The Human Stain (2000). Content and Description

Published during the heyday of identity politics and the academic culture wars to which they gave rise, The Human Stain is yet another of Roth’s highly literate and entertaining fictions and a work that reflects pressing social concerns. Coleman Silk, the protagonist of this meditation on race and the self, leaves home and family at the age of 18 to join the U.S. Navy. When he leaves his comfortably lower-middle-class African-American family for life on the seas, he sloughs off what he perceives as the anchor of his race and uses his light complexion and indeterminate physiognomy to “pass” as a white man.

Coleman Silk, high school valedictorian and favored son of the Silk clan, is intoxicated by the freedom that this transformation affords him. Returning to the United States, he continues his racial masquerade and adopts the identity of a Jewish man in order to fit in with the other dusky-skinned Jewish intellectuals flooding New York University on the G.I. Bill. While in New York, Silk meets Iris Gittelman, a woman similarly in flight, in her case from her radical Jewish background. Silk marries Iris for “that sinuous thicket of hair that was far more Negroid than” his own, a canny decision based on the desire to preempt any future doubts about the origin of their offspring’s hair texture (136).

Coleman never tells his wife his secret and dissociates himself from his family so as to live the life of a postwar Jewish intellectual. Silk and his wife move to WASP-dominated New England, where Coleman gets a position as a classics professor at Athena College, a small liberal arts institution. The Human Stain begins years later, when Coleman Silk has retired from his position as dean and returned to the classroom. Five weeks into the semester, when two students in his roll book have not shown up for class, he “open[s] the session by asking, ‘Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?’” (6). Silk’s joke is woefully misinterpreted. The two missing students, “who turned out to be black,” hear about Dean Silk’s use of the word spooks, a derogatory term for African Americans, and make a complaint to Silk’s superior (6). The new dean of faculty calls the distinguished professor into his office later in the day to face charges of racism.

The charge of racism is ironic on a number of levels: Apart from his true race, as one of Athena College’s first “Jewish” hires and its first “Jewish” academic dean, Silk has greatly changed the landscape of the university, firing blond and blue-eyed legacies (individuals who had received academic jobs mostly because of their money and connections). Viewed as an aggressive Jewish upstart by the old guard of WASP professors, Silk also hires the college’s first African-American professors, most notably Herb Keble, an eminent black political scientist who refuses to vouch for Silk when he is accused of racial insensitivity.

The charges enrage Silk and give Roth a springboard from which to comment on the complexities of race in America. They also provide both protagonist and author with a chance to meditate upon changes in the composition of the American university. The rising literary scholar Delphine Roux, chairperson of the English Department of Athena, punishes the aging professor for his transgression and becomes a symbol for Silk of the antihumanistic thrust of the contemporary university. He scoffs at her embrace of the importance of “private” identities (racial, ethnic, or gender affiliations) in what he deems the “public” institution of the university. Conversely, Roux takes a particular dislike to the macho posturing of Dean Silk and his burgeoning relationship with the illiterate cleaning woman Faunia Farley. This conflict allows Roth to weigh in on the battle over multiculturalism and the academy that was raging at the time of The Human Stain’s composition.

Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s longtime narrator, appears in The Human Stain (2000) to tell the story of the vanquished Coleman Silk. When Zuck- erman meets his neighbor Silk, the professor has just ignominiously resigned from Athena College after being accused of racism. His wife, Iris, has passed away, the stress from the scandal causing her to have a massive stroke. Silk is at work on a vengeful memoir about his experiences at Athena, entitled Spooks.

The title of Silk’s text is ironic not only because it recalls the term the aging professor uttered in the classroom, but because there is a specter at the heart of Silk’s memoir: his own masked racial history. Never mentioned in the vitriolic volume Silk shares with Zuckerman is the fact that he, like the accusing students, is African American. Nonetheless, after Silk dies in a violent car wreck with his scandalously younger lover Faunia Farley, Zuckerman finds out his friend’s secret and attempts to understand the professor’s life in light of this omission.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Roth often uses a text-within-a-text in his works. In The Human Stain, there are a number of such instances: Coleman Silk is at work on the tell-all Spooks, Nathan Zuckerman is engaged in writing his own version of the Silk affair, and Delphine Roux sends an e-mail that exposes her misdeeds. Why all of these texts? What role does the text-within-a-text play in The Human Stain? How can these internal texts be compared to similar texts in earlier Roth novels, most notably Operation Shylock and The Counterlife, not to mention The Ghost Writer?

2. While the complexity of Jewish racial identity in America arises as a theme in a number of Roth’s works, it takes on new dimensions in The Human Stain, where Roth’s “Jewish” protagonist grew up as an African American. What can we learn about race from the life of Coleman Silk? The critic Werner Sollors has argued that race and ethnic identity in America are complex and involve an interaction between relationships of consent (relationships we choose) and relationships of descent (those we are born into). How does Silk embody or not embody this conflict between consent and descent? Is there a comparison between African-American and Jewish racial identity in America drawn by Roth in The Human Stain?

3. The Human Stain is considered the third work in Roth’s American trilogy of novels. It is a work deeply concerned with contemporary history, opening with the events surrounding President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearing in the 1990s and going on to provide a commentary on the changing nature of ethnic identity in postwar America. How does Roth interweave personal and national history in The Human Stain? In what way do the trials of Coleman Silk, Delphine Roux, and Faunia Farley illuminate the historical era in which he is writing?

4. Roth has long been deemed a preeminent American author. In The Human Stain, one way he manifests this place in the genealogy of American writing is by referring frequently to the 19th-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. What role does Hawthorne, particularly his “romantic” novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), play in the world of The Human Stain? How does Roth’s theme of stigma and Puritanism relate to Hawthorne’s use of these tropes?

5. When Roth wrote The Human Stain, the story of Anatole Broyard was being discussed throughout America. Broyard was a popular writer and intellectual in the 1950s who disguised his African-American identity throughout his life. It was only after his death in the 1990s that people began discussing this lifelong example of racial passing. Research the history of Anatole Broyard. How do you think this narrative influenced Roth? What light does Bro- yard’s story shed on race in America?

6. The literature of passing has a long history in American letters. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) are two notable examples of the genre. How does Coleman Silk compare to the protagonists of these two works about racial transformation and masquerade in America? How should our reading of The Human Stain be affected by the fact that it is written by a white man? What should we make of this instance of racial ventriloquism, Roth’s donning the voice of a race not his own, just as Silk dons another race?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Appelfeld, Aharon. Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth. Translated by Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Fromm International, 1993.

Berryman, Charles. “Philip Roth and Nathan Zuck- erman: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prometheus.” Contemporary Literature 31, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 177-190.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Philip Roth. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.
Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001.
Gilman, Sander L. Multiculturalism and the Jews. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Greenberg, Robert M. “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth.” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 487-506.
Kartiganer, Donald. “Ghost-Writing: Philip Roth’s Portrait of the Artist.” AJS Review 13, nos. 1-2 (Spring 1988): 153-169.

Kremer, S. Lillian. “Philip Roth’s Self-Reflexive Fiction.” Modern Language Studies 28, nos. 3-4 (Autumn 1998): 57-72.
Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2002.