NEIL SCHMITZ
575
currents of feeling are united. For Portnoy, who has ruthlessly de–
graded either imaginatively or actually almost every woman he has
known, this is telling news. Currents, streams, confluence: it is withal
life on the raft, this Freudian conception of love, and what Portnoy
sees, text in hand, is a vision of that other Portnoy who, for a moment,
an episode, seems capable of Huckish abandonment. "And
swoosh,
there was sensual feeling mingling with the purest, deepest streams of
tenderness I've ever known! I'm telling you, the confluence of the two
currents was terrific!" Yet in the pastoral landscape, bathed in postcoi–
tal bliss, Portnoy still is not free. An incongruous poem predictably
comes to mind and he deli vers from memory the whole of
Leda and the
Swan
to Mary Jane.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Be–
fore the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Mary Jane thinks it is his
poem, but without the ironic knowledge that it
is,
in some sense, his
poem, a pure reflection of his condescending attitude, his vanity.
Like
unto a god,
the intellectual, literary lover. By the end of the novel,
having dropped Leda, facing an indignant Israeli Juno, Portnoy is no
longer capable of Jovian rape, but here he conceals himself in the
swan's plumage.
It
is Mary Jane's patience that rescues him from the
foolishness of this arrogance. She asks him
to
explain "what's Aga–
memnon," and he struggles through an explanation. Then she asks
him to explain once more, but" for Christ's sake, slow." As he does so,
he watches her face. "The Monkey looks like a child trying to master a
multiplication problem, but not a dumb child-no, a quick and clever
girl! Not stupid, at all!" Ultimately she draws his hand between her
own loosening thighs. "You understand the poem
I"
Portnoy exclaims,
failing to see that she has interpreted it, that the question has been
turned. Has he put on
her
knowledge with
her
power?
What, after all, is the most prevalent form of degradation in erotic
life (insofar as Portnoy is concerned) but the act of complaining, or the
act of writing that places Mary Jane Reed between the hard covers of
Freud and Yeats, replaces body with text, substance with shadow? Roth
puts the title of Freud's essay in boldface to preface the Vermont idyll,
but it is not the idyll that Portnoy first describes. He discusses instead
the horror of Mary Jane Reed's handwriting, the "work of an eight–
year-old." She spells clean with a
k:
"As in 'Joseph K.' Not to mention
'dear' as in the salutation of a letter: d-e-r-e. Or d-e-i-r. And that very
first time (this I love) d-i-r." Everything that is culturally and morally
wrong about Mary Jane Reed is humorously summarized in her
offensive writing of
dir.
The whole novel draws to this point, to this
word. As we have seen, Portnoy intensely believes in the power of the
