Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition by Andy Connolly

Author:Andy Connolly
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 4

“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes”1

Race and Ethnicity in The Human Stain

In The Human Stain, Zuckerman sets out to recount the highly complex biography of his late friend, Coleman Silk. Having earlier rebuffed requests to act as the ghost writer of Silk’s personal memoir, Zuckerman’s later decision to use Coleman’s story as a source of fiction is stimulated by the surprising revelation that a grave secret had lain at the center of the latter’s life. While attending Coleman’s funeral, Zuckerman is made aware that Silk was in fact African-American by birth and that his racial origins had been concealed to the wider world by his single-minded decision, made some fifty years earlier, to pass as a white man. Coleman’s initial act of passing is made during a post-war period in which American society was still structured hierarchically along racial lines, and was thus fully consonant with the myriad array of adaptive strategies used by African-Americans to deal with the long history of slavery and racism in America. However, as demonstrated by the cruelly ironic fate that befalls him in the novel, Coleman’s experimental approach toward coping with his racial disadvantage is rendered wholly anachronistic by the period in which he and Zuckerman first meet.

Zuckerman’s brief friendship with Silk develops in the late 1990s when the historical incentives motivating Coleman’s efforts to hide his origins have been largely supplanted by the self-empowering and protective racial categorizations that emerged in the post–Civil Rights era. The two men become acquainted following an incident in which the aged Coleman, by now a successful professor of ancient Greek literature at Athena College, has been accused of using a pejorative epithet to describe two African-American students whom he has never met and whose racial identities, as a result, are unknown to him. Despite arguing that his use of the word “spooks” was intended as a jocular means of calling into doubt the corporeal existence of two students who had never attended his class, Coleman incurs the zealous wrath of a number of politically correct faculty at Athena. Having been accused of racism, he departs from his academic post in a pique of rage. Determined to enlist help in writing an autobiography that he hopes will prove both a personal defense and a retributive form of vengeance against his accusers, while at the same maintaining intact his deep personal secret, Coleman calls on Zuckerman, the local writer who is—in ways that extend the metaphor of passing in The Human Stain—also somewhat in “hiding” from the greater social world.

According to Elaine Ginsberg, “both the process and the discourse of passing interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction.”2 Ginsberg suggests that passing not only challenges racist assumptions but also calls into question contrastingly defensive notions of racially determined subjectivity that are brought into play by identity politics: “[i]n its interrogation of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a space for creative self-determination and agency.”3 In ways that

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