SOURCE: Brauner, David. “Masturbation and Its Discontents, or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint.” Critical Review, no. 40 (2000): 75-90.

[In the following essay, Brauner explores the comedic aspects of Portnoy's Complaint, contending that the novel is based on the unresolved tension between Roth's impulse “to treat psychoanalysis comically, and to treat comedy psychoanalytically.”]

It has been more than thirty years since the first publication of one of the most infamous post-war novels, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Although it still outrages many readers—in my experience of teaching it to undergraduates more because of its misogyny than because of the obscenity which excited so much indignation at the time—and delights many others, its rhetorical complexity (in particular its juxtaposition of comic and psychoanalytic discourses) tends to go unremarked.

Most studies of Philip Roth make much of his comedy, and some see it as his defining characteristic, but few attempt to situate it in a theoretical or historical context. Two of the books on Roth have focused on his comedy. Neither has done him any favours. The first, Sanford Pinsker's The Comedy That ‘Hoits’, although it concludes with a ringing eulogy—‘He has taught us all how painfully complicated it is to laugh’—is full of faint praise that damns, or seems designed to damn. Moreover, the comedy that ‘hoits’ is otherwise variously characterized as ‘a smart-alecky, cruel laughter’, ‘shrill … chest-thumpingly adolescent’, and ‘sophomoric and self-indulgent’.¹ In contrast, J. Halio's Philip Roth Revisited is at pains to emphasize the ‘seriousness’ of Roth's work and in so doing tends at times to bury the comedy it comes to praise. Halio's dogmatic insistence that Roth's best work is comic leads him to dismiss as aberrant the fiction that doesn't match his prescriptive definition of comedy, so that Letting Go (1962), Roth's underrated first novel, becomes ‘a mistake … tedious … Roth's least typical novel’ and When She Was Good (1967), a tragic novel, becomes a comedy manqué in which the humour is ‘floating’, ‘submerged’, or ‘drowned’.²

Roth himself has written enthusiastically about his (re)discovery of the comic mode. Of the conception and execution of Portnoy's Complaint he observes that it ‘liberat[ed] me from an apprentice's literary models, particularly from the awesome graduate-school authority of Henry James’,³ and that ‘after several arduous years spent on When She Was Good … I was aching to write something freewheeling and funny’ and ‘not until I had got hold of guilt … as a comic idea, did I begin to feel myself lifting free and clear of my … old concerns’.⁴ Roth's explanations of his artistic processes are typically couched in such therapeutic terms: as internal struggles between imprisoning inhibitions and liberating impulses. Yet he is at pains to stress that, though Portnoy's neuroses may have originally resembled an amplified version of his own, it was the increasing divergence between author and fictional creation, rather than any autobiographical identification between them, that defined the development of the novel.

What had begun as a hopped-up, semi-falsified version of an analytic monologue that might have been mine … gradually [became] a full-scale comical counter-analysis.

(The Facts, 156)

For Roth, Portnoy's Complaint was a relief and a release: a relief from the high seriousness of the artist's vocation, from the vows of James's sacred office: a release of his—hitherto largely repressed—comic instincts. As the phrase ‘counter-analysis’ suggests, for Alex Portnoy his session with Dr Spielvogel (or, as the ending of the novel implies, the internal monologue that precedes it) is a direct inversion of this process; whereas Roth was taking himself too seriously, Portnoy's complaint is that no one (least of all himself) will take him seriously at all. Like Roth, Alex seeks relief, but in his case it is relief from comedy, from the absurd indignities of his life, and from the ‘Jewish joke’ in which he feels he is trapped.⁵ Alex is not liberated by comedy, but imprisoned by it: his monologue, hilarious though it is, is an agonized plea to be released from the role of comic butt, to be given some serious relief. Psychoanalytic discourse offers the prospect of this relief, but is itself continually deflated by a comic discourse, which in turn is deconstructed in psychoanalytic terms, and so on. The novel derives its momentum from a dialectic between these two discourses—or, to put it another way, exhibits an unresolved tension between two impulses: to treat psychoanalysis comically, and to treat comedy psychoanalytically.

One of Alex's most vivid memories—‘The scene itself is like some piece of heavy furniture that sits in my mind and will not budge’ (80)—is of an episode of bitter mutual recrimination between his parents, the cause of which, however, has become obscure. It appears to be prompted by the recollection of another episode. One night Alex's father brings home one of his work colleagues—‘a thin, tense, shy, deferential, soft-spoken, ageing cashier named Anne McCaffrey’, with ‘a terrific pair of legs’—“‘for a real Jewish meal’” (78-9). Extrapolating from the implied association between these two memories, Alex feels that he has finally identified the source of his parents’ disagreement: his father's infidelity with the shikse cashier. At this point, Alex suddenly pulls himself up:

Oh, this is pure fantasy, this is right out of the casebook, is it not? No, no, that is nobody else's father but my own who now brings his fist down on the kitchen table and shouts back at her, ‘I did no such thing! That is a lie and wrong!’ Only wait a minute—it's me who is screaming ‘I didn't do it!’ The culprit is me!

(81)

Just at the moment when his father's guilt seems evident (note the bathetic tautology of ‘That is a lie and wrong!’) Alex suddenly turns the tables. He rejects the theory that his mother had been accusing his father of adultery and decides that her anger originates instead from his refusal to punish Alex, who has done some ‘terrible thing’ (81). Alex is still unsatisfied, however, and appeals to his analyst, Spielvogel, for help:

But look, what is going on here after all? Surely, Doctor, we can figure this thing out, two smart Jewish boys like ourselves. … A terrible act has been committed, and it has been committed by either my father or me. The wrongdoer, in other words, is one of the two members of the family with a penis. Okay. So far so good. Now: did he fuck between those luscious legs the gentile cashier from the office, or have I eaten my sister's chocolate pudding?

(81-2)

The great psychodrama thus resolves itself into a joke whose butt is psychoanalysis. Alex begins by reading his memory in Freudian terms, rejects the reading as too trite and predictable to be true—‘right out of the casebook’—and then comically punctures our expectations (expectations raised by the assumptions of psychoanalysis that a traumatic memory such as this, whose origin appears to have been forgotten—that is, repressed—is likely to contain material too disturbing for the patient to cope with) by conceding that the parental rift might have been caused as easily by a minor act of childish theft as by a violation of the marriage vows.

The matter does not end here, however. Just as Alex is reliving his guilty denial, the confusion between himself and his father—between the brother's betrayal of his sister and the father's betrayal of the mother—resurfaces.

Even if I did [eat the chocolate pudding], I didn't mean it! I thought it was something else! I swear, I swear, I didn't mean to do it! … But is that me—or my father hollering out his defence before the jury? Sure, that's him—he did it, okay, okay, Sophie, leave me alone already, I did it, but I didn't mean it!

(82)

The blurring of identity between father and son here is enacted linguistically, as the third person (‘Sure, that's him—he did it, okay’) changes in mid-sentence to the first person (‘okay, Sophie, leave me alone already’) and the son's mitigating plea (‘I didn't mean it!’) is echoed by the father. The earlier satirical rejection of the psychoanalytic approach is revealed as nothing more than the patient's customary resistance to a painful recognition, and the memory of the purloined pudding is exposed as an attempt to displace his father's expression of prohibited sexual appetite with a transgression prompted by a different sort of appetite. (This identification between the ingestion of forbidden food and the enjoyment of forbidden sexual pleasure is a persistent theme in the novel.) Alex's Oedipal identification with his father in this instance (the father's sexual desire for a forbidden object, Anne McCaffrey, representing Alex's own desires for a forbidden object, his mother) implicitly reaffirms Freudian orthodoxy, as does his fear of and resentment towards his mother.

Later in the novel Alex invokes the suicide of Ronald Nimkin, an aspiring young pianist who lives in the same building, as an illustration of the lengths to which a Jewish mother can drive her son. The grieving Mrs Nimkin shrieks at Mrs Portnoy, ‘Why? Why? Why did he do this to us?’ Mrs Nimkin's reiterated expression of anguish recalls both Alex's reaction to his mother's deployment of a ‘long bread knife’ to ensure that he eat up his dinner (‘Doctor, why, why oh why oh why oh why does a mother pull a knife on her own son?’) and Mrs. Portnoy's plaintive incredulity on the occasion when the young Alex kicks and bites her: ‘Why … why do you do such a thing?’ (91, 19, 112.) Alex takes it upon himself to reply on behalf of Ronald and all Jewish sons:

BECAUSE YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE TOO FUCKING MUCH TO BEAR! I have read Freud on Leonardo, Doctor, and pardon the hubris, but my fantasies exactly: this big smothering bird beating frantic wings about my face and mouth so that I cannot even get my breath. What do we want, me and Ronald and Leonardo? To be left alone!

(113)

Once again Alex begins by deferring to Freud's wisdom, alluding grandly to his essay on Leonardo Da Vinci, only to render the allusion (and, by implication, Freud's own reading of the artist's psyche) absurd by inferring from it that all would have been well with Leonardo (whom he brackets, with a chutzpah unmitigated by his admission of hubris, with himself and Ronald Nimkin) had his mother simply left him alone.

However, Alex's reading of Freud's reading of Leonardo's childhood memory is not merely parodically reductive: it is also selective. According to ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’, Leonardo speaks not of ‘a big smothering bird beating frantic wings about my face and mouth’ but of a vulture which, as he lay in his cradle, ‘came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips’.⁶ For Freud, the significance of this dream is two-fold: it confirms (through a symbolic association between the vulture and the mother) that Leonardo ‘spent the critical first years of his life not by the side of his father and stepmother, but with his poor, forsaken, real mother, so that he had time to feel the absence of his father’, and it points (through the association of the bird's tail with the penis, and thereby the beating of the tail inside the mouth with an act of fellatio) to Leonardo's suppressed homosexuality. Alex ignores the second of these symbolic interpretations, and focuses on the first, which is actually based on a misconception (Freud explains that the vulture was a symbol of motherhood in Egyptian mythology, and goes to some lengths to establish the likelihood that Leonardo would have been aware of this, oblivious of the fact that he has mis-translated the word nibio, which is the Italian not for ‘vulture’ but for ‘kite’). Moreover, he neglects to follow Freud's argument that the two elements of the dream are linked, in that Leonardo's development as a homosexual resulted from the erotic feelings towards his mother, which he retained in later life and which prevented him from forming mature sexual relationships with women.

In alluding only to the suffocating intimacy of Leonardo's relationship with his mother, Alex may be having a further joke at Freud's expense: highlighting the eagerness with which he seized, mistakenly, upon a detail (the vulture which was actually a kite) in order to force Leonardo's biography into a preconceived psychoanalytical narrative. However, the Freudian explanation for Alex's selective reconstruction of Freud's observations is, clearly, that Alex is repressing the further identification between himself and Leonardo, the identification that would cast doubt on his own sexuality. Through his insistent invocation of Freud, Alex implicitly invites us to psychoanalyze his self-analysis in this way, but of course in doing so we risk incurring his comic fate: becoming the victims of an inchoate, exacerbated self-consciousness.

At one point in the novel Alex breaks off in the midst of one of his kvetches to protest:

But why must I explain myself? Excuse myself! Why must I justify with my Honesty and Compassion my desires? So I have desires—only they're endless. Endless! And that, that may not be such a blessing, taking for a moment the psychoanalytic point of view. … But then all the unconscious can do anyway, so Freud tells us, is want. And want! And WANT!

(96)

The collision here of formal and informal registers, psychoanalytical terminology and demotic exclamation, American locution with Yiddish syntax, is typical of the novel's prose. On the one hand Alex tries to elevate his comical predicament to the status of a serious case-study, to turn his personal complaints into a generic Complaint by ‘taking … the psychoanalytic point of view’. On the other he satirizes his own pretensions—and the Freudian construct of the unconscious—through the hyperbole of comic discourse (emphasized typographically through the use of italics, capitalization, and exclamation marks). This is one of the ways in which Alex's ambivalence towards psychoanalysis manifests itself: he continually vacillates between adopting—and implicitly endorsing—its discourse, and undermining or rejecting it (displacing it, or juxtaposing it ironically, with comic discourse). Often he treats Freudian terminology with comic irreverence (‘LET'S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!’; ‘That tyrant, my superego, he should be strung up that son of a bitch, hung up by his fucking storm-trooper's boots till he's dead!’; ‘Why do I run home. … To my Tollhouse cookie and my glass of milk, home to my nice clean bed! Oy, civilisation and its discontents!’: 115, 147-8, 167) and sometimes caricatures Freud himself as a dogmatic and intellectually simplistic charlatan. There are even moments in the novel when he treats psychoanalysis with disdain, such as in his description of Mary Jane Reed's therapy sessions with Dr Morris Frankel, whom Alex renames ‘Harpo’, after one of the Marx brothers:

Sometimes he coughs, sometimes he grunts, sometimes he belches, once in a while he farts, whether voluntarily or not who knows, though I hold that a fart has to be interpreted as a negative transference reaction on his part.

(144)

The derision here seems to be directed not just at Dr Frankel, but at the determinism of psychoanalysis itself (in which even a fart might be interpreted as negative transference). In Alex's version of events, Frankel becomes a comic buffoon, his therapy sessions comic vaudeville sketches.

At other times, however, Alex is respectful, deferential, even ingratiating towards his own therapist, and devout in his personal adherence to Freudian doctrine. When Alex tells Spielvogel of his father's parting words to him prior to his excursion to Europe with Mary Jane—‘What if I die?’—he feels compelled to append a qualification:

Now whether the words I hear are the words spoken is something else again. And whether what I hear I hear out of compassion for him, out of my agony over the inevitability of this horrific occurrence, his death, or out of my eager anticipation of that event, is also something else again. But this of course you understand, this of course is your bread and your butter.

(111)

Alex is clearly intent on impressing Spielvogel with his analytic powers, while at the same time being careful not to usurp his authority or trespass on his professional territory. However, in spite of his reassurances—‘this of course you understand’—the impression persists that Alex is not able fully to trust Spielvogel to arrive at an independent diagnosis of his condition.

Realizing, like any good Freudian, that his childhood attitude towards his excretions may be significant, Alex is dismayed at having been unable to keep his underwear unsoiled:

Oh, Doctor, I wipe and I wipe and I wipe. … I wipe until that little orifice of mine is red as a raspberry; but still, much as I would like to please my mother by dropping into her laundry hamper at the end of each day jockey shorts such as might have encased the asshole of a little angel, I deliver forth instead (deliberately, Herr Doctor?—or just inevitably?) the fetid little drawers of a boy.

(47)

Again the suspicion remains that this passage has as much to do with Alex's desire to please his analyst as his desire to please his mother. As a boy at school Alex impresses his teachers with his academic prowess; as an adult he tries to impress his analyst with his command of psychoanalytic procedures. Everything—even the ‘pale and wispy brushstroke’ (47) of shit at the bottom of his underwear—means something; everything has an unconscious motivation.

Later in the novel Alex pauses for breath, as it were, to review the nature of his complaint.

Whew! Have I got grievances! Do I harbour hatreds I didn't even know were there? Is it the process, Doctor, or is it what we call ‘the material?’. … I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public.

(88)

Again, Alex is keen to advertize his credentials as an insider, a member of the psychoanalytic fraternity (note the use of ‘we’ in his question to the doctor) and, moreover, as a ‘good’ patient, one who will not indulge in self-pity but will attempt to understand his predicament. Paradoxically, however, Alex's aspirations to be a model analysand—his willingness to mine his psychic life for deposits of repression and neurosis—is frustrated due not to a lack of ‘material’, but to a superabundance of it. Chez Portnoy ‘nothing was ever simply nothing but always SOMETHING’ (90). Instead of a buried ‘Oedipal drama’ there is only transparent ‘farce’ (242); instead of the subtleties of Freud's case-histories, with their latent dream-symbolism, with Alex

it all happens in broad daylight! The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread! … Who else do you know whose mother actually threatened him with the dreaded knife? Who else was so lucky as to have the threat of castration so straight-forwardly put by his momma?

(234)

For Alex, his mother brandishing a knife—ostensibly to encourage him to eat his dinner but, coinciding as it does with the onset of his compulsive onanism, implicitly an attempt to curb his sexuality—is another episode in the Freudian Oedipal narrative ‘right out of the casebook’. In ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, Freud writes:

When the (male) child's interest turns to his genitals … the adults do not approve of this behaviour. More or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values so highly will be taken away from him. Usually it is from women that the threat emanates …⁷

Time and again, Portnoy's complaint is not that his case is intractable, but that it is all too predictable, too obvious: ‘you don't have to go digging where these people [his parents] are concerned—they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!’ ‘With a life like mine, Doctor, who needs dreams?’; ‘Doctor, my psyche, it's about as difficult to understand as a grade-school primer! … Who needs Freud? Rose Franzenblau has enough on the ball to come up with an analysis of somebody like me!’ (91, 151, 165)

For Alex, the most galling aspect of his predicament is its corniness, its vulgarity, its transparency. He pleads with the mute Spielvogel not for an interpretation of his predicament (which he invariably supplies himself), but for a second opinion: that is, a more interesting, more satisfying, more sophisticated diagnosis of his complaint. When he asks Spielvogel the meaning of his violent desire for, and impotence with, Naomi (the last of his succession of girlfriends in the novel and the only one who is Jewish, she resembles his mother both physically and in her ability to humiliate him verbally), what he fears, above all, is confirmation of the banality of his case: ‘This mother-substitute! … Oh please, it can't be as simplistic as that! Not me!’ (242.)

However, it is not clear whether the banality of this reading is actually due to the banality of Alex's own psyche, or to the banality of the psychoanalytic Oedipal narrative itself. This is how Alex continues:

Because she [Naomi] wore red hair and freckles, this makes her, according to my unconscious one-track mind, my mother? … Too much to swallow, I'm afraid! Oedipus Rex is a famous tragedy, schmuck, not another joke! You're a sadist, you're a quack and a lousy comedian! I mean this is maybe going too far for a laugh, Doctor Spielvogel, Doctor Freud, Doctor Kronkite!⁸

Alex's indignation here (his ‘favorite word in the English language’) is aroused in the first place by the reductiveness of the psychoanalytic approach, the notion that the unconscious is perpetually ‘one-track’ (151). This is a criticism which surfaces earlier, in the most explicit consideration of Freud in the novel:

Now, I am under the influence at the moment of an essay entitled ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life’; as you may have guessed, I have bought a set of Collected Papers, and since my return from Europe, have been putting myself to sleep each night … with a volume of Freud in my hand. Sometimes Freud in hand, sometimes Alex in hand, frequently both. Yes, there in my unbuttoned pajamas all alone I lie, fiddling with it like a little boy-child in a dopey reverie, tugging on it, twisting it, rubbing and kneading it, and meanwhile reading spellbound through ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love,’ ever heedful of the sentence, the phrase, the word that will liberate me from what I understand are called my fantasies and fixations.

In the ‘Degradation’ essay there is that phrase, ‘currents of feeling’. ‘For a fully normal attitude in love’ (deserving of semantic scrutiny, that ‘normal’, but to go on) … it is necessary that two currents of feeling be united: the tender, affectionate feelings, and the sensuous feelings. And in many instances this just doesn't happen, sad to say. ‘Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love’.

Question: Am I to consider myself one of the fragmented multitude? In language plain and simple, are Alexander Portnoy's sensual feelings fixated to his incestuous fantasies? … Has a restriction so pathetic been laid upon my object choice?

(170)

As is clear from this and the previous quotation, however, there is more to Alex's critique of Freud than a protest at the dogmatism of psychoanalysis: his analysis is also linguistic, or literary-critical. In the first passage, Alex sees Freud's appropriation of the story of Oedipus as a reduction of Sophocles' great tragedy to the level of a smutty joke; in the second, he draws attention to the imprecision of the term ‘normal’ (as well as its implied ideological assumptions) and to the obscurity of psychoanalytic terminology—language that is anything but ‘plain and simple’. This literary sensibility is in evidence throughout the novel, but the challenge it poses to Freud's psychoanalytic views is characteristically balanced (or undercut) by a Freudian counter-analysis.

In ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life’, Freud suggests that

the man … feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object. … This is the source of his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is ethically inferior, to whom he need attribute no aesthetic scruples …⁹

At first glance, Alex's relationships with women seem to conform to this pattern. He loses interest in Sarah Abbott Maulsby because she won't perform fellatio on him, in Mary Jane Reed when she complains of feeling humiliated after a series of three-in-a-bed sex sessions, and in Kay Campbell when she refuses to contemplate a conversion to Judaism: when they refuse, that is, to fulfil the role of ‘a debased sexual object’, or when they assert their independence in terms that make it impossible for Alex to regard them as ‘ethically inferior’.

Is Alex's lovelife simply more grist for the Freudian mill, then? Not necessarily. Another way of looking at it is to say that Alex rejects these women not because he respects them, but because he doesn't; not because they have moral scruples, but because they don't have aesthetic ones; not because they are ethically superior, but because they are linguistically inferior; in other words because they do not speak his language.

When he spends Thanksgiving with the Campbells, the greatest culture shock for Alex is the way they speak to each other. In Iowa, he soon discovers,

they feel the sunshine on their faces, and it just sets off some sort of chemical reaction: Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! sung to half a dozen different tunes! … ‘Good morning,’ he [Mr. Campbell] says, and now it occurs to me that the word ‘morning,’ as he uses it, refers specifically to the hours between eight A.M. and twelve noon. … He wants the hours between eight and twelve to be good, which is to say, enjoyable, pleasurable, beneficial! We are all of us wishing each other four hours of pleasure and accomplishment! … The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets—no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

(202)

Although Alex is ostensibly praising the good humour, politeness, and straightforwardness of the Campbells, the overall effect of this passage is to highlight—comically—the conventionality, the banality of their language. The Campbells may use language to communicate with each other rather than, as the Portnoys do, to compete for rhetorical supremacy, but the linguistic richness of the Portnoys' complaints, when compared to the anodyne clichés of the Campbells, is incontentestable. After she rejects the idea of converting, Alex begins to find Kay ‘boringly predictable in conversation, and about as desirable as blubber in bed’ (211), but why does he—this most secular, indeed arguably most self-hating of all Jews—ask her, albeit jokingly, if she will convert in the first place, and why is he offended when she refuses? The implication is that he has always found her conversation boring and that his ‘joke’ about conversion had been a way of precipitating recognition of that fact. Kay may be ‘hard as a gourd on matters of moral principle’ (198) but because her discourse is flaccid her body likewise takes on the properties of ‘blubber’ and Alex himself detumesces.

With Sarah Maulsby, too, it is apparently linguistic, rather than sexual differences, that drive them apart.

Why didn't I marry the girl? Well, there was her cutesy-wootsy boarding-school argot, for one. Couldn't bear it. ‘Barf’ for vomit, ‘ticked off’ for angry, ‘a howl’ for funny, ‘crackers’ for crazy, ‘teeny’ for tiny.

(213)

However, if Alex finds Kay's conversation boring and Sarah's language inane, they are at least well-educated women, and they share his intellectual concerns. With Mary Jane Reed the situation is somewhat different. Mary Jane ‘moves her lips when she reads’ and she does not read very often (190). Sexually, she is the adept, the connoisseur, that Alex has longed for all his life, but this is not enough. He resolves ‘to improve her mind’ (190). It seems a futile mission—the gulf in education and manners seems incommensurable—until, on a driving holiday in Vermont, there is a breakthrough. In a mood of post-coital euphoria, Alex recites Yeats's ‘Leda and the Swan’ to Mary Jane, then immediately regrets it,

realizing how tactless I had been, with what insensitivity I had drawn attention to the chasm: I am smart and you are dumb, that's what it had meant to recite to this woman one of the three poems I happen to have learned by heart in my thirty-three years.

(176)

To his surprise, however, she is fascinated by the poem and insists that he explain it. This evidence of sensitivity, far from dampening Alex's ardour, excites it, and the rest of the holiday is spent in a state of mutual bliss. It is this holiday that Alex offers as testimony against the charge that his ‘affectionate feelings’ and his ‘sensuous feelings’ cannot be united. During those ‘few sunny days’, he claims, ‘there was sensual feeling mixed with the purest, deepest streams of tenderness I've ever known!’ (171.) Characteristically, however, Roth provides us with the fuel for a Freudian deconstruction of Alex's rejection of Freud.

Was it tenderness for one another we experienced, or just the fall doing its work, swelling the gourd (John Keats) and lathering the tourist trade into ecstasies of nostalgia for the good and simple life?

(171)

At any rate, the pastoral idyll doesn't last long. On the journey home, Alex is once again lamenting her philistinism and censoring her vocabulary, parodying her slang.

‘Like let's eat,’ I said. ‘Like food. Like nourishment, man.’

‘Look,’ she said, ‘maybe I don't know what I am, but you don't know what you want me to be, either! And don't forget that!’

‘Groovy, man.’

(181)

Mary Jane's response to Alex's goading is acute, as his refusal to respond to it illustrates; later on in this exchange she parodies his slavish Freudianism: ‘can't I say hang-up either? Okay—it's a compulsion’ (82). Alex is indeed unsure of what he wants from her. Does his irritation at her language indicate disillusionment, or does it mask his relief that she is, after all, beyond the cultural pale? Does he really want to respect her, or is his apparent desire to educate her—and thus to render her respectable—nothing more than a desire to confirm that she is not respectable? Alex's behaviour in Rome (when he engineers a three-way sexual spree) suggests the latter, as does his reluctance to use Mary Jane's name—or indeed Kay's or Sarah's—preferring instead to refer to them by the degrading nicknames ‘The Monkey’, ‘The Pumpkin’, and ‘The Pilgrim’, respectively.

Then again, just as Alex's proposal that Kay convert and his insistence that Sarah perform fellatio provided pretexts for quarrels whose origins were linguistic rather than religious or sexual, so with Mary Jane the episode with the Roman prostitute is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the rift between them. The rift itself actually derives from an earlier incident in which Alex arrives at Mary Jane's apartment to take her to a dinner party hosted by the mayor of New York. At this stage, soon after the trip to Vermont, Alex is still hopeful that all will be well. While he is waiting for her to get ready, however, he discovers a note she has left for the cleaning-lady:

     dir willa polish the flor by bathrum pleze
     & dont furget the insies of windose mary
     jane r

Three times I read the sentence through, and as happens with certain texts, each reading reveals new subtleties of meaning and implication, each reading augurs tribulations yet to be visited upon my ass. Why allow this ‘affair’ to gather any more momentum? What was I thinking about in Vermont! Oh that z, that z between the two e's of ‘pleze’—this is a mind with the depths of a movie marquee! and ‘furget’! Exactly how a prostitute would misspell that word! But it's something about the mangling of ‘dear’, that tender syllable of affection now collapsed into three lower-case letters, that strikes me as hopelessly pathetic. How unnatural can a relationship be? This woman is ineducable and beyond reclamation.

(188)

Ironically attributing to Mary Jane's ungrammatical, misspelt note the status of a ‘text’ which ‘reveals new subtleties’ with each successive ‘reading’, Alex's disgust is aroused by linguistic degeneracy in a way that it never is by sexual depravity. Yet the two are implicitly linked in Alex's mind, as his remark that Mary Jane's ‘mangling’ of language is ‘Exactly how a prostitute would misspell’ suggests. Just as his subtle deconstruction of Kay's father's text ‘Good morning’ serves only to reveal its essential vacuity, so here Alex's attention to the fine details of Mary Jane's note cruelly exposes its vulgarity. Just as the boredom of Kay's conversation is translated into boredom with her as a sexual partner; just as Sarah's unimaginative, prissy vocabulary corresponds with her sexual conservatism, so Mary Jane's illiteracy—her flouting of grammatical conventions—is equated in Alex's imagination with her illicit sexuality. Stung into a heightened sense of linguistic decorum by this illustration of Mary Jane's illiteracy, Alex has to place the word ‘affair’ between quotation marks, because he feels that it would otherwise convey a euphemistic air of respectability to his relations with her. Whereas what the discovery of this sample of her prose has made him realize is their outrageous incompatibility as partners in any but the sexual sense. The ‘unnatural’ sexual practices in which Alex involves himself and Mary Jane in Rome confirm, or consummate, the unnaturalness of the linguistic relationship between them. It is the comic incongruity between his own language and that of his lovers that jeopardizes Alex's erotic relationships, just as it is the comic incongruity between the language of the stand-up comedian and that of the therapist which always threatens to destabilize the novel and which finally finishes it in the form of Spielvogel's punchline: ‘Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?’ (250)

If Spielvogel—and by extension Freud—has the last laugh, there remains the accusation that the joke isn't funny—the charge that Freud is a ‘lousy comedian’. Now this might simply refer to the ‘joke’ which, according to Alex, Oedipus Rex becomes in Freud's hands, but I think that Alex has something else in mind. After all, Alex tells us that he has got hold of the Collected Papers: he is reading his way through all of Freud. Perhaps, then, Alex's labelling of Freud as a ‘lousy comedian’ refers principally not to Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, nor to his ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’, but to the work in which Freud actually tells jokes: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

For Freud, jokes are pleasurable because they enable us to overcome inhibitions without the psychic expenditure of effort that this would ordinarily require. Likewise, comedy is pleasurable because someone else, with whom we empathize, has spared us the effort of remaining solemn, allowing us to shed the dignity which is ordinarily a necessary burden of adult life. In Portnoy's Complaint, however, the opposite seems to be the case: jokes engender inhibitions, comedy imposes a state of ignominy.

One of the main sources of comedy which Freud identifies is what he calls ‘the degradation of the sublime’:

What is sublime is something large in the figurative, psychical sense … when I speak of something sublime I … try to bring the whole way in which I hold myself into harmony with the dignity of what I am having an idea of. I impose a solemn restraint upon myself …¹⁰

When degradation of the sublime occurs, however, one is spared the increased expenditure of the solemn restraint and the resulting release of tension manifests itself in laughter. In Portnoy's Complaint, Roth inverts this idea, so that Alex perceives his situation as inherently comic and, therefore, feels constrained to be frivolous, in harmony with the lack of dignity of his subject, himself. Instead of liberating, comedy imprisons.

Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain't no joke!

(37)

This plea is reiterated later in the novel:

Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little, at thirty-three! And also it hoits, you know, there is pain involved, a little human suffering is being felt …

(103)

In both these passages, Alex complains against being type-cast in the role of the son in the Jewish joke, and yet he does so in language that is associated with this stereotype, locutions that are highlighted through their italicization. ‘Only it ain't no joke!’, with its use of the double negative, and ‘hoits’ are expressions that we might expect to find in the very acts—those of ‘the Henny Youngmans and the Milton Berles’—by which Alex feels victimized (104). The point is, of course, that Alex is creating the ultimate Jewish joke even while he attempts to escape from it, and his ‘material’ (in the comic, as well as the psychoanalytic sense) is characteristically self-lacerating, as Naomi notes:

‘You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. … Everything you say is always somehow twisted, one way or another, to come out “funny”.’

(240)

Alex defends himself, claiming that ‘self-depreciation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor’ (241) and indeed Freud also alludes to this tradition:

A particularly favourable occasion for tendentious jokes is presented when the intended criticism is directed against the subject himself, or … against someone in whom the subject has a share—a collective person, that is (the subject's own nation, for instance). The occurrence of self-criticism as a determinant may explain how it is that a number of the most apt jokes … have grown up on the soil of Jewish popular life. They are stories created by Jews and directed against Jewish characteristics … I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.¹¹

Paradoxically, then, Alex's irreverence towards his Jewishness is at the same time a form of reverence. There is, however, more to Alex's self-depreciation than a homage to his Jewish roots. It is both a symptom of and an attempt to free himself from the confines of his comical identity. As his plane for Israel takes off, Alex asks ‘How have I come to be such an enemy and flayer of myself? … Nothing but self! Locked up in me!’ (226.) Alex abuses himself verbally for the same reason as he abuses himself physically: in the hope of forcing his way out of the comic prison that is his self (hence his reference (34) to his penis as his ‘battered battering ram to freedom’). Yet, as the pun here illustrates, Alex's jokes do not liberate him from himself; rather they chain him to it with guilt-edged manacles. On his way back from the burlesque house, where he has masturbated into his baseball mitt, Alex begins

chastising myself ruthlessly, moaning aloud, ‘Oh no, no,’ not unlike a man who has just felt his sole skid through a pile of dog turds—sole of his shoe, but take the pun, who cares, who cares …

(122)

Here again, sexual guilt is not expiated through a joke that releases tension; it is redoubled by the pun, a pun so self-consciously made that Alex actually alerts us to its existence.

Guilt as a comical idea, we should remember, was, according to Roth, the key to the composition of the novel, and indeed Alex exclaims at one point: ‘Any guilt on my part is comical!’ (227.) Yet for Alex this recognition is not the breakthrough that it was for Roth, for Alex does not want his guilt to be comical, his shame to be a punchline. He craves a suffering that is ‘Dignified’ and ‘Meaningful’—the ennobling pain of tragedy, rather than a comedy that ‘hoits’ (229). What he wants, in short, is to be relieved from his role as the perennial Jewish son in a perennial Jewish joke.

Seen in this light, his self-ridicule is a defence against the fear that his whole life is a joke, that he inhabits ‘a world given its meaning by some vulgar nightclub clown’ (104), a sort of pre-emptive comic strike intended to disarm the barbed comments of others. However, there is another possible explanation for Alex's fondness for jokes that compromise his dignity, in particular for scatalogical jokes. One of the comic strategies which Freud identifies in jokes is what he calls ‘unmasking’:

the method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to … the dependence of their mental functions on their bodily needs.¹²

It is precisely this comic ‘unmasking’ of the subordination of his mental functions to his bodily needs that Alex continually anticipates. Defending his reluctance to acknowledge publicly his relationship with Mary Jane, Alex offers this explanation:

Take her fully for my own, you see, and the whole neighborhood will at last know the truth about my dirty little mind. The so-called genius will be revealed in all his piggish proclivities and feelthy desires. The bathroom door will swing open (unlocked!), and behold, there sits the savior of mankind, drool running down his chin, absolutely ga-ga in the eyes, and his prick firing salvos at the light bulb! A laughingstock, at last!

(184)

This passage professes to represent Alex's worst nightmare, and yet the pun on ‘filthy’, the change in tense from the future (‘The bathroom door will swing open’) to the present (‘there sits the savior of mankind’), and the exuberant hyperbole (‘his prick firing salvos at the light bulb’) all tend to suggest that Alex longs to be exposed—to expose himself—as a slave to carnal desire. Indeed, the final sentence ‘A laughingstock, at last!’ suggests the attainment of a long-cherished goal rather than the realization of a dreadful fear. Perhaps, after all, there is some relief for Alex in becoming a figure of fun.

For a time, in the wake of the notoriety of Portnoy's Complaint, it seemed that Roth might share the fate of his protagonist and become the punchline of a perennial joke. (In Reading Myself and Others (217) he describes with a characteristic mixture of self-pity and self-irony how Jacqueline Susann ‘tickled ten million Americans by saying that she'd like to meet me but didn't want to shake my hand’.) Since then Roth has made the gradual transition from being one of the enfants terribles of American letters to becoming one of its elder statesmen, yet as one of his most recent novels, Sabbath's Theater (1995), shows, he has hardly mellowed (the novel's protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, has all Portnoy's vices, and more besides, but none of his inhibitions). I suspect that Roth would no more wish to be respectable than he would to be disreputable (he thrives on the tension between the two in his work), but if nothing else his current fully deserved reputation as one of America's finest post-war novelists should enable us to recognize that Portnoy's Complaint is not simply a prolonged dirty joke, but rather a comic rebuttal of psychoanalysis and a Freudian analysis of its own comic strategies.

Indeed, in its self-reflexiveness the novel arguably demonstrates not simply a postmodern aesthetic, but what might be termed a post-structuralist epistemology.¹³ In Styles of Radical Will, a collection of essays published in the same year as Roth's novel, Susan Sontag argues that in the work of Émile Cioran, ‘Thinking becomes confessional, exorcistic: an inventory of the most personal exacerbations of thinking’ and, moreover, that this thinking ‘devours itself—and continues intact and even flourishes, in spite (or perhaps because) of these repeated acts of self-cannibalism’.¹⁴ In ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Sontag bemoans what she calls ‘the devaluation of language’, in particular ‘the degeneration of public language’, and notes that one response to this crisis among serious contemporary writers has been to ‘employ a language whose norms and energies come from oral speech, with its circular repetitive movements and essentially first-person voice’.¹⁵ Although she is writing in the first instance of a Romanian philosopher and in the second of Modernists such as Joyce, Stein, and Beckett, her remarks are uncannily applicable to Portnoy's Complaint. Certainly, the pessimistic prognosis with which Sontag concludes ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’—‘It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one's assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one with no breath at all’—is confirmed by the despairing, breath-extinguishing howl that ends Portnoy's monologue.

And yet, tempting thought it might be to see Styles of Radical Will and Portnoy's Complaint as products of the same cultural moment, there is in fact a diametrical opposition between Sontag's fashionable apocalypticism and Roth's irrepressible self-mockery. After all, Roth's novel does not end with Portnoy's primal scream and a retreat into the silence so enamoured of the contemporary writers Sontag most admires, but with Spielvogel's invitation to speak: not with Portnoy's hysterical histrionic fantasy of self-immolation, but with the calm, bathetic resumption of everyday discourse. Whereas Sontag diagnoses in the fiction of Stein, Burroughs, and Beckett ‘the subliminal idea that it might be possible to outtalk language, or to talk oneself into silence’, Roth inverts this idea: instead of a protracted, attenuated monologue that eventually peters out altogether, we get a torrent of consciousness which eventually overflows and which is checked not by the exhaustion of speech, but by its initiation. Whereas Sontag sees the debasement of language as signalling the imminent collapse of meaningful literary discourse, Roth sees it as an opportunity for creating new kinds of literary discourse in which debased (that is popular, clichéd, banal) language is not a threat to, but constitutive of, meaning. In effect, Roth exploits the solipsism which Sontag sees as a dead-end and develops it into a new kind of prose fiction that has been much more influential than the French nouveau roman that Sontag championed as the future of fiction.

Notes

1. Sanford Pinsker, The Comedy That ‘Hoits’: An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975), 121, 25, 42, 73.

2. Jay L. Halio, Philip Roth Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1992), 37, 57. Of the other writers who have written on Roth's comedy, Mark Schechner perceives a ‘failure of magnanimity’, suggesting that Roth's books bring ‘laughter without cheer’ and that his ‘ample wit sports a chilling, mechanical edge’ (‘Philip Roth’, 119, in Sanford Pinsker (ed.), Critical Essays on Philip Roth (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 118-36); Donald G. Watson, in a Bakhtinian reading of Roth's work that perversely never mentions Bakhtin, argues that Roth ‘places himself within the traditions of carnivalesque comedy’, and that ‘his fictions renew and regenerate, bury and revive’ (‘Fiction, Show Business and the Land of Opportunity: Roth in the Early Seventies’, 108, in Asher Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (eds.), Reading Philip Roth (London: Macmillan, 1988), 107-27); David Monaghan sees Roth as a satirist whose aim is ‘to reveal the tragicomic gap between the life of moral seriousness and dignity presented by literature and the crude farce of reality’ (‘The Great American Novel and My Life as a Man: An Assessment of Philip Roth's Achievement’, 76, in Pinsker (ed.), Critical Essays on Philip Roth, 68-77); Howard Eiland characterizes Roth's fiction as ‘tragedy verging on farce’ (‘Philip Roth: The Ambiguities of Desire’, 256, in Pinsker (ed.), Critical Essays on Philip Roth, 256-64); Alan Cooper defines Roth's comedy as ‘sit-down comedy … rationalism being explored minutely while being ignored grossly’ (‘The Sit-Down Comedy of Philip Roth’, 168, in Sarah Blacher Cohen (ed.), Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 158-77); Thomas Pughe reads the Zuckerman novels as a ‘comic Künstler-roman’ (Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1994), 83-119; while for Julian Barnes ‘Roth isn't urbanely witty, or chucklingly ironic or wry and dry: he's just … fucking funny’ (‘Philip Roth in Israel’, 7, London Review of Books 9: 5 (5 March 1987), 6-7.

3. Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 157.

4. Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), 21-2.

5. Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint (London: Penguin, 1986), 250; further references are in parentheses in the text.

6. Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1985), 172.

7. Anna Freud (ed.), The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1986), 396.

8. Portnoy's Complaint, 242. The apposition between Spielvogel and Freud makes explicit what is implicit throughout the novel: that Alex's silent interlocutor is in a sense Freud himself and that the novel is a letter from a Jewish son to a Jewish father, a letter that testifies to, even while it debunks, the authority of that father. The inclusion of Walter Kronkite—another symbol of patriarchal authority and gravitas, this time from the realm of American current affairs broadcasting—in this trinity, may be a reference to Alex's recurring fantasies of exposure in the media, as well as another of those comically bathetic associations that serve to undermine the mystique of psychoanalysis. Kronkite, a media guru with an air of ineffable wisdom and integrity, is by implication no different from Freud, the psychoanalytic guru similarly given to affected omniscience.

9. Pelican Freud Library, vol. 3, On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977), 254.

10. Pelican Freud Library, vol. 6: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1976), 262, 261.

11. Ibid. 156-7.

12. Ibid. 262. This idea helps form the basis of Bakhtin's seminal work on comedy, Rabelais and His World.

13. I am indebted to Robin Grove for this suggestion, and for comments made on an earlier draft of this article which led me to consider the relationship between Susan Sontag's essays and Roth's novel.

14. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969), 79, 80.

15. Ibid. 21, 28.