Portnoy's Real Complaint

Zimring, Franklin

PORTNOY'S REAL COMPLAINT FRANKLIN ZINKING Philip Roth's venomous, bawdy, sexist, popular and disturbingly Jewish-American novel was published in 1967. On this bar mitzvah of its copyright, it is...

...Frequently, there are countervailing forces at work in a family that produce a more desirable equilibrium...
...In identifying his son's welfare with his own subservience, the senior Portnoy may simply have been making a loving mistake...
...To inspire this sense of obligation and ambition requires, excuse the expression, "quite a noodge...
...On these and other questions I bear good news: Alexander Portnoy is moderately neurotic, immature, self-centered and well on his way to growing up...
...You don't have to be Jewish to suffer from Portnoy's complaint...
...Doing it all "for the children" tends to produce the self-pity and self-congratulation that are the bread and shmaltz of Sophie Portnoy's existence...
...Is lust compatible with Mrs...
...But if this is correct, what has taken him so long...
...d'affaires in Alexander's household, is Mom, This is in sharp contrast to the sexual politics of the Orthodox shut, where God's messengers and law-givers are male and authoritarian...
...To my wife and my children, to a family of my own...
...my wife, Mrs...
...Professionally I'm going somewhere, granted, but privately—what have I got to show for myself...
...The dialogue almost writes itself: For this you graduate Number One in your class...
...He is at the same time the object of unqualified filial love: No money, no schooling, no language, no learning, curiosity without culture, drive without opportunity, experience without wisdom...
...On to Washington, on to the "Big Apple...
...We musn't...
...As we listen to Portnoy complain, it appears that he regards such questions as the equivalent of asking whether elephants can fly...
...A future, see...
...It seems plausible that whenever both parents want the son to be "much better" than his father, there is a potential threat to paternal authority and male-model identification...
...Persistently high expectations generate anxiety as well as achievement...
...The character we're introduced to is 24 or 25, and just getting ready to sort out his neurotic ailments and settle down...
...They also put all their eggs in one or two baskets...
...That Alexander's father sold insurance in these very same neighborhoods, that he believed he was serving these people, is beside the point...
...He wants to be a man, a good Jew and an American achiever...
...To say all this is not to say that parental aspiration inevitably castrates fathers, deprives sons of paternal models, depends on Sophie Portnoy's memorable mouth, or dooms sons and daughters to the psychiatrist's couch...
...Instead, the world of Jake Portnoy is divided between a small desk in a Gentile-dominated insurance company and New Jersey slums where insurance is sold and premium remittances are unremittingly collected...
...rather, Alexander's father has lovingly surrendered, in advance, leaving a little boy thoroughly unprotected against the totalitarian bossiness of a mother only he can please but even he can never please enough...
...What can the saga of Alexander Portnoy tell us about the psychic consequences of upward mobility in general...
...Fewer than 10 pages of the 274-page book cover the entire developmental career of the protagonist from 20 to 30...
...One can appreciate that our hero would approach such a situation in the careful way one deals with a stack of dynamite—but what if the dynamite didn't explode...
...he is concerned and ambivalent about his own sexuality...
...Just as one doesn't have to be Greek to have oedipal problems, the dislocations and conflicts associated with ambition for our children can be found in the careers of many families pursuing the American dream—Irish, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Afro-American, Polish and, yes, even just plain American...
...And not for a while, but for good...
...Sophie Portnoy, even in Roth's shrill parody, is a conspicuous agent of upward mobility...
...Small families facilitate educational and social mobility...
...First, high achievement requires high ambition...
...The argument for this relatively rosy future is not without textual evidence, but Portnoy himself disagrees: Thirty-three and still googling and day-dreaming about every girl who crosses her legs opposite him in the subway...
...For my own limited purposes, four of Portnoy's many parts are worthy of special mention: • Alexander Portnoy, self-styled sex fiend, is really a superachiever and a superconformist at that...
...The fact that Daddy's grammar ain't too good is of some importance during Alexander's adolescence, but Portnoy's real complaint is of earlier origin and deeper meaning: his father's failure to take a stand against the matriarchal preeminence of Sophie Portnoy: Pappy, why do we have to have such guilty deference to women, you and me—when we don't...
...Big Shot," the family savior, is moving back to the old neighborhood to open a storefront law office in the ghetto...
...So who's to blame for this mess...
...On this bar mitzvah of its copyright, it is ripe for retrospection...
...The only personal episode described during this period is a comic seduction of a New England country-club type, who is portrayed Continued on page 62 Continued from page 60 in such gross caricature that even her second cousin wouldn't marry her, let alone a nice Jewish boy...
...Honor your father by being somebody else...
...Just as our protagonist is deprived of his twenties, he is also artificially segregated from nice female Jewish peers...
...But the real irony of this scenario is that Portnoy's father would regard such an act of loving identification as a betrayal...
...How bad a disease is Portnoy's complaint...
...Alexander sees himself as doomed to spend an eternity out of his element: too Jewish for the Gentile world, too American for the secular communal socialism of Israel, too godless and sinful for the Jewish religion, and too good for Newark, New Jersey...
...He will continue to have problems "relating" to Jewish women, but this is a man on the verge of marriage, family and psychosexual maturity...
...And this is not the only sense in which the protagonist Portnoy is a good son...
...One consequence of this is that the rules, rituals and constraints are handed down by Mrs...
...One final element of the Portnoy family structure is both striking and historically authentic: in the game of upward mobility, Sophie and Jake Portnoy have put all their eggs in one basket...
...In his daydream, Alexander commutes from his own house in his old neighborhood to defend the poor and the oppressed in the nearby County Courthouse...
...Jake Portnoy's deference to maternal authority, his willingness to be kicked around by Alex through the course of his son's adolescence and his failure to appreciate his own value are not inevitable concomitants of his son's later success...
...Can a skeptic pray...
...This is the image of Portnoy that most readers and most critics recall...
...The entire decade of Alexander Portnoy's twenties is missing from this book and from his personal development...
...So many aspects of Portnoy's life and world link together, it is as if he were created during a literary critic's dream...
...here are excerpts from one of the book's most eloquent passages...
...The darker side of upward mobility is not confined to the Jewish-American family...
...I remain unconvinced...
...He is also, discounting Roth's hyperbole and difficulty with female characters, a remarkable and authentic post-mid-century Jewish-American achiever...
...The romance proceeds without interruption or sexual disloyalty for more than two and a half years...
...The rules, rituals and taboos are observed with a vengeance...
...It is also stressful when a child has to "Jive up to" his parents' dreams rather than their achievements...
...There are two corollary risks in the wish for upward mobility...
...Think of it, half the race is over, and I'm still standing here at the starting line...
...A comparable statement could be made, I suspect, when both parents support the proposition that a daughter must be "much better" than her mother, particularly in an era when "just housewives" are raising the next generation's liberated women...
...The caveats of kosher life may or may not come from God, but God's messenger, his charg...
...This man sounds like good husband material...
...And we can't be sure that Portnoy's marriage will last, but today such uncertainty is universal...
...At 33, he is awash with the longings that make husbands and fathers of us all: Why then do I live by myself and have no children of my own...
...At 20, our protagonist is not quite ready to be a good husband and father, but he's pretty close...
...The essence of Portnoy's childhood is mobility...
...While the tensions generated in families of upwardly mobile "outgroups" (such as Blacks and last generation's Jews) may make for easier entertainment, the insight must be more general to be valid...
...But children he'll have...
...The culture and community of Portnoy's youth is a Jewish-American semi-ghetto...
...This entails one kind of cost when junior has to "live up to" a successful parent...
...Father, mother, sister and protagonist are unanimous in aspiring to, indeed demanding, much, much more...
...However, if Alexander's father regularly attends services, it has escaped his son's recollection...
...Alexander Portnoy here identifies with the world of his father...
...It is easy to feel alienated and nearly impossible to retreat without denying the dream...
...Who should run the show...
...But how to wear three hats comfortably at the same time...
...feeling great, a robust Jewish man now gloriously pooped—yes, home I head for resuscitation . . . and to whom...
...But the symptoms are instructive...
...Why should this be so...
...Second, being "much better" frequently requires a form of exile in time, place and role...
...Such a man is in psychoanalysis for good reason...
...And doing it all for the children in a small, encapsulated nuclear family may be even more destructive when there is no countervailing force outside the family to keep things in perspective...
...There is no Jewish American Princess in this book, fresh from Barnard, abrim with good will toward minority groups and enthusiastic about sex with meaning...
...But these are the fears of the hypochondriac rather than his physician's diagnosis...
...He is returning to Sunday dinner at one o'clock: . . . sweat socks pungent from twenty-one innings of Softball...
...To live the life of the big shot is to be exiled both from Newark and from a life lived through paternal identification...
...The above quotation is typical but not fully disclosive...
...As easily as they move me to anger...
...And this is exactly how things were (and are) in many upwardly mobile families...
...Children should be playing on this earth who look like me...
...Never mind that it's never enough...
...Alexander has no one to compete with for the glory or the obligation...
...Alexander might have done rather well in law school even if his father had taken a stand...
...He fears women, particularly Jewish women...
...Feminism, Judaism and psychiatry have all apparently survived the intervening years...
...This is a God who brings faith, authority, purpose and reassurance...
...That this young lady would remind Portnoy of his mother is far from clear...
...And they in turn will have problems, "living up to" their father, finding a God, and creating their own delicate equilibrium in that fabulously complicated, rich, troublesome and promising world of the Jewish-American modern...
...Why then, doesn't the dream come true...
...The object of his developmen tally appropriate college romance is one Kay Campbell, a thoroughly admirable and believable Antioch coed equipped with ideals, principles and strength of character rarely seen in Philip Roth's women...
...But imagine graduating first in the class from Columbia Law School and announcing to these parents that "Mr...
...Through Alexander's lens, the family is at once profoundly Jewish and at some distance from communal observance of the Jewish faith...
...He is, at 33, Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity in Mayor Lindsay's then fashionable city government...
...Portnoy struggles against what he sees as the ugly underside of the cultural values of his youth, but he recoils in horror from the "alternative life-styles" of the Gentile^world...
...His physical stamina and perseverance are enormous...
...To handle two-bit cases in a grimy hole in the wall in Newark, New Jersey...
...Heroically he squeezes out a middle-class livelihood for his...
...Life is lonely, and very demanding, at the top...
...There are only two children, only one is a boy...
...How does the author take this nice, if stupendously spoiled, young man from the verge of adulthood and suspend his development for 13 years, from age 20 to 33...
...The chauvinistic masculinity of Orthodox Judaism was one of such forces enhancing paternal authority...
...To value the child's future status more than the parent's present one risks conveying the impression that the child is more important, more virtuous and ultimately more obligated than the parent...
...Jake Portnoy is, in my view, the central character of Alexander's childhood and the central puzzle of the book...
...He has been, in his words, first in every class he's been in, including law school...
...How easily his inadequacies can move me to tears...
...When doing it all for the children is a family's only religion, it is both too much for every member of the family and profoundly not enough for anyone...
...upward mobility is a journey into the unfamiliar...
...Yet Jake Portnoy is rendered by his son as ineffectual, constipated and henpecked...
...The book tempts us to conclude that Portnoy will shy away from any Jewish girl in fear of culminating his family romance incestuously...
...Whatever religiousness exists resides within the Portnoy household, rather than the local congregation...
...Finally, there is no law against fathers taking a stand in upwardly mobile families...
...f Franklin Zimring is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago Law School...
...We just don't know...
...He cheats, that's how...
...Portnoy has a briefly mentioned bar mitzvah, his father attempts to round up the family once for Rosh Hashanah during Alexander's early adolescence and the local rabbi visits Mrs...
...All these things and more give us Alexander Portnoy, age 33, full of guilt and achievement, eloquent, funny, immature—a dazzling combination of narcissism and empathy...
...he answers the phone, he visits and he cares...
...Portnoy, not Mr...
...And what will become of our real-life Alexander Portnoys...
...When the second generation of American | Jews had kids, it almost seemed as if ! they had calculated college tuition in the bridal bed...
...To say that Sophie Portnoy wouldn't approve is to put it mildly...
...There are also many other kinds of Jewish family structure that produce successful children...
...Portnoy's Complaint is a tantrum, a set of symptoms rather than a diagnosis...
...Perhaps the time is opportune for rereading this cause c?l?bre in search of Portnoy's real complaint and the not-so-hidden message at the heart of his affliction: upward mobility, and the families that foster it, come at a price...
...You don't have to have a degree in psychiatry to surmise that in this particular family romance there was never an oedipal struggle...
...Alexander Portnoy, is setting the table in the dining room—we will be having my mother and father as guests, they will be walking over any minute, as they do every Sunday...
...family during the Great Depression...
...A simple and satisfying future...
...Portnoy...
...At the age of nine, our tortured hero fantasizes a Sunday afternoon in his adulthood...
...And the reason for this is simple: Portnoy never has his twenties...
...But susceptibility to this kind of loving mistake is a regularly recurring feature of upwardly mobile families, and it is exacerbated by other regular features of that game...
...Portnoy for "a whole half hour" prior to her hysterectomy...
...The last thing that Jake Portnoy wants is a son "just like me...
...As fantasies, go, this is a modest one...
...In the sphere of emotional geography, the trip from Brooklyn to mid-Manhattan is one of the world's longest...
...Lacking both a God and a decent appreciation of their father, the Portnoys of this world have every right to seek psychiatric care...
...Rituals, rules and constraints are not enough...
...But the Portnoy family is practically never observed going to services...
...Portnoy's brand of Judaism...
...What is going to happen next...
...There is no evidence of "extreme sexual longings" or the masturbatory marathons of Alex's early adolescence...
...Many of the problems of Portnoy's adulthood—Jewish identity and its relation to the larger American culture, the relations between the sexes, and coming to terms with the limits of upward mobility—are the challenges faced by so many of his generation, and most of these problems confront all of those who have achieved themselves into urban upper middle classes...
...Pappy, is us...
...One such countervailing force is God, the God that Alexander Portnoy was raised without...
...In fact, Alexander was well on his way to sexual adulthood by the time he was 20...
...Whether Kay Campbell's successor is Jewish or Gentile, and whether if Gentile she converts, are open questions...
...The affair ends, as it probably should end, not because of Portnoy's lust or promiscuity, but because Kay Campbell will not convert to Judaism...
...No matter how much he protests to the contrary, this is exactly the kind of achievement that both his father and mother revere...
...Because this dream is too modest...
...He lives in a condition that is neither diminished nor has in any significant way been refined from what it was when he was 15 years old...

Vol. 6 • December 1980 • No. 1


 
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