagnostic. The two
styles differ in the way, say, a Bellow novel differs from a Roth novel,
for where Moses Herzog and Artur Sammler tend to make global in–
quiries like "What is this life?" and "What is the heart of man?" the
likes of Portnoy, Kepesh, and Tarnopol pour their perplexity into
more local and immediate questions: "How did I get
here
when I was
just
there?"
and "Why is
she
doing
that
to
me?"
In
the true Freudian
spirit, they assume that predicaments point to faults and that answers
should be formulated in terms of blame.
Tarnopol is quick to blame the culture. He was deceived into
making that vain and calamitous gesture of a marriage, he believes, by
the ethos or perhaps the superego of the fifties. For, in that decade,
Decency and Maturity, a young man's "seriousness," were at issue
precisely because it was thought to be the other way around: in
that the great world was so obviously a man's, it was only within
marriage that an ordinary woman could hope to find equality and
dignity. Indeed, we were led
to
believe by the defenders of woman–
kind of our era that we were exploiting and degrading the women
we
didn't
marry, rather than the ones we did.
And , as if the fifties weren't enough, there was the great tradition of
literary high seriousness to contend with, a tradition epitomized for
Tarnopol by an epigram from Thomas Mann that he had appended to
A Jewish Father
(and Roth had used for
Letting Go):
"All actuality is
deadly earnest, and it is morality itself that, one with life, forbids us to
be true to the guileless unrealism of our youth." Tarnopol is right
here. The courtship of cultural superegos has always been the English
major's game and Peter suffers the English major's fate-to have been
done in by the tight-lipped moralism of the great Protestant tradition
and by those ideas about honor, duty, and manly responsibility that
can be gotten from a University of Chicago education. "To live well,"
saith the superego, especially one nurtured upon Dostoevsky, Conrad,
Hawthorne, F. R. Leavis, and Mortimer Adler's
Syntopicon,
"is to suf–
fer." The great dialogue of Western Man says a lot less than it should
about the advantages of the pleasure principle.
