SELF-ERASURE AND SELF-CONSTRUAL IN PHILIP ROTH'S THE HUMAN STAIN

Abstract

Under the guise of the campus novel, Philip Roth 's multilayered interrogation of contemporaneity in The Human Stain notoriously blends the author's preoccupations with history, politics, social convention, and America's 'moral mood' at the end of the 20th century. Although not as clearly placed in the proximity of mental and physical exhaustion and, eventually, extinction as Roth 's later novels, it is, nevertheless, cleverly built upon a series of literal and symbolic deaths/ murders/ suicides and rebirths of the self. The present paper aims to reveal and decode their oftentimes perplexing nature, their objective and subjective causes, their intended and accomplished effects.

Headnote

Abstract: Under the guise of the campus novel, Philip Roth 's multilayered interrogation of contemporaneity in The Human Stain notoriously blends the author's preoccupations with history, politics, social convention, and America's 'moral mood' at the end of the 20th century. Although not as clearly placed in the proximity of mental and physical exhaustion and, eventually, extinction as Roth 's later novels, it is, nevertheless, cleverly built upon a series of literal and symbolic deaths/ murders/ suicides and rebirths of the self. The present paper aims to reveal and decode their oftentimes perplexing nature, their objective and subjective causes, their intended and accomplished effects.

Keywords: death, race, re-/de-construction, self, trauma

1. Introduction

The majority of critical studies revolving around The Human Stain (2000) have been, completely understandably, mesmerized by the Classics Professor Coleman Silk's fate, and have focused far less on the other identity crises that the novel portrays. However, apart from the protagonist, an academic who has decided quite early in life to annihilate his racial roots and practically kill his African-American legacy in order to free himself of its inherent constraints, there are other, secondary characters, whose existences turn out to be determined by apparently incomprehensible, enigmatic, yet real, intense, dramatic struggles and circumstances.

It is upon the reshuffling, re-/de-construction and re-/dis-membrance of the self in the context of turn-of-the-millennium America that this analysis will primarily focus upon. Faunia Farley, Les Farley, Delphine Roux are, in turn, individuals who have undergone traumatic events, and who have been forced or lured into making choices that have buried their former, younger, selves. Even when not literal, death haunts the entire book: from Nathan Zuckerman's determination to retrace and decipher Silk's story after both the retired intellectual and his lover have passed away in a car crash, to the ubiquitous ghosts of the Farleys' two children, asphyxiated in a fire which has unleashed the family demons, to the expiration of Silk's wife, Iris (which he blames on the shock of his own appalling treatment at the hands of the Athena College management), to the narrator's confrontation with his own ominous perishability after having undergone cancer surgery, a. s. o.

The ending of each stage in the characters' lives (be it irreversible or just a threshold to yet another, up- or down-graded version of themselves), seems to be accompanied by ambiguity and an intriguing desire for self-alteration, selftransformation, self-annihilation, self-denial: an entire series of erasures and recreations of public personas. The issue of racial passing, which lies at the heart of the novel's critical, yet accommodating, approach to Silk's secret life, is but one of the instances of such reconfigurations of private life into the public realm.

'To become a new being. To bifurcate. The drama that underlines America's story', Nathan Zuckerman writes late in The Human Stain (342). It is a declaration of an American goal that drives Coleman Silk, the 71-year-old protagonist of the novel, to 'pass' his entire life [...] The desire to transform one's self is the motive for Coleman Silk's lifetime drive to be white [...] Secrets motivate the novel, not only Coleman's overpowering and lifelong secret but also the secret fishing place of Les Farley, Faunia's Vietnam vet and violent ex-husband, as well as the secrets of Delphine Roux, the young French professor and chair of department at Athena. (Nadel 2011: 117, 118)

2.Self-annihilation and the price to pay

Apparently anachronistically - if one were to think of the massive phenomenon of racial passing and its literary representations in the early part of the 20th century - but, in fact, not at all inexplicably, the protagonist chooses to symbolically kill both himself and his family, in a sacrificial act meant to ensure the kind of social and professional freedom he craves, as an extraordinarily gifted young man at the beginning of his career. From the moment he realizes that his college scholarship may depend on his appurtenance to a certain community, to his unease while going to the all-colored Howard University his father had predestined him for, to his declaring himself white upon joining the U.S. Navy, and onto the moment he loses what, at the time, seemed to be the woman of his life, because of the imprudence of taking her home to meet his family, Roth builds a ladder of small, but irreversible steps towards Silk's renunciation of his black heritage.

Although placed during the latter half of the 20th century - before, during and after the Civil Rights Movements which, at least theoretically and legally, changed social perspectives and actions in terms of various minorities' emancipation, free speech, and legal rights -, the allegedly Jewish professor's identity construction is still shaped by what W.E.B du Bois had drawn public attention to in his 1903 emblematic Souls of Black Folk: 'the color line' (passim). Nevertheless, Silk's reasons for passing himself off as a Jew, despite his AfricanAmerican roots, as a drastic way of breaking with the past and creating himself anew, are as much of a financial, socio-economical nature, as they are psychological. Academic recognition, professional prestige and renown in one of the mainstream 'white' research fields are, evidently, convenient perks of his attempted racial suicide.

Yet, what Coleman seems to favor in his decision is rather the unrestrained ability of being whoever he desires (ethnically, intellectually, and even sexually). It is freedom that he proclaims as his ultimate goal and, not accidentally, he must pay a costly tribute. By basing his liberty on a counterfeit identity, which eventually entraps him, his chosen pursuit of happiness seems inevitably headed towards a failure that equals the very loss of his life. Although an Oedipal reading is not my main focus, one can hardly overlook the symbolism of Silk's fate, determined by his own (destructively free) will:

Suggestively, Coleman's attempts to slough off the 'othering' and to create himself as 'self by passing for a Jew do not guarantee him freedom from the coils of ideology. Elaine B. Safer tellingly highlights this determinism: 'He passes as white so as to escape the hostility of a prejudiced society, only to be punished by a fascistic academic community bent on purifying its white members of racism' (124). The status of the 'other', which haunts Coleman throughout his life and even ironically brings about his death, is forcefully exemplified in Les Farley's murder of Coleman, which is inspired as much by Coleman's Jewish ethnicity as by the affair he conducts with Les's estranged wife, Faunia. (Louis, Neelakantan 2010: 171)

Black humor is, inevitably, one of Roth's trademarks, and The Human Stain is no exception. Coleman's determination to terminate his inherited, raciallymarked self, and take refuge in a most radical version of mental (and physical) segregation is strengthened by his father's disappearance as a powerful foil/factor/obstacle in his chosen path. The announcement itself is associated with the latter's funeral, as an ill-boding premonition of the ensuing, multiple sideeffects. As finitude looms over the characters' destinies, it takes various shapes, from the concrete to the ineffable, from grotesque war crimes to cynical repudiations of affection and bloodlines, which translate into an actual matricide.

Silk's stubbornness to control his trajectory and forge an alternative destiny to suit his professional goals and expectations leads to his posthumous portrayal as a manic, almost monstrous individual, with few scruples in what his own ambitions and projected future are concerned:

Ernestine relates how Coleman told his mother that in order for him to live white he had to cut her off and repudiate his family, the family with roots deep in the interracial mix that was colonial southern New Jersey (European, Indian, and Black). Zuckerman conceives this in terms of Coleman making his secret on a grand scale: He will marry Iris (Iris with that wonderful kinky Jewish hair), have children (despite the risk), pretend to be Jewish (because he looks like a Jewish intellectual), and he will be a classicist (perhaps the 'whitest' discipline in academe). To accomplish this grand design, he will have to dig a trench between this conception of himself and his black family. As Zuckerman sees it, 'He was murdering her. You don't have to murder your father. The world will do that for you [...]. Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom! ' (Schwartz 2011: 72)

Like a reconfigured Thomas Sutpen, with a flawed design predicated on the cardinal values of family, education, love, while annihilating the exact same inherent values for the sake of convenient (self)-fabrication, Coleman Silk takes the distancing from his roots to the extreme. Warned by his astonished mother that he may well become a victim of his own scheming and fall prey to a dishonesty that goes against the grain of the freedom and verticality that he claims to aim for, the protagonist exposes himself to the poetic justice of the universe.

Ironically, it does not have him condemned for the moral crimes that never become public (betrayal of blood, family, race), but would rather mock him by punishing him absurdly, for his clashes with political correctness turned end-ofthe-millennium tyranny, and his presumed racism (of all possible things). Roth does not miss the opportunity to castigate the servitude of contemporary academic circles and critical thinkers to what appears to be a new terrorism of words and ideas, which has resulted in a shallowness of theoretical vogues, rather than in a reconfiguration of the American canon.

3.Symbolic deaths and rebirths: between public shallowness and private failure

Slightly shifting the objective, one can hardly ignore another symbolic death in the novel: that of the humanities in a traditional sense. At Athena (imaginary, yet representative locus of 'forward thinking' education), the classics are doomed to eventual extinction, as their study seems to be increasingly dictated (and marginalized) by the hermeneutical trends of the day. Caught in the culture wars of the 1990s and beyond, Coleman Silk witnesses aberrant discourses of humourless identity politics, the imposition of strict speech codes, and the fundamentalism of equalitarian beliefs that reach as far as his being accused of teaching Euripides' plays, which, one student complains, are 'degrading to women'.

Clearly, the death of classical education is near, and Roth uses his writing to warn against the shallowness and sterile nature of the new and dangerous impositions of the academic environment, which seems inclined towards a confusing misbalance between ethics and aesthetics, the dictates of quality and the dictatorship of representation. The major pillar of this simultaneously deplorable and risible conundrum in the novel is the young head of department, French professor Delphine Roux, whom Silk himself has hired and who is just as fierce a self-constructor as her colleague and, by now, subaltern.

More than being obsessively careful with her public image (which Roth will, of course, help her, tragic-comically, stain), she becomes a true executioner in the life-and-death campus battle (which literally makes a collateral victim in Coleman's wife, Iris). Author of the famous anonymous 'Everyone Knows' letter, that lends its title to the opening chapter, Roux assigns herself the role of fighter for justice and equality in the name of the students, and consequently places herself in quasi-ridiculous positions. She stubbornly applies preconceived theoretical grids to real-life practices and situations, proving her disconnectedness from the immediate world (as attested by both the accusations, and her simultaneously biased and clichéd jargon). As pointed out by Gustavo Sanchez Canales,

Delphine - a Marxist-feminist who interprets human relations in terms of dominance and submission - regards the Coleman-Faunia affair as sexual exploitation of the latter by the former: 'Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age' (38-39). Delphine's letter, in which the repeated phrase 'Everyone Knows' seems to be a farcical version of the oracle of Delphi's inscription 'Know thyself,' depicts her actual ignorance, wickedness and manipulation of her colleagues. Like Delphi, Delphine is obscure and dangerously ambiguous; unlike the oracle, she becomes a grotesque figure: she overtly embodies many of the flaws of the institution she works for. (Sanchez-Canales 2009: 117-118)

Incapable of surmounting stereotypes, bitter and resentful of Coleman's status and overall success, Delphine is yet another character who tries to pass herself off as somebody different from her real self, which she obscures in order to fit into the world of her choice. The episode in which Delphine pens a want-ad for a male companion is telling for the true nature of her own successive deaths and births of the self, on her way from the Old World to the New, from France to America. Dropping the mask, she unveils her immigrant background, the ambition and the desire for 'superiority' that made her leave ("for the pleasure of one day coming home, having done it, of returning home triumphant" - Roth 2001: 274).

Like Silk, she has been searching for independence and success, for a practical means of breaking away from the influence of a domineering and demanding mother, for a method by which she might prove herself via professional accomplishment. However, the contemplation of her private failures reveals a complete opposite to the overbearing, overconfident, cunning public persona that she has created. Behind the aggressive overachiever, there is an insecure woman who fully realizes the extent of her trauma, the disconnectedness from the life she has manufactured for herself, the devastating outcome of her symbolic killing of her European background for the sake of an illusory American glamour, alongside the impossibility and futility of the rebellion against her mother's lingering shadow.

The struggle, similar to Silk's - whom she feels, in fact, rather attracted to, than appalled by -, is that of reconciling the chosen self with the murdered one, of keeping the past at bay and burying the evidence forever. Once more, Roth would have been a lesser writer had he allowed that to happen. Playing a practical joke on his fierce female academic leader, who exposes her vulnerability by accidentally e-mailing her most intimate secret to the entire department, he does not neglect the exploration of her hidden, stifled, muted feelings, those of a person she is certain to present as a former, invalid version of herself:

Here she operates at fifty percent of her intelligence, and in Paris she understood every nuance. What's the point of being smart here when, because I am not from here, I am de facto dumb ... Thinking that the only English she really understands - no, the only American she understands - is academic American, which is hardly American, which is why she can't make it in, will never make it in, which is why there'll never be a man, this is why this will never be her home, why her intuitions are wrong and always will be [...] Thinking that all her intellectual advantages have been muted by her being depaysee ... Thinking that she has lost her peripheral vision, that she sees things that are in front of her but nothing out of the corner of her eye, that what she has here is not the vision of a woman of her intelligence but a flat, a totally frontal vision, the vision of an immigrant or a displaced person, a misplaced person. (Roth 2001: 276)

4. Self-erasure as means of coping with/escaping trauma

While Coleman Silk's fate embodies the drama of leaving one's racial roots behind, the apparently self-possessed Delphine is torn by the hyphenation, the mental, physical, intellectual dislocation, the maladaptation, the marginality that she desperately tries to turn into centrality, the essential, inevitable, encumbering neither/nor: a different kind of double burden that she struggles just as hard to disguise. Her implausible rival, Faunia Farley, who seems the most straightforward, understated, simple and simplistic character of all, will eventually produce one of the big surprises (once again, posthumously).

Working as a janitor who cannot read and write, she is pitied for her involvement with Coleman, seen by Delphine (and not only by her) as a victim of sexual exploitation. What remains unknown until after her death, apart from her obviously free choice of partner, is the fact that she is, in her turn, somebody who has deliberately opted for a new self, obliterating the pain-and-death ridden previous one(s). Abused in more ways than one, traumatized by her father and, afterwards, by her veteran husband, having lost to fire both her children, whose ashes she keeps under her bed, having tried to literally take her own life several times, she was, in fact, the child of a quite well-off family.

As such, she rapidly and painfully descended the social ladder, becoming an emotional wreck, desensitized to both public opinion and private judgment. Her decision to pass is, this time, not connected to race or immigration, but rather to class and education, as she chooses to sever all ties to her born and bred self, thus attempting to free herself from the unbearable burdens of the past. Just like the other characters who wear social masks in the novel, she creates the illusion of control over her destiny by building herself anew. Interestingly, she would rather play herself down than up, as she has grown indifferent to the apparent social advantages that have neither sheltered her from humiliation and oppression, nor spared her the loss of her offspring.

Since the norm establishes the primacy of the educated and wealthy in the hierarchy of class, Faunia deconstructs the class element of her identity by renouncing her upbringing and passing for an illiterate janitress. As the protagonists move within certain ideological spaces, mostly oppressive ones, their adherence or resistance to a particular ideology justifies the grounds of their identity choices and their modus vivendi. (Drăgulescu 2014: 100)

Opting out of her "category", defying conventional goals and expectations, refusing to be part of a 'community' that has very little to do with the traumatizing reality of her own life, she prefers the anonymity of a presumably effaced self. Moreover, she is constant in her decision, not permitting her highly academic lover to mentor her (as other Rothian male protagonists attempt to do in their relationships with much younger women). She stays in control of her apparently insignificant and empty existence by exerting a type of agency that baffles Zuckerman and plays notable counterpart to Silk's previously undeterred will. While the narrator, upon finding out about the existence of her diary, cannot help but wonder whether feigned illiteracy was a source of power and rebellion against grim circumstances, critics have found that,

while Farley and Silk's relationship may have appeared disproportionate to many, Farley, in fact, retained a great deal of control, which seems to have equalized any socioeconomic and educational differences [...] Much like Coleman, Faunia passes as a means of escape and to achieve a sense of freedom - freedom from her thoughts, her pains, and her sins. (Kirby 2006: 157-158)

Last but not least, one of the reasons for Faunia's early retirement from the 'natural' course of her life and her rebirth as an impersonator, in a supposedly inferior guise, is Les Farley, a Vietnam War veteran who is plagued by nightmares and whose present self seems to have, once more, very little to do with the person he used to be before his traumatic encounter with brutal, repeated, mass murder. Death surrounds and defines Les who, like many former soldiers, has lost control of his (f)actual being and reactions. Unlike the other characters, he does not choose to kill his former self; he rather wishes for death as an escape from the haunting memories that have transformed him ("EVERTHING SO INTENSE AND EVERYBODY FAR FROM HOME AND ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY RAGE" - Roth 2001: 72).

As Derek Parker Royal puts it, "Les Farley is the character in the novel most closely associated with death. After two tours of duty in Vietnam - during the second, a return to action he volunteered for, he went 'ape-shit' and spewed "death and destruction|" via "door gunning" (Roth 2001: 65) - Les is 'deadened' to existence" (idem: 131). The obvious perpetrator of family abuse and the alleged carrier of moral responsibility for Coleman and Faunia's fatal car crash, he is part of the numerous squad of living dead, left behind by forces of history that surpass by far individual will and determination.

A victim of the war, suffering from "goddam PTSD", he can barely tell past from present, immediate reality from former combat. He is doomed to relive the horror and battle numbness, depression, impotence. "Payback! I kept thinking about Vietnam. About all the times I think I died. That's how I began to know that I can't die. Because I died already. Because I died already in Vietnam. Because I am a man who fucking died" (Roth 2001: 73). Les' portrait, his sociopathic drives, his blurred self-search in the wake of witnessing and participating in disaster complete the circle of literal and symbolic deaths in The Human Stain. His sins are, evidently, neither excused nor pardoned, but his tragedy and those he inflicts upon others are echoes of socio-cultural evils that Roth never ceases to call attention to.

Fairly early on in the story, Roth enters the Vietnam vet's tortured mind, and what ensues is by now a classic Roth full-range riff that runs on for six, seven riveting pages. Here, and in the subsequent chilling set pieces, Roth recreates the burnt-out psychopathology of a permanently damaged man, presented with no more squeamishness than Homer's portrait of battlefield carnage at Troy. By the time we get to the final scene, which finds Les ice-fishing at a remote pond and brandishing a large auger before Zuckerman's eyes, we are persuaded that that such spectral casualties of war are afoot in the land. (Persky 2011: 18)

5.Conclusion

As grim reminders of cruel realities, Les and his perpetually menacing presence in the novel connect the multiple (vicious) circles of birth, death and rebirth of the self, placing them in an enlarged context and reminding the reader of the strong cultural, political, ideological tensions that actually form the background against which The Human Stain's "fantasies of purity" are projected. It is out of this all-encompassing and, ultimately, inevitably flawed American obsession with perfection (of race? class? ethnicity? status? nationality? education?) that the book draws its strength and verisimilitude. As Claudia Roth-Pierpont summarizes in her insightful monograph, Roth Unbound,

What, finally, does the American trilogy say about America? [...] 'The fantasy of purity,' renewed over and over again - from the extreme anti-war Left, from the extreme anti-Communist Right, from the hypocritically puritanical everybody, to take the three books in order - is appalling. 'But that's the great American blessing,' Roth tells me when I ask how the phrase applies to the country. 'It's a radically impure society'. Coleman Silk's genealogical history elaborated in two long pages of near Old Testament begats, includes runaway slaves, Lenape Indians who married Swedish settlers, and mulatto brothers from the West Indies who brought Dutch sisters from Holland to be their wives. And still, like most of the others, he made himself up. And still he was hounded and murdered for what he was and for what he wasn't. (2013: 258)

Sidebar

Cristina Chevereşan, Ph.D., dr. habil., is Associate Professor of American Literature and Culture at the West University of Timişoara. Fulbright Scholar and Ambassador, member of European and American academic societies, fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar, UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies, the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, she has authored, translated and edited twenty volumes, as well as published numerous articles in the fields of American Studies, Romanian and comparative literature.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

Ansu, Louis and Gurumurthy Neelakantan. 2010. "Two Versions of Oedipus and Philip Roth's The Human Stain" in Philip Roth Studies 6 (2) (Fall), pp. 167-187.

Drăgulescu, Luminiţa. 2014. "Race Trauma at the End of the Millennium: Passing in Philip Roth's The Human Stain" in Philip Roth Studies 10 (1) (Spring), pp. 91-108.

Du Bois, William Edward B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.; University Press John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. New York: Bartleby.com, 1999. [Online]. Available: www.bartleby.com/114/. [Accessed March 20, 2018].

Kirby, Lisa A. 2006. "Shades of Passing: Teaching and Interrogating Identity in Roth's The Human Stain and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby" in Philip Roth Studies 2 (2) (Fall), pp. 151-160.

Nadel, Ira B. 2011. Philip Roth. A Literary Reference to His Life and Works. New York: Facts on File.

Parker Royal, Derek. 2006. "Plotting the Frames of Subjectivity: Identity, Death, and Narrative in Philip Roth's The Human Stain" in Contemporary Literature 47 (1) (Spring), pp. 114-140.

Persky, Stan. 2011. "Indelible: Philip Roth's Human Stain". Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade, 2000-2009. Montreal, CA: MQUP, pp. 9-21.

Roth, Philip. 2001. The Human Stain. London: Vintage/Random House.

Roth Pierpont, Claudia. 2013. Roth Unbound. A Writer and His Books. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Sanchez Canales, Gustavo. 2009. "The Classical World and Modern Academia in Philip Roth's The Human Stain" in Philip Roth Studies 5 (1) (Spring), pp. 111-128.

Schwartz, Larry. 2011. "Erasing Race in Philip Roth's The Human Stain", in Philip Roth Studies 7 (1) (Spring), pp. 65-81.