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The Jewish-American fiction written after World War II reflects the changes
that have occurred in the American society and in the lives of the Jews
as an ethnic group. In the postwar period, living conditions of the
Jews in America improved dramatically. With a substantial growth in their
economic status, many of them became part of the American middle class. So, the
Jewish writer, who found himself better educated, merged with the
American mainstream, yet retaining his commitment to humanistic values and
Jewish ancestral awareness of the tragedy of human existence which reflected in
his works. Thus, the stage was set for the exploration of important conflicts
between the Jewish sensibility and the agnostic consumerism of the larger society.
Philip Roth (1933- ) is one of the most gifted Jewish American
novelists writing now. He translates his intelligence and feelings into terms specific
to serious fiction with firmness. What makes Roth special is that his
critical sense plays a big part in his imaginative creations. His stories are full
of beautiful insights into books and authors, into the business of
teaching, criticizing, and into living with works of literature over time. In the first
book-length study of Roth's achievement, The Fiction of Philip
Roth, McDaniel (1974) recognizes Roth as a major American writer, the recognition
unclouded by ethnic considerations. Roth transgresses the boundaries that confined
the generations of his forefathers and is dominant with countercurrents. 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 themes. The elation of success quickly changes into tribulation and
confusion or misunderstanding.
This paper examines the presence of the carnivalesque features of
sexual degradation and scatology in Roth's masterpiece Portnoy's Complaint.
These carnival elements enable Roth to penetrate resistant domains and
go where he feels excluded psychologically and sociologically. Halkin (1994,
45) argues, "[H]ad postmodernism not existed, [Roth] would have been quite
capable of inventing aspects of it by himself." Commentators on the cultural aspects
of American life have seen Roth as one of the most valuable
Jewish-American writers. Commenting on the theme of sexuality, Howe (1986, 73-74) says
that the "thrust against vulgarity can itself become vulgar" in the novel.
Similarly, Searles (1992, xvi) observes that "Roth underwent several years of
psychoanalysis and was drawn, as Portnoy reflects, into the possibilities of a fluid
confessional fictional mode." At a deeper level, it is understood that Portnoy's
sexual explicitness and political rebellion capture the era's destruction of political
and social boundaries, as well as its greater freedom and opening of new
possibilities for both women and men. |
