No Complaints but Portnoy's

*As always, there are spoilers in this post*

Portnoy’s Complaint is possibly the funniest and the most vulgar book on this reading list so far.  Well, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer might be more vulgar, but its vulgarity was infinitely less enjoyable than Philip Roth’s compelling creation.

Portnoy’s Complaint is the extended monologue  of Alexander Portnoy from the couch of his psychotherapist, Dr. Spielvogel.  Portnoy details every sexual compulsion, oddity, and desire he has ever felt with all the passion and enthusiasm of a sinner working through a final confession.  But unlike the sinner, there is defiance sewn in with his shame.  But even as the novel feels like a comedy routine that mines Portnoy’s life for every comic angle and that considers nothing too base to be a punch line, the novel has a depth and a power that raises it above a mere collection of humorous vignettes.  At some point in the middle of the novel, I doubted that there was anything in the plot that was going to develop into a huge revelation, and it became clear to me that the force of the novel lay entirely in Portnoy’s character.

Portnoy is a comic everyman, not in the sense that we all have bizarre sexual desires, but in the sense that we are all incredibly vexed by who we are and what we desire.  Warring in his mind are equal parts self-loathing and self-love, pride and shame, animal desires and intellectual analysis—and the war has left a bloody mess on the battlefield of his soul.  He is by turns disgusting and endearing.  It is a testament to Roth’s ability as a writer that Portnoy can be a hostile sexist pig and yet I found myself more sympathetic than critical.  His humor and his total forthrightness make him relatable and enjoyable to follow.  He is brutally honest, and in telling these scenes of humiliation and personal pain, he had me laughing out loud. Even though the neurotic Jew has become something of a caricature in our times (and I believe that it was not uncommon in 1969 either), there is nothing stale or hackneyed in Roth's depiction of Portnoy.

At its root, the novel is about masculinity and the idea of becoming a “man.”  What he is trying to free himself from as far as his mother is concerned is not his Oedipal desire for her but his status as a momma’s boy, a good rule-following kid who is an over-achieving academic.  He admires most the “men,” a word that he himself puts in quotation marks, who play softball on Sunday afternoons when he was a kid growing up in New Jersey.  His obsession with his penis is his obsession with maleness, for this is a coming of age story (pun intended) in which the protagonist is unable to come (pun intended) of age.  He may have grown to be a 33 year old public figure in New York, but he has never grown up, and for that, he mostly blames his mother.  He cycles through his past girlfriends to identify the moments at which he could have grown up and settled into manhood.  And Portnoy is merciless in his criticisms of himself and his treatment of the women in his life.

For as humorous as the novel is, it is also incredibly angry.  Behind all the jokes and self-deprecation, there lies a sometimes simmering and sometimes explosive hostility.  Whether Alex is jerking off of going at it with The Monkey, he is violent and unrelenting.  And even though I suspected, as I stated earlier, that the plot would prove to have no natural or insightful climax, I was wrong.  All this hostility erupts at the novel’s conclusion when Alex attempts to rape Naomi in Israel.   In that scene, Naomi takes from Alex his final and most dependable crutch, his humor.  She says of him, “And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable.  The contribution you could make!  Such stupid self-deprecation!  How disagreeable!”  Alex replies, “Oh I don’t know, . . . self deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”  “Not Jewish humor!” Naomi erupts.  “No!  Ghetto humor.”   She then proceeds to say that Portnoy is everything wrong with the disapora of the Jews and that his humor is part of Jewish character that allowed the Jews to be destroyed by the Nazis.  It is only after this criticism that Alex jumps up and attempts to rape Naomi, proving to her and himself that he is a “man.”  But it is also at this moment that he is ultimately unmanned, since he has become impotent, which is what has led him to Dr. Spielvogel’s office.  His self-loathing has bested his self-love, and the delicate balance that has allowed him to continue is upset.

That is our hero who is not in the least way heroic.  Roth does an amazing job in capturing the complex machinery of anger and self-loathing that churns about in our brains at every level of consciousness, and he manages to do that with style, humor, love, and sympathy.  I may not want to hang out with Alex Portnoy, but I respect and understand him, feel his pain, and see myself in him.  I cannot imagine it was an easy thing to balance all the pieces of Portnoy’s soul.  If you are not comfortable with crass humor,  extended scenes of masturbation and sex, or swearing and vulgar expressions, then this is probably not the book for you.  But if you enjoy laughing in the face of what is sad and unchanging about the human condition, and if you love a sharply told story, beautifully written with laugh-out-loud passages, then I highly recommend Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.

An American Tragedy: The Confessions of Nat Turner

*As always, there are spoilers ahead*

The Heartland Film Festival plays for two weeks every fall here in Indianapolis.  In spite of the fact that we have lived here for ten years, this is the first year that Ann and I have been able to attend any of the screenings.  Our son was in California for his fall break, so we took a Friday off and saw three films in a row.  The last film for the night was We Are the Giant, a documentary by Greg Barker about three pairs of individuals involved in separate Arab Spring rebellions.  It was a fantastic film, and I highly recommend that you see it when it is released in theaters.  One of the striking features of the film is that all the people at the center of the narratives are still in the midst of the revolutions.  Nothing is settled, and these people are fighting against an institutional power with no assurances that they will be victorious or that their cause will not be undermined even if victory is attained.  This uncertainty of rebellion has been bouncing around in my head since the viewing.  The other aspect of the stories that resonated with me was the violence of any political uprising.  Some revolutions begin with bullets, but others are begun with a determination to employ only peaceful means.  At some point, however, those peaceful protestors are set upon by tanks and machine guns run by the national powers that are equally determined not to be overthrown.  Do the protestors avoid violence and offer themselves as sacrificial lambs and martyrs, or do they pick up arms and fight not only for freedom but for self preservation? 

It was not until I was half way into the novel that I realized the issues fresh in my head from We Are the Giant are also at play in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.  From the start, I knew that I was reading a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, the largest slave uprising in history.  I knew that there is a real 20-page document of Turner’s confessions and that Styron, as he says in his Author’s Note that opens the novel, “rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt of which he was the leader,” but that “in those areas where there is little knowledge in regard to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events.”  Yet knowing those things, I had no idea how Turner would be created or how his rebellion would be imagined.  The details of those imaginings are the very things that make this novel incredible.

How many reasons could a slave possibly need for rising up and killing his oppressors?  I never expected anything impressive because no labor would need to be done to even imagine the motives.  But Styron does a beautiful job of making his world as messy and as complicated and as real as life itself.  His characters are complex jumbles of competing motivations and desires and the book stinks of their sweat and worry, their aspirations and longings.  The slave owners and white lawyers are as human as Nat and his inner circle of friends who help him execute his plan.  Styron, in short, takes no short cuts.  He does not let any of his or your assumptions about slaves, slave owners, whites, blacks, early 19^th-century Virginians dictate his story.  As a result, the reader is always on a voyage of discovery in this tragic world brought magically to life.

The novel begins in a jail cell where Nat and his friend Hark are imprisoned waiting for their trials and eventual executions.  In the first part of the novel, Nat meets with Thomas Gray, an attorney who takes down his confession and writes it up for Nat to sign.  In this section we learn the general facts of the matter, as Styron uses actual passages from the original text published as The Confessions of Nat Turner.  We learn that Nat is well versed in the Bible, that he is something of a reverend, that he is well educated and feeling separated from his God.  I assumed that his rebellion started as an impulsive act against a cruel overseer that gained unintentional speed, so it was with some shock that I read this offhand statement that Nat makes in the middle of a reverie:  

I had for going on to several years now considered the necessity of exterminating all the white people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me, and there was thus available to me more time than I had ever had before to ponder the Bible and its exhortations, and to think over the complexities of the bloody mission that was set out before me.

The calm with which Turner referred to the mass slaughter of “all the white people” took me by surprise and made me uncomfortable.  Moreover his religious fervor and sense that the Bible was “exhort[ing]” him on a “mission” made me think to myself that Turner must be a little nuts and a dangerous religious zealot.  And as I said earlier, it was not until the middle of the novel that I began to understand how Nat could so casually insist of killing every white person, men, women, and children without being the least bit crazy. 

Nat may feel his religion strongly, but his thinking is always ordered and rational—there is no trace of insanity in his plans.  Nat’s goal is to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom in the depths of a nearby swamp from where they can defend themselves from whites seeking to re-enslave them.  It is a three day march through the countryside and along the way, he and his crew will need to amass an army, supplies, weapons, and horses to ensure their reaching the swamp and surviving once there.  As Nat tells his four disciples when first revealing his plan to them, “One or two niggers run off an’ they send out the dogs.  Three niggers run off an’ they sent out the army.”  In short, the white men react strongly to the smallest rebellion, so the reaction to something large will be astronomical.  If Nat and his followers are to survive three days, they will need to go undiscovered for at least two.  To go undiscovered, no one can be left alive to run and warn the other.  No one.  The reality of this necessity is brought to the reader slowly and subtly, and it becomes clear that Nat is correct—any betrayal can undo them, and to spare one white life is to create the argument that another should be spared, and mercy will result in their ultimate defeat.  In fact, it is one tiny act of mercy by Nat himself that does undo the rebellion leading to an alarm going up among the whites, which puts an eventual end to the rebellion.  As a reader you are in a no win situation, wanted Nat to succeed and wanting no one to have to die.

This necessity of death is the tragedy at the heart of the book.  The very institution of slavery and the violence (and continual threat of violence) by the whites needed to keep slavery alive is the very thing that necessitates the murder of so many innocents.  Just like those involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, in Virginia, 1831, there can be no peaceful rebellion if the rebellion has any hopes of ending in freedom.  Styron weaves this fact together through the slow building of the novel and the revealing of the characters and the character of the world they live in.  Styron does what I admire most of any writer, creating characters who are understandable, admirable in their own way, though flawed in equally understandable ways.  I don’t need to like a character, but I need to love something about them, to love that complicated knot at their heart that makes them incontrovertibly human.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a heartbreaking and powerful novel, beautifully constructed and beautifully written.

A Lot to Love: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

There are many enemies lying in wait to ambush a great novel and rob it of everything that makes it powerful and meaningful and moving.  If the author is trying to “say something” in addition to telling a compelling narrative, then those enemies only multiply.  The dark figures of destruction lined up against Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 are as numerous and nefarious as the mythical marauders of Tristero, yet Pynchon deftly sidesteps each attack, moving carelessly down his path as the failed assassins fall into a dust-covered pile behind him.  The Crying of Lot 49 is a truly amazing book and one of my all-time favorites.

The first and worst enemy to saying something meaningful is pretentiousness.  Pretentiousness has taken the knees out from under an untold number of potentially great stories.  Of course, pretentiousness is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, but in spite of all the academic and inter-disciplinary topics touched upon by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49, the novel remains unpretentious.  It does so through its surreal humor and its wry ability to present one possibility and in the next sentence undermine it.  Pynchon simultaneously proposes profound possibilities while winking at us and making us laugh at those very notions.   As a quick example, during the play within the novel, The Courier’s Tragedy, which humorously describes the violent nature of Jacobean revenge plays, the narrator takes a moment to make things serious, noting, “It is at about this point in the play, in fact, that things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words.”  Then, after the mystery of Tristero is relayed to us, Pynchon once again laughs with us in the “bloodbath” that is the fifth act: “Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including the lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom’d talons, is employed.  It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.”  Following the play, the director, Driblette, warns Oedipa not to think too much about the play: “It was written to entertain people.  Like horror movies.  It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything.”  And that’s the line that the novel itself delights in, between entertainment and meaning, for without one the other is without value.

The second and third enemy work together as a dual threat, like Scylla and Charybdis.   Scylla in this case is the danger of not saying anything of meaning, and Charybdis is the danger of saying too much, being too on the nose and becoming more of a lecture than a novel.  The Crying of Lot 49 is uniquely satisfying in this respect as it nimbly gathers up historical, literary, technological, and cultural artifacts like so many daisies to chain together, creating a woven and intricate article to admire and ponder over.  Freudian psychology, paranoia, the mafia, generic narrative conventions, World War II battles, Civil War sea battles, the Pony Express, oscilloscopes, corporate greed, mythical figures, the homeless and disenfranchised, the workings of mystery novels, Jacobean tragedies, acronyms, an underground postal system, stamp collecting—they are all brought together and presented to us as part of the same cloth.  The earth is dug up from this garden of life and we are shown that all the roots of what seem to us like individual plants are tangled and inseparable.  Or rather, like a magician, Pynchon shows us each colorful scarf before dropping them into his hat and pulling out a single scarf of colors impossibly long.  We laugh and wonder and simultaneously enjoy the parlor trick and know that something great is hinted at even as we know what we see is not what it seems. 

Through all this fun and play with the world and its history, Pynchon presents us with the modern condition.  In the last handful of pages, in which Oedipa is wandering the streets and train tracks around San Narciso, she contemplates what it all means, concluding that either she’s paranoid, crazy, the victim of an elaborate hoax, or the witness of an unbelievable plot.   The road in her mind leads her in circles but always back to something grand: 

She walked down a stretch of railroad tracks next to the highway.  Spurs ran off here and there into factory property.  Pierce may have owned these factories too.  But did it matter now if he’d owned all of San Narciso?  San Narciso was a name; an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams became among our accumulated daylight, a moment’s squall-line or tornado’s touchdown among the higher, more continental solemnities—storm-systems of group suffering and need, prevailing winds of affluence.  There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries.  No one knew yet how to draw them.  She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

And again, a few pages later, bouncing between paranoia and a real plot, Oedipa thinks:

Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none.  Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero.  For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into paranoia.

The truth of Tristero would mean that America was irreparably divided into the affluent and the disenfranchised to the point that there was a secret existence for those “storm-systems of group suffering and need.”  Knowing this, Oedipa couldn’t continue in her old life and would have to exist in some space between the two worlds, which is where the paranoids tread.  Oedipa, once trapped in her Remedios Varo tower of a woven world of her own creation has been freed by her pursuit of Tristero, but that freedom is uncomfortable, lonely, and looks a lot like madness.

Everything about The Crying of Lot 49 is, to me, perfect.  It is a book that I can open to any page and read something hilarious and profound and insightful and gripping.  We follow Oedipa’s travels with her at a safe distance from our own towers, pushing ourselves to understand, to grasp, to make sense of the world so lovingly and playfully laid out by Pynchon.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do in the Wide Sargasso Sea

I first read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in an upper level college course about colonialism in 1993.  I was aware, of course, that the novel told the story of Rochester’s madwoman-in-the-attic wife.  I had read Jane Eyre only three years earlier, and my Norton edition was filled with hastily written marginalia declaring Rochester to be a smug, self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, so I was excited to see him revealed as some kind of monster and victimizer.    I was in fact so caught up with the novel’s connections to the Bronte classic that I did a grave injustice to the book and did not read it for what it really was, its own story.  There is certainly enjoyment in seeing the points where the narratives cross over, but if you come to Wide Sargasso Sea looking for Jane Eyre tie-ins, you will not only be disappointed, but you will lose the opportunity to find a heartbreaking and compelling narrative all its own.

The novel is divided into three parts.  In the first section, Antoinette narrates her time from the 1833 British emancipation act, when she is a small child, to when she is a young adult, being removed from the convent by her stepfather to meet the man he plans for her to wed.  At the time that the slaves in the British colonies were freed by the emancipation act, the British government promised financial compensation to the slaveowners, but that compensation was a long time in coming.  Families like Antoinette’s that relied entirely on slaves found their funds rapidly depleted and their estates increasingly rundown.  Antoinette and her mother lived near poverty, rejected by the wealthier white British families and scorned by the black islanders who struggled with their own poverty.

This state of being between two worlds and belonging to neither defined Antoinette’s existence.  Many times does Antoinette state that she does not know who she is or where she belongs, and Rhys makes use of the recurring theme of looking glasses as a way of showing Antoinette’s crisis of identity.  She occupies a no man’s land at the intersections of white and black, European and Caribbean, colonizer and colonized, wealth and poverty, privilege and disenfranchisement.  Traditional critical discussions of Wide Sargasso Sea have centered on the cultural, racial, and national complexities that make up Antoinette’s identity crisis and their inevitable contributions to her madness.  But the reason the novel has endured over the last 50 years is not because of any of the political quandaries it casts light upon, but because it allows the problems and confusions of poor Antoinette to live and breathe with reality and subtlety.  Antoinette is not some puppet for Rhys.  She is a sympathetic, heartbreakingly tragic figure with a real life dimensionality.  As I found myself marveling at the depth of the characters, I was drawn to Rhys’s treatment of “madness” itself.

In my memory of my first reading, I would have told you that Rochester (who interestingly remains unnamed in the novel) drove Antoinette to madness with his cold cruelty.  But of course Antoinette is already in a fragile state before Rochester takes her away for their honeymoon.  Having watched her mother’s passionate outbursts at her own powerlessness, having been rejected by her mother when she needed her comforting touch, having been taunted and physically assaulted by other children, Antoinette sought nothing more in this world than safety.  When she lay in bed as a child, she would say to herself, “I am safe.”  When her father died and she and her mother slid into poverty, Antoinette notes that “feeling safe in bed . . . belonged to the past.”  When her mother begins to fall apart, Antoinette observes this in terms of safety: “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the blue sofa—once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe.”  The world is hostile and a threat to Antoinette’s personhood and sanity.  (As a side note, I find it not coincidental that Wide Sargasso Sea and The Painted Bird were written and published around the same time since they are both haunted by horrible cruelty.)

In her relationship with Rochester, she dares to reach for more than mere safety.  The shy and self-protecting girl of the first section is replaced by a charming, happy young bride in the second section, narrated by Rochester.  She is talkative.  She is earnest.  She seems genuinely delighted with her new husband as she loves him and believes he loves her.  But all that improvement comes to a crashing halt when Rochester’s dislike of Antoinette and the Dominican island lead him to greater acts of cruelty, culminating in his sleeping with the servant Amelie within earshot of Antoinette.  In the aftermath of this betrayal, Rochester has a long conversation with Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nanny, and the only person who seems to care about Antoinette’s well being.  This conversation, or rather, confrontation, is for me the heart of the novel.

In this confrontation, Christophine accuses Rochester of wanting to “break [Antoinette] up”: 

you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more.  Only you she see.  But all you want is to break her up.

Christophine repeats the phrase “break her up” to describe Antoinette’s emotional and mental meltdown.  She never uses the words “crazy” or “mad.”  It is Rochester who first uses the word “mad” when he asks Christophine, “And that her mother was mad.  Another lie?”  Christophine responds:

They drive her to it.  When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away.  They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad.  Question, question.  But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her.  They won’t let me see her.  I try, but no.  They won’t let Antoinette see her.  In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing.  That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk.  That man, and others.  They they have her.  Ah there is no God.

For Christophine, all that happened to Annette was that “she los[t] herself for a while.”  But instead surrounding her with kind words, friends, a loving husband, they diagnose her as “mad” and treat her as such.  That declaration of “madness” is Annette’s doom, for with it, she is discarded by her husband and family and left in the “care” of strangers who have no interest in helping, only in taking advantage of a powerless and hurt woman.  And when Rochester won’t be swayed by Christophine’s words to love Antoinette and nurture her, Christophine declares: “You think me a fool?  You want her money but you don’t want her.  It is in your mind to pretend she is mad.  I know it.  The doctors say what you tell them to say.  That man Richard he say what you want him to say—glad and willing too, I know.  She will be like her mother.”

When someone is broken up, she is a sympathetic creature to be healed and made well again.  When someone is “mad,” she is something to be feared and locked away.  “Madness” is a tool for blameless dismissal of another human being.  As if to drive the Christophine’s point home, once Rochester forces Christophine to leave, he thinks:  “She’s as mad as the others.”  Boom.  With the one word, Rochester rids himself of needing the consider anything said to him.

This distinction between madness and broken up ties in neatly with the novel’s larger concerns about race, culture, and colonization, since it is the European men who give the diagnosis of madness like an obeah curse, bringing a dramatic end to fates of Antoinette and her mother.  In the section that follow’s Rochester’s talk with Christophine, Rochester seems as broken up as Antoinette ever was, employing broken syntax and passionate outbursts.  But this momentary outburst, not even three pages in my edition, does not result in “madness” as Rochester regains his composure and determination in the next section.  Both Antoinette and Rochester suffer the same ailments, but one is bundled off to an attic in England while the other gets to establish himself as a Byronic hero.