Portnoy's complaints

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Cover of the American first edition from 1969 by Random House

Portnoy's Complaint , English original title Portnoy's Complaint , is a novel published in 1969 by the American writer Philip Roth . The first German translation by Kai Molvig was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1970 . In 2006, Carl Hanser Verlag had the novel translated by Werner Schmitz .

In the form of a letter to his psychiatrist Dr. Spielvogel-directed monologue , Alexander Portnoy, the title character of the novel, describes his youth in a Jewish-American family , his attempts to assert himself against the overprotective mother and the awakening sexuality , which soon becomes his dominant obsession.

Portnoy's Complaint became a bestseller that made its author widely known. The blunt portrayal of ludicrous sexual escapades , often spiced with vulgar expressions, and the supposedly clichéd portrayal of American Jews sparked fierce controversy. The novel remained decisive for Philip Roth's further literary career and was interpreted autobiographically by many readers .

content

As Portnoy's Complaint , the psychiatrist called Dr. Spielvogel a personality disorder that arises from the conflict between strong moral principles and a pronounced sex drive . They express themselves in the frequent exercise of various sexual practices , none of which, however, lead to sexual satisfaction, but to feelings of shame , fear of punishment and castration . The trigger often lies in the mother-child relationship . Spielvogel named the disorder after his patient Alexander Portnoy.

Alexander Portnoy, born in 1933, grew up in a Jewish family in a Jewish neighborhood in Newark , New Jersey . Father Jack is an insurance salesman whose inimitable ability to sell insurance to the poorest of all people prevents him from ever advancing to a higher level in the hierarchy. In private life, he is weak and constipated , which results in him spending most of his time on the toilet. Mother Sophie is dominant, addicted to control, over-anxious and rejects everything strange, be it dealing with “ goyim ” or just fast food . The roles are distributed early between the two children. The older daughter Hannah does not count, the genius of the family is the son Alexander, who needs to be encouraged, but especially to be protected from false influences. When he hits puberty, Alexander soon spends most of his time on the toilet too, masturbating excessively , accompanied by his characteristic mixture of sexual lust and feelings of guilt, as well as the worry of his mother shaking the door.

Alexander's secret passions, which are inconceivable in his family, are non-Jewish “ jokes ”, but typical of his advances is an episode in which he tries to stalk a skating girl on ice skates, stumbles and breaks his leg so complicated that he temporarily breaks has a limp. In college he had his first long relationship with a gentile woman, the meek Midwestern Kay Campbell , whom he simply calls "Pumpkin" because of her pronounced bottom. Their love is so unclouded that they are already thinking of marriage when Kay's categorical refusal to convert to the Jewish faith makes the otherwise completely non-religious Portnoy suddenly lose interest in her. A few years later, her relationship with Sarah Abbot Maulsby, who he called “Pilgrim” because of her Yankee attitude and her elitist origins, fails, which is symbolically expressed in her inability to perform fellatio with him .

It was only with Mary Jane Reed, known as the “little monkey”, that Portnoy, who had meanwhile become a lawyer, found a form of fulfillment of his lustful dreams for the first time. The kind-hearted, insecure, uneducated model is of a sexual permissiveness surprising even Portnoy, whereby her reduction of social contacts to sexuality is the result of her traumatic childhood. Portnoy leads her to all kinds of sexual debauchery like a threesome with an Italian prostitute, but he cannot imagine ever marrying her because she is not "serious" enough for him. On a trip to Europe, he leaves her in a hotel in Athens . From now on he constantly sees terrible images in his mind's eye of her committing suicide, for which he, the so smart, serious lawyer, could be held responsible.

In order to find himself as a Jew, Portnoy finally travels to Israel , where in a kibbutz he meets the defensive socialist Naomi, who is superior to him not only verbally but also in physical self-defense. When he tries to rape her, she inflicts his ultimate defeat on him: he remains impotent , a punishment he sees himself sentenced to for his "crimes against humanity" against Mary Jane.

Interpretative approach

In the opening credits to the novel, Portnoy's Complaint , as mentioned above, is referred to as a disease in which strongly perceived ethical or altruistic impulses are in constant conflict with an extreme sexual desire. The protagonist , after whom this disease got its name, reports or “confesses” in the novel to his analyst Dr. Spielvogel's own past. This report is essentially about two areas of experience: on the one hand, that of his illness and his childhood and youth at home, and on the other, his subsequent encounters with the opposite sex, especially with his lover “The Monkey”.

The protagonist's “kvetch” , as he uses the Yiddish word to describe his wailing complaint , is especially geared towards the restriction of his personal development and freedom of life, which he perceives as parental concern for him. According to his perception, his parents are determined by the millennia-long ghetto existence of the Jewish people and characterized by concern for the preservation of the tribe in the hope of a better future for their children. They therefore do everything imaginable so that their son Alexander grows up in the right faith and stays healthy, in order to use his above-average intelligence in a useful form and to maintain the tribe in the future through marriage and procreation.

According to Krieger, Portnoy's parents embody a “Jewish couple who stand on the border between archetypalism and caricature ”. The mother is thus "of survival great influence," the father against the aufreibt for his family in his profession, weak and constantly constipated ; According to Krieger, Roth draws a Jewish couple who understand “their entire existence as a service, as a sacrifice for their son”, who is better off and should achieve something. For the son, however, the price for this martyr- like willingness to sacrifice himself is an inescapable web of do's and don'ts and the lifelong “mortgage of the obligation to be grateful, to recognize the sacrifices made for him”.

In the first years of his childhood, Alexander Portnoy fits into this family scenario without contradiction; with increasing age, however, he increasingly feels the expectations and hopes placed in him as a burden and limitation. He undertakes various attempts at rebellion, for example by not aiming to earn a lot of money after completing his studies and his training and instead campaigning for political decency or cleanliness and social justice and with several "shikses", i.e. H. non-Jewish girls, and indulging in excessive sexual masturbation at an early stage.

As the narrator, Portnoy himself does not give a precise reason why he feels inhibited in his personality development by the parental care and does not speak of the suppression of any abilities by his parents. He only believes that he has to control his sexual desires, the excesses of which may represent a kind of compensation for his disturbed personality development.

Nevertheless, according to Krieger, various moments can be found in the conjectures, self-explanations and hypotheses that Portnoy offers himself and his psychiatrist which suggest that Portnoy has become a victim of his Jewish milieu, his upbringing and his own unbridled imagination. He finds himself in a "dilemma between enforced decency and rebellion that must be concealed at any cost"; Resistance to his parents creates enormous guilt complexes in him; in the face of excessive repression he feels, masturbation very quickly becomes a means of self-assertion for him.

The repressive conditions of the parental home result to a not inconsiderable extent from the constants of the Jewish milieu , so that Portnoy on the one hand grows up with the self-confidence of an outsider, but on the other hand is at the same time characterized by a messianic certainty of being something better than the Goyim . Given these two moments in Portnoy's life, it is not surprising that sexual intercourse with a shikse takes on an almost metaphysical dimension for him . Even as an adult, Portnoy leads a kind of double existence, which is also noticeable in the novel in the leitmotif of his excessive imagination. As a child and adolescent, Portnoy anticipated the possible reactions to his behavior in his imagination; this form of negative reality coping also determines his life in adulthood. This makes Portnoy's inability to enter into a real relationship with another person or to allow a lasting bond to be understandable. In addition, Portnoy accompanies his fear of impotence or castration from childhood , which obstructs his ability to secure his identity and, after his experiences in Israel, urges him to seek psychotherapeutic help.

The strong ethical and altruistic motives in Portnoy's actions, which later manifest themselves, for example, in his work for a commission in the city of New York against discrimination , were in no way suppressed by his parents. Above all, they are very emphatic that he does not enter into marriage with a gentile woman. This influence from his parents is well expressed, for example, when Portnoy asked a friend he met in college that she should convert to the Jewish faith if they were to marry.

This stressful restriction is in turn justified by the parents' wish to pass on the Jewish tradition to their son. On the one hand, Portnoy rebels against it, but his practical behavior is repeatedly shaped by this tradition. So he suffers from the ambivalent attitude towards the past and tradition of his people, but is ultimately unable to actually break away from it, although he would like to. He repeatedly makes fun of the situations he gets into as a result and looks at his past with an irony that wants to distance himself from what he is trying to ironize, but is unable to.

The ambiguity that Portnoy shows with regard to the tradition of his parents is expressed equally in his obscenities, in which he indulges but at the same time feels guilty. At a reception for the New York Mayor, for example, he fears that “The Monkey”, whom he took to the reception, will talk to the Mayor in the same obscene manner as he does to him. In 1989, Roth himself spoke in The Facts of “the fantastical style of obscene satire that began to challenge virtually every hallowed rule of social propriety in the middle and late sixties” (German meaning: “the fantastic style of obscene satire that began practically every to challenge sacred rule of social decency in the mid and late 1960s ”).

He saw a reason for this not only in his anger at America's mission in Vietnam , but also in the behavior of his first wife, whom he tried to parody with the “little monkey”.

The experiences with “The Monkey” in the second circle of his report represent the absolute climax of Portnoy's sexual adventures. She is ready to fulfill all of his sexual desires and seems to like them too; however, the purely sexual relationship is not enough for her. She hopes to have found the man in Portnoy who will marry her and start a family with her. Portnoy is not ready for this, however; he regards "The Monkey" solely as the object of his sexual desire and is unable to recognize it in its entirety. Despite his otherwise apparently altruistic commitment to social justice, Portnoy is not ready or able to accept other people in all their characteristics as an independent person or to allow their own personal development as well as their personality.

Portnoy is not only socially isolated , he also lacks the inner strength or power to develop further in confrontations with other personalities. Accordingly, Naomi, the soldier from Kibbutz, during his visit to Israel as corrupt, hypocritical, disgusting, self-hating Jew ( "calls him disgusting self-hating Jew "), which just a "pig" ( " Pig was").

After Portnoy fled his parents and assimilated Judaism from America, at the end of his adventure with the female Israeli officer Naomi, the young woman from the kibbutz, as well as the life in the kibbutz, he is faced with a different life, which Naomi in turn is a life of Considered the Jewish people liberated from the ghetto, in whom each respects the other and stands up for him.

Portnoy, on the other hand, describes this as an ironic ideal that has no real basis and can only be understood by him as a facade. In his view, Israel is also just an " exile "; However, he has to admit that his previous way of life has only led him to self-destruction. The response from Dr. Spielvogel's response to Portnoy's admission at the end of the novel - the only words he speaks as a therapist in the entire novel - is: “So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes? " (German analogous:" So [said the doctor]. Now maybe we can start. Yes? ")

Link interprets this to mean that Portnoy's therapy can begin now, and in a broader sense that Portnoy can now - after he has become aware of his past - find a real life. Whether this could succeed is questionable, however, since Portnoy is still obsessed with his past and he still enjoys this obsession , although he has recognized it as hideous.

Portnoy's situation is repeatedly described as typically Jewish in various literary representations and reviews. The Jewish milieu gives Portnoy's report an even stronger authenticity than, for example, Bellows , Malamud or Mailer . However, as Link explains in his interpretation of the novel, Portnoy's problem can be seen as valid far beyond the limits of the Jewish.

Form and language

Portnoy's Complaint is told in the form of a long monologue that Alexander Portnoy gave to his psychotherapist Dr. Playing bird judges. The novel is divided into six chapters. The first two chapters The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met and Whacking Off are about Portnoy's childhood and adolescence memories, including the discovery of masturbation as a form of escape family closeness. The Jewis Blue ("Judenblues") continues the generation conflict and tension between Alexander and his predominantly Jewish environment. By far the longest chapter, Cunt Crazy ("Crazy About Cunts"), focuses on the sexual experiences of adolescents. The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life , named after the title of a treatise by Sigmund Freud , describes the sexual affairs of adult Portnoys with various women during In Exile ("In Exile") the final trip to Israel. Only in the last sentence, under the heading Punch Line ("Pointe"), does a different voice than Portnoys come into play when Dr. Spielvogel asks his patient “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes? ” (“ Maybe we can start now. Yes? ”), Which means that the whole monologue is classified as part or prelude to a psychoanalysis .

Replica of Sigmund Freud's couch in Příbor

The form of the psychoanalytic monologue gives the novel a justification for the content-related self-exposure and accusations, for the emphasis on sexuality and for the often vulgar linguistic expression , the exaggerations, strong simplifications, repetitions and digressions that are typical of Portnoy's personality, but in would not be appropriate to any other narrative form. He also takes care of the immanent audience that Portnoy addresses with his dramatic monologue , before whom he becomes both analysand and actor, character and author of his own tragic comedy . The reader gets the whole novel presented exclusively through Portnoys partly pathological point of view and is thereby instructed to question the boundary between reality and interpretation, not only in Portnoys, but also in his own life. The style of the novel and its sometimes obscene language are, according to Bernard F. Rogers, Jr., the formal equivalent of Portnoy's search for freedom and his rebellion against cultural constraints.

Franz Link, on the other hand, interprets the pronounced “vocabulary of profanity” in Portnoy's Complaint , which in his opinion surpasses all “ pornographic descriptions of sexual perversities ”, as Roth's attempt to parody pornography . In his analysis of the novel, Gottfried Krieger comes to the conclusion that the text certainly shows features of pornographic literature, such as "Portnoy's constant partner swapping, his quickly reached stimulus threshold and the resulting addiction to variations and increases" and the like. Taking into account the theses z. B. from Susan Sontag on the characteristics of pornographic literature, however, Krieger sees the supposedly so prominent pornographic elements in Roth's novel only as "set pieces in an extraordinarily complex overall picture". A general criticism directed against the pornographic moments, according to Krieger, only obscures the central importance of masturbation in Portnoy's Complaint , which precisely describes the process that leads to Alexander Portnoy having to seek psychiatric treatment.

Portnoy's Complaint for David Brauner proves its formal modernity in several ways : Instead of a positive figure of identification, an egocentric , dramatic, misanthropic , if not misogynous , in any case instinctual neurotics tells the story . Instead of a linear, chronological course of action, seemingly random, purely associative fragments of consciousness are presented. Instead of a dialogue of different perspectives, there is a monologue of a single voice, instead of development standstill. Roth, however, ties in with numerous literary traditions: with the stream of consciousness of the first-person narrators of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf , with the special focus on the physicality of Joyce or DH Lawrence , with his theme of guilt and shame, with the morbid masochism of Franz Kafka , with his hero to the comical, neurotic characters in Italo Svevo and Gogol . The reference to Freud and psychoanalysis also has a strong tradition in Jewish-American literature , from Henry Roth's Call it Sleep to Saul Bellow's Duke .

In addition, Roth problematizes both his own function as a writer and that of the Jewish narrator with the form of representation of the event as a "confession" embedded in the framework of psychotherapeutic sessions, which, however, led to him in the subsequent discussions about Portnoy's Complaint was accused of harming his own people of origin with his critical presentation of the Jewish heritage.

History of origin

Yaddo artists' colony (1900–1910)

After the early success of Roth's collection of short stories Goodbye Columbus , published in 1959, the period of time between the first novel Letting Go (German: Other people worries , 1962) and its successor When She Was Good (German: Lucy Nelson or Die Moral , 1967) was unusually long for the writer. During this period, however, there was not only Roth's novel-like attempt to exorcise his relationship with his first wife Margaret, from whom he had separated in 1963 but who resisted a divorce , but Roth was also working on several other works in different formats about his own biographical background, which became the building blocks of Portnoy's Complaint .

A few months after Letting Go , the humorous prose text The Jewboy was written , which, according to Roth, “described growing up in Newark as a kind of folklore ”. In 1964 a less conciliatory drama The Nice Jewish Boy was performed as a reading at the American Place Theater , with the young Dustin Hoffman speaking the lead role before Roth abandoned the project. Immediately after completing the When She Was Good manuscript in mid-1966, Roth began a monologue that he described as " blasphemous , mean, bizarre, scatological , tasteless, energetic," which remained unfinished, but already contained a lengthy excus on adolescent masturbation. The autobiographical text Portrait of the Artist , in which a family named Portnoy appeared for the first time, was written during the same period . From the remnants of the draft, the story A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis emerged , in the center of which Roth first placed Alexander, the son of the Portnoys, and who introduced the psychoanalytic monologue that later determined Portnoy's Complaint .

Philip Roth himself had been in the treatment of the psychiatrist Hans Kleinschmidt since August 1962, who published the case history in 1967 under the title The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity anonymously in the journal American Imago and the writer " castration fears against a phallic mother figure" certified. In the same year When She Was Good was received mostly bored by the critics. However, the first extracts from the new work, as yet unnamed, attracted a great deal of public attention. In April 1967, A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis appeared in Esquire , in August Whacking Off in Partisan Review , in the following month The Jewish Blues in the New American Review , where Civilization and its Discontents (named after the English title of Freud's treatise Das Uneasiness in Culture ) appeared as the last preprint of a novel that had achieved cult status long before it was published and the excerpts of which were circulating at dinner parties.

Two events in 1967 and 1968 had a formative influence on the completion of Portnoy's Complaint : The serious complications of appendicitis put Roth out of action for several months in 1967 and prevented further work on the novel. In the following year, his separated wife Margaret died in a traffic accident in Central Park , an event that long burdened Roth with feelings of guilt, but in 1968, above all, meant liberation for the writer. Following the funeral, Roth retired to the Yaddo artists' colony in Saratoga Springs , where he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day until the novel was finished. In his autobiography The Facts , he described a "feeling of triumph and indestructibility" on his return to Manhattan .

reception

Fueled by the advance publications, there was enormous expectation when the novel was published in February 1969. Albert Goldman announced a "major event" in Life , which is rarely a book publication. Portnoy's Complaint was considered the book of its decade and an American Huckleberry Finn- style masterpiece . Geoffrey Wolff spoke in the Washington Post of the most important book of his generation. Even before it went on sale, advances on film, paperback and book club rights had brought in nearly $ 1 million. The initial circulation of 150,000 increased to 420,000 copies sold in the first year. The author, who had once again withdrawn to Yaddo from the public hustle and bustle , was generally identified with his main character in the mass media, he was accused of having an affair with Barbra Streisand , and Jacqueline Susann's remark made the rounds that she would invite Roth to a talk show but don't shake his hand.

The critical reactions were divided, but never lukewarm. According to Alan Cooper, everyone who bought the book seemed to laugh at it, but afterwards wonder if their laughter was appropriate. The accusation kept coming up that Portnoy's Complaint was not literary serious enough. Brendan Gill compared Roth in the New Yorker as the author of one of the “dirtiest” and at the same time “funniest” books with “great pornographers” like Rabelais , Shakespeare , Joyce and Celine . Anatole Broyard called the novel in The New Republic the " Moby Dick of Masturbation" and " Catch-22 of Sexuality". However, he criticized the characters as caricatures that were "just as grossly simplified as a comic strip". Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed a “technical masterpiece” in the New York Times , Diana Trilling in Harper's Magazine a “gimmicky” “farce with a thesis”. Alfred Kazin complained in the New York Review of Books that Roth could only write about "Jews as hysterics". The book is "very funny, dirty, impressively clever, but not easy to like".

However, the sharpest criticism of the novel came from the Jewish side, where Roth was accused of disloyalty, self-hatred and anti-Semitism . In her review in the Zionist magazine Midstream, Marie Syrkin went so far as to draw a comparison with Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels when she denounced: "The anti-Jewish stereotype lurks beneath the cartoon of the Jewish joke ". In Haaretz, Gershom Scholem feared the price that the Jewish community would have to pay for a “book for which all anti-Semites have prayed”. A young Jew had provided a template for future slanders of the degeneration and depravity of Jews, particularly in the area of ​​sexuality, for which anti-Jewish enemies had long been waiting. Few of the voices from Orthodox Judaism were positive, such as Eugene Borowitz in Dimensions , who recognized Portnoy's Complaint as "one of the great moral documents and Jewish books of our time." For Trude Weiss-Rosmarin in The Jewish Spectator , Roth spoke only “for a certain segment of alienated Jews ignorant of Judaism”. Even Marcel Reich-Ranicki criticized 1970 German edition: "Not only the incorrigible anti-Semites, but especially those innumerable readers, which the Jews go only to the nerves, seen in the history of Portnoy's justification of many of their prejudices." Everyone else could at least "delight in the plentiful supply of piglets".

One of the most sustained attacks on Roth came in Commentary magazine in December 1972 , when the influential critic Irving Howe , who had favorably reviewed the writer's early works, took Portnoy's Complaint and subsequent publications as an opportunity to express his views on Roth in his Essay Philip Roth Reconsidered to revise. Howe did not limit himself to criticizing the work - he declared Portnoy's Complaint to be a comical but cheap nightclub number, before reading it again and again - but attacked Roth personally, who he accused of "undiagnosed depression " . He was an "extremely joyless writer, even if he was very funny," and his novels showed "vengeful desolation." Howe's criticism, according to Joseph Epstein , was such a low blow for Roth that he found himself in the "spiritual equivalent of intensive care" for the following decade. In any event, the critic's attack paved the way for the intellectual establishment to degrade Roth's work in the same way that the moralists in particular had done so far.

Roth responded to the criticism only two years later in the essay Imagining Jews in the New York Review of Books , where he addressed Howe only marginally, but turned against biased and fashion-oriented critics in general and explicitly attacked Marie Syrkin and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. In an unsent letter to Diana Trilling, which he published in Reading Myself and Others in 1975 , Roth blasphemed that his views of life were “in parody , burlesque , slapstick , ridicule , insults, insults, vilification, jokes , nonsense, carelessness and play , so embedded in the methods and procedures of comedy ”, remained far more hidden from certain readers than they suspected. According to Alan Cooper, this at least enabled Roth to have the last word in the debate. In fact, in the decade after Howe's criticism, in which he was allegedly in agony on the floor, he created some of the central works of his resuevre such as Mein Leben als Mann or the Zuckerman trilogy.

Portnoy's Complaint developed into a long seller and sold 6 million copies by 2013. It remained Philip Roth's best-known book, the one with which he is identified in public and which most people at least know from hearsay. For Ross Posnock, Portnoy's Complaint is Roth's most canonical work alongside The Human Stain . The author himself saw his literary career overshadowed to the end by the one work that determined his reputation both as a writer and as a man, both negatively and positively. In 1997, the New Yorker headlined the novel, which has now become a classic: “Portnoy is forever” (“Portnoy is for eternity”). On its 40th birthday, Portnoy's Complaint was awarded an unofficial retrospective Booker Prize for the best novel of 1969 at the 2009 Cheltenham Literature Festival . In 2014, Roth quipped in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet about his existence as an eternal Nobel Prize contender that the Swedish Academy might have taken him into account if he had only published Portnoy's Complaint under the title The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism ("The orgasm in predatory capitalism ").

In 1972, Ernest Lehman filmed the novel. Richard Benjamin as Alexander Portnoy and Karen Black as "Little Monkey" starred in the lead roles . Other roles played by Jill Clayburgh , Lee Grant , Jeannie Berlin and Kevin Conway . Roger Ebert described the film in the Chicago Sun-Times as "a true fiasco". He has "no heart and apparently little sympathy for his Jewish figures". The lexicon of the international film judged: "Technically solid, but neither as a satire nor as a psychoanalytic study."

German translation

Portnoy's Complaint has been translated twice from American into German. In 1970 Kai Molvig translated for Rowohlt Verlag . After the rights to Roth's work had passed to Carl Hanser Verlag , the latter had Werner Schmitz translate the novel again. Werner von Koppenfels found in his comparison of the two translations that Schmitz's translation was more precise and sometimes stylistically better, while Molvig, on the other hand, hit the "cheeky colloquial tone" and the puns better. He criticizes the exchange of Peter Gans transmission of William Butler Yeats ' sonnet Leda and the swan by the "awkward, unmetric version" by Erich Kahler . And Schmitz's translation of “she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy” as “She gives the Jew his it back, I give the Goy back his suffering” does not go at all.

For Thomas Hummitzsch, Portnoy's "modern version" Schmitz 'with "more courage to be direct" compared to a "no longer up-to-date, almost shy translation" by Molvig achieves greater authenticity. Burkhard Müller states “that both translators have done good and reliable work, but inevitably imperfect work, and that Schmitz is not simply replacing Molvig, but is able to complement him.” Schmitz attests that Schmitz has “perhaps overall a finer rhythmic ear”, But the reader should be happy to have two translations, "slightly offset in time, for critical selection".

expenditure

  • Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint . Random House, New York 1969.
  • Philip Roth: Portnoy's complaints . Translated by Kai Molvig. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1970, ISBN 3-498-05667-0 .
  • Philip Roth: Portnoy's complaints . Translated by Werner Schmitz. Hanser, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-23401-7 .
  • Philip Roth: Portnoy's complaints . Translated by Werner Schmitz. Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek 2011, ISBN 978-3-499-25565-6 .

Secondary literature

  • Bernard Avishai : Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness . Yale University Press, New Haven CN 2012, ISBN 978-0-300-15190-9 .
  • Bruno Bettelheim : Portnoy Psychoanalyzed . In: Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review 15: 6, 1969, pp. 3-10.
  • Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 .
  • David Brauner: Masturbation and Its Discontents, or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy's Complaint. In: Critical Review 40, 2000, pp. 75-90.
  • David Brauner: "Getting in Your Retaliation First": Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Derek Parker Royal (Ed.): Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author . Praeger, Westport, Mass. 2005, ISBN 0-275-98363-3 , pp. 43-57.
  • Eileen Z. Cohen: Alex in Wonderland, or Portnoy's Complaint . In: Twentieth-Century Literature 17, 1971, pp. 161-68.
  • Dan Colson: Impotence and the Futility of Liberation in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Philip Roth Studies 3, 2007, pp. 131–43.
  • Dean Franco: Portnoy's Complaint: It's about Race, Not Sex (Even the Sex Is about Race) . In: Prooftexts 21, 2009, pp. 86–115.
  • Claudia Görg: Portnoy, the American Jew in Israel . In: International Fiction Review 23, 1996, pp. 59-66.
  • Sheldon Grebstein: The Comic Anatomy of Portnoy's Complaint . In: Sarah Blacher Cohen (ed.): Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature . University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1978, pp. 152-71.
  • Barry Gross: Seduction of the Innocent: Portnoy's Complaint and Popular Culture. In: MELUS 8: 4, 1981, pp. 81-92.
  • Barry Gross: Sophie Portnoy and "The Opossum's Death": American Sexism and Jewish Anti-Gentilism. In: Studies in American Jewish Literature 3, 1983, pp. 166-78.
  • Josh Kavaloski: Humor and the Representation of Jewish Culture in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and in Jurek Becker's Jacob the Liar . In: David Metzger and Peter Schulman (eds.): Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference . Kol Katan Press, Santa Monica 2005, pp. 32-48.
  • Bernice W. Kliman: Names in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Critique 14: 3, 1973, pp. 16-24.
  • Soo-Hyun Lee: Jewish Self-Consciousness in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Journal of English Language and Literature 29, 1983, pp. 83-114.
  • Richard Locke: Philip Roth's Performing Loudmouth: Alexander Portnoy . In: Richard Locke: Critical Children: The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels . Columbia University Press, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-231-15783-4 , pp. 173-86.
  • Pierre Michel: Portnoy's Complaint and Philip Roth's Complexities . In: Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 4, 1974, pp. 1-10.
  • Helge Norman Nilsen: Rebellion Against Jewishness: Portnoy's Complaint . In: English Studies 65, 1984, pp. 495-503.
  • Werner Reinhart: Food motifs in Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral : Oral identity and poetological program in the work of Philip Roth . In: Christa Grewe-Volpp and Werner Reinhart (eds.): Exquisite food. Literary and cultural studies contributions on hunger, satiety and enjoyment . Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 2003, ISBN 3-8233-5655-0 , pp. 148-171.
  • Paul Strong: Firing into the Dark: Sexual Warfare in Portnoy's Complaint . In: International Fiction Review 10, 1983, pp. 41-43.
  • Mark E. Workman: The Serious Consequences of Ethnic Humor in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Midwest Folklore 13: 7, 1987, pp. 16-26.
  • Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 141.
  2. ↑ Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 p. 144f.
  3. ↑ On this interpretation, see Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 141.
  4. ↑ See detailed Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 pp. 143-145.
  5. ↑ See detailed Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 pp. 145-147.
  6. ↑ On this interpretation, see Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 142. Cf. also the detailed explanations by Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 144f.
  7. ↑ See Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 142. The Roth quotation from The Facts is also taken from this source.
  8. ↑ See Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 142.
  9. ↑ See Portnoy 'Complaint, pp. 261f., P. 265, p. 266. See also Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 142.
  10. ^ Portnoy's Complaint. P. 274.
  11. ↑ See Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 142.
  12. ↑ Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaints (2011), p. 286.
  13. ↑ David Brauner: "Getting in Your Retaliation First". Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Derek Parker Royal (Ed.): Philip Roth. New Perspectives on an American Author . Praeger, Westport, Mass. 2005, ISBN 0-275-98363-3 , pp. 44, 46.
  14. ^ Bernard F. Rogers, Jr .: In the American Grain (Portnoy's Complaint) . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 34-36. On the narrative form and perspective of the “unreliable narrator”, see also the explanations by Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 142f.
  15. ^ Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 142.
  16. ↑ Susan Sontag , Die pornographische Phantasie , Akzente, 15, 1968, pp. 77–99, 169–190.
  17. ↑ Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , p. 143f.
  18. ↑ David Brauner: "Getting in Your Retaliation First". Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's Complaint . In: Derek Parker Royal (Ed.): Philip Roth. New Perspectives on an American Author . Praeger, Westport, Mass. 2005, ISBN 0-275-98363-3 , pp. 45-46.
  19. ↑ See detailed Franz Link: Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. In: Franz Link: American storytellers since 1950 · Topics · Contents · Forms . Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-70822-8 , p. 143f.
  20. ^ Alan Cooper: The Alex Perplex . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 129-130.
  21. ↑ Philip Roth: Answer for those who have asked me: "How did it come about that you wrote this book" . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , pp. 49-60, citations pp. 49, 53.
  22. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , pp. 50–51, quotation "castration anxiety vis-à-vis a phallic mother figure", p. 51.
  23. ↑ Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 80, 83.
  24. ^ Alan Cooper: The Alex Perplex . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 134-135.
  25. ↑ Philip Roth: The facts. A writer's autobiography . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-499-24004-1 , p. 199.
  26. ^ Alan Cooper: The Alex Perplex . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 141-143.
  27. ^ Alan Cooper: The Alex Perplex . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , p. 143.
  28. ^ Quotations from Thomas David: Philip Roth . Rowohlt's monographs. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-50578-2 , pp. 87-88.
  29. ↑ See also the description by Gottfried Krieger: Philip Roth . In: Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in individual representations. Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 129-143.
  30. ^ "Under the cartoon of the Jewish joke leers the anti-Jewish stereotype" (144), "the book for which all anti-Semites have been praying" (146), "one of the great moral documents and Jewish books of our time "(153)," for a certain segment of alienated Jewishly ignorant Jews "(152). Quotes after Alan Cooper: The Alex Perplex . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , pp. 144-153.
  31. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki : Self-hatred as a bestseller . In: The time of April 10, 1970.
  32. ↑ "unexamined depression", "an exceedingly joyful writer, even when being very funny", "vindictive bleakness". Irving Howe: Philip Roth Reconsidered . In: Commentary 54: 6, 1972, pp. 69-77. Quoted in: Alan Cooper: Philip Roth and the Jews . State University of New York Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2910-5 , p. 159.
  33. ^ "The spiritual equivalent of intensive care". Quoted from: Alan Cooper: Philip Roth and the Jews . State University of New York Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2910-5 , p. 158.
  34. ^ Alan Cooper: Philip Roth and the Jews . State University of New York Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2910-5 , pp. 158-159.
  35. ↑ Philip Roth: What it means to think up Jewish characters . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , pp. 367-408.
  36. ↑ Philip Roth: Document dated July 27, 1969 . In: Reread own and other books . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-499-24881-8 , p. 48.
  37. ^ Alan Cooper: Philip Roth and the Jews . State University of New York Press, Albany 1996, ISBN 0-7914-2910-5 , pp. 159-163.
  38. ^ Dorit Silberman: Philip Roth is the most highly regarded author in America . In: Jewish Business News of March 7, 2013.
  39. ^ Bernard F. Rogers, Jr .: In the American Grain (Portnoy's Complaint) . In: Harold Bloom (Ed.): Portnoy's Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations . Chelsea House, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7910-7582-6 , p. 27.
  40. ^ Ross Posnock: Philip Roth's Rude Truth. The Art of Immaturity . Princeton University Press, Princeton 2006, ISBN 0-691-11604-0 , pp. Xvii.
  41. ^ Claudia Roth Pierpont: Roth Unbound . Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-374-28051-2 , p. 65.
  42. ↑ My Life as a Writer - Interview with Daniel Sandstrom from Svenska Dagbladet , previously published in the online edition of the New York Times on March 2, 2014.
  43. ↑ Portnoy's Complaint in the Internet Movie Database .
  44. ^ "A true fiasco" "The movie has no heart and little apparent sympathy with its Jewish characters". Quoted from: Portnoy's Complaint on the page of Roger Ebert , review from the Chicago Sun-Times of July 7, 1972.
  45. ^ Portnoy's Complaints in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used .
  46. ↑ Philip Roth: Portnoy's complaints (2011), p. 219.
  47. ↑ Werner von Koppenfels : Dearest! You understood the poem! In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 14, 2009.
  48. ↑ Thomas Hummitzsch: The Alexander Portnoy Show . In: Shine & Misery .
  49. ↑ Burkhard Müller: Where is the anti-defamation league? In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 17, 2009.