Jewishness & EMOTION IN Portnoy’s Complaint
I grew up in Lancaster Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia and New Jersey, but by a strange turn of fate, find myself in Haifa, Israel, where I have been for less than a year. I had been meaning to read more Philip Roth; I had only read Goodbye, Columbus, and American Pastoral, both of which I loved, the latter especially being a powerful reading experience for me. Wanting to order another Philip Roth book to enjoy, I told my brother Daniel to pick up two Roth books from the bookstore and pack them away to me, and one of them was the Complaint. It’s wild to think of this book making its way to me, printed in the United States, and making its way to me in Israel, as at the close of the book, that is exactly what Alexander Portnoy does. Brought up in the Northeast United States, like me, he comes to Israel. During the book’s final chapters, he explains a tryst he had with an Israeli girl: “During the day, at dinner, then as we walked along the romantic harbor wall at Akko at night, I told her about my life,” then explaining how they “drove around the bay to Haifa.” And it amazed me, that this simple description of a walk beside Akko’s harbor walls and a drive “around the bay to Haifa,” could be more familiar to me than any of the settings in New Jersey, near which I spent the first eighteen years of my life.
A (modern) view of Haifa Bay, taken from Mount Carmel in Haifa. Akko (the ancient Phoenician city of Akre, which became an important crusader city), is far to the north, across the bay.
Not even ten months in Israel, and yet this sojourn at the book’s close, meant to be novel and foreign, to thrill with exoticism, is more familiar than the scenes in New Jersey, just down the road from where I grew up! It struck me as indicative of Philip Roth’s extreme talent and knowledge. Akko’s harbor walls make a definite romantic impression, large, formidable, and beautiful. And when driving south from Akko to Haifa, it really feels like skirting around the edge of a circle: the preposition “around,” . . . one can really feel it. My reaction to these passages was so strong that I truly felt like I was meant to pick up this book at this juncture of my life. It’s funny: such realizations usually only happen in retrospect. One can look back on a book or film experienced years ago and see why one was meant to encounter it at that moment. Such realizations hardly ever happen while experiencing them, as they did for me with this novel.
Portnoy’s Complaint is a virtuosic novel in first person, ostensibly an extended monologue spoken to a therapist, as Alexander Portnoy describes his upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, his coddling by his mother, and the ways that his youth and treatment by his parents caused his current neurotic habits. As he enters adulthood his preoccupation with masturbation and sex take center stage, as well as the shame that accompanies them. Overwhelmingly, Alexander Portnoy emerges as a bitter figure, angry at his parents for the ways his upbringing caused his unique and occasionally perverted sexual desires. The novel is full of yelling and screaming: almost every page is filled with exclamation points, as Portnoy rages and marvels at the person he’s become, whom he clearly despises. The result is a remarkably sustained intensity, that exhausts us, at times. But what’s most impressive about the narrative is how Roth tempers what would otherwise be brutal and unrelenting narrative, filled, with sex, swearing, misogyny, and most difficult of all, putrid bitterness, with almost constant humor. Portnoy, despite the myriad of faults which haunt him, is so wonderfully funny, possessing a uniquely inventive mind that can make his painful stories self-deprecating and enjoyable. It’s an amazing achievement, the way that Roth keeps his reader’s attention while presenting a character who is so unlikable. By the end of the narrative, Alexander Portnoy became for me . . . while not exactly a likable person, he was nevertheless someone who was easy to listen to. The reader withholds his sympathy but lends his attention, as Portnoy relates things that shock and even disgust us.
In this way, it was hard not to think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published 14 years earlier, as a close sister-novel to Portnoy’s Complaint. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, resembles Portnoy in many ways. Like Portnoy, he keeps the reader’s attention through his tales of sexual misadventure, by being so incredibly and so consistently funny. Throughout Lolita, Humbert Humbert increasingly dehumanizes and objectifies his beloved nymphet Lolita, just as Portnoy does to his women, whom Portnoy gives demeaning titles to rather than human names. Instead they are “The Monkey”, “The Pumpkin,” and “The Pilgrim.” Despite these similarities, they differ in their temperament, Humbert Humbert more closely resembles a psychopath, he is nonchalant, debonair, and almost emotionless at times, almost always witty, and very funny, but totally disconnected from the emotions we would consider “normal.” In contrast, Portnoy is often too emotional, overwhelmed alternatingly by shame, by anger, rage at his parents, even a certain outrage and surprise at his own actions. Humber Humbert’s unruffled suaveness and poise seems worlds away. One can easily imagine the entire spectrum of human emotionality being between these two extremes, cold Humbert Humbert, and Portnoy warm beyond measure. A short-tempered choleric personality, and a serene melancholic one.
The Cover of the first edition of Philip Roth’s early spitfire novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, originally published in 1967.
On the spectrum of emotionality, two outer limits, and thus rare, two people we would be unlikely to meet in our real lives. This isn’t that unusual for novels, which tend to be about exceptional people, or record how someone ordinary became exceptional. While reading Portnoy’s Complaint, though, and noticing its similarities to Lolita, I wondered whether these sexual perversities, and/or the dehumanization of others, push people to one of these two extremes of human emotion, either towards Humbert’s frigid numbness, or Portnoy’s fetid rage. But now I wonder if I am seeing too many differences between Portnoy and Humbert. It’s been a while since I read Lolita, but I remember that despite Humbert’s normal state of poise and nonchalance, he nevertheless had moments intense frenzy and obsession, akin to Portnoy’s animal behavior, but in Humbert Humbert, they seem to almost break out of him as something long suppressed.
But Portnoy’s Complaint and Lolita also take place in two different contexts. Portnoy’s Complaint is a private moment between a therapist and a troubled patient, while much of Lolita’s thrill comes from watching how Humbert Humbert hides his perversions from the world, maintaining outward respectability. The threat of public scandal enters into Portnoy’s rant, but it never feels like a real antagonist. He is increasingly irrationally bold about what he does, but it never comes back to haunt him in a big way, as it does for Humbert Humbert. With his therapist, Portnoy is free to be more effusive and to rant as he likes, but we barely see him make a respectable face to the world in the novel. I also wonder if Humbert Humbert would be as free and angry as Portnoy is, if he were lying on a divan unburdening himself to a therapist as well. Though I suspect not, Humbert Humbert delights in playing the part of respectable debonair bachelor. I could easily imagine him lying to a therapist to maintain the charade, so naturally does such playacting come to him.
1960s photograph of the young Philip Roth.
In a connected and more positive way, what are the connections between these two figures and their genius for humor, or their natural intelligence (both are bona fide geniuses) and their sexual preoccupations? Personal experience can show the sad and occasionally tragic connection between sexual “creativity,” whether perverse or more neutral, and true genius. Brilliant, truly brilliant men with terrible skeletons in their closet. I shy away from making a moral judgment on this, but the conclusion, the connection, is far too obvious not to at least mention.
But returning to the Sojourn in Israel at the book’s close, by ending the book in the country of Israel, scarcely twenty years old by the time Portnoy’s Complaint is published, Roth seems to affirm that the novel is as much about Jewish identity as it is about everything else. And shockingly, as someone who hears Hebrew spoken every day, and interacts with Jewish people all the time, it’s something that I wasn’t necessarily continuously aware of while reading Portnoy’s Complaint, Portnoy’s “Jewishness” I mean. Perhaps this is due to the current climate of tolerance in which I live, which I did not think of connecting the repulsive Portnoy and his grotesque desires with his race. It’s not as if Roth or anyone else is affirming that all Jewish men are like the creep Portnoy. One thinks of the Merchant of Venice, another work to which the Complaint owes much.
But at the end of the book, in the sojourn in Israel, Roth makes me uncomfortable with his implications. By ending his novel in the new country of Israel, at that time scarcely twenty years old, Roth affirms that this novel is at least in part, a novel about Jewish Identity. The conclusions are uncomfortable for the reader. Doubtless all races contain their fair share of terrible people, as they do of wonderful people. But to spend two hundred pages expounding upon a man’s perverted and two-faced lifestyle, and then to quite sharply draw the reader’s attention to his race, is quite pungent and uncomfortable. Roth, more Jewish than I, can’t be accused of antisemitism, so is it possible he is trying to reveal the prejudices of his readers? My guess is that Portnoy’s “Jewishness,” acts as a stand-in for something inherent inside of him, and thus exonerates Portnoy even more.
This novel quite powerfully contends with the question, one of the great questions, of nature vs. nurture, on top of all its other wonderful themes. Over the course of the novel’s first act, we learn about Portnoy’s bizarre childhood, that pushed him to become a man of odd habits, outwardly respectable and prosperous, but with sexual preoccupation that he keeps hidden from the world for fear he might disgust them.
