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PARTISAN REVIEW
locality of idiom, a feeling of condescension and nostalgia that
intensified after the Civil War, but in itself the style is simply,
fundamentally, phonocentric.
It
immediately draws our attention to
the difference between (natur) speech and (poetri) writing. Each
contrived mistake presents the primordial innocence of speech. The
speaker unknowingly writes wrongly what he wishes to say, disrupts
the textual line, and forces the knowing reader to mark the error and
measure his superior distance.
If
the speech is transcribed as it is in
Thomas Bangs Thorpe's exemplary Southwestern sketch, "The Big
Bear of Arkansas," which first appeared in 1841, then a writerly
interlocutor carefully frames the ostensible error of its way. Because it
does not see itself, speech reveals, the style sez, whereas writing, always
looking at itself, poses. Children misspell words. And what such
speech reveals to us, to the literate, is the absolute
other:
the illiterate.
What occurs in nineteenth-century American humor as it variously
imagines this illiterate, this
other
who stands on the periphery of
writing, is a gradual crystallization of the humorous style into a single
metaphor, Huckspeech , an antimetaphorical metaphor that is turned
against metaphorical thinking, against the complicated thought that
makes treaties, bills of indenture, and literature.
Portnoy's Complaint,
as we shall see, turns on that single fleeting
recognition of the
other
scrawled in writing. The note Mary Jane Reed
leaves for the maid, that relic of dialect humor from the nineteenth
century (a frail sliver of Huckleberry Finn's larynx), is enshrined in
Roth 's novel:
dir willa polish the flor by bathrum pleze
&
dont furget
the insies of windose mary jane
r (.)
It
is here that Alex Portnoy
confronts the great splendid Presence of Humor, the Priority, the
Primacy of Voluptuous Speech, the
Other,
and he cannot laugh. Like
Tom Sawyer, he belongs to the self-conscious rectitude of writing. A
rectifier of sentences, rewriter of plots, he stares at the note, recognizing
tragic difference, and is appalled. How can he have an intimate life
with a woman who can not write
dear
properly, who does not think
dear
but
dir
or
deir
or
deer
or
dere?
He is like the tormented Rousseau
described in Jacques Derrida's
Of Grammatology,
the writer who
perversely longs for Thereal McCoy, for the near presence of speech,
from the shielding safety of his writing, his analysis. "Speech," Derrida
writes, establishing the awful scale of supplements, "comes
to
be added
to intuitive presence (of the en tity, of
essence,
of the
eidos,
of
ousia,
and
so forth); writing comes to be added
to
living self-present speech;
masturbation comes to be added
to
so-called normal sexual experience;
culture to nature, evil to innocence, history to origin, and so on." The
