“Juice or Gravy?”: —Philosophies of Composition by Roth, Poe, and Sartre

Why does Philip Roth’s essay “Juice or Gravy?” (1994)—the “Afterword to the Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary Edition” of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)—fail to mention the novel whose anniversary it purports to commemorate? What does the ladling of juice or gravy atop roast beef have to do with misreadings, a quarter century earlier, of Portnoy’s Complaint as offering up personal confession on the part of Roth, himself? This study argues that the afterword indeed pertains to early biographical (and therefore quasi-fatalistic) responses to Portnoy’s Complaint, but via Roth’s resurrection of the related deterministic misnomer wryly advanced in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and in accounts of bad faith featured in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943, L’être et le néant). The fatalism of Roth’s narrator—in claiming to have found a piece of paper with nineteen arbitrary sentences that turned into the opening of his most famous novels—takes its lead from the determinism of Poe; yet the preoccupation of Roth’s narrator with juice and gravy pertains to Sartre’s belief that “slime” symbolizes “the revenge of the In-itself ” on the freedom of the “For-itself” via the “absorption” of the For-itself into the thickening and inert substance of non-reflective, Being—including one’s past. The lesson, philosophically veiled, renders the “afterword” all too pertinent to deterministic, because biographical, readings of Portnoy’s Complaint.