MORRIS DICKSTEIN
193
Shechner does in a recent essay on Roth
(Partisan Review,
#
3, 1974),
what unexamined impulses of aggression and sadistic cruelty have
gone into the making of this type of "humor. " By contrast, the
earlier breakthrough book ,
Portnoy 's Complaint,
really does use
black humor, psychoanalysis, fantasy, and even lyricism to explore a
real novelistic subject, which combines sex, ]ewishness, growing up,
morality, and the "family romance." After
Portnoy
Roth seems to
have imagined that he had found a quite different formula, that a
stand-up routine of bad taste and exaggeration were enough in them–
selves, without any deep personal engagement or formal effort.
The black humorists are generally strong in fantasy, and Roth is
unusual among them-much closer to the writers of the fifties-in
his inability to fantasticate materials from outside his own experience . .
But Roth 's
post-Portnoy
books do have a typical end-of-the-sixties
quality in their gratuitous violence and desperate , but unearned,
extremity. They belong to what we might call the W.eatherman phase
of recent literature, when the utopian hopes of an earlier moment
turned sour, when some of the would-be free spirits were driven to
such a pitch of frustration and intense desperation that they lost
touch with reality. There had been such a thread, though minor, in
the politics of the period from the beginning, and even moreso in the
literature. As Blake made clear in his' 'Proverbs of Hell," liberation
finds its necessary limits only through excess, not by way of caution
and prudent restraint. But the verbal black humorists test the limits
of exaggeration as a useful literary strategy. Thus the later stories in
Malamud's
Pictures ofFide/man
push the schlemiel character into a
masochistic comedy of humiliation that is genuinely unpleasant to
read. A writer like Terry Southern is often crass and trivial, except in
rare moments like the last pages of
The Magic Christian,
where his
imagination brings off an apocalyptic fantasy of large comic propor–
tions. At the bottom of the barrel are novels like Bruce]ay Friedman's
The Dick,
where there is no imagination at all, where instead of
imagination the novelist offers up his most rancid prejudices and
adolescent twitches , from a repulsive racism to a sophomoric back–
alley lechery, all in the name of shock and bad taste. Even a fine
writer's writer like Stanley Elkin , who can be terribly subtle in the
rhythms of his language, tends to be gross in his emotional tone–
hysterical and overwrought in a way that 's unbearable because it's
