NEIL SCHMITZ
573
Throughout his narrative Portnoy is greatly confused about
me
and
it
and the words that intervene. He calls his boyhood friend,
Smolka, "my Tom Sawyer," although Smolka, a raffish delinquent
who lives "on Hostess cupcakes and his own wits," is evidently far too
swinish to pass as Tom, and when Portnoy embraces, providentially,
Thereal McCoy in the palpable form of Mary Jane Reed, the "fulfill–
ment of all my lascivious adolescent dreams ," whom he takes and eats,
he calls her the Monkey. Morosely defiant, bitchy, caged in this term,
she is simply a projection of the meaning Portnoy assigns to his own
body. Indeed a monkey, and on his back as criminal bliss, as an
addiction, the object of his lust, and as a curse, the epitome of and
witness to his debasement, as the very
Ding an sich.
It
is a word he
places between himself and the human significance of Mary Jane Reed,
this certain ly, and yet the term in the language of the novel is
singularly apt. For if she is an incarnation of
l'enfant sauvage,
briefly
down from the trees , her bestiality is only a part of her wildness . There
is also the issue of her ignorance. And here Portnoy shares Tom
Sawyer 's dilemma: how to cherish the risk of Huck 's uncivilized
existence and yet do without Huck's vulnerability, without Huck's
dirt, how to keep Huck Huck and yet safely delineated, fixed, rational–
ized? His so lution is to make Huck "respectable" in the daytime but
avai lable in the evening for illicit prowls, to contrive a role for Huck in
his fantasies and then persuade Huck to play that part. When we last
see Mary Jane Reed in
Portnoy's Complaint,
she is clinging to a hotel
window in Athens, threatening to let go and fall. She has been
brought to this impasse by the manipulation of a literary fellow whose
confused instruction , like Tom Sawyer's in
Huckleberry Finn,
has
proved disastrous. The written word is between them. In the long run ,
Portnoy sees clearly enough, any mixture of right and wrong styles is
inconceivable. Yet he will recite to her
Leda and the Swan.
All these mythic tropes are present in Portnoy's terse account of his
first meeting with the Monkey. There she Huckishly stands on the
corner of Lexington and Fifty-second, a lissome hillbilly girl on the
lam, in and out of different beds, different scrapes, still audacious, still
innocent. An involuted writer, he fears disclosure-and there, a veri–
table Muse, she stands. "Go ahead, you shackled and fettered son of a
bitch, " Portnoy says to himself,
" speak to her.
She has an ass on her
with the swell and the cleft of the world's most perfect nectarine!
Speak!"
His approach is lamely conventional ("Hi!" and an offer to
buy her a drink), but she in turn faces him with all the directness of
Huckspeech. "What do
you
want?" Everything in discourse that is
