Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth

Abstract

In The Anatomy Lesson (1983) Philip Roth provides an explanation for Nathan Zuckerman's involvement with transgression as man and writer. Roth describes first-generation immigrant fathers as pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos who produce second-generation sons boiling with temptations. A page later he adds about his literary alter ego, If it hadn't been for his father's frazzled nerves and rigid principles and narrow understanding, he'd never have been at all, a second-generation American son possessed by . . . exorcism of his father's demons (268-69). This intergenerational interpretation of the cultural origin of transgression in Roth's fiction illuminates the details of many of his narratives. Yet an important dimension that is missing from this analysis is social or psychosocial perspective. Roth's frustration with his subcultural position as Jew in American society is, in many ways, the irritant that produces his fiction. His irritation, however, is not simply the result of overt resistance by mainstream society. His frustration is also clearly determined by his position in culture - by his embroilment in and rebellion against the world of his parents. In contrast with Norman Mailer, who is also fixed on transgression and also Jewish (although scarcely involved in Jewishness), the origin of Roth's major theme is located and delineated in terms of cultural dynamics and subcultural perspectives on mainstream existence. Where Mailer has been more politically radical, ideological, and heroically disposed, Roth has shown himself, beneath the brittle surface of his social defiance, to be rooted in Jewish and European traditions and in feelings of vulnerability to persecution. Moreover, this substratum of Jewish feelings and ideas in Roth has resulted in far more explicit burden of moral/ethical sensibility in his work at the same time that Roth has striven like Mailer to achieve authenticity and artistic power through cultural and psychological transgression. Another facet of this ethical substratum in Roth the novelist is certain ambivalence about succeeding in the American mainstream. To transgress is to step across boundary or past limit; and Roth's success in bursting the boundaries that confined his father's generation is rife with crosscurrents. A second-generation American from lower-middle-class Jewish home, Roth dramatizes in his fiction the arc of career of talented literary rebel who uses liberal times, the permission of his gift, and early success to express damned-up Jewish ambition, appetite, and anger, only then to suffer the backlash, the countercurrent, of communal recrimination and psychological guilt. The elation of success quickly changes into the tribulation and confusion of misunderstanding. This essay examines the omnipresent theme of transgression in Roth's fiction from Portnoy's Complaint (1967) to the Zuckerman Bound trilogy (1979-85); it also includes section on transgression in his recent, more explicitly postmodernist work up to Sabbath's Theater (1995). Of particular interest is the psychosocial dimension of his narratives. Using spatial model, I hope to show that, ultimately, transgression enables Roth to penetrate resistant domains and to go where he feels excluded psychologically and socially. Of final importance will be these questions: What is the dynamic relation for Roth between mainstream experience and his self?. Does Roth build his house of fiction from outside the mainstream or inside? And if from outside, how does he manage this when his relation to life is also largely one of rebel and existential outcast? As will become evident, defining Roth's footing as novelist in the cultural field of American life has interesting implications for the value of the category Jewish-American writer when examining second- and third-generation writers. We can begin, then, by turning the perspective provided by Roth himself in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) onto his first explicit work of boundary violation, Portnoy's Complaint (1967). …