576
PARTISAN REVIEW
word to comprehend desire, believes, that is, in the efficacy of analysis,
in the power of knowledge, and so it all finally comes
to
this ultimate
either/ or: the spoken word wrongly written, but there,
dir,
and the
written word somewhere in the Freudian text that will correctly define
Portnoy 's complaint and release him from his malady. His complaint,
of course, is that he is never
there,
never free of remorse and anxiety, his
fear of what
there
means. Impotent, he can no longer say
dear.
His
analysis is therefore a surrender to the authority of Freud, a sophisti–
cated transformation of his juvenile question: do we believe in winter?
Yet the Freudian enterprise is itself an attempt to come
to
terms with
the irrational meaning compacted in
dir,
an attempt to listen closely
through the reverie of a free-associating analysand
to
the unruly speech
of an unconscious self. Mary Jane Reed has herself undergone such
analysis, talked interminably from the locus of
dir,
and met only
helpless silence from her analyst. Know ledge collapses before the
humorous manifestation of
dir.
"It nearly drove me crazy," Portnoy
humorlessly reports .
Dere, deir, dir:
he spells out each error for the
benefit of the silent Spielvogel.
"Beginning with
Goodbye, Columbus,"
Roth writes in
Reading
Myself and Others,
"I've been attracted to prose that has the turns ,
vibrations, intonations, and cadences, the spontaneity and ease, of
spoken language, at the same time that it is solidly grounded on the
page, weighted with the irony, precision, and ambiguity associated
with a more traditional literary rhetoric. " Roth 's sentence itself is
syntactically odd, strangely tensed to sustain a difficult balance, an
improbable mixture. Speech is musically in the air as breath, vibrating,
all "spontaneity and ease," whereas" literary rhetoric" heavil y endures
the drag of precise inscription (pen -pushing, key-tapping), is "solidly
grounded on the page," responsive to gravity. Like
Huckleberry Finn
dragged out at the end by Tom Sawyer's busy scribbling,
Portnoy's
Complaint
incloses Mary Jane Reed's wrong writing in an unbreak–
able parenthesis and asserts at last the fata l primacy of the interlocutor
who shows us as dream, as nightmare, the slip into speech of
dir.
How
to write "at the same time" in both modes, how to elevate trash , that
is
a project, and it is brilliantly, funnily, reflected in
Portnoy's Com–
plaint.
There are, however, other kitchens in American literature where
the sentence is humorously cooked. What Gertrude Stein places on the
table in
Tender Buttons,
that shaky table, is a discourse neither kosher
nor
chazerai,
neither wrong nor right, a discourse that magically
transforms these categories:
