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Transgression in the fiction of Philip Roth
In The Anatomy Lesson (1983) Philip Roth provides an explanation for Nathan Zuckerman's involvement with transgression as a man and a writer. Roth describes first-generation immigrant fathers as "pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos" who produce second-generation sons "boiling with temptations." A page later he adds about his literary alter ego, "If it hadn't been for his father's frazzled nerves and rigid principles and narrow understanding, he'd never have been a writer at all," "a second-generation American son possessed by . . . exorcism" of his father's "demons" (268-69). This intergenerational interpretation of the cultural origin of transgression in Roth's fiction illuminates the details of many of his narratives. Yet an important dimension that is missing from this analysis is a social or psychosocial perspective. Roth's frustration with his subcultural position as a Jew in American society is, in many ways, the irritant that produces his fiction. His irritation, however, is not simply the result of overt resistance by mainstream society. His frustration is also clearly determined by his position in Jewish-American culture - by his embroilment in and rebellion against the world of his parents. In contrast with Norman Mailer, who is also fixed on transgression and also Jewish (although scarcely involved in Jewishness), the origin of Roth's major theme is located and delineated in terms of cultural dynamics and subcultural perspectives on mainstream existence. Where Mailer has been more politically radical, ideological, and heroically disposed, Roth has shown himself, beneath the brittle surface of his social defiance, to be rooted in Jewish and European traditions and in feelings of vulnerability to persecution. Moreover, this substratum of Jewish feelings and ideas in Roth has resulted in a far more explicit burden of moral/ethical sensibility in his work at the same time that Roth has striven like Mailer to achieve authenticity and artistic power through cultural and psychological transgression.
Another facet of this ethical substratum in Roth the novelist is a certain ambivalence about succeeding in the American mainstream. To transgress is to step across a boundary or past a limit; and Roth's success in bursting the boundaries that confined his father's generation is rife with crosscurrents. A second-generation American from a lower-middle-class Jewish home, Roth dramatizes in his fiction the arc of a career of a talented literary rebel who uses liberal times, the permission of his gift, and early success to express damned-up Jewish ambition, appetite, and anger, only then to suffer the backlash, the countercurrent, of communal recrimination and psychological guilt. The elation of success quickly changes into the tribulation and confusion of misunderstanding.
This essay examines the omnipresent theme of transgression in Roth's fiction from Portnoy's Complaint (1967) to the Zuckerman Bound trilogy (1979-85); it also includes a section on transgression in his recent, more explicitly postmodernist work up to Sabbath's Theater (1995). Of particular interest is the psychosocial dimension of his narratives. Using a spatial model, I hope to show that, ultimately, transgression enables Roth to penetrate resistant domains and to go where he feels excluded psychologically and socially. Of final importance will be these questions: What is the dynamic relation for Roth between mainstream experience and his Jewish-American self?. Does Roth build his house of fiction from outside the mainstream or inside? And if from outside, how does he manage this when his relation to Jewish-American life is also largely one of a rebel and existential outcast? As will become evident, defining Roth's footing as a novelist in the cultural field of American life has interesting implications for the value of the category "Jewish-American writer" when examining second- and third-generation writers.
We can begin, then, by turning the perspective provided by Roth himself in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) onto his first explicit work of boundary violation, Portnoy's Complaint (1967). In Portnoy, transgression involves a second-generation son's demand for instant gratification in defiance of his father's protracted effort to achieve economic and moral stability for his family. Alex Portnoy, described as New York City's Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity (204), has become a transgressive monologist impelled toward narratives of outrageous sexual and psychological candor and uncomplimentary family satire. The motive of honoring the liberal values of his father and mother has been superseded by the imperatives of a seriocomic artist. Only comic marksmanship at his parents foibles and the pleasure of venting his fury stir him.
We learn that as a boy young Alex Portnoy nearly suffocates from parental expectations that he be the smartest, neatest, and best-behaved little boy in his school. His melodramatic mother, aspiring to impress Gentile America with her perfect offspring, supervises him to death and turns minor infractions into operatic disappointments. At times, for frustrating her, he is locked out of his home. With adolescence, masturbation becomes the spearhead of Alex's rebellion. In manhood, sexuality remains at the center of his effort to overturn inhibitions and push back repression. Portnoy contends his transgressions often produce guilt: "Why must the least deviation from respectable convention cause me such inner hell? . . . When I know better than the taboos!" (124). Most times, however, he seems to find it is surprisingly easy to transgress; the only obstacle to freedom is his hesitation. After being treated to his first lobster dinner by his sister's boyfriend, Portnoy is tempted to masturbate on the darkened bus back to New Jersey with a Gentile girl sitting beside him. The adult Portnoy retrospectively speculates that being encouraged to violate the Jewish dietary code also prompted him to take a sexual risk: