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PARTISAN REVIEW
Obviously Roth is influenced in
Portnoy's Complaint
by his
reading of
Huckleberry Finn.
There is explicit reference in the text,
Portnoy has been to college and knows about the River and the Shore,
the novels share certain structural features, both are told in the racy
first person, but their difference (beyond these similarities) is so great,
Roth's understanding of the problem (the fatality of an amour with
Thereal McCoy) so uniquely tortured, that the question of influence is
properly beside the point. What is on Huck 's plate is put before young
Alex Portnoy in Newark, the same sentence, the same deprivation, but
Portnoy is distinctively, decisively, not Huckish in his response.
Portnoy's Complaint
emerges from two different projects, we learn in
Reading Myself and Others
(1974), a slapstick
Great Expectations
"where the Dickensian orphan-hero (first found in a shoebox by an
aged
mohel
and circumcised, hair-raisingly, on the spot) runs away
from his loving stepparents at age twelve and on ice skates sets off
across a Newark lake after a little blond shiksa whose name, he thinks,
is Thereal McCoy," and a somewhat conventional domestic comedy,
The Nice Jewish Boy,
both of which were provocative failures. As Roth
discusses his problems in writing these experimental texts, the struc–
ture, the politics of American humor, the archetypal faces of Huck and
Tom, come steadily into view . Neither the "fantastic" yarn nor the
"relatively measured" play satisfied Roth. Restricted in each form , in
each style, to a single comic performance, he lacked the conflict that
generates eloquent humor and found himself" technically" recapitu–
lating the complaint that rips Portnoy, so Portnoy tells us, asunder.
"Not until I found, in the person of a troubled analysand," he writes,
"the voice that could speak in behalf of both the' Jewboy' (with all that
word signifies to Jew and Gentile alike about aggression , appetite, and
marginality) and the 'nice Jewish boy' (and what that epithet implies
about repression, respectability, and social acceptance) was I able to
complete a fiction that was expressive, instead of symptomatic, of the
character 's dilemma." But it is just there, as Roth finds the appropriate
voice, the right style, that all the confusion begins in
Portnoy's
Complaint.
How does that "troubled, " bitterly ironic voice speak
for
the self that speaks outside the language of analysis and against the
discourse of introspection? This unresolved question, humorously
resolved at the end of the novel by Portnoy's wordless scream, and by
the subsequent article Dr. Spielvogel publishes in the
Internationale
Zeitschrijt fur Psychoanalyse,
frames the entire forthcoming adventure
in Roth 's career
(Our Gang, The Breast,
"On the Air, "
The Great
American Novel),
that protracted humiliation of Writerly Roth , the
Serious Literary Figure.
