Portnoy’s Complaint: The Jew as American

Portnoy's Complaint:The Jew as American GENE BLUESTEIN Despite his more recent excursions, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is likely to endure as his most important contribution to American literary tradition . Raising in that book some themes that Jewish-American writers have not been able to deal with candidly, he explores them on a level of diction that has been equally taboo in the history of Jewish-American literature. Given the generally puritan cast of that tradition, it is not surprising that Roth's treatment of sex appeared so scandalous - almost as scandalous as his attitudes toward Jews. Now that the dust has settled a bit it's possible to see that in regard to both subjects he employs shock techniques which, especially in the sexual themes, recall Walt Whitman and Henry Miller. As has been the case with both Whitman and Miller, the first responses of critics inevitably miss the serious thematic intentions of the author because they are so outraged at what seems to be the immorality of the work. It's an old American custom, as the Wall Street Journal noted not long ago when it reprinted the comments of a Boston critic who characterized the author of a book of poetry published in 1855 as "some escaped lunatic raving in pitiable delirium," suggesting finally that "he be kicked from all decent society as below the level of the brute." Few of our important authors have escaped such condemnation. The clue to Roth's place in this history comes not only from his candid use of sexual materials (after Henry Miller what is there left to do?) but from his joining them to the Jewish themes which have concerned him for some time. Shock values aside, Portnoy'sComplaintmarks a major moment in the history of Jewish experience as, in a similar way, Ellison's InvisibleMan is consciously more than a black novel. Although his mode is comedy, Roth deals seriously with most of the themes that have preoccupied American writers (especially sex and identity) and in a way which is actually reminiscent of Whitman in "Song of Myself." But I think Roth's main thrust is to question the assumptions of Jewish exceptionalism, assumptions which have been implicit in the work of every Jewish-American writer up to this time. Portnoy's Complaint documents a new level of consciousness for American Jews; in the process it strips them of some illusions which they and many of their Gentile brethren in this country have all too easily accepted. Ithink that helps to explain why it is such an important book and also why it has been attacked so furiously from all sides. Once the ad hominem arguments are disposed of, the main objection from THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 1, SPRING 1976 Jewish quarters is that Roth has done a disservice to his people by portraying them in such negative terms while exposing his own "self-hatred." The real argument is that a writer owes a certain allegiance to his tribe (whether it be regional or national in designation), and that is the same argument that some Southerners used to attack Twain and Faulkner because their portrayal of the South was "negative." The first barrage of such criticism in Roth's case came after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus (1960). And the best answer to it, interestingly enough, came from Saul Bellow in the introduction to his collection, Great JewishShort Stories (1963). For the Jewish writer in the Diaspora, he notes, "it seemed most important to present Jewish life as sympathetically as possible. Because the Jews were remorselessly oppressed, all the good qualities of Jewish life were heaped up in the foreground of their stories. Raw things - jealousies, ambitions, hatreds, deceptions-were frequently withheld." Bellow recalls that the Jewish slums of Montreal where he grew up were not very far removed from the ghettoes of Poland or Russia but that it was difficult to recognize the realities of life there in the work of modern Jewish writers. "These writers," he says, "generally tended to idealize it, to cover it up in prayer shawls and phylacteries and Sabbath sentiment, the Seder, the...