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The American Novel Since 1945 - The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The American Novel Since 1945 - The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Now I want to talk about identity. So, does this novel conform to the form of the
Identity Plot? There are certain ways I think it does, and it does so in a very explicit way.
Remember how I mentioned that tension in the Identity Plot is produced by the
individual’s relationship to the group and the way that’s vexed. It isn’t a very exciting
Identity Plot if the protagonist just discovers that he or she is whatever categorizable
identity and says, “Oh, good. I’ll be that,” and then goes on. The tension comes from
feeling that either such an identification would be coercion, or that it comes with all kinds
of attendant suffering. There are all kinds of tensions that are produced in making that not
an easy identification, and you can see that very explicitly in this novel on page 108–106,
108–when Coleman talks about being at Howard University, and along with that, the
experience of being called a “nigger” for the first time. This is on the top of 106:
Especially when he began to think that there was something of the nigger about
him, even to the kids in the dorm who had all sorts of new clothes, and money in their
pockets, and in the summertime didn’t hang around the hot streets at home, but went to
camp, and not Boy Scout camp out in the Jersey sticks, but fancy places where they rode
horses and played tennis and acted in plays. What the hell was a cotillion? Where was
Highland Beach? What were these kids talking about? He was among the very lightest of
the light-skinned in his freshman class, lighter even than his tea-colored roommate, but
he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand, for all they knew that he
didn’t. He hated Howard from the day he arrived. Within a week he hated Washington,
and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania
Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30th Street station in Philadelphia for
Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished
with that college.
Right there in that sentence, in this little set of scenes about Howard and his
experience in D.C., you see him at first being asked by his family to identify with a certain
version of the black middle class, and then finding he is revolted by his own difference
from that middle class. He feels like a black field hand, the darkest of the dark field hand,
“for all they knew that he didn’t,” and on 108 we get it in very abstract terms. “You finally
leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we, another place that’s just like that, the
substitute for that.”
The problem of the Identity Plot is the problem of the “I” and the “we.” Here is
Coleman laying out exactly how he feels about that, and so what he’s going to favor there,
again on 108, is the raw “I,” all the subtlety of being Silky Silk. So there you have
encapsulated, in a very short amount of prose, a major form–narrative form, narrative
dynamic–of the Identity Plot as a genre. On 144, you get another version of that, slightly
more personalized to his family. This is another version of identity and what Coleman
thinks about it. This is after we get the history of Coleman’s family, his ancestors, and
we’re told that he is not the first to pass as white or to disappear from the black family in
to which he was born:
“Lost himself to all his people” was another way they, the family, put it. Ancestor
worship, that’s how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing. The idolatry that is
ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment.
So, this version of identity on 144, this vision of it, is identity as ancestor worship
and imprisonment in that family, imprisonment in that way of thinking, a radical un-
freedom. So, this is one version of identity, radically individual, rising out of the
difference that you feel from the various “we” groups you are asked to join. But there are
other versions of identity that are imagined here, and they track pretty clearly with
scholarly ways of thinking about identity at this same time.
So, in one sense identity is this radical individual humanist version that I’ve been
tracing in the last few minutes. Another is that identity is a constantly changing
performance, and we get that too in Coleman. You see it, again, right in the section about
Howard on 109, and I want you to note the words that Roth chooses here, 109 in the
middle: “He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose.”
“Play his skin any way he wanted.” Now, remember that his father is a great
devotee of Shakespeare and tries to communicate to his children, not only through their
Shakespearian middle names, but through every verbal interaction he has with them, that
the grandeur of the English language will somehow fill them and make them who they
are, that this is the source of their dignity and their power. He takes that lesson and
transforms it. It’s about playing on the model of drama, but it’s about playing color, and
this is an artist’s vocation, “color himself just as he chose.” He’s like a painter, in this
sense, so this is identity as performance. There are many instances of this. On page 115,
116, there is just a little description of Steena’s dance for Coleman. I’m going to just read
a little bit of it.
All at once, with no prompting from him, seemingly prompted only by Eldridge’s
trumpet, she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever
erformed by a Fergus Falls girl after a little more than a year in New York City. She could
have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang
the song, prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song. There
to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness, that big, white thing. “Someday
he’ll come along, the man I love, and he’ll be big and strong, the man I love.” The
language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade
primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half
meaning, half pretending, to cover her shame.
The history of jazz that’s concentrated in to that tiny, little passage has been
unpacked by a critic by the name of Jonathan Freedman. He does a whole history, which
I can’t produce here, of how Artie Shaw and various players played Gershwin, and used
black musicians in their ensembles, and how this very dance, when Steena, here, we’re
told, in a way, inhabits most fully her whiteness, she does that by performing to a music
that is radically hybrid, black and Jewish. So, Freedman argues that in this passage we
get identity as a vision of absolute fluidity, absolute performance and fluidity, and that
the whole history of American jazz stands behind that imagined state. It’s the very
difference between the hybrid music and the pure whiteness of Steena’s body that creates
what’s so provocative to Coleman, the spectacle of whiteness in the context of hybridity.
The cocker spaniel: Why? Why choose that as what the little boy thinks of when
he looks at that floppy volume? It’s a moment when being trained to classify and to
categorize causes him to see the source of that linguistic precision, the book of
Shakespeare, in very demeaning terms, or reductive terms or–I’m not getting quite the
precise word I want–in deflating terms. So that, instead of grandeur, the book of
Shakespeare becomes the source for the names of dogs. And the way the child’s
imagination blends grandeur and the ordinary, I think, gives us Coleman, who can
imagine the details of everyday life, the life he lives, as a grand play. Doc Chizner furthers
this transformation of the father’s lesson in this very crucial passage, that I’m going to
talk more about later, when Coleman passes as white or Jewish for the first time. And
that’s when he’s boxing for the pit coach:
“If nothing comes up,” Doc said [this is the bottom of 98] “you don’t bring it up. You’re
neither one thing or the other. You’re Silky Silk. That’s enough. That’s the deal.”
“You’re neither one thing or the other. You’re Silky Silk.” This takes the question
of categorization–are you colored? Are you not?–it negates it: you’re neither one thing
nor another, but then reinstates it in a different mode: you’re Silky Silk. Make up a new
category for yourself. So, Doc Chizner takes that transgressing use of precision that we
see in the cocker spaniel metaphor in the child’s imagination, and he shows Coleman how
to apply that to living race in America, living his race in America. You are Silky Silk.
You’re not a race. You’re a proper name, the irreducible singularity of a person.
Chapter 4. The Body as a Sign: Moments of Irreducible Otherness
There is a third way of thinking about race, and that, of course, is as biology. That,
too, is present in this novel. The body is relentlessly present, and I hope that you picked
up on that. It’s not hard to pick up on it. The very matter and specificity of the body is
everywhere in this novel, and so I want to look back at 21 and 22. This is in that wonderful
scene when Coleman dances with Nathan. So, we get a whole description of Coleman’s
body and what it is that Nathan sees in it, suddenly, now that he’s shirtless on this hot
summer night, and also now that he is no longer talking about the “spooks” business. This
is 21.
On display were the shoulders, arms and chest of a smallish man still trim and
attractive, a belly no longer flat, to be sure, but nothing that had gotten seriously out of
hand, altogether the physique of someone who had seemed to have been a cunning and
wily competitor at sports rather than an overpowering one. And all of this had previously
been concealed from me, because he was always shirted, and also because of his having
been so drastically consumed by his rage.
What you see there is the revelation of certain things we will find out to be true
about Coleman, that he was a cunning and wily competitor rather than an overpowering
one, that he is still fit and virile, that he has himself in hand, nothing that had gotten out
of hand, seriously out of hand. Coleman very much still has himself in hand. He is still
the maker of himself, the presenter of himself to the world in a deliberate way. But then
we go on, and there are some things that we see that perhaps tell us something different.
Rather than the body revealing the truth about Coleman– certain kinds of truth, not a
racial truth, other kinds of truth–we see marks on his body that don’t produce that
knowledge.
Also previously concealed was the small, Popeye-ish blue tattoo situated at the
top of his right arm just at the shoulder joining, the words “U.S. Navy” inscribed between
the hooklike arms of a shadowy little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the
deltoid muscle, a tiny symbol if one were needed of all the million circumstances of the
other fellow’s life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human
biography, a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be,
at best, slightly wrong.
What’s revealed when Coleman is shirtless is the very sign that he cannot be
known in any kind of complete way. It’s the mark of a history on his body, that he was in
the navy, a history we’ll learn a little bit about, but not a lot, but for Nathan it is the mark
of an irreducible difference between persons, that always there are details that are not
accessible, circumstances of the other fellow’s life. In this moment Nathan recognizes
Coleman as a cipher, a sign that can be projected upon with meanings of his own. I would
suggest to you that we don’t see the full flowering of this until quite a bit later in the
novel, but I think this is the first moment where, in Coleman revealing his body, he
suggests to Nathan the possibilities of that body as a sign. So, he is no longer, in this
moment, entirely “in hand” anymore. So, if his physique hasn’t gotten out of hand, his
circulation as a sign certainly has. In this case, he has now become a blank canvas for
Nathan. Certainly, up until this moment at the beginning of the novel, what’s most on the
surface of the plot is how he has become the victim of rumor, how his self-presentation
got completely out of hand, taken over by other people’s erroneous readings of his words.
So, if the body seems to be in his control, himself as a signifier is not. Here Nathan is
invited into it, but in a very different way than the rumormongers who surround him at
Athena College and in the town.