Literary Onanism
My Life as a Man.
by Philip Roth.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 330 pp. $8.25.
In 1961, Philip Roth published in these pages a remarkable essay entitled “Writing American Fiction” which attracted considerable attention at the time and has since come to be regarded as something of a classic critical statement. The essay was written with all the self-assurance and high moral severity one could expect to find in a young writer who had been rather extravagantly overpraised for his first book and who might be forgiven for considering himself qualified to sit in judgment upon his elders and contemporaries. What impresses one most in re-reading it today is the accuracy with which Roth was able to diagnose the more serious problems facing the writer of fiction in contemporary society and to forecast developments such as black humor, the New Journalism, and fictionalized autobiography which in 1961 were barely emergent as major literary trends. But the essay has also taken on over the years a certain poignant dimension. For in predicting the future course of American fiction in the 60's and 70's and castigating some of his fellow writers for the creative adjustments they had made, or failed to make, to the dilemma he described, Roth unwittingly prophesied the course of his own future career as a novelist. Most of the errors and evasions of artistic responsibility which he detected in the work of others were to be precisely those to which he himself was later to succumb.
The most widely quoted observation in the essay has to do with the writer's feelings of bafflement and frustration when confronted with the grotesque improbability of most of the events of contemporary life. “. . . [T]he American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents. . . .” Roth then proceeded to discuss the work of certain of his contemporaries and to find in much of it evidence of a failure to engage the American reality—an inevitable failure, he believed, because “what will be [the writer's] subject? His landscape? It is the tug of reality, its mystery and magnetism, that leads one into the writing of fiction—what then when one is not mystified but stupefied? not drawn but repelled? It would seem that what we might get would be a high proportion of historical novels or contemporary satire—or perhaps just nothing. No books.”
Roth cited Mailer's Advertisements for Myself as the expression of “a despair so great that the man who bears it, or is borne by it, seems for the time being . . . to have given up on making an imaginative assault upon the American experience, and has become instead the champion of a kind of public revenge”—exactly the kind, one might propose, that Roth himself has been taking upon the public through various of his later novels as his own power to assault the American experience has steadily declined.
Later in the essay he criticized Salinger for creating characters whose sole response to the contemporary world is to have nervous breakdowns or commit suicide or retreat into a specious mysticism, while Malamud's characters seemed to him to be people who exist outside the realities of the current historical situation and who function as metaphors for general human possibilities rather than as representations of existing social types. Roth next accused Bellow and Styron of imaginative falsification, most notably in Henderson the Rain King and Set This House on Fire where the action is resolved in gestures or statements of unearned optimism and philosophical affirmation. Herbert Gold particularly troubled Roth because Gold, in his view, was the perfect example of the writer so completely turned away from the contemporary scene that he is left with nothing but his narcissism. In Gold's work “there is a good deal of delight in the work of his own hand. And, I think, with the hand itself”—a statement which, coming from a man who was later to write Portnoy's Complaint, the most hand-infatuated novel in American literary history, is surely rich in ironic portent.
Roth again might have been displaying prescience about his own future creative incarnations, this time as the author of My Life as a Man, in his final comments on Gold:
[His] extravagant prose, his confessional tone (the article about divorce; then the several prefaces and appendices about his own divorce—my ex-wife says this about me, etc.; then finally the story about divorce)—all of this seems to have meaning to me in terms of this separation. . . . the not-so-friendly relationship between the writer and the culture. . . . I must say I am not trying to sell selflessness. . . . The writer pushes before our eyes . . . personality, in all its separateness and specialness. Of course the mystery of personality is nothing less than the writer's ultimate concern . . . at its worst, however, as a form of literary onanism, it seriously curtails the fictional possibilities, and may perhaps be thought of, and sympathetically so, as a symptom of the writer's loss of the community as subject . . . it may be that when the [cultural] predicament produces in the writer not only feelings of disgust, rage, and melancholy but impotence too, he is apt to lose heart and finally . . . turn to other matters or to other worlds; or to the self, which may, in a variety of ways, become his subject or even the impulse for his technique. What I have tried to point out is that the sheer fact of self, the vision of self as inviolable, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment, that that vision has given to some writers joy, solace, and muscle.
Roth's own decision to seek his subject through the exploration of self, in particular within the narcissistic imperatives of the self at war with the derangements of contemporary life, was to be made some years after these sentences were written, and it proved to be the crucial and determining act of his later career.
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Given his premises as stated in the essay and his perhaps excessive sensitivity to the social conditions in which the creative imagination is obliged to function, there was undoubtedly no other decision he could have made. For ten years following the appearance of Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, Roth struggled to find a form that would contain and objectify his sternly adversary vision of American culture, and in his two massive novels of the early and middle 60's, Letting Go and When She Was Good, he experimented with greater effectiveness than is generally recognized with the traditional form of the realistic social novel. But the difficulty of this form for Roth was that it demanded a sense of thematic coherence which he did not possess as well as a social experience definable in terms of certain implicit concepts of communal order which, as he well knew, contemporary society did not possess. As a result, Roth found himself caught in a predicament which, to one degree or another, has confounded American writers ever since Melville: he had vast quantities of material, but he could not discover and possess a subject. All he could do was describe and document at infinite length the experiences of his characters, record every word of their interminable and mostly trivial conversations, and in that way produce a certain effect of life—busy, abrasive, vibrant, but finally one-dimensional and incoherent. It also became apparent in these novels that Roth suffered from two primary weaknesses that severely limited his ability to work successfully with objectively created characters in a realistically presented social milieu: he had no power to identify or sympathize with characters who were not to some degree extensions or idealizations of himself, and his natural tendency was to recoil in horror from contemporary experience and to treat it with the contempt of one who feels that he alone is worthy of salvation.
In short, on the evidence of these novels, it was clear that the form most congenial to Roth was the novel of narcissism, just as his strongest gift was for the tragicomedy of paranoia, and it happened that in Portnoy's Complaint he was able to coordinate form and gift to extraordinary effect. Yet there was still a lingering urge in Roth to make the kind of direct assault on the social and political realities of our time which in his essay he had criticized some of his contemporaries for failing to make. He accordingly produced after Portnoy's Complaint three very different and very bad novels: Our Gang, a heavy-handed and adolescent satire of the Nixon administration which only verified the truth of Roth's observation that “the actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” particularly when the actuality is Richard Nixon; The Breast, a baffling and pretentious scrap of psychological fantasy that is ghoulish in its tastelessness; and The Great American Novel, an even more baffling melange of hyperkinetic writing about the mythology of baseball. Clearly, it was impossible for Roth to deal successfully in fiction with either the public realities or the various fantasy worlds of contemporary life, and the reasons were precisely those he had recognized in 1961. The experience of our time was stupefying and infuriating to the writer not merely because it was so often more incredible than anything he could imagine, but because it seemed to have no relation to the individual self. That, in fact, was the prime feature of its incredibility.
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For a writer of Roth's particular talent and temperament there is only one reliable measure of credibility—what the self feels and thinks—and only one compelling interest—what the self experiences: in Roth's case, how events and people, especially women, have assaulted his sanity, thwarted or provoked his sexuality, and outraged his sense of moral virtue. This is the story he told in Portnoy's Complaint, and he tells it again in rather different terms in My Life as a Man. But the fact which in the former was partially obscured by the absorbing joys of book-length masturbation is here once again in full evidence: although Roth is a fine stylist and may be the funniest serious writer in America, he is gravely deficient in a sense of the novel form; he has no firm understanding of what his novels are supposed to mean; and he has no subject matter except fanatical self-infatuation.
His strategy this time is to try to convert these weaknesses into literary capital by making them part of the contrived architectural and thematic design of the novel. The theory behind this presumably is that an author is permitted to do anything in a novel provided he can convince the reader that he did it deliberately, in the service of some artistic intention, however obscure. Roth divides his narrative into two sections: the first purporting to be a fictional account written by a young novelist named Peter Tarnopol of the adventures of a young novelist named Nathan Zuckerman; the second presenting Tarnopol's ostensibly autobiographical account of actual experiences of his from which some of the events of the first section have been distilled. Throughout this monologue Tarnopol speculates continually about the relationship between his own life and that of his fictional alter ego, expresses bafflement at the complexity of the problem, and seems to be trying to create the impression that his (and Roth's) novel is really about the effort of the novelist to define and explore the connection between life and art. The writing of My Life as a Man would thus become for Roth-Tarnopol not only a search for but a record of the search for the novel's meaning; the life-art relationship is given dramatic objectification in the novel's two-part structure; and the expectation is that the novel's theme is to be discovered in Tarnopol's struggle to make fictional use of the materials of his life.
This technique of incorporating the author's creative difficulties into the work which is generating the difficulties is of course an old and familiar one, and so is the technique of bringing the author or his surrogate into the work and depicting him in the act of writing what one is in the act of reading. Gide, Huxley, Nabokov, and others have made brilliant use of many variations of such devices and with them created an effect of conflicting illusion and reality which has formed one of the most common thematic perspectives of literary modernism. But in Roth's hands they become merely tricks employed to produce a mirage of complication evidently intended to conceal a feebleness of conception. There is actually no earned relationship between the fictional experiences of Zuckerman and the “real-life” experiences of Tarnopol; hence, there is no thematic justification for the presence of both men in the novel. Tarnopol might as well have devoted the entire novel to the story of his own life or Roth might have devoted it to the story of his. Whatever advantage he gained through the use of Tarnopol and Zuckerman may have been of some value in a defense against a charge of libel, but literarily it appears meaningless.
In addition to the complications of structure and the refracting perspectives of his fictional personae, Roth resorts to other devices in his effort to give the appearance of artistic deliberation to effects which he seems to have sensed might be viewed as artistic flaws. At one point in Tarnopol's narrative, for example, Roth introduces, and by introducing apparently hopes to forestall, an obvious criticism of his novel. Tarnopol has sent his brother Morris copies of the two stories which comprise the Zuckerman narrative, and Morris responds in part as follows:
What is it with you Jewish writers? Madeleine Herzog, Deborah Rojack, the cutie-pie castrator in After the Fall, and isn't the desirable shiksa of A New Life a kvetch and titless in the bargain? And now, for the further delight of the rabbis and the reading public, Lydia Zuckerman, that Gentile tomato. Chicken soup in every pot, and a Grushenka in every garage. With all the Dark Ladies to choose from, you luftmenschen can really pick 'em. Peppy, why are you still wasting your talent on that Dead End Kid? Leave her to Heaven, okay? . . . Peppy, enough with her already!
Throughout the novel Tarnopol is repeatedly accused of fanatical preoccupation with his guilts, his Jewishness, his marriage, and his ego. His psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel, who is cutely resurrected from Portnoy's Complaint, considers him to be “among the nation's top young narcissists in the arts” and diagnoses his troubles as stemming from “narcissistic self-dramatization.” He also writes him a letter of criticism of the Zuckerman stories. In fact, almost all the people in Tarnopol's life—his relatives, mistresses, students, wife—write him letters about the stories, and they call attention to shortcomings which Roth has had ample opportunity to discover his own writings possesses. But it is, after all, Tarnopol's writing which is being criticized, and because it is, Roth nearly succeeds in having it both ways. He can disarm critics by pointing out his artistic flaws before they do, and he can assign them to the work of a fictional writer who is not himself but to whom, as his creator, he is superior. The trouble is that there is actually no discernible difference between Tarnopol and Roth, just as there is no discernible reason except perhaps a legalistic one why Tarnopol rather than Roth should be acting as narrator. Tarnopol is never evaluated by Roth even though he is criticized by just about everybody else, and Roth never achieves sufficient dramatic distance from him to make it clear what he thinks and, therefore, what the reader is supposed to think about Tarnopol's character and behavior. There is, furthermore, no evidence that Tarnopol is intended to function as an untrustworthy narrator, the kind who is characterized by his errors of perception and extravagant responses. His is the only point of view in his story, and those moments when another might become authoritative and contradictory of his are never exploited—presumably because he and his creator are at all times in complete agreement.
My Life as a Man is, in short, a totally solipsistic novel, which may well make it a perfect expression of the times. It is created out of the materials of exactly the kind of alienation from the public culture which Roth described in his essay. Its form is the endless ranting monologue; its content is guilt, anxiety, and acute paranoia; its appropriate setting is the psychiatrist's office where, as was literally the case in Portnoy's Complaint, the only sound is the sound of the narrator's voice. Nothing is real in the world except that voice, all our separate, complaining voices.
But the problem with Roth is that he cannot function as his own psychiatrist. He cannot find the meaning of his anguish or his anger: hence, we cannot. All he can do is talk, talk, talk, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes tediously, but always toward a point that is never reached because it does not exist. What he is up to really is—to use his own phrase—a form of literary onanism.
