The Schlemiel in the Postmodern Context
in
Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
Ba Thesis English Language and Culture, Utrecht University
David Slings, 3791998
18 July 2014
First reader: Roselinde Supheert
Second reader: William Philip
Words: 7807
2
Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 2
1. The Postmodern Schlemiel..................................................................................................... 5
2. The Schlemiel in Crisis ........................................................................................................ 11
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 24
Introduction
In 1969, American society exploded over a novel called Portnoy’s Complaint, which
apparently shocked the elderly and made in one crushing stroke aware of the danger the
author Philip Roth had evoked on the literary imagination of thousands. The book consisted,
according to some critics, only of vulgarity and pornography of the gravest kind (Howe). Who
else but Philip Roth, who caused a smaller riot ten years earlier with the publication of
Goodbye, Columbus, could write a chapter titled “Whacking Off” and still pretend it was
literature. Moreover, not just the conservative, mostly WASP Americans reacted harshly;
from within the Jewish community, rabbis violently protested the contents of the novel, as one
rabbi exclaimed: “[i]n the Middle Ages we knew what to do with Jews like Philip Roth”
(Chanes). Roth had managed to upset numerous Americans, but he had also gained the favor
of most of the people in the arts industry. Although some literary reviewers rebuked him for
his novel, most notably Irving Howe, the majority of the artistic community could identify
with the tantalizing life of Alexander Portnoy. (Michel 1)
The story is presented as a monologue on the couch in the psychiatrist’s office. The
doctor strongly resembles Freud, and throughout the novel numerous references to him and
his work occur. For example, it is worth considering one the novel’s notorious lines: “Let’s
put the id back in yid!” Yid, the Yiddish word for Jew, highlights the highly comical handling
of psycho-analytic discourse. In line with the given example, the comedy of the novel in
general to a large extent attempts to satirize various discourses and genres.
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In artistic circles, Portnoy’s Complaint has been through a wild and highly fluctuating
ride, but overall it is regarded as a literary treasure. According to Pierre Michel, Portnoy’s
thematic content “attracted more readers than [it] repelled” (1). In the decade after its first
publication, critics mostly focused on the comedy in the book. Although not always positive,
critics usually judged Roth’s novel favorably. To Michel, the author “obviously finds pleasure
in building up a tension that he then allows to fizzle out inexplicably” (10). David Brauner
notes that most books on Roth “make much of his [Roth’s] comedy” (75), but also that the
work offers “faint praise that damns, or seems designed to damn.” (ibid.) Thus, comedy is
widely analyzed in the novel, while tragedy is usually left behind. Irving Howe, one of the
main literary critics, as well as a Jew, of the 1960s and 70s, heavily criticized the book, not
because of its anti-Semitism, but rather because he felt it was far below any moral standards
and had pornographic content. (74) This was refuted by critics such as Ruth Wisse, who saw
its contents as anti-pornographic because of the “very intellectual form of wit” inherent in the
novel. Brooke Allen has recently reconsidered all of Roth’s work and concluded on Portnoy
that “what looked then like the breakout testament of an angry young man is now revealed as
one of the most artful, literarily savvy, stunningly skillful novels in American history” (20).
Critics have tried to put the novel in theoretical contexts which yielded some results.
The Marxist narrative has been applied to the novel, and there have been articles focusing on
the ethnicity and class.1 Although there are repeated references to Freud in the novel, critics’
reactions have been limited regarding psycho-analysis. One exception is David Brauner’s
“Masturbation and Its Discontents, or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy’s
Complaint.” He places the novel in a psycho-analytic framework, which becomes a complex
shuffling of characters through verbal confusion and schizophrenia. However, Brauner
focuses very much on the tragedy, while other critics had been focusing on the comedy. The
1
See David Tenenbaum for an exhaustive reading of race and class within Portnoy’s Complaint.
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thing that has been forgotten, or so it seems, is that the power of the novel lies in the tragic
product of highly comic events. The literary figure of the schlemiel, which has been
researched by Ruth Wisse2, stands at the center of this tragicomic narrative
One thing that stood out during my research was Portnoy’s Complaint’s inclusion in
the modernist canon of literature. For example, in another article Brauner claims that
Portnoy´s Complaint is a masterpiece “in the great modernist tradition” (45). He views Roth
as drawing on an array of high modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz
Kafka and D. H. Lawrence. The stream-of-consciousness style of narrating Roth reportedly
inherited from the first two, and a “preoccupation with bodily functions” is seen as an
extrapolation of literary novelties exhibited in the works of Joyce and Lawrence. While these
features of form and content do resemble those of the high modernist classics, and while it
cannot be denied that Roth, during the writing of Portnoy’s Complaint, was influenced
especially by Kafka (as he claimed in Reading Myself and Others), the character’s rebellion
and the way Roth handled this can be seen as much less in the modernist tradition than in the
postmodern and indicating a writer in tune with the “iconoclasm and fluidity of the times”
(Ross Posnock 12).
This essay attempts to find similarities between the literary figure of the schlemiel and
the cultural movement known as postmodernism by analyzing Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s
Complaint. The analysis of Portnoy’s Complaint and its use of and reflections on the
transformed schlemiel leads to the notion that Portnoy’s Complaint strongly voices the need
for a schlemiel as the postmodern hero. Portnoy shows a subversive desire to break away
from conventions and norms, while at the same time it reveals the suffering and eventual
failure involved in the attempt to achieve freedom from cultural constraints. The
2
See Ruth Wisse (pg nmbrs) for a reading of Portnoy’s Complaint with regard to schlemiel theory.
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contradictory, fragmented memories of the main character, Alexander Portnoy, who through
the analysis is established as a schlemiel, are presented as features of a postmodern schlemiel.
The first chapter will establish the main characteristics of the postmodern schlemiel,
partly based on critics’ insights and historical fact. With respect to these characteristics,
chapter three will analyze Portnoy’s Complaint. First, it will give evidence as to how Portnoy
is portrayed as a schlemiel. Then the analysis will point out that Portnoy is in fact a
postmodern schlemiel.
1. The Postmodern Schlemiel3
The character known as the schlemiel plays an important role in the literary
imagination of Jewish writers. The schlemiel is characterized by Menachem Feuer as
exemplifying “the wounded hope of Jewish humor” (80), relating to the harsh history of Jews
in Europe. This history has been intertwined with persecution and oppression, as Jews were a
heavily prejudiced minority. Jewish humor, Feuer claims, focuses on disclosing the contrast
between tragic life and comedy in general. Jewish history may be largely responsible for this
change in comedic direction, as the tragic was never too far from the Jewish segregated shtetls
(80). The schlemiel has been an important literary defense mechanism of Jews in Europe
during their 2000-year exile, and it caused them to continue to see hope and provide an image
of strength through hardship, no matter the extent of suffering.
The word schlemiel has only become generally known in the 19th-century, through the
story of Peter Schlemihl by Adalbert von Chamisso. That century in Russia and Eastern
Europe, the czar introduced the pogrom policies, causing thousands of people to flee the East
towards America. The use of the schlemiel in the face of defeat and desperation had been their
3
Representations of the schlemiel in literature have usually excluded any female Jewish stereotypes, meaning
that schlemiels are usually considered to be male. However, Ruth Johnston has written about the female
schlemiel, who, according to Johnston, breaks the pattern of masculine schlemiels, in “Joke-Work: The
Construction of Jewish Postmodern Identity in Contemporary Theory and American Film”.
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primary weapon for centuries, and European Jews used schlemiel stories against the forces of
oppression, prejudice and a lasting sensation of desperation (Wisse x). In practice however,
many Jews acted in a passive way and did not want trouble with the authorities. This might be
considered somewhat naïve, and during the 19th-century Czarist pogrom policies, many
Jewish writers resisted this idea of passivity. However, as Wisse suggests, “the sleight of hand
of [the schlemiel’s] comedy is intended to persuade us that this weakness is strength. In much
the same way, the technique of adaptation required of the Jew is that he or she reinterpret his
weakness as strength, for how else could a weakling survive?” (x). Paradoxically, the
schlemiel in the literary sense can change man´s weak spots and create something positive out
of them. If there is no chance at physical rebellion, possibilities arise for textual irony to
subvert and alleviate the pressure of society.
Schlemiel comedy is characteristic of Yiddish humor, notably of Eastern European
Jews. According to Wisse, in Eastern Europe, the schlemiel was perceived by the Gentiles as
a metaphor for European Jews in general (4). As one might expect, the schlemiel was the
symbol of a people in minor or greater despair. Surprisingly, the schlemiel, in contrast, had an
optimistic outlook; i.e., the good would eventually defeat the evil, if one waited long enough.
Accompanying this moralistic idea was the faith schlemiels had in their religion. One of the
most characteristic schlemiels in 20th-century Yiddish literature, Gimpel the Fool (from a
famous story by I. B. Singer), believes in the goodness of the world and in Judaism until the
very end of his life, attempting to convince us that only good faith in the world and humanity
is worth anything. It is an extreme example of how a religious schlemiel might think, but it
does visualize the power with which a schlemiel is bound to Jewish culture.
In The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, Wisse has shown how the characteristics of the
schlemiel changed during the great Jewish emigrations from Germany and Eastern Europe in
the 19th and 20thcentury to the immigrant nation of the United States. This new world was
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initially perceived by the Jews as being full of possibilities and riches, in stark contrast with
the countries they had just left. As Jewish literature in Europe was radically put to an end by
Adolf Hitler, it had to beget some successors in other parts of the world, as Helge Nilsen
conveys in an historical survey of Jewish-American fiction (507). So the schlemiel arrived in
America, figuring in texts by I. B. Singer and at the level of popular culture (Wisse 73).
It underwent a transformation: the schlemiel became less and less religious, and more
and more concerned with its own (secular) affairs and trivialities. Neurotic obsessions and the
inability to accept oneself became primary characteristics; however, the older ironies
remained. According to Wisse, the focus was transferred from “an unbroken faith in almost
universal skepticism”, to an emphasis on emotional intensity and feeling (82). The schlemiel
stopped being symbolic for the Jewish people as a whole, and started to live its own life, out
of the Jewish genesis that had created it.
With regard to that change in character, compare I. B. Singer’s Gimpel the Fool
(1953) with Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer.4 They are both considered schlemiels, but act
differently in important aspects. Gimpel is fully convinced of the goodness of the world, and
“like a golem believed everyone” (233). Although the entire village is making fun of him, he
stays true to his faith and morals. In contrast, Annie Hall starts with a cut-scene in which main
character Alvy Singer talks about his life: “Now, that’s essentially how I feel about life. Full
of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it is all over much too quickly.”
The example shows the dramatic change in behavior of the schlemiel, going from religious
and optimistic to secular, skeptical and pessimistic.
Moreover, the schlemiel’s relationship with women in general is remarkable. A
schlemiel as he is normally portrayed will be dominated by a female figure in his life, whether
4
From the film Annie Hall, 1977.
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it is his mother or a girlfriend/wife. These women play a quintessential role in the forming of
the schlemiel stereotype.
Besides the stereotype of the schlemiel, another major Jewish stereotype evolved after
WO II. After the war had changed the pre-war anti-Semitic Jewish stereotype in American
society, two major new or transformed stereotypes developed out of the vacated area of
Jewish stereotypes: firstly, the transformed schlemiel as benign and kind, though weak and
irrational, and secondly, the female stereotype of the Jewish American Princess.
Then, during the late sixties, the schlemiel apparently almost all but disappears from
literature, according to Wisse (123). This disappearance is most interesting, because at the
same time the schlemiel started its steady decline, the intellectual and cultural movement
known as postmodernism surfaced.
“The term postmodernism,” according to The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
& Criticism, “was first used in reference to architecture as early as 1947 and then by the
historian Arnold Toynbee in the 1950s.” Toynbee’s definition, which posits that the era of
postmodernism started in 1875, has never really been picked up by literary scholars, but the
advent of the movement was not far off after the coinage of the word. The term
postmodernism was picked up by various disciplines in different chronological order. From
the late 1950s onwards it was used in the arts, then in the late 1960s for architecture, and in
the 1970s the postmodern debate started in cultural theory, sparked by Jean-François
Lyotard’s work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Wakchaure 1). Already
in 1972, however, literary critic Leslie Fiedler noted that:
We are living, have been living for two decades -- and have become acutely conscious
of the fact since 1955 -- through the death throes of Modernism and the birth pangs of
Post-Modernism. The kind of literature which had arrogated to itself the name Modern
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(with the presumption that it represented the ultimate advance in sensibility and form,
that beyond it newness was not possible), and whose moment of triumph lasted from a
point just before World War I until one just after World War II is dead, i.e., belongs to
history not actuality.
Fiedler accurately and enthusiastically invited people to let popular culture into the realm of
literature and the arts. The distinction between high and low art was created in the modernist
period, according to Bell-Vilada, because of the obsessive attention given to originality and
the modernist ethos of art for art’s sake (11). However, somewhere in the 1950s and 60s, that
distinction disappeared, as is suggested by Fiedler.
Postmodern fiction, as Fiedler argues, broke with the old distinction between high and
low art, and showed society another way of writing literature. Besides the shattering of
highbrow elitism, skepticism about the norm and the literary institution also played a strong
role in postmodern fiction; but it did not only react skeptically to modernist ideas:
“Postmodernism … in general terms takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, selfundermining statement. It is rather like saying something whilst at the same time putting
inverted commas around what is being said” (Hutcheon 1). When applied to fiction, but also
postmodernism in general, postmodern ideals do not only react to modernist art, but also react
internally. This creates an effect of subverting and at the same time installing elements of the
dominant culture. It seeks to contradict everything and puts doubts around the concept of
truth.
Wisse´s claim that the schlemiel is declining from literature is in connection with a
notion by Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. He argues that in postmodernity, pure parody has
become impossible, as it depends on linguistic norms that are accepted by everyone. He
juxtaposes parody with the concept of pastiche. Pastiche, Jameson argues, does not need a
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linguistic norm. A harboring of eclectic historic materials, without the notion of ridicule:
“pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor” (Norton 1849). Although
pastiche itself is not directly connected to the schlemiel, the disappearance of parody is
something to be considered when discussing the schlemiel. As Wisse puts it, “the ground of
all satire is a social and ethical norm freely acknowledged by both reader and author.” (28) If
these norms do no longer exist in the age of postmodernity, the schlemiel cannot any longer
fall back on these, as the figure is created to highlight deviations from linguistic and social
norms and consequently satirizes these. This might be one of the reasons for Wisse’s claim of
the schlemiel’s disappearance from the literary milieu at the close of the 1960s.
While it may be hard to prove a direct connection between schlemiel comical
characteristics and postmodern tendencies, overlaps exist. For instance, postmodern art’s
desire to subvert and rebel seems automatically to lead to new forms of irony, parody and
satire of perceived social or linguistic norms, especially the need to deviate from any norm.
The schlemiel captures these feelings too by failing to adhere to the norm, whether
consciously or not; due to bad luck or ineptness, the result remains the same.
Furthermore, instead of being self-congratulatory and righteous, postmodernists seek
to find contradictions in the past and the present, in the textual and the intertextual. These
contradictions are also found in texts themselves, creating self-deprecatory, sometimes
confusing texts. This is accurately described by Linda Hutcheon: “Postmodern texts
paradoxically point to the opaque nature of their representational strategies and at the same
time to their complicity with the notion of the transparency of representation” (qtd. in Woods
70). Hutcheon here refers to postmodern fiction in connection with the crisis of
representation.5 Hutcheon’s quote can also be used in the larger context of subversive texts
5
The notion of representation in postmodern society is distrusted by postmodernists, because representations
imply that there is a solid and complete connection between signifier and signified, to the fullest extent. This is
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and their inner contradictions. When this is applied to schlemiel theory, the schlemiel appears
as a figure of hope in the face of defeat, and ambivalence pops out. Ambivalent in creating his
own life, Janus-faced, the schlemiel seems to fit in neatly in the postmodern context in this
regard.
Besides, the schlemiel also challenges dominant notions of liberal humanism: firstly,
the idea of man as perfectible and secondly, liberal humanism contains the notion of classic
heroes in fiction and theater: “The schlemiel is not a hero manqué, but a challenge to the
whole accepted notion of heroism. He responds not to the question of whether classical
heroism is still possible, but of whether it was ever desirable (Wisse 39). The Jewish hero can
be considered the antithesis and a challenge to Beowulf, entrenched for centuries in our minds
as our historical hero a priori. The anti-hero that is the schlemiel is not an evil-minded supervillain on the one hand, and on the other also uncommitted to the contemporary religion of
success. He is rather an advocate of failure. Because of the all similarities described above
that tie the schlemiel to postmodernity, the schlemiel may be posted as the postmodern hero.
2. The Schlemiel in Crisis
In his essay on morality in Philip Roth’s work, James Phelan writes: “A receptive
reader basks in Roth’s delight in making Alex Portnoy, an epitome, a cartoon, of Jewish-male
generational neurosis, sing his grievance” (8). Apparently, the comedy of the novel revolves
around a conceit that establishes the main character, Alexander Portnoy, as a caricature. The
novel in general, however, works differently: the narrative style takes the form of a
monologue: Ales is talking to his psycho-therapist. He reminisces and reflects on his life, with
the aim to disseminate his life into little fragments and find out whatever caused him to
become mentally ill, which together seem to create the story of a cartoon come to life in a
not how it works, according to postmodern scholar Jean Baudrillard, for instance. He writes extensively about
this in his essay “The Precession of Simulacra.”
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fully rounded character. The specific type of cartoon character Alex portrays can be described
as an extreme, stereotypical schlemiel. As outlined above, the modern schlemiel is constantly
in doubt and is usually associated with failure through neuroticism and persistent lack of good
fortune. Moreover, there is more evidence that Alexander is the stereotypical schlemiel.
Alex has a typically overbearing mother, who actions cause him to erupt in a rant:
“BECAUSE YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH TO
BEAR!” (86). Moreover, it appears Portnoy repulses this kind of mother-figure. Portnoy’s
mother, Sophie Portnoy, is a hard-working, concerned housewife who raises her son with
strict discipline in order to help Alex in later life. Alex finds her impossible to please. For
example, Alex is repeatedly banished out of the house at a young age: “Nonetheless, there is a
year or so in my life when not a month goes by that I don’t do something so inexcusable that I
am told to pack a bag and leave.” (9) It is not the case that the young Portnoy is a badbehaved child, but that Sophie overreacts in her desire to straighten her son out. It is due
partly to his upbringing that Portnoy developed such strong problems in his sexual
relationships later in life, as is suggested by the epigraph:
Portnoy’s Complaint (pôrt’-noiz kəm-plãnt’) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-
)]
A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually
warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says:
”Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are
plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s “morality,” however, neither fantasy nor
act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame
and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.” (Spielvogel, O.
“The Puzzled Penis,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.)
It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds
obtaining in the mother-child relationship. (Epigraph)
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Those bonds can be interpreted as Alex’s strong connection to his mother in his youth, as he
definitely may be called ‘a mother’s boy’. It is a defining characteristic, the schlemiel’s
mother as the strict supervisor of the son’s life.
Jack Portnoy represents the life Alex does not want to lead, because the father is a
schlemiel with no strength to rise out of that position. Jack Portnoy is ruled by indeterminism
and has had little opportunity to rise above his status as lowly insurance agent. He is called by
one critic “an underfunctioner” in contrast with Portnoy’s mother, who is overfunctioning in
her desire to lead her son to the best possible future (Schiff 36). Unlike normal dads, Alex
argues, “[Jack] drank – of course, not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of
magnesia; and chewed on Ex-Lax” (2). Jack is portrayed as a failure; Alex is determined to
rise above his family’s average living standards and static, closed off culture. One recalled
memory in the first chapter shows the hopes Jack has for his son: “Where he [Jack] had been
imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream. Mine was its corollary: in my liberation would be
his” (5). As Jack is stuck in his socio-economic bubble, his son must succeed and be an
example of the American Dream. Jack’s failure should have been the root of Alex’s fortune in
life, which of course did not turn out as Jack would have wanted it. As Alex seeks to penetrate
the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture that lies at the very core of American
civilization, his desired future is not so much different from his parent’s view on Alex’s
future. However, his parents want him to succeed with his Jewishness still intact, while he
wants to all but remove his perceived malevolent root culture. Due to his family bonds,
Portnoy feels that he is locked in some literary-cultural or comedic ditch, i.e. “the son in the
Jewish joke.” (25) With this feeling comes a growing resistance against this joke, which can
be accurately transcribed as the joke of the schlemiel. When considering this notion, Portnoy
doubts the status of the schlemiel and attempts to contradict it. This rebellion against that
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literary figure, which had been established by revered modernist writers, can be considered to
be postmodern.
The first chapter, “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met,” contains Portnoy’s
reflections on his early childhood, which are mostly concerned with critique of the nuclear
Jewish family and raising the central issue of the novel: it can be best described as the critique
Alex has on Jewish culture. The title of the chapter itself is ambiguous: on the surface, it
seems to refer to Sophie and her strict and disciplined behavior. However, in the light of the
discussion of the schlemiel, it could also refer to the character of the schlemiel, which has a
lasting influence on Alex’s life and is thus “unforgettable”.
Alex has an obsession with his pre-determined Jewishness, which is congruent with
the post-war Jewish stereotype. It might be helpful, now, to claim that effeminate male
Jews/schlemiels came out of the Second World War as the new image of Jews, the male
stereotype, like the later evolution of the Jewish female as the Jewish American Princess.
Alex, however, is aware of his position, and seeks to transgress the boundaries of the Jewish
schlemiel. It makes for a volatile reaction against the Jewish literary figure known as the
schlemiel.
Alex has problems with his Jewishness which lead him to engage in deviating sexual
behavior; the cause and its symptoms (troubles with Jewishness & sexual deviance)
eventually convince him to visit a psychiatrist. His sexual behavior can also be seen within
the context of the schlemiel. In the last chapter, “In Exile”, Alex’s schlemielkeit is finally
made explicit to the reader. It starts when he leaves his girlfriend Mary Jane in Athens, when
she tried to force him into marriage. He is “running away! In flight, escaping again – and from
what? From someone else who would have me a saint! Which I ain’t!” (177) He refers here to
his mother, who also had exaggerated expectations of him, in a sense. “In Exile” shows
15
Portnoy leaving for Israel, to meet his “final downfall and humiliation, Naomi, The Jewish
Pumpkin, The Heroine” (183). When the sabra resists his advances, the situation erupts into a
verbal back-and-forth: “’Mr. Portnoy,’ she said, raising her knapsack from the floor, ‘you are
nothing but a self-hating Jew.’ ‘Ah, but Naomi, maybe that’s the best kind.’ ‘Coward!’
‘Tomboy!’ ‘Shlemiel!’” (189). The final insult hits the reader’s nerve, especially the reader
aware of Jewish literary themes. After the shouting, Portnoy attempts to sexually assault her,
which eventually fails because he turns out to be impotent. The impotence of Alex can be
interpreted in many ways, but within the narrative, it functions as the climax of the story. As
his perverse and exhibitionistic sexuality was his way of trying to get out of his constraining
cultural cage, this attempt at sexually engaging the first Jewish girl in the novel denotes some
kind of confused, very troublesome relationship with the Jewish people.
Portnoy is effectively struggling with two commitments, to Jewish and to mainstream
American culture. Instead of embracing them both, he resents both at times: “The idiocy of
the Jews all year long, and then the idiocy of the goyim on these holidays! What a country! Is
it any wonder we’re all of us half nuts?” (102) Alex, like many American immigrants,
struggles to combine the new-found mainstream American culture with his Jewish roots.
According to Chaim Potok, Roth´s earlier stories contain cultural confrontations which are
similar to these types of cultural relations. In an essay titled “Culture Confrontations in Urban
American: A Writer’s Beginnings,” Potok links Roth’s earlier stories to periphery-toperiphery culture confrontation, which produces “cultural aberrations, awkward
misunderstandings, bizarre fusions” (qtd. in Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) A Jewish
American Writer 31). Roth’s hero is not in love with anything; a creature unable to love or
that loves only out of feelings of extreme guilt or shame. This claim leads to the notion that
Portnoy is struggling to get out of his cultural location because he is the product of some
16
bizarre fusion of cultures. That product can be seen as being Portnoy’s specific form of
schlemiel.
Bernard Rogers claims that Portnoy, through his resentment and rebellion, does not
acquire his goals; Rogers continues to say that his active hatred only makes him further
unstable. He quotes sociologist Alan Segal, who claims that the irony of the story implied in
Portnoy’s rebelliousness against his parents and his roots is conditioned by exactly those
morals and values he wants to oppose in the first place. Alex can masturbate all he wants and
have sex with all the goyim he can possibly lay his hands on, says Segal, and try to
emancipate as such. However, as he seeks to “shed the Jewish identity”, that is virtually
impossible by having sexual intercourse with Gentile girls on a large scale (Philip Roth 92).
What Segal implies is that he could never rise from his tortured position, “half in, half out”
(Roth 85). In Philip Roth´s autobiographical collection of his own pieces of writing and
interviews, Reading Myself and Others, he suggests that Portnoy, together with various
characters from his other novels, is one “stage of a single explosive projectile that is fired into
the barrier . . . of personal inhibition, ethical conviction and plain, old monumental fear
beyond which lies the moral and psychological unknown.” (ibid.) Portnoy is stuck in this
barrier, “half in, half out”. However, Rogers’ claim suggests that Portnoy’s Jewishness is so
intertwined with his personality that by destroying it, he also destroys himself. Seen from this
light, the novel thus tells of the inefficient or even impossible ways a schlemiel tries to step
out of his inherent position.
To establish a clear connection with postmodern speakers in novels and the authors of
those speakers, the novel must be analyzed with regard to this connection. In Portnoy, the
distance Roth takes from his speaker is a point of confusion. On the one hand, Alex shares
much of his past and intellectual characteristics with Roth himself; on the other hand, it is to
be hoped that Roth did not lead the sexual life Alex led as a sexual deviant. It is not without
17
purpose that Roth published “Writing About Jews” (1963), a politically loaded statement on
the self and the speaker in defense of accusations of helping anti-Semitism gain a foothold or
be stimulated and agreed upon. In the era of “The Death of the Author,” the speaker in novels
needs to be distinguished very much from the author, as an author is only a
producer/processor of words, not its creator. If Roth agreed with everything his main
characters would think or say, he would in most aspects be a violent, narcissistic, angry little
man with an ego so sexually charged as to be a danger to most women, in any case for their
genitals. However, behind the thoughts and actions of Roth’s characters, there could many
interpretations that involve Roth’s opinion on socio-political and cultural matters. It is thus
important to be aware of the unclear relationship between author and speaker, as knowledge
of this will lead to clearer and more knowledgeable interpretations of texts.
The distinction between high and low art is virtually destroyed in Portnoy by Roth
who created the sexually grotesque character of Alex Portnoy. In the 1960s, modernism was
still booming and the academic literary canon still stood strong. Although critics such as
Leslie Fiedler, quoted in the previous chapter, spoke up against this trend, prominent literary
figures and theorists in America such as Irving Howe and Saul Bellow still very much
retained to the modernist tradition. So it is no mystery why Howe wrote in an essay titled
“Philip Roth Reconsidered” that “Portnoy’s Complaint… demands little more from the reader
than a nightclub performer demands” (74). Wryly comical, when this statement is set in the
light of the modernist distinction of high and low art, Howe’s argument makes more sense.
Roth can be seen as breaking with this distinction, especially with regard to the title of
the second chapter of the novel, “Whacking Off” (11). This may be interpreted as an assault
on the values of modernism. As the 20th-century progressed, conservative sounds aimed at
Portnoy’s Complaint gradually blunted, and although the novel is still shocking, it is also an
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staggering masterpiece, as one recent critic put it: “Forty years after it was published, Philip
Roth´s comic novel remains an outrageous read.” (Chris Cox)
As we have established the simultaneous implicit- and explicitness of Portnoy’s
position as a literary and cartoon-like schlemiel, it is worth looking further into the relation
between that position and his identity. It is Alex’s most obvious imperative to escape the
notion of his schlemielkeit, given to him by his parents and past, which is what Alex conveyed
to his psycho-analyst. Remember the quote where he exclaims his desire to escape the Jewish
joke; he seems to have been trying to do this for much of his life.
However, it may also be argued that the attempts at reaching some unreachable
alternate lifestyle ultimately produce him as a schlemiel. This would not necessarily
undermine his parents’ role in his perceived status, because they are still the ones that gave
him his early cultural understandings and worldviews which may have been a partial blame in
his fate. But the ways he tried to cope with this may only have led him further into the
position of the schlemiel.
In search of a truth that could stop his suffering, he turns to the secular humanism
intrinsic in mainstream American society. His countless escapades with Gentile women
suggest he wanted to do more than just “stick it up their backgrounds” (167); one may also
consider the possibility of Alex’s attempt to change himself. To get away from the guilt and
shame, he believes he has to cut loose all bonds tying him to Jewishness. He desperately seeks
the core of American culture, to be fully Americanized. The last chapter suggests the
inevitability of his failure to see that it remains impossible to break away from the roots of
one’s past. In other words, he finds it impossible to remove his schlemielkeit from his identity.
In the last chapter, when he finds out that he is impotent and after the sabra left, he finally
abandons the last shreds of his hope: “my salvation! My kin! – and I am whimpering on the
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floor with MY ENDLESS MEMORIES! My endless childhood! Which I won’t relinquish –
or which won’t relinquish me! Which is it!” (193) What Portnoy is saying is that is impossible
for him to shed his Jewish identity. When he finally attempts to make amends and go to Israel
to find redemption , he is rebuked for it, making it impossible to redeem himself.
Roth managed to portray this very unwilling schlemiel in a static position; unwilling
because Alex attempts to rebel against his schlemiel identity; static because it seems that he
cannot escape that position. Wisse argues that although Portnoy resembles earlier schlemiel
literature, it is not an addition to the genre but a reaction. The text shows Alex, normally seen
as a figure of laughter in the face of defeat, as a reversal of that irony which is displayed in
older schlemiel texts (120). By attempting to Americanize completely and complying with its
secular humanist ideals, Alex believed he could undo his Jewishness. However, what Alex’s
self-reflexive psycho-analytic monologue reveals is that secular humanism fails to comply
with 20th-century cultural contradictions. The text may be seen as a reaction to the schlemiel
as he is portrayed throughout 20th-century Jewish-American text containing similar
characters.
Roth’s schlemiel differs greatly from other schlemiels. The schlemiels that appear in
other Jewish-American texts can be identified in the spirit of liberal humanism, secular or
religious, and this claim is strengthened when considering Helge Nilsen: “The emphasis on
humanism, as well as on religious or metaphysical issues, is everywhere present in Jewish
fiction. As Max Schulz puts it, ‘The Jew has historically been God-intoxicated and mancentered.’” (510) Furthermore, Ruth Wisse called the chapter in which she indulges the reader
with an analysis of schlemiels in Saul Bellow’s fiction “The Schlemiel as Liberal Humanist.”
(92)
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Moreover, there is a more important difference in the use of literary schlemiels. Older
generation writers such as Bellow and Malamud, in their schlemiel-novels, differ with Roth in
that the former show the schlemiel in struggle with its circumstances, indirectly or not linked
to its schlemielkeit, while Roth, in contrast, displays specifically the troubles Alex has with
being a schlemiel, rather than issues arising from that situation. In this, he satirizes the
position the schlemiel has enjoyed by these earlier writers, and posits the schlemiel inbetween modernism and postmodernism. This is supported by reading the character of
Portnoy as Roth’s indecisiveness in choosing between the two movements. In one way, Roth
is inspired very much by modernist writers, but in another, he deviates from the methods of
modernism and clearly seeks to stretch the boundaries of modernist aestheticism. This
contradiction can be considered, then, as postmodern, since one of the aims of postmodernism
is to show the contradictions within the text and with the outside world. If we recall
Hutcheon, Portnoy, in postmodern terms, is at one time rejecting the old schlemiel tradition,
and at another time it contradicts itself by eventually portraying the invincibility of the
schlemiel.
Exaggeration of Jewish themes is widespread in the novel: the overbearing mother, the
goofy failure of a father and the suffering of the main character to the extreme. Placed in this
context, the assimilation debate, which tells of the dichotomy between full integration and
segregated ethnic attachment, suffers some painfully satirical strokes, as this is exaggerated
into a cultural farce.
By consciously using and satirizing cultural stereotypes, Roth is critiquing the
perceived static of stereotypes, especially with regard to the novel’s ending. On this issue,
Pierre Michel wrote in 1974 that: “the novel is based on a formula that has become a
convention, a cliché; the Jewish concept of inherited guilt and oppression, with which the Jew
finds himself unable to cope but which is so inherently Jewish that he cannot conceive living
21
without it” (2). The schlemiel is pictured as a cliché, a stereotype designed by Roth, typical of
his fiction. This farcical parody of the schlemiel, explained by Wisse as a reaction to the
schlemiel genre, rather than an addition, clarifies Alex’s childhood and adolescent rebellions.
The ending pages describe Alex’s thoughts when he contemplates his ‘discovery’ as the
sexual deviant, despite his professional status as Assistant Commissioner of Human
Opportunity for the City of New York. The final scream
(“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!”
(195)) can be revealed as his last act of rebellion in the wake of his psycho-analytic intake.
Rebellion against the superimposed position of the schlemiel in which Alex finds himself, but
maybe also against the static nature of the literary schlemiel: his fixed position as a stock
character in the Jewish joke and his subsequent repulsion away from this and towards some
American icon, or as Alex puts it, “the real McCoy!” (113). The idea of Jewish stereotypes as
being static is not necessarily true, but may be perceived by Roth as such. Roth may have
wanted to write a revolt against the writers who have added to the schlemiel genre.
Another interpretation of Portnoy’s final scream may involve the outburst of
maximized desperation and frustration the main character faces throughout his life. The
scream may also ironically allude to an orgasm; the irony springs from Portnoy’s impotence
in the last chapter. However, in my view, this outburst may have been a direct result of the
postmodern switch in arts, and the subsequent changes the schlemiel had to face because of
that. The schlemiel relied for hundreds of years on linguistic norms with which to compare
malevolent and hypocritical actions or behavior. That stage finally passed when new
postmodern arts started to rethink and recreate the space they inhibited, mostly due to the fact
that people concerned with the movement stopped believing in a transcendental truth which
could be used to rationalize and assure validity to certain concepts. When the schlemiel
entered these new postmodern texts, it had to adapt in some way, for it could no longer rely
22
on any kind of absolute truth. This may be where Portnoy’s book-ending scream is inspired
by. The schlemiel is stripped of his parodying gear and cannot bear the frustration and
desperation that is now left for the traditional schlemiel. The text thus voices the need for a
postmodern schlemiel; that need is voiced by Portnoy, as he seeks to be that postmodern
schlemiel.
In a sense, all Jewish-American texts deal with the theme of assimilation. In ethnic
groups, holding onto one’s identity can be considered extremely important, as opposed to
assimilating within the umbrella society of the American mainstream. In his aforementioned
article, Nilsen explains that where Bellow and Malamud “occupy a middle position between
outright secularism and a feeling of being tied to the Jewish background,” Portnoy’s
Complaint seems to be the odd-one out (514). Roth’s novels, according to Nilsen, could be
more likely associated with the early, gratefully assimilating immigrant novels than the
complexly navigated moral situations of the later Jewish fiction. One thing that can be noted
is the way Roth treats the assimilation/segregation debate in Portnoy. Instead of letting his
hero choose its stance on the basis of social or moral reflections, Alex is confounded in his
position, i.e. appropriating the stereotypical place of the schlemiel. The novel seems to satirize
the complex cultural reflections and to laugh at the assimilation debate. Could not a Jew like
Alex achieve complete assimilation in the 1960s? Alex had the knowledge and the means to
make it to the finish and show the world that it was not too hard to fit in if one really desired
it. Alex cannot achieve this, according to Nilsen because the problem is “too deep-rooted and
intractable” (514). However, the apparent deep-rootedness and intractability of Portnoy’s
problem is precisely the issue that is being satirized.
The problem of assimilation that Nilsen addresses is not the central theme of the
novel. Although in other schlemiel texts by Bellow and Malamud this is usually explicitly or
implicitly centralized by the character’s thoughts and actions, Roth wreaks havoc on the issue
23
by revolting against the schlemiel genre and the writers connected to it. Bellow’s schlemiel
characters, for instance, are much more humane and give the reader as much reason as
possible to accept and identify with the characters (Michel 8). In a postmodern sense, Roth
parodies the older generation of writers such as Bellow and Malamud, and although he much
respected the former, he dedicated Reading Myself and Others to Bellow, they do represent
the older, late-modernist Jewish writers. This parody of the schlemiel genre is then set up to
comically satirize the schlemiel and its accompanying notions of humanity.
When examining the novel in the context of earlier Jewish fiction and the time it was
published, three things can be observed: Wisse’s claim that the schlemiel is declining from
literature, together with Fredric Jameson’s discussion of pastiche (being parody without a
normative comparison), and the following statement by Michel: “We are given no yardstick to
assess Portnoy’s judgment” (Michel 9) “No yardstick” implies a missing norm with which to
successfully parody or ridicule other characters. Although Pierre sees this as a negative thing,
this lack of linguistic norm can also be considered as a tenet of postmodernism, denoting that
one line of thinking is never truer than another, i.e. lacks a linguistic norm with which to
deduce absolute truth from a statement. Chapter one explained the importance of the possible
disappearance of parody because of these notions, and opted that it might pose a problem for
the schlemiel. As Wisse observed the decline of the literary schlemiel in the early 1970s,
postmodernist writers became louder and more accepted into mainstream American literature.
There seems to be a connection between these events. Although there is no hard evidence to
back the disappearance of parody from the postmodern milieu, the notion can still be
considered with relation to postmodern fiction and the schlemiel genre. If it considered, there
might be a ground to claim that Roth proclaimed the final death scream of the schlemiel on
the novel´s last page. Of course, what Wisse did not know was that the schlemiel would never
24
really leave the screen or the text, as numerous novels, films and TV-shows in the 80s, 90s
and onwards had explicit or implicit schlemiels, Jewish and Gentile.
Conclusion
In 2009, Philip Roth called his work Portnoy’s Complaint a “youthful indiscretion,”
and told the interviewer that he was not sure he could read it again (Brown). (Of course), the
novel is a manifesto which at first glance contains childish features, but behind Roth´s
simplifying citation, subtle literary goals can be found. As Alexander Portnoy repeatedly
vents his anger and frustration at Jewish culture, an average reader would find plenty of
reason to consider it offensive and spiteful. However, if that reader would take the time to try
and uncover the reasons behind that spitefulness, a whole different layer of meaning is to be
found.
By reacting to the schlemiel genre, Roth forces his main character and writers within
the schlemiel genre to reconsider their position. In a way, the use of caricatures as characters
is a form of ridicule of the older generation. Roth achieved a wholly new and different look at
the schlemiel genre by taking the status of the schlemiel as the central issue in his novel. In a
time when society was rapidly polarizing between left and right, it was hard to exclude
oneself from this polarization. However, this was precisely what a schlemiel could not do. As
Wisse argues, “single-minded dedication to a particular cause or specific goal cannot tolerate
a character whose perception of reality is essentially dualistic” (109). As expressed before, the
ambivalent nature of the schlemiel prohibits it from definitively choosing sides, as the
schlemiel doubts the world and most of all himself.
After the schlemiel’s establishment as liberal humanist and above all as a modernist
creature by writers such as Malamud and Bellow, the schlemiel suffered from the rapid
changes in society which tended toward postmodernity. The schlemiel transformed, through
25
boundless desperation as seen in Portnoy’s Complaint, into a neurotic, obsessive and mentally
unstable character, but one which could clearly voice and lament the problems of a
postmodern society.
It is no coincidence that postmodern fiction and arts rose in the 1960s, a decade which
remade so much of society. Amongst the ruins of Auschwitz and the ideological war between
left and right, some people stood up without claiming their solutions contained any truth.
Postmodern artists wanted at once to doubt other’s steadfast opinions and their own opinions.
Roth joined this debate by portraying the transitional stage between modernism and
postmodernism. In this context, Portnoy might be seen as being in the middle of this change;
as moving towards a postmodern future.
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