The American Century: Literature since 1945 581One condition for beginning, or being able to think about doing so, is some measure
of liberation from the past. Herzog perhaps achieves this by the conclusion of
Bellow’s novel. But Alexander Portnoy still seems to be drowning in his own
subjectivity – a subjectivity which, like that of so many of Roth’s protagonists, seems
to be determined by other people, the larger narrative of his family, his community,
and his culture. In an earlier Roth novel, Letting Go (1962), Gabe Wallach, one of the
major characters, reveals some of the psychologically crippling effects of being
raised in the family nest, or trap. He tells his girlfriend that he can never escape from
that trap, be “off the hook,” until, as he puts it, “I make some sense of the larger hook
I’m on.” Within the terms of the story, he never does. Similarly, in Roth’s first novel,
Goodbye, Columbus (1959), the protagonist Neil Klugman stands staring at his
reflection in a library window after the painful end of an affair. “I was only that sub-
stance,” he reflects, “that face that I saw in front of me.” “The outside of me gave up
little information about the inside of me,” Klugman says; he wanted “to go behind
that image and catch whatever it was that looked through those eyes.” However, as
he “looked hard” at his own image, he recalls, and his “gaze pushed through it,” all he
ended up seeing was “a broken wall of books, imperfectly shelved.” The project of all
Roth’s fiction could be said to be precisely this: to gaze at the image of an American
like himself, to discover what lies beneath. What, it asks, is the mysterious self,
the subjectivity that stares back, that captivates me? There is no simple answer to this
question, of course. But as Roth’s protagonists and narrators maneuver their way
between the outside and the inside – what Portnoy calls the “hundreds of thousands
of little rules laid down by none other than None Other” and “Nothing but self!
Locked up in me!” – they incline toward the inclination Neil Klugman offers as he
looks in the library window. Perhaps selfhood is a fiction, a product of the past
and the dreaming imagination – all that is written and recorded in books. For that
matter, perhaps nationhood is as well.
The earlier novels explore this enigma of subjectivity through a series of
protagonists who share Roth’s own Jewish upbringing, and who find it hard, if not
impossible, to escape from the narrative of the Jewish family and culture. Portnoy,
for instance, is locked in a past that is circumscribed by his mother and orthodox
“boundaries and restrictions,” the “None Other” of traditional Jewish law. He seeks
relief in obsessive masturbation and an equally obsessive masturbatory monologue.
But the forms of relief, sexual and verbal, that he finds for himself only reveal his
entrapment: endlessly, it seems, he circles around the past and the guilt it instills.
Constantly, like so many of Roth’s entrapped Jewish males, he looks with longing at
the “goyim” and their world. “These people are the Americans,” he declares;
“these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place.”
They occupy “center-field” rather than the margins of society; and they seem to him
to possess a freedom from the past, a mobility and unreflective, unconstrained
subjectivity that he can only look at with envy. This perception of “the Americans,”
as Portnoy calls them, is a mirage, of course, the product of his yearning, his own
dreaming imagination longing to escape from the stories of his culture. And, in
many of his later novels, Roth has explored both that mirage and the use of writingGGray_c05.indd 581ray_c 05 .indd 581 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM