SANFORD PINSKER
61
What turned out to be much more important, however, is the way
that Roth showed a subsequent generation of writers how to mine the
rich material beneath their very noses. Yet, as they used to say in vaude–
ville, "You ain't seen nuthin' yet," for in
Portnoy's Complaint,
Roth
sailed free of the nets that were meant to hold him down. There, his off–
the-wall protagonist insisted on nothing more or less than that old-fash–
ioned, all-purpose American word-freedom. To liberate oneself from
Tribal constraint, from the parochial straightjacket of everything that
screams "Thou shalt not. .. " (whether the words emanate from God on
Sinai or, more likely, from one's mother at the dinner
table)-that
is the
dream Roth's character hankers for. As Alexander Portnoy puts it, as he
works himself into one of his characteristic tears:
Because I'm sick and tired of
goyische
this and
goyische
that!
If
it's
bad it's the
goyim,
if it's good it's the Jews! Can't you see, my dear
parents, from whose loins I somehow leaped, that such thinking is
a trifle barbaric? That all you are expressing is your
fear?
....
Jew
Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It's coming out of my ears already, the saga
of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor and stick your suffering her–
itage up your suffering ass-J
happen also to be a human being!
With certain necessary adjustments, Coleman Silk, the black charac–
ter who passes for a mild-mannered Jewish professor in
The Human
Stain
(2000),
feels much the same way. Indeed, one could argue that he
expresses in "black face," what many of Roth's characters have insisted
on-namely, a weighting that puts its primary emphasis on the self as
opposed to society. For Silk, the moment of truth, the incident that
changes everything, happens, ironically enough, in Washington, D.C.,
when he is about to enroll in all-Negro Howard University. He is called
the N-word, with its accumulated cultural force of all that is degrading
and delimiting. Silk, however, will have none of it. Instead, he will rein–
vent himself, and in the process, become " ...free to be whatever he
wants, free to pursue the hugest aim, the confidence right in his bones to
be his particular
I. ..
.free to go ahead and be stupen,dous. Free to enact
the boundless, self-defining drama of the pronouns we, they, and
I."
The dream strikes us as quintessentially American, whether it clusters
around a Benjamin Franklin making his way down Philadelphia's Broad
Street with three loaves under his arms and three pennies in his pocket,
a Midwestern boy named James Gatz dreaming of one day becoming
the fabulous Jay Gatsby, or the Coleman Silk who wills himself into
becoming a putatively Jewish professor of classics at Athena College.
