Mirth and Hatred
Prompted by Philip Roth’s appearance on Fresh Air, and subsequently by Hitchens’ hilarious essay on Roth’s latest, I decided to finally read Portnoy’s Complaint, a book which my dad unsuccessfully tried to foist on me many years ago.
As a teenager, I was horrified that my old man would recommend me a book containing so many exegeses on masturbation. I read about fifty pages in and gave up from sheer embarrassment. At thirty, having relaxed a bit about the whole pud-pulling thing, I’m still finding it difficult to get through the damned book. Hearing a man ceaselessly complain about his repressive Jewish upbringing and then wax philosophical about the resulting unabated desire to fuck non-Jewish girls1 is amusing the first and maybe the second time he goes through the cycle. By the time he’s harping on the same chords a fourth and fifth time, my patience has run out. I’m anxious for him to move on. With only 100 pages left, I’m increasingly sure he’s not going anywhere.
There are, of course, fun passages even in the repetitive parts:
Every girl he sees turns out (hold your hats) to be carrying around between her legs—a real cunt. Astonishing! Amazing! Still can’t get over the fantastic idea that when you’re looking at a girl, you are looking at somebody who is guaranteed to have on her—a cunt! They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts—for fucking!
What struck me in this bit is how the feminist project of tabooing “the c-word” has in fact made it far worse for women on balance. While a modern woman surely shudders at Roth’s irrepressible conflation of women and their genitals, how much healthier and more alive his usage is than, say, mine whenever I reach for the c-word to voice my ultimate censure of some unlucky female. The woman is still conflated with her vagina (which it would seem is in some sense an inevitability), but that vagina is now a despicable and filthy thing, not the wondrous and mysterious object of desire in Roth’s fevered brain. Better to have cunts for fucking than for hating, sez I.
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I successfully fought the urge to use kvetch, shtupp and shiksa in this sentence. It’s only too easy to slip into Yiddish after a few days with Roth on the brain, which is a testament to his talent with language, if not narrative. ↩
Funny stuff, D. That Hitch review was a good one. (Ugh, but did you read his latest half-pompous/half-schmaltzy essay in Vanity Fair? Barf.)
I agree with you on the “cunt” issue—in principle, at least—yet the word hardly has the mouth-feel of an expression of amazement or awe, even in this lively passage. The hard “c” and “t,” the monosyllabic thrust of it… as a phrase, “cunts for fucking” sounds about as full of wonder and mystery as “eyes for stabbing.”
In any case, cunts aside, the real reason I commented is to tell you that “having relaxed a bit about the whole pud-pulling thing” is the best clause I’ve read all day.
[…] for women having equal rights and being treated respectfully (while preserving my rights to use the c-word in fits of pique) as much as the next socially liberal guy. But seriously, my feminist friends, you […]