The Human Stain

Dear Brent,

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To keep our readers up to date, I'll repeat the question you posed yesterday about The Human Stain: "By worshipping at the cult of the self and minimizing the impact of history, Roth turns both race and Coleman into little tchotchkes. Yes? Or no?"

As always, you've gone to the heart of the thing. You've plunged us back into the debate that, 28 years after it began, remains the source of the most pertinent questions about Roth's work. I'm talking about Irving Howe's famous 1972 essay in Commentary, "Philip Roth Reconsidered," which got so deep under Roth's skin he created a Howe-like literary critic, Milton Appel, to unleash his fury on (in the 1983 Anatomy Lesson Nathan Zuckerman calls the self-important Appel the "President of the Rabbinical Society for the Suppression of Laughter in the Interest of Loftier Values"). In the essay, Howe accuses Roth of 1) literary narcissism and 2) bad faith, particularly in his depiction of the middle-class Jewish family the Patimkins, whom he lampoons mercilessly in Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Roth's main sin, says Howe, is that in his indifference to social and historical realities, he forces his Ur-Jews to be vulgar and uncultured in a way Howe thinks they would never be. "Even a philistine character has certain rights, if not as a philistine then as a character in whose 'reality' we are being asked to believe," Howe writes.

Now, I happen to think Howe vitiates himself hilariously at the end of that essay, when he holds up Hubert Selby's dreary work of leftist agitprop, Last Exit to Brooklyn, as everything Roth's fiction ought to be but isn't--dispassionate, objective, pure-spirited, etc. But Howe's notion that a character has a right to fair and accurate representation is still a powerful idea--a defensible check on the self-aggrandizing excesses to which satirical writers are prone--and Roth has never stopped testing the boundaries of this rule, which Howe deems to be the central tenet of "literary tact." Roth is most untactfully exploiting the painful historical reality of people like Coleman for his own ends. As you point out, racism isn't the reason Coleman decides to pass--or, to bring the enormity of his act down to intimate detail, to tell his wife that his family is dead and to tell his gracious, supportive, unflinchingly aware mother that she can never see her son again. His wife, the almost appallingly unjudgmental daughter of Jewish anarchists, couldn't care less whether he's black, nor would it have bothered her to keep his secret, if a secret is what he wanted to keep it. What he wants is to hurt his mother, repudiate his family, negate his past, in full consciousness of the terribleness of these things. Even as he's breaking the news to his mother, he's thinking:

You can't do this to a wonderful mother who loves you unconditionally and has made you happy, you can't inflict this pain and then think you can go back on it. It's so awful that all you can do is live with it. Once you've done a thing like this, you have done so much violence it can never be undone--which is what Coleman wants.

Consider what Roth has done here: He has taken the saddest consequence of American racism there is--the need some people feel to sever all ties to their cultural and hereditary identity--and turned it inside out, so that it becomes not the result of pressures from the outside world but the function of some not very well understood internal imperative held by a member of just about any despised minority group to punch his own mother in the womb. It is not that Roth ignores what it means to be black in America in the 1940s and '50s; it's that he's come up with a way to relegate it to the background, and to turn passing, a perfectly comprehensible response to an insane situation--Coleman's father calls it "Negrophobia"--into a vile bit of personal treachery. This is an odd and daring twist; it may or may not shed light on the social experience of passing, but it does tell us a great deal about what Roth thinks a self is, and how the effort to shape one leads you inevitably to some sort of criminality and pain, whether for you or others. The question--your question--is, Is Roth wrong to use a specific historical phenomenon such as passing, and, say, that woman he met at Chicago, in this way? Is he turning race and Coleman into tchotchkes?

Me, I don't think so. Coleman is no tchotchke. He's fascinatingly, troublingly, acutely, magnificently alive, even if he does read more as a Jew than a black. Race isn't exactly reified, either; it's just rendered as an abstraction, which I suspect is not how any person who had lived within its grip would see it. You know who I think are tchotchkes? Coleman Silk's family. The real problem with The Human Stain, in fact, is that, with the exception of Coleman, Roth is so damn pious about his black people. The father, with his orotund speech and love of Shakespeare and endless dignity, is like some King Vidor or John Steinbeck version of a black preacher, and the mother and sister are so relentlessly noble and reasonable and self-sacrificing you want to scream: Where the hell is Roth in all this? Would he ever be this uncritical of Jews? Isn't this the racism, this condescending kindness, this sweet, respectful gentleness? Actually, I don't think it is racism--I think it's discomfort. Roth doesn't know black people well enough to make fun of them, so, perhaps wisely, he doesn't even try.

I mean, contrast the Silks with Coleman's wife's family, the lunatic Gittelmans, who despite being minor are my favorite characters in the book. Roth's writing, which is relatively sober, for him, in much of this novel, soars to Portnoy-ish heights whenever he has their daughter talk about them:

All that afternoon she told Coleman folklorishly enchanting stories that made having survived growing up above the Passaic candy store as the daughter of such vividly benighted individualists as Morris and Ethel Gittelman appear to have been a grim adventure not so much out of Russian literature as out of the Russian funny papers, as though the Gittelmans had been the deranged next-door neighbors in a Sunday comic strip called "The Karamazov Kids."

That's the Roth I love. The ennobling Roth, the civil-rights Roth--feh. Every time Roth tries like a good Howe-ian to get inside the heads of people he can't fondly, or even cruelly, tease, in my opinion, he goes stone dead. (Though let me reiterate that I'd rather read dead Roth than live most other people any day.)

Now I can't resist putting a somewhat off-topic question to you: This is a month when Saul Bellow and Roth, the two surviving members of the famous Three Stooges of Jewish writers--Bellow, Malamud, and Roth--both have books coming out. Both are campus novels, which makes me wonder about their own campus experiences. You had a similar experience, albeit much later. So once you're done showing me all the ways I'm wrong about where I come down on Howe and race and tchotchkes, as I hope you will, will you explain this to me, Mr. University of Chicago graduate student? What was it about the U of C that produced so many Jewish heavy-hitters in the 1940s and '50s--Bellow, Roth, Bloom, etc.?

Best,
Judith

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This week, a discussion of Philip Roth's new novel, The Human Stain (click here to buy it, and here to read an excerpt). Judith Shulevitz writes Slate's "Culturebox" column. Brent Staples writes editorials on politics and culture for the New York Times and is the author of Parallel Time (click here to buy it).

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