574
PARTISAN REVIEW
wrong, difficult, forbidden, everything that irony deflects, is right there
on the tip of the tongue. What do you want? The echoing of Echo to
Narcissus , it is a feminine question that reverberates throughout
Roth's fiction. Go ahead, Portnoy thinks,
do it,
and Mary Jane Reed:
"Go ahead ." They go immediately to her apartment where, without
introduction, the coupling begins.
Thinks Portnoy,
soixante-neuf:
"What a mouth I have fallen into!
Talk about opportunities! And simultaneously:
Get out! Go! Who and
what can this person be!"
The romance that ensues curiously recapitu–
lates the aforesaid
agon
of nineteenth-century American humor , that
single act in which a literary interlocutor (bemused, a loof, distant)
characterizes the idiom of a native speaker, falls (as a writer) into a
mouth at once obscene and lyrical, the delight of which is intimidat–
ing. The situation is wonderfully complex. For this "person" is the
first person singu lar speaking from the center of desire, from the
natur
of orality, the Portnoy who has spoken and is here now, in the middle
of a wet dream, in the wrong, exposed. Who therefore strives to retain a
proper distance, to bracket his experience. Tom explains literature to
Huck, Huck explains literature to Jim , and in each case the instructed
protests, denies the knowledge expressed. The native speaker always
gets to talk back, and is usually right. "Doan ' talk to me 'bout
SOllermun, Huck, I knows him by de back. " The extent to which the
native speaker's response challenges the interlocutor's ability to control
the issue determines the gravity of the humorous text, measures the
distance between Josh Billings and Mark Twain, between the comic
ventriloquist and the humorist. In
Portnoy's Complaint
the Monkey
has a great deal to say: "Look ... maybe I don't know what I am, but
you don 't know what you want me to be, either
I"
But Portnoy 's
realization of her realizing capabilities, her straight talk, occurs only
through the elucidation of a Freudian text. In bed with this text,
masturbating, Portnoy studies the one scene in his life where Roth
most impinges on
Huckleberry Finn:
the Vermont idyll. He is looking
for the "sentence, the phrase, the
word
that will liberate me from what I
understand are called my fantasies and fixations," without realizing
that the search for the
word,
the right word, is the prime fixation, and
therein comes upon the essay, "The Most Prevalent Form of Degrada–
tion in Erotic Life." Suddenly he remembers, against his ironic
awareness of the "ecstasies of nostalgia for the good simple life, " a
brief, imperiled escape from self-consciousness in the New England
countryside.
In "fully normal " love, Freud writes, the tender and sensuous
