The Human Stain: Difference between revisions

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| language = English
 
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'''''The Human Stain''''' (2000) is a novel by [[Philip Roth]]. It is set in late 1990s rural [[New England]]. Its first person [[narrator]] is 65-year-old author [[Nathan Zuckerman]], a character in previous Roth novels, including ''[[American Pastoral]]'' (1997) and ''[[I Married a Communist]]'' (1998); these two books form a loose trilogy with ''The Human Stain''.<ref name="salon">{{cite web |first=Charles |last=Taylor |url=http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/04/24/roth/index.html |title=Life and life only |date=April 24, 2000 |publisher=[[Salon.com]] }}</ref> Zuckerman acts largely as an observer rather than the [[protagonist]] of the novel.
+
'''''The Human Stain''''' (2000) is a novel by [[Philip Roth]] set in late 1990s rural [[New England]]. Its first person [[narrator]] is 65-year-old author [[Nathan Zuckerman]], who appeared in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both ''[[American Pastoral]]'' (1997) and ''[[I Married a Communist]]'' (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with ''The Human Stain''.<ref name="salon">{{cite web |first=Charles |last=Taylor |url=http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2000/04/24/roth/index.html |title=Life and life only |date=24 April 2000 |publisher=[[Salon.com]] |accessdate=9 September 2012}}</ref> Zuckerman acts largely as an observer rather than the [[protagonist]] of the novel, who is Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics whose complex story is slowly revealed.
   
−
''The Human Stain'' was a national bestseller. It was adapted as [[The Human Stain (film)|a film by the same name]] directed by [[Robert Benton]]; released in 2003, it starred [[Anthony Hopkins]], [[Nicole Kidman]], and [[Gary Sinise]].
 +
A national bestseller, ''The Human Stain'' was adapted as a [[The Human Stain (film)|film by the same name]] directed by [[Robert Benton]]. Released in 2003, the film starred [[Anthony Hopkins]], [[Nicole Kidman]], and [[Gary Sinise]].
   
 
==Synopsis==
  
==Synopsis==
  ⚫
The story is told by [[Nathan Zuckerman]], a writer who lives a secluded life in New England, where Coleman Silk is his neighbor. Silk is a former [[classics]] professor and dean of faculty at nearby Athena College, a fictional institution in [[the Berkshires]] of western [[Massachusetts]]. At 71, Silk is accused of [[racism]] by two black students because of referring to them as "[[wikt:spook|spook]]s". As they have never shown up in his seminar, he asks: "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Having never seen the students, Silk does not know they are black when he makes the comment.
−
''The Human Stain'' is set in the 1998 United States, during the period of President [[Bill Clinton]]'s impeachment hearings and scandal over [[Monica Lewinsky]]. It is the third in Roth's postwar novels that take on large social themes.<ref name="Kakutani">[http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/050200roth-book-review.html Michiko Kakutani, "Confronting the Failures of a Professor Who Passes"], ''New York Times'', 2 May 2000, accessed 20 August 2012</ref>
  
   
  ⚫
The uproar leads to Silk's resignation. Soon after, his wife Iris dies of a stroke, which Silk feels is caused by the stress of his being forced out of the college. Silk begins an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old local woman who works as a janitor at the college and is married to an abusive [[Vietnam veteran]]. Silk is criticized by feminist scholars at the college for this.
⚫
The story is told by [[Nathan Zuckerman]], a writer who lives a secluded life in New England, where Coleman Silk is his neighbor. Silk is a former [[classics]] professor and dean of faculty at Athena College, a fictional institution in [[the Berkshires]] of western [[Massachusetts]]. At 71, Silk was accused of [[racism]] by two black students, because of referring to them as "[[wikt:spook|spook]]s." As they had never shown up in his seminar, he had said: "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Having never seen the students, Silk did not know they were black when he made the comment.
 
   
  ⚫
Zuckerman gradually learns that Silk is an African-American who has presented himself as Jewish (and white) since a stint in the Navy. He completed graduate school, married a white woman and had four children with her. (He never told his wife and children of his mixed ancestry.) As Roth wrote in the novel, Silk chose "to take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate".<ref name="Kakutani"/>
⚫
The uproar led to Silk's resignation. Soon after, his wife Iris dies of a stroke, which Silk feels was caused by the stress of his being forced out. Silk begins an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old local woman who works as a janitor at the college. She is married to an abusive [[Vietnam veteran]]. Silk is criticized by feminist scholars at the college for this.
  
   
  +
== Critical interpretation ==
⚫
Zuckerman gradually learns that Silk is an African-American man. He has presented himself as a [[Jew]] (and a white) since a stint in the Navy, completed graduate school, married and had four children. (He never told his wife and children of his ancestry.) As Roth wrote in the novel, Silk chose "to take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate."<ref name="Kakutani"/>
  
  +
''The Human Stain'' is set in 1998 in the United States, during the period of President [[Bill Clinton]]'s impeachment hearings and scandal over [[Monica Lewinsky]]. It is the third of Roth's postwar novels that take on large social themes.<ref name="Kakutani">{{cite news |title=Confronting the Failures of a Professor Who Passes |author=[[Michiko Kakutani]] |url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/050200roth-book-review.html |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=2 May 2000 |accessdate=8 September 2012}}</ref> ''The Human Stain'' is the third in a trilogy following ''[[American Pastoral]]'' and ''[[I Married a Communist]]'' in which Roth explores American morality and its effects. Here he examines the cut-throat and, at times, petty, atmosphere in American academia, in which "political correctness" was upheld.<ref>Shechner (2003), 187</ref> Roth said he wrote the trilogy to reflect periods in the 20th century—the [[McCarthyism|McCarthy years]], the [[Vietnam War]], and Bill Clinton's impeachment—that he thinks are the "historical moments in post-war American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation".<ref>Safer (0023), 239</ref>
   
  +
Mark Shechner writes that in the novel Roth explores issues in American society that forces a man such as Silk to hide his background, to the point of not having a personal history to share with his children or family. He wanted to pursue an independent course unbounded by racial restraints. Silk has become what he once despised. His downfall to some extent is engineered by Delphine Roux, the young, female, elite, French intellectual who is dismayed to find herself in an New England outpost of sorts, and sees Silk as having become deadwood in academia, the very thing he abhorred at the beginning of his own career.<ref>Shechner (2003), 186-195</ref>
⚫
==Reception==
  
−
The novel was well received, became a national bestseller, and won numerous awards. In choosing it for its "Editors' Choice" list of 2000, the ''[[New York Times]]'' said,
 
⚫
<blockquote>"... when Zuckerman and Silk are together and testing each other, Roth's writing reaches an emotional intensity and a vividness not exceeded in any of his books. The American dream of starting over entirely new has the force of inevitability here, and Roth's judgment clearly is that you can never make it all the way. There is no comfort in this vision, but the tranquility Zuckerman achieves as he tells the story is infectious, and that is a certain reward."<ref name="NYT">[http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/03/reviews/001203.03editort.html?_r=1 "Editors' Choice"], ''New York Times'', 2 December 2000, accessed 20 August 2012</ref> </blockquote>
  
   
  +
In his chapter on the book, Shechner begins with quotations about [[Anatole Broyard]], a well-known New York literary editor who, it was revealed after his death, [[Passing (racial identity)|racially passed]] during his many years employed as a critic at the ''[[The New York Times]]''.<ref>Shechner (2003), 186</ref> In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday ''New York Times'', [[Michiko Kakutani]] and [[Lorrie Moore]], respectively, suggest that Coleman Silk may have been inspired by Broyard.<ref name="Kakutani"/><ref name = "Moore">[http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/05/07/reviews/000507.07mooret.html Lorrie Moore, "The Wrath of Athena"], ''New York Times'', 7 May 2000, accessed 20 August 2012. Quote: "In addition to the hypnotic creation of Coleman Silk – whom many readers will feel, correctly or not, to be partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard – Roth has brought Nathan Zuckerman into old age, continuing what he began in ''[[American Pastoral]]''.</ref> [[Brent Staples]], in an editorial in ''The New York Times'', [[Andrew Sarris]], in a ''[[New York Observer]]'' review of the book's film, and [[Patricia J. Williams]], in ''[[The Nation]]'s'' review of the film, made the same suggestion.<ref name="Staples">[http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/opinion/07SUN3.html?pagewanted=print&position=#top Brent Staples, "Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny, Unless You Passed for White"], ''New York Times'', 7 September 2003, accessed 25 January 2011. Quote: "This was raw meat for Philip Roth, who may have known the outlines of the story even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. told it in detail in The New Yorker in 1996. When Mr. Roth's novel about "passing" – "The Human Stain" – appeared in 2000, the character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard."</ref><ref>{{cite news |title=Cinematic Stain Stirs My Soul: Coleman Silk, I Feel Your Pain |first=Andrew |last=Sarris |authorlink=Andrew Sarris |url=http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-109503199.html |newspaper=[[The New York Observer]] |date=3 November 2003 |accessdate=13 September 2012 |quote=my professional debt to the late Anatole Broyard, the "passer" and Times book reviewer on whom Mr. Roth's Coleman Silk is partly based.}}{{subscription}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |title=Rush Limbaugh's inner black child (The Human Stain, movie adaptation of book by Philip Roth) |author=[[Patricia J. Williams]] |url=http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-108993849.html |newspaper=[[The Nation]] |date=27 October 2003 |accessdate=13 September 2012 |quote=Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain attracted considerable attention some years back; it was widely read as a fictionalized version of literary critic Anatole Broyard's life. Broyard, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, was a light-skinned black man who decided early in his career to "pass"; he cut ties with his family and lived his life as a white man.}}{{subscription}}</ref> However, Roth stated in a 2008 interview that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later.<ref name="bloomberg">{{cite web | url = http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aw9u2ESpnFN0&refer=muse | title = Philip Roth Serves Up Blood and Guts in 'Indignation' (Update1) | author = Robert Hilferty | date = 2008-09-16 | publisher = Bloomberg | quote = I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn't know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole's life written months and months after I had begun my book.}}</ref>
⚫
[[Michiko Kakutani]] wrote, "It is a book that shows how the public Zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life, a book that takes all of Roth's favorite themes of identity and rebellion and generational strife and refracts them not through the narrow prism of the self but through a wide-angle lens that exposes the fissures and discontinuities of 20th-century life."<ref name="Kakutani"/> She also said,
 
−
<blockquote>"This premise seems to have been inspired by the life story of [[Anatole Broyard]] -- a critic for 'The New York Times' who died in 1990 -- at least as recounted by [[Henry Louis Gates Jr.]] in his 1997 book '13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man.' But when stripped of its racial overtones, Roth's book echoes a story he has told in novel after novel. Indeed, it closely parallels the story of Nathan Zuckerman, himself another dutiful, middle-class boy from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, "unbound" as it were, from his roots."<ref name="Kakutani"/></blockquote>
 
   
  +
In 7 September 2012, Roth wrote, in the ''[[The New Yorker]]'', an open letter to Wikipedia in which he stated that his novel was based on an incident in the life of his friend, [[Melvin Tumin]], professor of sociology at [[Princeton University|Princeton]]. According to Roth, Tumin noticed midway through the semester, that two students enrolled in one of his courses had not attended class or contacted him. He asked the class (as does the character Coleman Silk) about the missing students: "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?" Tumin then learned the students were African-American; he spent several months providing depositions to clear up suspicions regarding his use of the sometimes racially charged term "spooks". Roth notes the irony that Tumin was a noted specialist in [[race relations]].<ref name="Roth">{{cite news |title=An Open Letter To Wikipedia |author=[[Philip Roth]] |url=http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia.htm |newspaper=[[The New Yorker]] |date=7 September 2012 |accessdate=9 September 2012}}</ref> In response to the claim that ''The Human Stain'' was inspired by the life of the Anatole Broyard, Roth wrote that he barely knew Broyard, and, "Neither Broyard nor anyone associated with Broyard had anything to do with my imagining anything in 'The Human Stain.'"<ref name="Roth"/> He also notes, "This 'spooks' event is the initiating incident of ''The Human Stain''. It is the core of the book. There is no novel without it. There is no Coleman Silk without it. Every last thing we learn about Coleman Silk over the course of three hundred and sixty-one pages begins with his unwarranted persecution for having uttered 'spooks' aloud in a college classroom."<ref name="Roth"/>
−
Kakutani and other critics were struck by the parallels to the life of [[Anatole Broyard]], a writer and the ''New York Times'' literary critic in the 1950s and 1960s who was of [[Louisiana Creole]] mixed-race descent and passed for white.<ref>Taylor (2000), "Lie and Life Only, ''Salon'', Quote: "The thrill of gossip become literature hovers over “The Human Stain”: There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years. But Coleman Silk is a singularly conceived and realized character, and his hidden racial past is a trap Roth has laid for his readers..."</ref><ref name="Moore">[http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/05/07/reviews/000507.07mooret.html Lorrie Moore, "The Wrath of Athena"], ''New York Times'', 7 May 2000, accessed 20 August 2012. Quote: "In addition to the hypnotic creation of Coleman Silk -- whom many readers will feel, correctly or not, to be partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard -- Roth has brought Nathan Zuckerman into old age, continuing what he began in ''[[American Pastoral]]."</ref><ref name="Staples">[http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/opinion/07SUN3.html?pagewanted=print&position=#top Brent Staples, "Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny, Unless You Passed for White"], ''New York Times'', 7 September 2003, accessed 25 January 2011. Quote: "This was raw meat for Philip Roth, who may have known the outlines of the story even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. told it in detail in 'The New Yorker' in 1996. When Mr. Roth's novel about ''passing'' -- ''The Human Stain'' -- appeared in 2000, the character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard."</ref>
  
   
  ⚫
==Reception==
−
Roth said that he had not learned about Broyard's ancestry until after starting to write this novel.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aw9u2ESpnFN0&refer=muse | title = Philip Roth Serves Up Blood and Guts in 'Indignation' (Update1) | author = Robert Hilferty | date = 2008-09-16 | publisher = Bloomberg | quote = I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn't know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole's life written months and months after I had begun my book.}}</ref>
  
  ⚫
The novel was well received, became a national bestseller, and won numerous awards. In choosing it for its "Editors' Choice" list of 2000, the ''[[The New York Times]]'' wrote: "When Zuckerman and Silk are together and testing each other, Roth's writing reaches an emotional intensity and a vividness not exceeded in any of his books. The American dream of starting over entirely new has the force of inevitability here, and Roth's judgment clearly is that you can never make it all the way. There is no comfort in this vision, but the tranquility Zuckerman achieves as he tells the story is infectious, and that is a certain reward."<ref name="NYT">{{cite news |title=Editors' Choice: The 10 best books of 2000 |author=[[Staff writer]] |url=http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/03/reviews/001203.03editort.html |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=3 December 2000 |accessdate=9 September 2012}}</ref>
−  
−
The book was adapted as [[The Human Stain (film)|a film by the same name]] directed by [[Robert Benton]]. Released in 2003, it starred [[Anthony Hopkins]] as Silk, [[Nicole Kidman]] as Farley, and [[Gary Sinise]] as Zuckerman.
  
   
  ⚫
In ''The New York Times'' Kakutani wrote: "It is a book that shows how the public Zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life, a book that takes all of Roth's favorite themes of identity and rebellion and generational strife and refracts them not through the narrow prism of the self but through a wide-angle lens that exposes the fissures and discontinuities of 20th-century life. ... When stripped of its racial overtones, Roth's book echoes a story he has told in novel after novel. Indeed, it closely parallels the story of Nathan Zuckerman, himself another dutiful, middle-class boy from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, 'unbound' as it were, from his roots."<ref name="Kakutani"/>
   
 
==Awards==
  
==Awards==
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*''[[New York Times]]'' "Editors' Choice" (2000)<ref name="NYT"/>
  
*''[[New York Times]]'' "Editors' Choice" (2000)<ref name="NYT"/>
 
*[[Koret Jewish Book Award]] (2000)<ref name="awards">{{cite web |url=http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=awards&titleNumber=682684 |title=The Human Stain: Awards |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |quote="This complex novel about 'dissembling and impersonation is the work of a remarkable creative intelligence,' added Alvin H. Rosen." |accessdate=2008-03-28 }}</ref>
  
*[[Koret Jewish Book Award]] (2000)<ref name="awards">{{cite web |url=http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=awards&titleNumber=682684 |title=The Human Stain: Awards |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |quote="This complex novel about 'dissembling and impersonation is the work of a remarkable creative intelligence,' added Alvin H. Rosen." |accessdate=2008-03-28 }}</ref>
−
*''Chicago Tribune'' Editor's Pick (2000)<ref name="awards" />
 +
*''[[Chicago Tribune]]'' Editor's Pick (2000)<ref name="awards" />
 
*[[WH Smith Literary Award]] (2001)<ref name="awards" />
  
*[[WH Smith Literary Award]] (2001)<ref name="awards" />
 
*[[National Jewish Book Award]] (2001)<ref name="awards" />
  
*[[National Jewish Book Award]] (2001)<ref name="awards" />
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*[[Prix Médicis étranger]]; Meilleur livre de l'année 2002
  
*[[Prix Médicis étranger]]; Meilleur livre de l'année 2002
   
−
===Finalist===
 +
===Finalist===
 
*[[Los Angeles Times Book Prize|''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize]] for fiction (2000).<ref>[http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/newsreleases/print_2001_06.html LA Times Book Awards], ''Los Angeles Times'', press release, June 2001</ref>
  
*[[Los Angeles Times Book Prize|''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize]] for fiction (2000).<ref>[http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/newsreleases/print_2001_06.html LA Times Book Awards], ''Los Angeles Times'', press release, June 2001</ref>
 
*L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (2001)<ref name="awards" />
  
*L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (2001)<ref name="awards" />
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==References==
  
==References==
 
{{Reflist}}
  
{{Reflist}}
  +
  +
== Sources ==
  +
* Safer, Elaine B. "Tragedy and Farce in Roth's the Human Stain". in Bloom, Harold (ed.) ''Philip Roth''. Chelsea House. ISBN 0–7910–7446–3
  +
* Shechner, Mark (2003). ''Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth''. University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 9780299193546
  +
  +
== Further reading ==
  +
* Boddy, Kasia (2010). "Philip Roth's Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain". ''Cambridge Quarterly'' (2010) 39 (1): 39-60. doi: 10.1093/camqtly/bfp025
  +
* Faisst, Julia (2006). "Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or in Between: Fictions of Race in Philip Roth's ''The Human Stain''". ''Philip Roth Studies'', 2006
  +
* Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2005). "Anatole Broyard's Human Stain: Performing Postracial Consciousness." ''Philip Roth Studies'', 1.2 (2005): 125-44. <!-- "Many commentators have noted that Roth based the character of Coleman on Anatole Broyard..." -->
  +
* Moynihan, Sinéad (2010). ''Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing''. Manchester University Press, ISBN 978-0719082290
  +
* Tierney, William G. (2002). "Interpreting Academic Identities: Reality and Fiction on Campus". ''The Journal of Higher Education'', Vol. 73, No. 1, Special Issue: The Faculty in the New Millennium (Jan. - Feb., 2002), pp. 161-172
   
 
==External links==
  
==External links==
 
*[http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/humanstain/ ''The Human Stain'' at Random House's Reading Group Center page]
  
*[http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/humanstain/ ''The Human Stain'' at Random House's Reading Group Center page]
 
*[http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=awards&titleNumber=682684 Awards: ''The Human Stain''], Houghton Mifflin
  
*[http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=awards&titleNumber=682684 Awards: ''The Human Stain''], Houghton Mifflin
  +
*[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia.html "Philip Roth's open letter to Wikipedia" – Sept 7, 2012], ''New Yorker'' Blog 'Page Turner'
   
 
{{PhilipRoth}}
  
{{PhilipRoth}}
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[[Category:Novels by Philip Roth]]
  
[[Category:Novels by Philip Roth]]
 
[[Category:American novels adapted into films]]
  
[[Category:American novels adapted into films]]
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[[Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles]]
   
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[[de:Philip Roth#Der menschliche Makel]]
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[[de:Philip_Roth#Der_menschliche_Makel]]
  
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[[es:La mancha humana]]
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[[fr:La Tache (Philip Roth)]]
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[[fr:La Tache]]
  
 
[[it:La macchia umana]]
  
[[it:La macchia umana]]
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[[pt:The Human Stain]]
  

Revision as of 19:51, 18 September 2012

This article is about the novel. For the movie, see The Human Stain (film). For the Cornerstone album, see Human Stain (album).
The Human Stain
Human stain.jpg
First edition cover
AuthorPhilip Roth
Cover artistMichaela Sullivan
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
PublisherHoughton Mifflin
Publication date
May 2000
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages352 pp
ISBN0-618-05945-8
OCLC43109968
813/.54 21
LC ClassPS3568.O855 H8 2000

The Human Stain (2000) is a novel by Philip Roth set in late 1990s rural New England. Its first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appeared in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain.[1] Zuckerman acts largely as an observer rather than the protagonist of the novel, who is Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics whose complex story is slowly revealed.

A national bestseller, The Human Stain was adapted as a film by the same name directed by Robert Benton. Released in 2003, the film starred Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, and Gary Sinise.

Synopsis

The story is told by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who lives a secluded life in New England, where Coleman Silk is his neighbor. Silk is a former classics professor and dean of faculty at nearby Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. At 71, Silk is accused of racism by two black students because of referring to them as "spooks". As they have never shown up in his seminar, he asks: "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Having never seen the students, Silk does not know they are black when he makes the comment.

The uproar leads to Silk's resignation. Soon after, his wife Iris dies of a stroke, which Silk feels is caused by the stress of his being forced out of the college. Silk begins an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old local woman who works as a janitor at the college and is married to an abusive Vietnam veteran. Silk is criticized by feminist scholars at the college for this.

Zuckerman gradually learns that Silk is an African-American who has presented himself as Jewish (and white) since a stint in the Navy. He completed graduate school, married a white woman and had four children with her. (He never told his wife and children of his mixed ancestry.) As Roth wrote in the novel, Silk chose "to take the future into his own hands rather than to leave it to an unenlightened society to determine his fate".[2]

Critical interpretation

The Human Stain is set in 1998 in the United States, during the period of President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings and scandal over Monica Lewinsky. It is the third of Roth's postwar novels that take on large social themes.[2] The Human Stain is the third in a trilogy following American Pastoral and I Married a Communist in which Roth explores American morality and its effects. Here he examines the cut-throat and, at times, petty, atmosphere in American academia, in which "political correctness" was upheld.[3] Roth said he wrote the trilogy to reflect periods in the 20th century—the McCarthy years, the Vietnam War, and Bill Clinton's impeachment—that he thinks are the "historical moments in post-war American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation".[4]

Mark Shechner writes that in the novel Roth explores issues in American society that forces a man such as Silk to hide his background, to the point of not having a personal history to share with his children or family. He wanted to pursue an independent course unbounded by racial restraints. Silk has become what he once despised. His downfall to some extent is engineered by Delphine Roux, the young, female, elite, French intellectual who is dismayed to find herself in an New England outpost of sorts, and sees Silk as having become deadwood in academia, the very thing he abhorred at the beginning of his own career.[5]

In his chapter on the book, Shechner begins with quotations about Anatole Broyard, a well-known New York literary editor who, it was revealed after his death, racially passed during his many years employed as a critic at the The New York Times.[6] In the reviews of the book in both the daily and the Sunday New York Times, Michiko Kakutani and Lorrie Moore, respectively, suggest that Coleman Silk may have been inspired by Broyard.[2][7] Brent Staples, in an editorial in The New York Times, Andrew Sarris, in a New York Observer review of the book's film, and Patricia J. Williams, in The Nation's review of the film, made the same suggestion.[8][9][10] However, Roth stated in a 2008 interview that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later.[11]

In 7 September 2012, Roth wrote, in the The New Yorker, an open letter to Wikipedia in which he stated that his novel was based on an incident in the life of his friend, Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton. According to Roth, Tumin noticed midway through the semester, that two students enrolled in one of his courses had not attended class or contacted him. He asked the class (as does the character Coleman Silk) about the missing students: "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?" Tumin then learned the students were African-American; he spent several months providing depositions to clear up suspicions regarding his use of the sometimes racially charged term "spooks". Roth notes the irony that Tumin was a noted specialist in race relations.[12] In response to the claim that The Human Stain was inspired by the life of the Anatole Broyard, Roth wrote that he barely knew Broyard, and, "Neither Broyard nor anyone associated with Broyard had anything to do with my imagining anything in 'The Human Stain.'"[12] He also notes, "This 'spooks' event is the initiating incident of The Human Stain. It is the core of the book. There is no novel without it. There is no Coleman Silk without it. Every last thing we learn about Coleman Silk over the course of three hundred and sixty-one pages begins with his unwarranted persecution for having uttered 'spooks' aloud in a college classroom."[12]

Reception

The novel was well received, became a national bestseller, and won numerous awards. In choosing it for its "Editors' Choice" list of 2000, the The New York Times wrote: "When Zuckerman and Silk are together and testing each other, Roth's writing reaches an emotional intensity and a vividness not exceeded in any of his books. The American dream of starting over entirely new has the force of inevitability here, and Roth's judgment clearly is that you can never make it all the way. There is no comfort in this vision, but the tranquility Zuckerman achieves as he tells the story is infectious, and that is a certain reward."[13]

In The New York Times Kakutani wrote: "It is a book that shows how the public Zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life, a book that takes all of Roth's favorite themes of identity and rebellion and generational strife and refracts them not through the narrow prism of the self but through a wide-angle lens that exposes the fissures and discontinuities of 20th-century life. ... When stripped of its racial overtones, Roth's book echoes a story he has told in novel after novel. Indeed, it closely parallels the story of Nathan Zuckerman, himself another dutiful, middle-class boy from New Jersey who rebelled against his family and found himself exiled, 'unbound' as it were, from his roots."[2]

Awards

Winner

Finalist

References

  1. ^ Taylor, Charles (24 April 2000). "Life and life only". Salon.com. Retrieved 9 September 2012.
  2. ^ a b c d Michiko Kakutani (2 May 2000). "Confronting the Failures of a Professor Who Passes". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 September 2012.
  3. ^ Shechner (2003), 187
  4. ^ Safer (0023), 239
  5. ^ Shechner (2003), 186-195
  6. ^ Shechner (2003), 186
  7. ^ Lorrie Moore, "The Wrath of Athena", New York Times, 7 May 2000, accessed 20 August 2012. Quote: "In addition to the hypnotic creation of Coleman Silk – whom many readers will feel, correctly or not, to be partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard – Roth has brought Nathan Zuckerman into old age, continuing what he began in American Pastoral.
  8. ^ Brent Staples, "Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny, Unless You Passed for White", New York Times, 7 September 2003, accessed 25 January 2011. Quote: "This was raw meat for Philip Roth, who may have known the outlines of the story even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. told it in detail in The New Yorker in 1996. When Mr. Roth's novel about "passing" – "The Human Stain" – appeared in 2000, the character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard."
  9. ^ Sarris, Andrew (3 November 2003). "Cinematic Stain Stirs My Soul: Coleman Silk, I Feel Your Pain". The New York Observer. Retrieved 13 September 2012. my professional debt to the late Anatole Broyard, the "passer" and Times book reviewer on whom Mr. Roth's Coleman Silk is partly based.(subscription required)
  10. ^ Patricia J. Williams (27 October 2003). "Rush Limbaugh's inner black child (The Human Stain, movie adaptation of book by Philip Roth)". The Nation. Retrieved 13 September 2012. Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain attracted considerable attention some years back; it was widely read as a fictionalized version of literary critic Anatole Broyard's life. Broyard, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, was a light-skinned black man who decided early in his career to "pass"; he cut ties with his family and lived his life as a white man.(subscription required)
  11. ^ Robert Hilferty (2008-09-16). "Philip Roth Serves Up Blood and Guts in 'Indignation' (Update1)". Bloomberg. I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn't know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole's life written months and months after I had begun my book.
  12. ^ a b c Philip Roth (7 September 2012). "An Open Letter To Wikipedia". The New Yorker. Retrieved 9 September 2012.
  13. ^ a b Staff writer (3 December 2000). "Editors' Choice: The 10 best books of 2000". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 September 2012.
  14. ^ a b c d e "The Human Stain: Awards". Houghton Mifflin. Retrieved 2008-03-28. This complex novel about 'dissembling and impersonation is the work of a remarkable creative intelligence,' added Alvin H. Rosen.
  15. ^ PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Winners 1996–2006
  16. ^ LA Times Book Awards, Los Angeles Times, press release, June 2001

Sources

  • Safer, Elaine B. "Tragedy and Farce in Roth's the Human Stain". in Bloom, Harold (ed.) Philip Roth. Chelsea House. ISBN 0–7910–7446–3
  • Shechner, Mark (2003). Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 9780299193546

Further reading

  • Boddy, Kasia (2010). "Philip Roth's Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain". Cambridge Quarterly (2010) 39 (1): 39-60. doi: 10.1093/camqtly/bfp025
  • Faisst, Julia (2006). "Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or in Between: Fictions of Race in Philip Roth's The Human Stain". Philip Roth Studies, 2006
  • Kaplan, Brett Ashley (2005). "Anatole Broyard's Human Stain: Performing Postracial Consciousness." Philip Roth Studies, 1.2 (2005): 125-44.
  • Moynihan, Sinéad (2010). Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing. Manchester University Press, ISBN 978-0719082290
  • Tierney, William G. (2002). "Interpreting Academic Identities: Reality and Fiction on Campus". The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 73, No. 1, Special Issue: The Faculty in the New Millennium (Jan. - Feb., 2002), pp. 161-172

External links

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