Shame, Masculinity and Desire of Belonging by Aneta Stepien

Author:Aneta Stepien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG

Portnoy Has Aged: Everyman’s Complaint?

This section provides a comparative overview of the two novels, Everyman and Portnoy’s Complaint, which have not been previously studied in relation to each other. Although the novels differ in their narrative technique and form, they appear to be in a dialogue: the two texts seem to be drawing from the aesthetics of shame and shamelessness. In Portnoy’s Complaint, it is the framework of psychoanalytical confession that allows the writer to bring to the forefront of his fiction the ‘intimate, shameful sexual detail’.27 Alexander Portnoy, suffers from a disorder ‘in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature’ (PC 1). Described with a great detail, Alex’s body forms a site of shame and equally it provides a constant opportunity for it. The obsessive masturbation that led Alex to believe he gave himself cancer (PC 19), the ‘shit’ on his pants (PC 47) or an uncontrollable ‘cunt crazy’ penis are examples of the frequently recalled embarrassing moments leading to the creation of a character, whose spheres of existence are bound with shame: ‘shame and shame and shame and shame – every place I turn something else to be ashamed of’, exclaims Alex in despair (PC 50). In order to make Alex’s shame more palpable, Roth features the aesthetic of disgust bringing what is considered disgusting, and thus prohibited or even a taboo, to the fore of his narrative. He engages with disgust as a normative category when, for instance, he points out how within Jewish orthodox tradition prohibited foods are marked as ‘disgusting’; after pork, sausage being ‘most disgusting of all’ (PC 90).28 Such featuring of disgust, ← 151 | 152 → namely as a kind of political weapon, was pointed out by the editors’ cover information of a recent reading of Portnoy’s Complaint, with a telling title Promiscuous (2012), ‘Portnoy and other main characters became instant archetypes, and Roth himself became a touchstone for conflicting attitudes towards sexual liberation, Jewish power, political correctness, Freudian language, and bourgeois disgust’.29 In addition, the disgusting in Roth’s works is bound up with the erotic, the very content that transgresses the limits of the bourgeois good taste.

The content, narrative and language of Portnoy’s Complaint appears a tribute to shame. It is not only for the almost compulsive use of the words ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ over the course of the entire narrative, but also, and most significantly, because of the content which flouts traditional taboos, religious, sexual and ethnic, existing in the American society of the time. Many aspects of the novel, including the person of the writer, were condemned due to its perceived shamelessness. In his study on Roth, David Brauner comments on the inappropriate content of Portnoy’s Complaint of which ‘candid, detailed discussion of onanism was revolutionary in the late sixties’ and of which explicit language caused the novel to be banned from many public libraries in the United States.30 As it seems, however, the biggest taboo Roth violates

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.