The End of Promiscuity

Whence the persistent thrill of being able to write and read words like “cunt” and “fuck” on university press-bound acid-free paper rather than on, say, the cheap newsprint pages of Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine? Well, if there’s one thing that reading Joshua Lambert’s Unclean Lips: Jews, Obscenity, and American Culture (2013) and Bernard Avishai’s Promiscuous: “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (2012) together will suggest, an answer to this question has a lot to do with normalization—the normalization of cultural and social mores, certainly, as well as of a mode of identity-framed thinking characteristic of the ethnic literary field, among other academic habits of thought. These studies reveal that we need to direct our critical attention more specifically to an apparatus of identification that operates in a kind of symbiosis with normalizing processes. Readers familiar with the history of Jewish-American literary criticism may take for granted that identification has frequently seemed the dominant affect through which the Jewish-American literary field gained currency and circulation—certainly during the formative period of its institutionalization from World War II through the Vietnam era—but the patterns and itineraries of this identification remain clearly legible throughout popular and academic literary criticism today. Not only has the literature been ethnographically identified with a historical population, but the field’s leading practitioners have been assumed to be—when they weren’t in fact actively promoting themselves as—native informants, writing about their own experiences, or at least the experiences of their families, or their neighbors, in the very act of writing about this identifiable body of literature. Such has historically been a key wellspring of authenticity for the field’s leading scholarly intellectuals. Through their mutual illumination of the interpenetration of identifying and normalizing processes, Avishai’s and Lambert’s books, each in its way, contribute to our understanding of how the category of “Jewish-American literature” achieved this legibility and status that the field enjoys today.

The more things change, the more the lessons of poststructuralist critique seem relevant. Illustrating Michel Foucault’s twinned analyses of the role of the putatively “marginal” as a site of investment and the compensatory attractions mapped by the “repressive hypothesis,” and also Gayatri Spivak’s insistence that “claims for marginality assure validation from the center” (55),¹ Lambert’s and Avishai’s books are deeply invested in a normalizing project; more strikingly, perhaps, they illuminate the powerfully normalizing lineaments of professional and popular literary criticism.² In their parallel investigations of the transformation of the erstwhile obscene, they share an enlightened interest in owning what used to be forbidden, in normalizing those energies whose previously seeming disruptiveness can retrospectively be reinscribed as rebellious and liberatory, with the very cultural dynamics they claim as their respective interpretative objects.

Bernard Avishai launches his book out of what he sees as a paradox. If Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) blew away so many people of his generation, Avishai argues that an inability to talk intelligently and critically about the nature of this consequence seems to have reached epidemic proportions. Alexander Portnoy’s taking on—or refusing to let off—his American Jewish family, which “was immediately assumed to mean Jews in general,” seemed in 1969, “only twenty-seven years after 1942 and twenty-one years after 1948,” not to mention just two years after 1967, to be “especially brazen”—the constellation of Holocaust and Zionist triumph here having earned American Jews at once a stamp of coolness and a “moral intermission” from reproach. “We recall Portnoy avidly moving from one exhausted insight to the next, one exhausted fantasy to the next, punch line to punch line, nipple to nipple—brilliant, aggrieved, promiscuous” (5). Yet, for all this brazen promiscuity, “the effect that endures” (5) more than 40 years after the novel’s publication is “something of a blur . . . . [F]ew can remember the book’s architecture or identify any...