Portnoy’s Complaint (Censorship (Ready Reference series))

The Work

Portnoy’s Complaint, a long monologue narrated by a young Jewish man while in analysis, is prefaced by a definition of “Portnoy’s Complaint” as a disorder in which “strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The book focuses on Portnoy’s parents, his endless adolescent experimentation with masturbation, his youthful sexual encounters with girls, his varied sexual experiences with a model named Monkey, and his pilgrimage to Israel—all of which are punctuated by frequently obscene outcries against the guilt he feels for his sexual obsessions. Roth, who has defended himself and the book many times, claims it is full of dirty words because Portnoy wants to be free: “I wanted to raise obscenity to the level of a subject.”

The book became a cause célèbre in 1969, commented on by social critics and stand-up comedians alike. Most objections to it came from Jewish groups and rabbis who called it “anti-Semitic” and “self-hating” and protested against libraries that put it on their shelves. It was seized in Australia in 1970 and 1971 by Melbourne officials, who filed obscenity charges against it and the bookseller who sold it.

Bibliography

Cohen, Sarah Blacher. “Philip Roth’s Would-Be Patriarchs and Their Shikses and Shrews.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (Spring, 1975): 16-23. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Philip Roth, edited by Sanford Pinsker. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. About the women in several of Roth’s novels, including Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth’s “petulant” young men typically blame their “Yiddishe mommes” for their problems and powerlessness.

Grebstein, Sheldon. “The Comic Anatomy of Portnoy’s Complaint.” In Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. An excellent essay on Roth’s “stand-up” humor, as developed from professional comedians such as Henny Youngman and others.

Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Contains an essay, “Philip Roth and the Rabbis,” that shows Roth’s sensitivity to the problems of assimilation in America.

Halio, Jay L. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. The chapter “The Comedy of Excess” treats various aspects of Roth’s comic mastery in Portnoy’s Complaint. It also comments on the underlying humanity of Mary Jane Reed, the Monkey, as Portnoy, who fails to recognize her humanity, derisively nicknames her.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “About Portnoy.” The Yale Review 58 (Summer, 1969): 623-635. Mainly about Roth’s linguistic virtuosity in Portnoy’s Complaint.