Reading Myself and Others

by Philip Roth

  I’m not arguing that impenetrability is itself some kind of virtue. It’s not hard, after all, for a writer to delude himself into believing he is being deep just because he is being difficult or vague. The issue isn’t opacity or transparency anyway—it’s usability. What makes an image telling or even, if you prefer, meaningful, is not how much meaning we can associate to it but the quality of the overall invention that it inspires, the freedom it gives the writer to explore his obsessions and his talent. A novelist doesn’t persuade by what he is “trying to say,” but by a sense of fictional authenticity he communicates, the sense of an imagination so relentless and thoroughgoing that it is able to convert into its own nonconvertible currency whatever the author has absorbed through reading, thinking, and “raw experience.”

  To get back to your critic’s complaint: what’s frustrating him is very like what’s killing Kepesh. I wish I had thought to give Professor Kepesh those words to speak: “On the metaphorical level the fantasy remains rather opaque.” What a marvelous, chilling conclusion that would have made! What your critic senses as a literary problem seems to me the human problem that triggers a good deal of Kepesh’s ruminations. To try to unravel the mystery of “meaning” here is really to participate to some degree in Kepesh’s struggle—and to be defeated, as he is. Not all the ingenuity of all the English teachers in all the English departments in America can put David Kepesh together again. For him there is no way out of the monstrous situation, not even through literary interpretation. There is only the unrelenting education in his own misfortune. What he learns by the end is that, whatever else it is, it is the real thing: he is a breast, and must act accordingly.

  Now what “accordingly” means is still another question, and the one Kepesh raises near the end of the story, with his daydream about becoming his own one-man, or one-breast, circus. Unlike Gregor Samsa, who accepts his transformation into a beetle from the first sentence, Kepesh is continually challenging, questioning, and defying his fate, and even after he consents to believe that he has actually become a mammary gland, his mind is alive with alternative ways of being one.

  I’m interested in the relationship between the sexual ecstasy that Kepesh discovers as a breast and his spiritual pain, his excruciating sense of exile and aloneness. Doesn’t the connection you make here recapitulate, in a more extreme way, a psychological motif that was central to Portnoy’s Complaint, where the hero feels increasingly at odds with himself and his past the more sexually adventurous he becomes?

  Yes, though with a different emphasis and implications, Speaking broadly, it’s the struggle to accommodate warring (or, at least, contending) impulses and desires, to negotiate some kind of inner peace or balance of power, or perhaps just to maintain hostilities at a low destructive level, between the ethical and social yearnings and the implacable, singular lusts for the flesh and its pleasures. The measured self vs. the insatiable self. The accommodating self vs. the ravenous self. In these works of fiction, of course, the sides are not this clearly drawn, nor are they in opposition right on down the line. These aren’t meant to be diagrams of conflicting “selves” anyway but stories of men experiencing the complicated economics of human satisfaction, men in whom spiritual ambitions and sensual ambitions are inextricably bound up with the overarching desire to somehow achieve their own true purpose.

  However, I don’t think of the two works simply as variations on a sexual theme. The grotesqueness of Kepesh’s transformation complicates the sexual struggle to a point where it’s no longer really useful to view him and Portnoy as blood brothers—or to describe his trouble as only sexual. Portnoy, for all his confusion and isolation, knows the world like the back of his own hand (to make the kind of joke that book seems to inspire). Kepesh is lost—somewhat the way Descartes claims to be lost at the beginning of the Meditations: “I am certain that I am, but what am I? What is there that can be esteemed true?” Unlike Portnoy, Kepesh is not interested in making his misery entertaining, nor is he able to bridge the gap between what he looks like and what he feels like with wild humor. If Portnoy could do that, it was because he had less territory to cover.

  Is there any implied criticism in The Breast of ideas about sexual freedom that are currently enjoying a vogue? When you speak of the “economics of human satisfaction,” with its implications of loss as well as gain, I wonder if perhaps you may have had a satiric intention—if there’s a critique here aimed at the high value placed upon a “liberated” sexual life. Along this line, I’d like to ask you if you didn’t also set out to criticize, or deromanticize, certain extreme but increasingly popular notions about madness and alienation—in particular, the idea that either is a desirable alternative to sanity and to a sense of harmony with ordinary life.

  I don’t think you’re describing my intentions so much as a point of view that may have stimulated my imagination along the way but that was consumed—I’d like to think—by the invention itself. For me, one of the strongest motives for continuing to write fiction is an increasing distrust of “positions,” my own included. This is not to say that you leave your intellectual baggage at the door when you sit down to write, or that in your novel you discover that you really think just the opposite of what you’ve been telling people—if you do, you’re probably too confused to be producing good work. I’m only saying that I often feel that I don’t really know what I’m talking about until I’ve stopped talking about it and sent everything down through the blades of the fiction-making machine, to be ground into something else, something that is decidedly not a position but that allows me to say, when I’m done, “Well, that isn’t what I mean either—but it’s more like it.”

  So—I intended to write a critique of nobody’s ideas but my own. Not that I think that madness or alienation are glamorous or enviable conditions; being insane and feeling estranged don’t accord with my conception of the good life. You correctly identify the bias, but are sniffing after a polemical objective that isn’t there. I see what you mean about “deromanticizing” these “voguish” ideas, but if that happens, it happens by the way. And had I intended to write a satire, even of the most muted kind, I would have flashed a different set of signals from the coach’s box to the reader.

  Do you anticipate hostile reactions to The Breast from voices within the women’s movement? I know that there has already been discussion of the book which characterizes the hero, disapprovingly, as a man who thinks of women as existing solely for his sexual pleasure. What do you think of this sort of reading of your story?

  I think it’s inaccurate and misses the point. Whatever Kepesh thinks, whether about women, art, reality, or his father, hasn’t to do with his being a man but with the fact that he isn’t one any longer, that he’s all but lost touch, to quote him, with the “professor of literature, the lover, the son, the friend, the neighbor, the customer, the client, and the citizen” that he was before his transformation. What he’s become has narrowed his life down to a single issue: his anatomy.

  I would think that there might even be women, particularly those who have been sensitized by the women’s movement, who will feel a certain kinship with my hero and his predicament. Surely if anybody has ever been turned totally into a “sexual object,” both to himself and to others, it is David Alan Kepesh. Isn’t this all-encompassing sexualization exactly what he struggles with from the moment he discovers he’s an enormous female breast with a supersensitive five-inch nipple? The battle to be, not simply that shape and those dimensions, but simultaneously to be something other, constitutes the entire action of the book.

  Of course it’s an ambiguous struggle, shot through with contradiction and bewilderment, and waged with varying degrees of wisdom and success—but then it’s the confused nature of Kepesh’s battle with his own soft adipose tissue that might well strike a chord familiar to women who are thoughtful about the relationships possible between their physical and their psychic selves.

  One of the surprising aspects of the book is its eleg
iac tone—David Kepesh mourning his predicament the way, say, Tommy Wilhelm mourns his in Bellow’s Seize the Day. Given that the book begins with such a bizarre, freakish catastrophe, one might have expected either comedy or grotesquerie, not elegy. Can you explain why you took the approach you did?

  I’m not sure I’d call the tone elegiac. It’s a sad story and Kepesh is mournful sometimes, but it’s more to the point to say that there is an elegiac note trying to make itself heard but held in check by the overriding (and, I think, in the circumstances, ironic) tone of reasonableness. The mood is less plaintive than reflective—horror recollected in a kind of stunned tranquillity. The mood of the convalescent.

  The story could have been more comic, or more grotesque, or both. Certainly there are wonderful models for the kind of humor that manages to be wildly funny and perfectly gruesome all at once. “The Nose” treats mutilation as a marvelous joke, and then in Molloy and Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett does for bodily decomposition what Jack Benny used to do on Sunday nights for stinginess. I like that kind of comedy, and it goes without saying that at the outset I recognized the gruesomely comic possibilities in the idea of a man turning into a breast.

  But I resisted comedy or farce in large part because the possibility was so immediately apparent. Since the joke was there before I even began, perhaps the best thing was to stand it on its head by refusing to take it as a joke … Then a certain contrariness probably figured in my decision, a reluctance, such as I imagine any writer might feel, to do what is supposed to be his “number.”

  In all, it seemed to me that if I was going to come up with anything new (in terms of my own work), it might best be done by taking this potentially hilarious situation and treating it perfectly seriously. I think there are still funny moments in the story, but that’s okay with me too. I didn’t feel I had necessarily to make myself over into William Ernest Henley just for the sake of going against the expectations aroused by the material or by my own track record.

  On The Great American Novel*

  To begin with, how extreme a departure from your previous fiction is The Great American Novel?

  If The Great American Novel is an extreme departure, it’s because the tendency to comedy that’s been present even in my most somber books and stories was allowed to take charge of my imagination and lead it where it would. I was no less farcical, blatant, and coarse-grained in Our Gang, but that book, aimed at a precise target, had a punitive purpose that restricted the range of humorous possibilities. And in Portnoy’s Complaint, though the comedy may have been what was most obvious about the novel, strains of pathos, nostalgia, and (as I see it) evocative lyricism worked to qualify the humor and to place the monologue in a reasonably familiar setting, literary and psychological; comedy was the means by which the character synthesized and articulated his sense of himself and his predicament.

  In The Great American Novel the satiric bull’s-eye has been replaced by a good-sized imaginary world more loosely connected to the actual than in Our Gang. And except for the Prologue and Epilogue, the comedy is not turned on and off, or on and on, by a self-conscious narrator using humor to shape your (and his) idea of himself, as in Portnoy’s Complaint. Widening the focus, and by and large removing the comedian himself from the stage, allowed for a less constrained kind of comic invention. The comedy here is not softened or mitigated by the familiar human presence it flows through and defines, nor does the book try to justify whatever is reckless about it by claiming some redeeming social or political value. It follows its own comic logic—if one can speak of the “logic” of farce, burlesque, and slapstick—rather than the logic of a political satire or a personal monologue.

  But there is certainly satire in this novel, directed, however playfully, at aspects of American popular mythology. The comedy may not be so free of polemical intent, or even of redeeming social or moral value as you might like to think. And why would you want to think that anyway?

  The comedy in The Great American Novel exists for the sake of no higher value than comedy itself; the redeeming value is not social or cultural reform, or moral instruction, but comic inventiveness. Destructive, or lawless, playfulness—and for the fun of it.

  Now, there is an art to this sort of thing that distinguishes it from sadism, nonsense, or even nihilism for the fun of it; however, a feel for the sadistic, the nonsensical, and the nihilistic certainly goes into making such comedy (and into enjoying it). I don’t like using the word “satiric” for describing this book because the suggestion of cruel means employed for a higher purpose doesn’t square with what I felt myself to be doing. “Satyric,” suggesting the sheer pleasure of exploring the anarchic and the unsocialized, is more like it.

  The direction my work has taken since Portnoy’s Complaint can in part be accounted for by my increased responsiveness to, and respect for, what is unsocialized in me. I don’t mean that I am interested in propagandizing for the anarcho-libidinists in our midst; rather, Portnoy’s Complaint, which was concerned with the comic side of the struggle between a hectoring superego and an ambitious id, seems now, in retrospect, to have realigned those forces as they act upon my imagination.

  Can you explain why you are trying to come on like a bad boy—although in the manner of a very good boy indeed? Why quarrel, in decorous tones, no less, with decorum? Why insist, in balanced sentences, on libido? Why “reckless” and “anarchic” to describe one’s work, rather than “responsible” and “serious” and “humane”? In “Writing About Jews,”* the essay you published in Commentary in 1963, answering charges of “self-hatred” and “anti-Semitism,” your argument consisted almost entirely of an attempt to demonstrate your righteousness through the evidence of your work. Does that now seem to you so much defensive obfuscation?

  No, it expressed concerns central to the stories under attack; and my rhetoric then, far from being borrowed to obfuscate the issue, was all too close at hand, the language of a preoccupation with conscience, responsibility, and rectitude rather grindingly at the center of Letting Go, the novel I was writing in those years.

  At that time, still in my twenties, I imagined fiction to be something like a religious calling, and literature a kind of sacrament, a sense of things I have had reason to modify since. Such elevated notions aren’t (or weren’t, back then) that uncommon in vain young writers; they dovetailed nicely in my case with a penchant for ethical striving that I had absorbed as a Jewish child, and with the salvationist literary ethos in which I had been introduced to high art in the fifties, a decade when cultural, rather than political, loyalties divided the young into the armies of the damned and the cadre of the blessed. I might turn out to be a bad artist, or no artist at all, but having declared myself for art—the art of Tolstoy, James, Flaubert, and Mann, whose appeal was as much in their heroic literary integrity as in their work—I imagined I had sealed myself off from being a morally unacceptable person, in others’ eyes as well as my own.

  The last thing I expected, having chosen this vocation—the vocation—was to be charged with heartlessness, vengeance, malice, and treachery. Yet that was to be one of the first experiences of importance to befall me out in the world. Ambitious and meticulous (if not wholly enlightened) in conscience, I had gravitated to the genre that constituted the most thoroughgoing investigation of conscience that I knew of—only to be told by more than a few Jews that I was a conscienceless young man holding attitudes uncomfortably close to those promulgated by the Nazis. As I saw it then, I had to argue in public and in print that I was not what they said I was. The characterization was ill-founded, I explained, and untrue, and yes, I maintained that Conscience and Righteousness were the very words emblazoned upon the banner I believed myself to be marching under, as a writer and as a Jew.

  I think now—I didn’t then—that this conflict with my Jewish critics was as valuable a struggle as I could have had at the outset of my career. For one thing, it yanked me, screaming, out of the classroom; all one’s readers, it turned out, weren�
��t New Critics sitting on their cans at Kenyon. Some people out there took what one wrote to heart—and wasn’t that as it should be? I resented how they read me, but I was never able to complain afterward that they didn’t read me; I never felt neglected.

  Also, the attack from Jewish critics and readers, along with personal difficulties I was having during those years, made me begin to understand that admiration for me and my mission on earth was, somewhat to my surprise, going to be less than unanimous, and probably hardest to win closest to home. Above all, I eventually came to realize that my way of taking myself seriously was more at odds than I ever could have imagined with what others believed seriousness to be. In time (more, probably, than it should have taken) I became aware of enormous differences of sensibility between my Jewish adversaries and myself—a good deal of the disagreement, I realized, had to do with somewhat antithetical systems of aversion and tolerance, particularly with respect to subjects that are conventionally described as “distasteful.”

  In brief, the opposition was instructive—partly because opposition wasn’t all that my early work aroused. However, one shouldn’t conclude that a friendly, or enthusiastic, readership functions as a kind of countervailing soporific, or “ego trip,” for the writer. The greatest value of an appreciative audience may even be the irritant that it provides, specifically by its collective (therefore simplistic) sense of the writer, the place it chooses for him to occupy on the cultural pecking order, and the uses it wants to make of selective, disconnected elements of his work and of his own (imagined) persona. Like antagonistic opposition, the amiable irritant is useful insomuch as it arouses whatever is stubborn, elusive, or even defiant in the writer’s nature, whatever resents being easily digested. Almost invariably one’s reaction against will exceed the necessities of one’s work (certainly as they might narrowly be defined), and the relationship with an attentive audience may even come, as in the case of J. D. Salinger on the one idiosyncratic extreme, and Norman Mailer on the other, to shape one’s conduct, not only as a writer, but as a friend, a husband, a citizen, a colleague, etc.