Imagining Tragedy - Philip Roth's The Human Stain

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Imagining Tragedy: Philip Roth's The Human StainAuthors(s): Adam KellySource: Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 189-205Published by: Purdue University Press

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ABSTRACT. While the centrality of the genre of tragedy to The HumanStain has been consistently acknowledged by critics, the novel has tended tobe read simply as an embodiment of tragedy, rather than as a reflection uponthe genre and an examination of its processes and assumptions. Focusing onthe relationship between various levels of the text—writer, narrator, hero,reader—and addressing issues of allusion, symbolism and temporality, thisessay outlines Roth’s complex re-imagining of contemporary tragedy throughNathan Zuckerman’s narration of the story of Coleman Silk.

Philip Roth makes no secret of his intention that The Human Stain (2000)be read with reference to classical tragedy. From the epigraphic citationof Oedipus Rex , to the five-chapter structure capped by a final act entitled“The Purifying Ritual,” to a plot that reads like an exercise in Sophocleanhomage—talented hero doggedly refuses to acknowledge a terrible act he hascommitted, only to succumb to an ironic and mysteriously inevitable fateyears later—all the signs point to a sustained effort by the author to fullyexploit the conventions and traditional hallmarks of tragedy: seriousness, highrhetoric, a powerful central protagonist, an ambiguous play of agency and

fate, a movement towards revelation and death, and the lingering sense of apainful mystery that resists analysis. Moreover, the novel’s consistent allusionsto canonical works of tragedy—including The Bacchae , The Iliad , Hamlet andDeath in Venice , in addition to Oedipus —suggest that Roth is determined toengage not only with tragic themes and conventions but also with previoustragic literature, and hence to carry out, in narrative form, an intertextualengagement with the history of the genre itself.

TRAGIC ALLUSIONS

As early critical responses to The Human Stain implicitly testify, this engage-

ment intervenes in a contemporary context in which “a rethinking of tragedy

Imagining Tragedy: Philip

Roth’s The Human Stain

Adam Kelly



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190 Philip Roth Studies Fall 2010

is undoubtedly beginning to take place” (Felski vi). Following a period ofdeclining interest in tragedy within the academy, Kathleen Sands identifies

“a renewed sense of the tragic” in literary studies, arising both as a lament fora sensibility that seemed to go missing in modernity, and as a way of under-standing the failings of the modern project itself (41). Dennis Schmidt arguesthat the increasing self-doubt of philosophy and the contemporary suspicionof the value of conceptual knowledge have much to do with the powerfulbut often unrecognized persistence of tragedy, which resists conceptualizationand dramatizes blindness, hubris, and error. In addition, Rita Felski remarksthat “tragic art has come to seem more resonant, alive, and contemporane-ous than much tragic theory” (vii), meaning that as we enter the twenty-firstcentury, we cannot be at all complacent about our comprehension of classical

texts. Against this intellectual background, then, The Human Stain, publishedon the cusp of the new millennium and very much concerned, both in toto and explicitly in one of its plot strands, with the status of the classics withinacademia, can function both as a work of tragic art and as a reading of thetragic canon, both as an exemplar of tragic themes and as a reflection uponthe historical persistence of those themes.

Unsurprisingly, then, in the growing critical literature on The HumanStain, the majority of treatments mention the tragic elements of the novel. 1 Nevertheless, tragedy is taken as the central concern of only a handful ofessays to date. Bonnie Lyons declares that the late trilogy of which The Human

Stain is the third part “establish[es] Roth as our most important author ofsignificant American tragedies” (125). Similarly, Elaine B. Safer argues thatthe comic elements of the novel prepare the reader for a shift to tragedy, andsuggests that “Coleman and Faunia are rounded personalities, tragic and morecomplex than any Roth has previously portrayed” (213). Patrice Rankinenotes that “[a]llusions to Greek epic and tragedy are the driving force of thenovel” (103), and contends that Roth utilizes tragic references in order todeepen the implications of the theme of “passing” in the novel. Rankine’sessay usefully lists and outlines many of the implicit and explicit allusions totragedy in The Human Stain, highlighting the sheer number of intertextual

and generic references throughout the text. What his essay shares with thoseof Lyons and Safer, however, is a lack of attention to the way the relationshipbetween established motifs of tragedy and the particular story of Coleman Silkis itself treated as a significant theme in the novel. In other words, these criticsread The Human Stain simply as an embodiment of tragedy, rather than as areflection upon it and an examination of its processes and assumptions. It isno coincidence that the narrative structure of the novel does not play a largerole in their arguments, for it is here, and particularly in the role of NathanZuckerman as the novel’s narrator, that this examination and reflection pri-marily take place, and, as I will argue, that Roth undertakes his reinscriptionand re-imagining of tragedy.



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With this context in mind, the critic who has to date produced the mostcompelling exploration of tragedy in the novel is Geoffrey W. Bakewell. While

remarking that The Human Stain is “Sophoclean in theme: it addresses ourcultural taboos, and how we deal with those who violate them,” Bakewellalso sets out to examine how Roth “reshapes this Oedipal inheritance,” bor-rowing from established tragic patterns in a critical manner (30). Specifically,Bakewell argues that Roth reverses the epistemological structure of Sophocles’sdrama, so that gradual and painful self-discovery is replaced in The HumanStain by the revelation of the hero’s consciously hidden secret to the reader.Bakewell links this structural shift to the role of Zuckerman as the text’s nar-rator, acknowledging not only the often overlooked point that “The HumanStain is ultimately his creation and composed almost entirely of his empathetic

reconstructions and imaginings” (42), but suggesting further that Zuckermantakes on the mantle of tragic poet, “applying to Coleman’s life the standardexplanatory categories of accident and inevitability, destiny and fate” (43).Thus, rather than being simply “a newer novelistic version of the dramaticChorus” (Lyons 126), Zuckerman is also poet, messenger, and actor in hisown drama.2 And to his credit, Bakewell goes even further, recognizing thatin Zuckerman’s frequent reflections upon the role of tragedy in Coleman’s lifeand story, another kind of interrogation is going on, an interrogation that, as we shall see in what follows, touches upon questions of epistemology, ontol-ogy, and the basic possibility of tragedy itself. In a footnote, Bakewell hits

upon the major compositional question The Human Stain asks its readers, aquestion he states without attempting to answer: “If it really is a ‘foolish illu-sion’ to apply to ‘real life’ the forms and patterns of Greek tragedy, why doesNathan make this mistake so frequently?” (43). While my argument in thisessay will journey through the novel’s treatment of character, allusion, symbol-ism, temporality and Zuckerman’s role as narrator, it is Bakewell’s framing ofthis fundamental question that will mark both my point of departure and myfinal destination.3

TRAGIC REALITIES

Zuckerman writes of the “foolish illusion” of applying tragic forms to “reallife” late in the text, during a passage commenting upon Mark Silk’s mourn-ing ritual for his father; to understand the import of his remark in context we must begin at the novel’s beginning, and examine evidence of how tragicthemes and tropes are cited and utilized as the narrative progresses. Even asidefrom the epigraph, the centrality of tragedy to The Human Stain is made clearfrom the outset. Coleman is a professor of classics at Athena College, and indescribing The Iliad to his students, he implicitly connects the book we arereading with the original exemplar of tragedy: “there, for better or worse, inthis offense against the phallic entitlement, the phallic dignity , of a powerhouse

of a warrior prince, is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins,



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and that is why, close to three thousand years later, we are going to begin theretoday. . .” (5). Little has changed over time. We begin The Human Stain with

a latter-day warrior prince, who in an academic context has leveled the fieldbefore him, powerfully asserting his will in the reconstruction of a faculty thathe dredges from oblivion to high-level achievement. That this process makeshim enemies, who then turn against him in his hour of need, is a reversalcharacteristic of tragic story-telling. Coleman’s reaction to the new slights thatcome his way remind Zuckerman of “the derangement of […] the monarchdeposed” (23), and when the narrator comments that “[t]here is somethingfascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvi-ous way a weak or feeble person. […] Its raw realism is like nothing else” (12),the reader is reminded of the sufferings of Lear and Othello, blindsided by

their own flaws and the maliciousness of others. But it is only when Coleman’sbig secret is gradually revealed to the reader early in the second chapter thatthe full and complex irony of his position becomes clear. He is where he isas the result of a decision, an assertion of agency in the face of his racial fate,displaying what Arthur Miller saw in all tragic heroes: “his inherent unwill-ingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challengeto his dignity, his image of his rightful status” (4). And it is this decision that will unseat him and finally destroy him, in an irony reminiscent of the fateof heroes before him.

Although Zuckerman only discovers the secret of Coleman’s race, and thus

the secret of his decision, after the latter’s death in the final chapter, most ofthe discussion of Coleman’s back-story takes place in chapter two, “SlippingThe Punch.” This arrangement shifts the narrative emphasis from the reader’sdiscovery of Coleman’s “passing” (which could form the focus of a suspensenovel, or melodrama, for example) to an enquiry into the motives behind hischoice. The first foreshadowing of that choice comes in Coleman’s teenageyears, when he secretly takes up boxing, a fitting betrayal of the Shakespeare-loving but violence-hating father who had given him the middle name Brutus.On the advice of his coach Doc Chizner, in his first major fight Coleman men-tions nothing about his race, a suppression of information that inspires him

“to be more damaging than he’d ever dared before” (99), a drive he puts downto the power of having a secret: “He did love secrets. The secret of nobody’sknowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wantedto think with no way of anybody’s knowing” (100). “Everyone Knows,” theironic illusion of public knowledge invoked by the title of the opening chap-ter, and by Delphine Roux’s scurrilous letter therein, here become “nobodyknows,” as the secret enters as a major trope.4 His desire for secrecy will latermotivate Coleman’s decision to split with Ellie Magee, who knows he is black,and take up with his future wife Iris Gittelman, who doesn’t. The boxing anal-ogy reasserts itself as this decision is explained: “But here he comes roaring outof his corner—he has the secret again. […] He’s got the elixir of the secret,and it’s like being fluent in another language” (135-36).



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The language in which Coleman becomes fluent is the language of indi-viduality, of self. A key moment in his life is the death of his father, a removal

of constraint that encourages him to finally begin “making up” his own story,in which “[h]e was Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneers of the I” (107,108). An attempt to get away from group identification is instinctive for Cole-man, and in order to offer an explanation of this trait, Zuckerman imaginesa scene in Washington, DC in which Coleman, then at Howard, is called a “nigger” and refused a hotdog in Woolworth’s (102-103). This incident helpsformulate an ethic for his life: “You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry onyou any more than you can let the little they become a we and impose its eth-ics on you. […] Self -discovery—that was the punch to the labonz. Singularity”(108). Here we have the traditional American hero, the hero of self-invention.

But the language of self also invites the language of tragedy: “‘Beware the Idesof March.’ Bullshit—beware nothing . Free. […] Free to enact the boundless,self-defining drama of the pronouns we, they, and I” (108-109). Here is thefirst significant occasion in his life when Coleman chooses to ignore the adviceof the classical texts, advice beloved of his father, and goes his own way.

From this point onwards, the parallels and intertextual references to tragedydo not abate. Zuckerman, as narrator, is intent on delineating a tragic outlinefor Coleman’s life, and in so doing, is determined that tragic thoughts and ref-erences should enter Coleman’s mind as often as possible. Despite (or perhapsbecause of ) this, Coleman’s conscious relationship to tragedy, and the seeming

“tragedy” of his own life, is a vexed and complex one. Sometimes tragic refer-ences are used to support agency, while sometimes they emphasize fate andaccident; sometimes Coleman correctly recognizes parallels, and sometimeshe does not; sometimes his knowledge of tragedy aids his understanding andaction, and at other times he becomes puzzled, indignant and resistant to theteachings of his own field of specialism. Quoting Northrop Frye’s remark that“tragedy seems to elude the antithesis of moral responsibility and arbitraryfate,” Felski notes a general critical agreement that “what distinguishes tragedyis an uncanny unraveling of the distinction between agency and fate, internalvolition and the pressure of external circumstance” (xiii). We see this unravel-

ling played out in the various ways tragedy makes an impact on Coleman’sconsciousness, a selection of which is worth exploring.It is often in those moments when Coleman feels most strongly the power

of his own self-creation that his certainty is most starkly undone. When heinvites his first white girlfriend, Steena Paulsen, to dinner at his house, therebyrevealing his secret to her, the text focalizes his thoughts: “His decision toinvite her to East Orange for Sunday dinner, like all his other decisions now[…] was based on nobody’s thinking but his own” (118). This profession ofagency, forceful though it seems, is quickly complicated by a scene that occursa few pages later, in which Coleman meets Steena again, four years after theirbreak-up over the revelation of his race:



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The way it might have ended—the conclusion against which reality had deci-sively voted—was all he could think about. Stunned by how little he’d gotten

over her and she’d gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside hisreading in classical Greek drama he’d never had to understand before, how easilylife can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made. . . on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can neverturn out other than they do. That is, he walked away understanding nothing,knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about thisstubborn determination of his to become his own man if . . . if only such things

were understandable. (125-26)

This is a rich passage, foregrounding the themes of agency, destiny, andunknowability that are central to the text, and doing so through a moment

of anagnorisis (critical discovery) for the protagonist. Struggling to grasp themetaphysical meaning of his sudden recognition, Coleman is brought backto the Greek texts with a kind of baffled insight, and is left with an experi-ence of contingency that his own decisions, “based on nobody’s thinking buthis own,” had seemed designed to counteract. Now he realizes that “[w]hathappened with his mother and Walt could as easily never have occurred. HadSteena said fine, he would have lived another life” (126). At the close of thesection, the link that these thoughts have to tragic themes is made even moreexplicit: “He thought the same useless thoughts—useless to a man of no greattalent like himself, if not to Sophocles: how accidentally a fate is made . . . or

how accidental it all may seem when it is inescapable” (127). While the Greek parallels may appear uncanny, if useless, to Colemanin the above passage, at other moments he willfully rejects the trappings oftragedy, feeling that bare reality must contrast with the narrative conventionshe teaches in class. For instance, as Coleman watches Faunia jokingly interact with her co-workers on the Athena campus lawn, he suddenly regrets the pathhis life has taken, and vows to change:

To live in a way that does not bring Philoctetes to mind. He does not have to livelike a tragic character in his course. […] Jokingly dancing with Nathan Zucker-man. Confiding in him. Reminiscing with him. Letting him listen. Sharpeningthe writer’s sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist’s

mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms into writing. Catastropheis cannon fodder for him. But what can I transform this into? I am stuck with it.

As is. Sans language, shape, structure, meaning—sans the unities, the catharsis,sans everything. (170)

Coleman here projects as his other Zuckerman the writer, whose narrativeimaginings are taken to contrast with the unformed reality of his own exis-tence, an existence that ought to offer freedom to live outside the boundsof narrative convention. Yet it is not difficult to see that this repudiation ofnarrative form itself occurs within a narrative designed by Zuckerman (andof course by Roth), where “language, shape, structure, meaning” are provided

by the narrator in an echoing of the prior conventions that Coleman rejects.



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This illusion of a space of autonomy for a character to reflect on his experi-ence outside narrative, all while the reader is made aware of the writtenness

of the scene, is a typical trope of Roth’s fiction, characteristic of his particularapproach to the boundary between “the written and unwritten world” (Roth,Reading xiii).5 In this case it performs a specific role, preparing the readerfor a moment when Coleman’s refusal to absorb the lessons of tragedy willmean that he becomes bewildered by his own story, hanging grimly onto theconviction that everything is explicable in rational terms when his experienceconsistently suggests otherwise. This moment occurs when Coleman consid-ers the possibility that his son Mark hates him because he knows his secret:

That made no sense at all as a grievance—it could not be! Yet Coleman won-dered anyway, irrational as it might be to associate Markie’s brooding anger with

his own secret. […] If the children who carried his origins in their genes and who would pass those origins on to their own children could find it so easy tosuspect him of the worst kind of cruelty to Faunia, what explanation could therebe? […] Retribution was not unconsciously or unknowingly enacted. There wasno such quid pro quo. It could not be. And yet, after the phone call—leaving thestudent union, leaving the campus, all the while he was driving in tears back upthe mountain—that was exactly what it felt like. (176-77)

Coleman has been accustomed to reading classical tragedy in an allegori-cal manner—he is not prepared to have its “irrational” or “unconscious”anti-logic of retribution presented to him as the best causal explanation forhis son’s hate. Yet his repressed recognition here points to forces beyond his

understanding, forces that indelibly connect him to generations before andafter in a manner no ideology of agency, no attempt to grasp “the alternatedestiny, on one’s own terms” (139), can fully suppress.

TRAGIC ILLUSIONS

To this point, in discussing the “tragic realities” of The Human Stain, I have written as if, whatever the weight and variation of tragic influence on his lifeand consciousness, Coleman’s character is consistent and his story is explicableas a sequence in the manner indicated. I have done so because this is what the

early parts of the novel would have us believe; later, however, we encounter athorough unraveling of this logic of locatable cause and demonstrable effect.The realism of the novel’s second chapter is challenged by the epistemologicalspeculations of the fourth and the revelations of the fifth. The reader gradu-ally realizes just how much motivation Zuckerman has invented, and howmuch mapping and patterning he has had to carry out on an inexplicablelife. Now the narrative changes tack, and it is this very inexplicability thatis foregrounded. Spotting Coleman and Faunia at a summer concert in theBerkshires, leaning to talk to one another “about what, of course, I did notknow,” Zuckerman is prompted into an angry condemnation of the presump-tion to know that he finds everywhere in contemporary life:



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Because we don’t know, do we? Everyone knows . . . How what happens the wayit does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties,

the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs?Nobody knows, Professor Roux. […] What we know is that, in an unclichéd way,nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you know youdon’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don’t knowis astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. (208-209)

Although this diatribe is nominally directed at Delphine Roux, the way thesentiment reflects on Zuckerman’s own narrative project is striking. All thereader’s knowledge to this point, the illusion that “everyone knows […] whathappens the way it does,” has been provided not by Roux but by Zuckerman’smix of reportage and imaginings. Indeed Delphine herself, whom Zuckermannever meets, is almost entirely the creation of the latter’s pen.6 Narrative isa primary form of knowledge; in telling Coleman’s story, as well as those ofFaunia, Delphine and Les Farley, Zuckerman stands guilty of allowing imagi-nation to take the place of truth, of inventing intention, motive, consequence,meaning. But while the narrator can freely admit this guilt, and hence allowprovisional truth claims to be contextualized by the epistemological uncer-tainty that surfaces in passages such as the above, in the final movement ofthe novel a more profound problem begins to emerge.

When Ernestine tells Zuckerman the story of Coleman’s separation fromhis family, she admits that she is baffled as to her brother’s motives: “Colemannever in his life chafed under being a Negro. Not for as long as we knew him.

This is true. Being a Negro was just never an issue with him. […] Mother would propose reasons, but none was ever adequate” (324-25). Here the stresson the unlocatability of causes and the inexplicability of actions emphasizes theunknowability of the other person, the very otherness of the other. But whatalso begins to suggest itself to Zuckerman in these late passages is somethingmore radical: a basic discontinuity to life, a fragmentation that results when acoherent notion of subjectivity fractures and breaks down. Understandably,Zuckerman cannot resist attempting to connect the Coleman who revoltedagainst race and family to the Coleman who decided to quit Athena under aracist cloud, supposing that through this linkage some basic questions can be

answered: “Not that I was sure there was any connection, any circuitry loop-ing the one decision to the other, but we could try to look and see, couldn’t we? How did such a man as Coleman Silk come to exist? What is it that he was?” (332-33). But finding that such an enquiry leads nowhere, Zuckermanadmits his perplexity: “I couldn’t imagine anything that could have madeColeman more of a mystery to me than this unmasking. Now that I kneweverything, it was as though I knew nothing, and instead of what I’d learnedfrom Ernestine unifying my idea of him, he became not just an unknown butan uncohesive person” (333, my emphasis). All of a sudden, we witness a shiftfrom an epistemological problem to an ontological one. With the dawn of

Ernestine’s revelation it is as though Coleman ceases to submit to any notion



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of a unifying subjectivity, becoming “uncohesive,” his life a series of eventsunconnected by any underlying core of self. We glimpse here a recognition by

Zuckerman that not only can the connections that would indicate “what [it is]that [Coleman] was” not be discovered, but they may not in fact exist at all. Incondemning the gossipers of Athena, Zuckerman has already noted ironicallythat a label performatively effected upon a person can be thoroughly divorcedfrom any cause: “No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or ratio-nale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label isthe evidence. The label is the logic” (290). The label, presumably, is not thetruth. Yet Zuckerman’s own label for the events that have befallen Coleman,“tragic,” has by now become equally questionable as a true description of thestory he is attempting to tell.

As a result, the reader’s understanding of the tragedy that is in progressin The Human Stain must alter at this point.7 According to Arthur Miller,“Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of causeand effect” (6). Miller assumes that cause and effect can be known, and forhim the inner secrets of humanity, including the key dialectic of free will anddeterminism, are to be expounded by the keen artistic mind. Yet the under-mining of the tragic pattern is manifest in Roth’s novel. The central characterbecomes, for the tragic poet, “an uncohesive person.” His decisions no longerappear to have continuity: they do not occur due to particular and identifiablecharacter traits, but rather register as contingent events. This might seem to

bring us back, perhaps ironically, to a more Aristotelian view of tragedy—theimitation of an action and not of a character. Zuckerman mostly knows, afterall, what Coleman does in his life, if not the reasons why he does it. But inhis theory of tragedy Aristotle was still centrally concerned with the fate ofthe protagonist—“people possess certain qualities in accordance with theircharacter, but they achieve well-being or its opposite on the basis of how theyfare” (11)—and could not have countenanced an unknowable or uncohesivecentral presence in the drama. Yet while Zuckerman’s narrative examinationof cause and effect runs aground here, another mode of understanding, one oftraditional importance in literary art, shadows this search for causality, and is

offered at certain points in the text as a supplement or alternative. Aware thatlogical coherence fails to account for Coleman’s life, in his search for the kindof coherent insights that tragedy seems to require, Zuckerman at times turnsovertly to symbolism, the hermeneutic backbone of so much modern art.

TRAGIC SYMBOLS

The first major symbol in the text is the tattoo that Coleman receives on “the worst night of his life” (180, 184), the night he is forcibly removed from the white whorehouse in Norfolk. In an extraordinary scene, Zuckerman imag-ines the voice of Coleman’s dead father coming back to remind him of the

immensity of his racial defection: “A world of love, that’s what you had, and



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instead you forsake it for this! The tragic, reckless thing that you’ve done!”(183) Coleman promises his father’s spirit that if he gets through to his navy

discharge he will “never lie again” (182). Yet what becomes of this promiseis another in a long line of discontinuities. The narration suddenly switchesfrom free indirect discourse to a detached recounting of Coleman’s discoveryby shore patrol the next morning, with a fresh US Navy tattoo imprinted onhis arm. In considering the symbolic potential of this tattoo, we move backinside Coleman’s mind:

[I]t was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the hero-ism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total imageof himself. The ineradicable biography was there, as was the prototype of theineradicable, a tattoo being the very emblem of what cannot ever be removed.

The enormous enterprise was also there. The outside forces were there. The whole chain of the unforeseen, all the dangers of exposure and all the dangers ofconcealment—even the senselessness of life was there in that stupid little bluetattoo. (184)

The tattoo is a synecdoche par excellence —not only does it stand for the total-ity of Coleman’s life, but it also contains all the “outside forces” that completethe tragic pattern to which his life is subjected in the book. It seems to encloseall the meaning that the narrative as a whole meditates upon. And yet thecoherence offered is illusory: nothing can be learned from such symbolic pos-iting that can bring us closer to real understanding. This we can intuit becauseat this very point we witness perhaps the most abrupt shift in the entire novel:the narrative moves immediately from the above passage to an introductionto the vexed relationship between Coleman and Delphine which begins yearslater. The symbolic tattoo has proven an epistemological dead-end—it is as ifZuckerman cannot decide where else to go after the enclosing totality that itrepresents. His tragic narrative is attempting to map an authentic temporality, whereas the basic relation of symbolism, as Paul de Man has argued, “is one ofsimultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind, and in which the invention oftime is merely a matter of contingency” (207). Refusing an illusory modernistcoherence, Zuckerman cannot fully countenance understanding the world orColeman’s life in a manner that negates the importance of time.

To strengthen this reading, we can look to other examples of potentially all-encompassing symbols in the text. In the final confrontation with Les Farley,much of the palpable tension of the scene is created by the presence of Farley’sthreatening drilling tool, the auger. This unfamiliar word is no doubt utilizedto exploit its visual and aural similarity to “augur,” another term resonant withtragic potential. That the auge(u)r may hold the promise of wisdom is con-firmed when Zuckerman responds to the presence of the drilling tool a fewinches from his face: “Here. Here was the origin. Here was the essence. Here”(359). In this instant, the auge(u)r would seem, like the tattoo before it, toencapsulate the meaning of the entire narrative; and yet that meaning proves

more obscure than ever. Again, it is the very secrecy of meaning we are seeing,



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and it is fitting that Farley himself should recap on this theme in his eulogyto his “secret spot” in the mountains: “That’s how secret it is. Maybe I end up

tending to be a little dishonest. But this place is like the best-kept secret in the whole world” (349). “And now I know,” responds Zuckerman. But despite hisconfidence here, Zuckerman knows nothing, neither about this secret nor theothers he has struggled with in his narrative. Roth would seem to be mockingthe symbolic mode even while paying homage to it, never more so than in thefinal two lines of the novel, in which the entire scene becomes an ironic imageof purity and peace: “There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture.Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure andpeaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteeninches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian

mountain in America” (361). Here, at the novel’s millennial finale, is Roth’sdefinitive puncturing of a symbolic explanation of events. Denied “the wholestory” through the lack of knowledge and certainty offered by narrative, here we are offered “the whole picture.” Yet a moment of reflection reveals this tobe a grand forgery there is nothing pure and peaceful about Les Farley or whathe represents to Zuckerman, and behind this Thoreauvian image of arcadialies a murderous and disturbing reality. This reality could only be grasped,if at all, through the temporal terms of a tragic reading; the spatial “picture”offered by a symbolic hermeneutics cannot fill the necessary gap.

This symbol of the human mark on the arcadian landscape—“like the X

of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper” (361)—recalls once again what would seem to be the master symbol of the text, the one that gives the book itstitle both within the covers and without—the human stain itself. As a tragictrope it recalls the notion of hamartia , although the image, as it is exploredin the novel, suggests a more universal application than as a straightforwardanalogy with the hero’s fatal flaw. The passage within which the phrase occurshas Faunia Farley considering the deficiencies of the hand-raised crow she hasbecome fond of:

“That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The humanstain,” she said, and without revulsion or contempt or condemnation. Not even

with sadness. That’s how it is —in her own dry way, that is all Faunia was tellingthe girl feeding the snake: we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint.Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to behere. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvationor redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. […] All she wassaying about the stain is that it’s inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia’stake on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. (242)

Here, it initially seems, we have the final word on the tragic meaning of thenovel. The quest for purity (a quest Coleman appears to engage in through-out the novel) is a fantasy, a lie. It finds its image in the stain, a fundamentalmark common to all humans. Critics and commentators have been near-

unanimous in proclaiming this as the novel’s central message.8 Yet the final



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line of the above quotation should give us pause: “That, naturally, would beFaunia’s take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are.” To this point

in the narrative, Zuckerman has been at pains to imagine Faunia as a kind ofhyper-materialist. For her, all forms of metaphysical thinking are at fault forthe sins of the world.9 That a view ascribed to her should contain the coremessage of a novel so obsessed with metaphysical questions is not impos-sible, but more likely Zuckerman means to indicate that the stained natureof humanity is just one of a number of possible interpretations to place inthe epistemological vortex that the novel has by now become. Once again, asymbolic interpretation is here both imposed, and then undermined, func-tioning as a spatial substitute for the properly temporal meaning of the novel,a meaning embodied in the process of its reading.10

TRAGIC IMAGININGS

In his philosophical writings of the 1840s, Soren Kierkegaard shifted tragedyaway from an emphasis on the social and a reliance on truth categories towarda concentration on the individual as his own creator. Hence modern tragedy,in the hands of playwrights like Miller, became existential in nature. But inMiller, as in Bertolt Brecht and his followers, tragedy retained its instructiverole, which for Antonin Artaud, another great theorist of tragedy, was neces-sary for the genre: “We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads andthe theater has been created to teach us that first of all” (qtd. in Drakakis and

Liebler 5). Indeed, in exalting the tragic above other literary modes, Raymond Williams saw in it a profound lesson for understanding “the fundamentalbeliefs and tensions of a period,” arguing that through tragedy “the shape andset of a particular culture is often deeply realised” (45). But in The HumanStain, the tragic pattern is a failed one, as the uncohesive life of the protago-nist defeats the tragic unities, resists becoming a model for instruction, andfails to help us find the right way to live (as Miller, writing in 1949, claimedall tragedy must do [10]). Because of this breakdown, the explicit allusions to,and constant emphasis on, tragic tropes and texts throughout the novel canin fact be understood as an invitation to read the text as a critique of tragic

coherence (achieved either via narrative or symbol), rather than as an embodi-ment of it. It has always been disputed as to whether tragedy is a matter of lifeor a matter of art, and Roth’s novel suggests that, rather than the perennialthemes of tragedy persisting in unchanged form, it is in fact only the explicitreference to a literary tradition that can provide the illusionary stabilizing ele-ment in a fragmented world which we can never know.

And yet, as most readers of the novel will testify, The Human Stain isnot a work of fragments. This is because, as eventually becomes clear, whatdoes offer the novel its coherence is the voice and imagination of its narra-tor, Nathan Zuckerman. This is, of course, the case in all fiction, where the

controlling consciousness, in whatever form it takes, provides the connections



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between the different parts.11 But Roth’s novel goes a step further, thematizat-ing Zuckerman’s position as a surrogate for both the reader and writer of the

text. We see Zuckerman surveying the evidence for meaningful content justas a reader does, and then connecting that content imaginatively, just as thereader is wont to do. And Zuckerman is also that story’s provider, the writer who puts shape on his material, giving it a beginning, development andoverall order. His consciousness thus provides the temporal dimension to thenarrative that Coleman’s story fails to provide. Nonetheless, closure presentsa problem. Viewing Mark’s emotional breakdown at the funeral of his hatedfather, Zuckerman speculates that, just like the writer completing his story,Coleman’s son also desires a proper beginning, middle and end. Nonetheless,“outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of

completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusionfor an adult to hold” (315). And so we are back to the question of the “fool-ish illusion” that Bakewell highlights in his essay, the illusion of a tragic orderin “real life,” an illusion that Zuckerman himself appears to buy into in thecreation of his story.

To understand the origin and necessity of this illusion, we must look to where the story begins for the writer, where the decision to undertake beliefin the illusion comes. It occurs for Zuckerman at Coleman’s graveside: “stand-ing in the falling darkness beside the uneven earth mound roughly heapedover Coleman’s coffin, I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by

its beginning, and, then and there, I began this book” (337). Zuckerman isstirred to action by the thought of the arbitrary closure offered by death—“Death intervenes to simplify everything” (290)—and it is here that the writerfinds that he must enter the fray: “And that is how all this began: by my stand-ing alone in a darkening graveyard and entering into professional competition with death” (338). In The Human Stain, it finally becomes clear to the reader,the self-knowledge, recognition and revelation characteristic of tragedy haveoccurred not for the story’s ostensible protagonist, the unknowable ColemanSilk, but for the writer of that story. The battle against death, the battle againstpremature closure, is now carried out by the creative writer, who with this

recognition becomes the hero of the piece. Faced with the lack of meaningthat is death, Zuckerman’s task is a heroic one, because it involves a stancetaken against inevitability in favor of a temporal openness, a stance which isthe paradigm of all tragedy. That the writer must always take this stance Rothalso makes evident in American Pastoral , where Zuckerman declares, “Writingturns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may getit right someday is the perversity that draws you on” (63). Once again, that word “illusion” makes its presence felt, this time linked to a “perversity” thatreminds one of the vain struggle of Oedipus to escape his fate, or of Hamlet toundo the wrong that has been done to his father and state. Though he knowsit to be false, the writer must engage in the “foolish illusion” of “completion”



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and “consummation,” must use his imagination to find the things he cannotknow by other means:

Faunia alone knew how Coleman Silk had come about being himself. How doI know she knew? I don’t. I couldn’t know that either. I can’t know. Now thatthey’re dead, nobody can know. For better or worse, I can only do what everyonedoes who thinks that they know. I imagine. I am forced to imagine. It happensto be what I do for a living. It is my job. It’s now all I do. (213)

And finally, lest this act of imagining not be deemed heroic enough, TheHuman Stain ends with Zuckerman stepping out from the margins, wherehe has remained throughout Roth’s late trilogy, and back to centre stage, ina confrontation with his imagined nemesis, Les Farley. The epic scene set isreminiscent of The Iliad , Coleman’s favorite text and the one George Steiner

referred to as “the primer of tragic art” (5):

This great bright arched space, this cold aboveground vault of a mountaintopcradling at its peak a largish oval of fresh water frozen hard as rock, the ancientactivity that is the life of a lake, that is the formation of ice, that is the metabo-lism of fish, all the soundless, ageless forces unyieldingly working away—it isas though we have encountered each other at the top of the world, two hiddenbrains mistrustfully ticking, mutual hatred and paranoia the only introspectionthere is anywhere. (Stain 351)

Despite the evocatively literary setting, Zuckerman claims a reality for hisexperience that bypasses anything that has gone before in the novel: “This was

not speculation. This was not meditation. This was not that way of thinkingthat is fiction writing. This was the thing itself” (350). The power of these words brings to mind Miller’s claim, in his manifesto for modern tragedy,that “[y]ou are witnessing a tragedy when the characters before you are whollyand intensely realized, to the degree that your belief in their reality is all butcomplete” (11). Throughout the final scene of The Human Stain, despite thefact that the reader knows Zuckerman must survive in order to write the story we are reading, our belief in the reality of the danger he faces is indeed all butcomplete. Having provided an apparently genuine tragic hero in ColemanSilk, only to whisk him away again, Zuckerman is now repeating the trick,

with himself as replacement protagonist. The end of The Human Stain is theculmination of a journey begun in The Ghost Writer (1979), a journey thathas relentlessly explored how it is possible to place oneself at the center ofone’s art, while still achieving a universal significance only attainable in thecreation of fiction rather than autobiography.12 Finally, via a reinscription oftragedy, that most formidable of literary genres, Roth has found “the solution,the secret to his secret” (Stain 132). In an era marked by a progressive demys-tification of literature’s power, he has created a literary work with a genuinelymillennial force, so that the sense of a century ending, evoked in the novel’sfinal line, provides no reductive closure, but rather an opening up of freshpossibilities for the art of the novel in the new century to come.



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NOTES

1. In the short time since its publication, The Human Stain has garnered a large andvaried critical response, in keeping with what Derek Parker Royal terms “a revitaliza-tion of Roth studies within academia” (“Introduction” 2). The many essays devoted tothe novel in Royal’s two edited collections, in Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel’s collection,in the issues of Philip Roth Studies published to date, and in various other journals,indicate the scope of the appeal of The Human Stain to critics with markedly differ-ing interests, and point to its increasingly privileged status within the extensive Rothcanon, as perhaps the major novel of the “late” period (thus far).2. For an account of how the novel’s reviewers and early critics have generally under-

played Zuckerman’s imaginative role in the story’s construction, see Royal, “Plotting”(esp. 117n4). A thorough narratological analysis of the novel can be found in DebraShostak’s book on Roth (257-66).3. It is worth noting here that the complexity of Roth’s borrowing from the tragic

tradition is also evident in American Pastoral , the first book in his late trilogy. Whilethe chapter titles—“Paradise Remembered,” “The Fall,” “Paradise Lost”—would seemto suggest that the paradigmatic intertext is Genesis, it is not Swede Levov’s Adamic

pursuit of knowledge but his more Oedipal avoidance of it that the novel portrays ascentral to his downfall.4. According to Shostak, “Coleman has built his life around the premise that secrets

offer an escape from history” (258). But as she points out, narration is itself a betrayalof secrets; in the passage just quoted, Coleman’s cherished “nobody knows” is exposedto open view for the reader, so that the “everybody knows” principle appears to winout. However, I would add that this apparent exposure in fact prepares the reader forthe reversal inherent in Zuckerman’s disclaiming of knowledge later in the text, when“nobody knows” will reassert itself. This shift makes the earlier passage, and others like

it, doubly ironic in their discussion of the secret.5. The metafictional or postmodernist aspects of Roth’s aesthetic have provoked a

huge amount of critical debate. Apart from Shostak’s book, the most original recenttreatment appears in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era , where McGurl reads the “auto-poetic” reflexivity of Roth’s fiction through the frame of systems theory (51-56).6. For evidence pointing to the extent of Zuckerman’s imaginative construction of

Delphine Roux, and of Les Farley, see Royal (“Plotting” 119-20).7. This shift in understanding on the reader’s part shows how structures of recognition

and revision are invoked at the performative level of Roth’s text, just as they are forColeman and Zuckerman. While, as we have seen, Coleman suffers many moments oftragic insight in which his prior certainties are overturned, these moments can be readas displacements of Zuckerman’s own sudden realization at Coleman’s graveside that

so much of what he thought he knew about his friend was mistaken. And what allowsfor this displaced reading is the reader’s own gradual recognition of the full scale ofthe intertwined relationship between Coleman’s story and Zuckerman’s imagination,a recognition that invites a revisionary approach to understanding the meaning of thestory we have been told.8. See, as one example among many, Ross Posnock’s essay “Purity and Danger: On

Philip Roth.”9. Zuckerman draws Faunia’s difference to Delphine Roux most starkly on this point.

For Faunia, sex is a wholly concrete act; she says to Coleman at one point: “Don’t fuckit up by thinking it’s more than this. You don’t, and I won’t. It doesn’t have to be morethan this” (228). Delphine, in contrast, recoils at the purely material nature of inter-course; what she wants is “Sex, yes, wonderful sex, but sex with metaphysics” (262).

10. The centrality of symbolism within modernist critical practice is confirmed bythe tendency of critics to offer their own interpretative readings of the various symbols



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in The Human Stain. To offer just one of innumerable examples, Derek Parker Royalstates of Coleman’s tattoo that it functions as “a signifying mark of individual inde-

terminacy, of something that both is and is not there” (“Plotting” 136). While sucha reading is far from incorrect within its own terms, I would argue that in reading ametafictional text narrated by a writer-figure so eager to offer interpretations of hisown symbols, an enquiry into how symbols mean as much as what they mean must bekept at the forefront of a critical reading. Such a method respects the temporality ofthe reading process, a process I have tried to relate in this essay to the novel’s stagingand re-imagining of tragedy.11. This is what distinguishes the novel from drama, and the reason why the former

has always been a problematic home for tragedy: “The debate about whether the novelcan be a genuinely tragic form has been going on for some time, with mixed results”(Felski viii). And yet, as we shall see, Roth does finally reclaim tragedy for the novel.12. In this sense Exit Ghost (2007) reads like an exquisite coda to the achievement of

the trilogy, revealing the powerful and culminating presentness evoked by the ending ofThe Human Stain to be a thing of the past: “I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment” (1). In this novel we are presented with a Zuckerman whose powers—not just of body but now of mind and memory too—are finally begin-ning to irreversibly wane, resulting in a species of unreliable narration that, owing asit does primarily to age, seems quite unlike anything found in Roth’s previous work.

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. Poetics . Trans. Malcolm Heath. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Print.Bakewell, Geoffrey W. “Philip Roth’s Oedipal Stain.” Classical and Modern Literature 24.2

(2004): 29-46. Print.De Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of

Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1983. 187-228. Print.Drakakis, John and Naomi Conn Liebler, eds. Tragedy . London: Longman, 1998. Print.Felski, Rita. “Introduction.” Rethinking Tragedy . Spec. issue of New Literary History 35.1 (2004):

v-xx. Print.Halio, Jay L. and Ben Siegel, eds. Turning Up The Flame: Philip Roth’s Later Novels . Newark, DE:

U of Delaware P, 2005. Print.Lyons, Bonnie. “Philip Roth’s American Tragedies.” Turning Up The Flame: Philip Roth’s Later

Novels . Ed. Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2005. 125-30.Print.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing . London: Har-vard UP, 2009. Print.

Miller, Arthur. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller . Ed. Robert A. Martin. New York: Viking,1978. Print.

Posnock, Ross. “Purity and Danger: On Philip Roth.” Raritan 21.2 (2001): 85-101.

Rankine, Patrice D. “Passing as Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the Oedipus Myth, andthe Self-Made Man.” Critique 47.1 (2005): 101-12. Print.

Roth, Philip. American Pastoral . London: Vintage, 2003. Print.—. Exit Ghost . London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Print.—. The Human Stain. London: Vintage, 2001. Print.—. Reading Myself and Others . London: Vintage, 2001. Print.Royal, Derek Parker, ed. Philip Roth’s America: The Later Novels . Spec. issue of Studies in American

Jewish Literature 23 (2004): 1-181. Print.—. “Introduction; Or, ‘Now Vee May Perhaps to Begin, Yes?’” Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an

American Author . Ed. Royal. Westport, CT: Praeger-Greenwood, 2005. 1-7. Print.—, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author . Ed. Royal. Westport, CT: Praeger-

Greenwood, 2005. Print.—. “Plotting the Frames of Subjectivity: Identity, Death, and Narrative in Philip Roth’s The

Human Stain.” Contemporary Literature 47.1 (2006): 114-40. Print.



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Safer, Elaine B. “Tragedy and Farce in Roth’s The Human Stain.” Critique 43.3 (2002): 211-27.Print.

Sands, Kathleen. “Tragedy, Theology, and Feminism in Time After Time.” Rethinking Tragedy .Spec. issue of New Literary History 35.1 (2004): 41-61. Print.

Schmidt, Dennis J. On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life . Bloomington: Indi-ana UP, 2001. Print.

Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives . Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P,2004. Print.

Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy . London: Faber, 1961. Print. Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy . (2nd ed.) London: Verso, 1979. Print.

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