Presentation of Portnoy’s Complaint

Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint is a part of a cultural movement of the 1960s, a raucous man’s story of his sexual obsessions, the plight of a son who has been dominated by his smothering mother and attempts to release his anxieties through masturbation. This story became famous overnight, receiving both wide acclaim and contempt. Roth is described as a product of the 1950s, the last decade in history when education, family values, high culture and high principles were still held in esteem—until demolished by the sexual and psychedelic revolution that followed.

There are notable similarities between Portnoy and Roth himself, and the debate whether the novel is a thinly veiled autobiography still ensues among literary critics. A particular type of Jewish humor can be traced to the activities of Portnoy. Such humor, which features so prominently in the novel, has been effectively identified as a separate kind by Sigmund Freud, who wrote that Jewish jokes were usually directed inwards and characterized by profound self-criticism.

The protagonist in Portnoy’s Complaint confesses that his entire life reminds of a Jewish joke, although it is not a joke. Thus, Alex Portnoy seems incapable of escaping any of the downsides of his cultural predicament. Immediately after the book was published, the novel quickly acquired a scandalous flavor, and Roth had to cope with a lot of newly acquired celebrity which he despised so much. This hymn to self-stimulation and liberation of repressed sexuality got reflected in both social sciences and popular culture of Roth’s era. Shades of Portnoy can be seen in Woody Allen’s films.

Portnoy’s Complaint was attacked multiple times by the Jewish community for ridiculing their culture and heritage. Norman Podhoretz and Peter Shaw used their positions as editor and associate editor of the conservative Jewish journal, Commentary, to revile at Roth’s alleged hatred of Jewish history and identity. However, the most scathing vilification of the novel came in 1972 from Irving Howe in an essay titled “Philip Roth Reconsidered”, who accused the author of Portnoy’s Complaint of lack of taste, vulgarity and, above all, homeliness.

Despite its central thematic preoccupations, which appear to be embattled Jewishness and masturbation, the novel’s popularity can be explained by the universalism of the issues author strives to explicate, such as the growth and decay of big cities, the difficulty of reconciling the sex urge and the love urge over time, and the painful need to outgrow one’s parents. While many literary influences can be traced in the novel, by far the greatest and the most important is that of Sigmund Freud.

The views on Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis as expressed by Alex Portnoy are interestingly controversial: on the one hand, Freud is often alluded to as a source of wisdom; on the other hand, Portnoy seems to implicitly blame Freud for trivializing complex human relationships by his excessive and exclusive focus on sex. Essentially, the revolt against parental authority was very characteristic of the decade: the hippie culture, hitchhiking, and experiments with mind-altering substances were all manifestations of this revolt.

Like many of his contemporaries, Alex struggles for his right to be bad, together with the entire generation that won the right to misbehave for their descendants. In this struggle, there were many obstacles Portnoy had to overcome, mostly of internal psychological nature, such as the fear of retribution, especially in the form of castration. It is necessary to note that Portnoy’s Complaint is a perfect illustration of the notion that literature cannot be fully understood without immersion into the cultural realities of the age when a certain work was created.

Subtly autobiographic, the novel ought to be analyzed based on knowledge of Philip Roth’s own life and background. Although critics concur that there are notable differences between the loving and caring family Roth grew up in and oppressive and neurotic parents of Alex Portnoy, beyond reasonable doubt, Roth’s experiences with the mainstream American culture and the opposite sex have been reflected in the novel.