Return to The Breast: The Body, the Masculine Subject, and Philip Roth - Critical Essay

When Philip Roth published The Breast in 1972, the novella met with a flurry of notice. Some readers picked it up hoping to find Portnoy-like sexual outrageousness, and they weren't disappointed; others, predisposed to be offended, were, and they were likewise disposed to look no further, believing that Roth meant only to shock and titillate. [1] The Breast was clearly a work of its time in its explicit sexual references and flouting of manners, and its readings were perhaps overdetermined not only by the reputation of Portnoy's Complaint (1969) for unrestrained and taboo-breaking representations of sexuality but also by the rantings of Our Gang (1971), the rather coarse political satire that immediately preceded The Breast's publication, and, more broadly, by the novella's appearance on the American scene in the 1970s as part of a wave of transgressive cultural artifacts. One clue to the book's reception might be found in the puzzlement of a reviewer who asked "Why this conceit rather than another?" (Ridley) . The answer to this question will show The Breast to be a book not just of its time but ahead of its time. Roth anticipated recent investigations into subjectivity and, especially, the masculine subject. The Breast deserves a second look because it challenges some of the most deeply held oppositions--human versus nonhuman, masculine versus feminine, subject versus object, inside versus outside--that structure our thinking about the "self." [2] By forcing a confrontation with the manifold meanings of the gendered body--by representing the very fleshliness of gendering--Roth makes a valuable contribution to thinking about the conventions of subjectivity.

When David Kepesh awakes to find that he has metamorphosed into a six-foot mammary gland, the existential question of identity becomes painfully centered on his physical condition. His anatomy is his destiny; he is rewritten bodily as Other. All that remains recognizable of David Kepesh to the outside world is his voice. Roth's book uncovers Kepesh's desperate desire to find that the voice, which most clearly represents the subject as a sentient being to the world, can affirm the possibility of an irreducible self, a self that cannot be altered--morally, psychologically, ontologically--by accident or design. To understand Roth's choice of conceit, however--why a breast rather than some other thing or creature or body part, and why a female body part?--it helps to start with his choice of narrative form. The novella makes no attempt to disguise its indebtedness to Kafka's Metamorphosis. [3] A professor of comparative literature familiar by trade with Kafka's transformation of Gregor Samsa into a gigantic inse ct, David Kepesh concludes that he has, with his own transformation, "out-Kafkaed Kafka" (82). While the metamorphic tradition in Western literature is long and honorable, [4] it is to Kafka we look for the way the metaphor of transformation points to the modern perspective on the human condition--as Geoffrey Green writes:

born without our consent, our bodies made to God's order in often odd or peculiar shapes, who is there who has not experienced mystification at the arbitrariness of life? (39)

In the allegory of metamorphosis, Kafka's emphatically rational and unquestioning presentation of the inexplicable provides Roth with a form for exploring the inalterability of the self. As Roth remarked to Hermione Lee: "My hero has to be in a state of vivid transformation or radical displacement. 'I am not what I am--I am, if anything, what I am not!'" ("The Art of Fiction" 182). How does one ask about the irreducibility of the self unless one can find a means to strip away all that may be reducible? How does one ask about the meaning of the body in relation to the self unless one can test that self against some ultimate physical otherness?

One of the strengths of The Breast is the way in which Roth makes an absolutely implausible premise believable--precisely the lesson that he learned best from Kafka. Kafka works to ensure the verisimilitude of Gregor Samsa's predicament when, in the second paragraph, the narrator asserts "It was no dream" (89). Nothing intrudes in the story to suggest otherwise as Gregor, trapped in his room and his insect body, tries to deal pragmatically with his fatal estrangement from the world. Likewise, the realism of Roth's text is relatively unmediated, and the narrator's voice does not change with his body. Kepesh feels an extremity of dislocation because his body is in catastrophe, and yet his consciousness remains surprisingly constant. Roth starts from a fantastic premise, but the narrative unfolding of the transformation cannot be similarly fantastic if he is to explore its implications for subjectivity. [5] Were Kepesh's consciousness--as reflected in his speech and perceptions--to change in a representable way , Roth would merely be writing science fiction: once one looks like a breast, one thinks like a breast. What is interesting about the novella, as about Kafka's story, is precisely that consciousness in itself does not change at the moment the body is altered. (Clearly, Kepesh's consciousness does change gradually as a result of the transformation, but not as a condition of it.) The conscious organism must find strategies for accommodating a change that tries to pull it out of shape in every possible way. The interest of The Breast lies in the conflict it presents between sameness and otherness--in exploring, that is, the definition and stability of identity. Roth must situate his protagonist's fantastic predicament within a world documented narratively as realistic, so that Kepesh can measure the seeming fantasy of his condition against the "real."