“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner wrote that line in Sanctuary, published in 1931. In this sense, Philip Roth is Faulkner’s heir.
Roth is a strange author to recommend. He writes beautifully, wrestles with deep questions, and his books are quite well described by his own definition of satire: “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.” But, along with the good, you have to take a lot of ruminations about sex.
Fifteen years ago, I tried to read Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint) and about two dozen pages in, I gave up, thinking I would never return. Then along came one of those bright, fascinating students with whom every conversation was lively, fun, and thoughtful and she really wanted to read a Roth novel as part of an independent study. I figured I might as well give him another chance. The Plot Against America. Wow, it was good.
So, the next semester, she did another independent study and all we did was read Roth. Since then, his novels have been regularly on my To Be Read list. The Library of America has his complete works! (A curious thing about the Library of America Roth novels—the spines on the dust jackets are formatted differently than on every other LOA volume. It is strange looking. I have no idea why they broke the format for Roth.)
The latest read: The Human Stain.
First, the title. It shows up in the novel in a discussion about crows. A crow raised by humans escapes the house and finds itself attacked by the other crows.
“That’s what comes of being hand-raised,” said Faunia. “That’s what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The human stain,” 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 telling the 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 be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark. Without the sign it is there. The stain so intrinsic it doesn’t require a mark. The stain that precedes disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke. A barbaric joke at that. The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity? All she was saying about the stain was that it’s inescapable. That, naturally, would be Faunia’s take on it: the inevitably stained creatures that we are. Reconciled to the horrible, elemental imperfection.
Roth is thinking about Oedipus (more about that anon), but another name for “The Human Stain” is “Original Sin.” Original sin precedes disobedience. Original sin encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. Try to explain Original Sin and you’ll see; it is very hard to make sense of how we all become permanently stained with original sin before birth. But we are. Augustine knew this, which is why he has that odd bit at the start of Confessions lamenting how sinful he was as a baby for selfishly crying for milk.
Original sin is in everyone. It is indwelling, inherent and defining. It is inescapable. It is a horrible, elemental imperfection.
It is interesting to look at the reviews of The Human Stain. Most of them miss the point entirely, largely because they neither noticed the title of the book nor the epigraph from Oedipus the King. Most reviews focus on the event that kicks off the novel.
Coleman Silk was a professor and the Dean of Faculty at Athena College, the fictional place in the Berkshires near where Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman resides. Well, Silk, it turns out, is also an old Jewish man, so Roth has two alter-egos in this novel. Roth likes to put himself in his books. (He even has a set of books where the fictional protagonist is named Philip Roth.)
Silk is teaching a class on the Greeks late in his life. Fourteen students. Half-way through the semester, he had only seen 12 of the students. So one day he asks the dozen students who are there about the ones who have never shown up to class, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”
Career over.
The two students whom he had never seen were Black, and thus his comment was obviously interpreted to be racially motivated. He protested that “spooks” means “ghosts” and he had never even seen these students, so how could he possibly be using a racial slur? His protests fell on deaf ears. He ended up leaving the college. The novel picks up when Silk visits Zuckerman and asks him to write up the story. (Curiously, Roth later revealed that this episode actually happened at Princeton. A professor actually said exactly what Silk said in the novel and the furor ensued.)
So, at the start of the novel, you think you are settling in for a long tale of the academy. Easy target. But then there is a genuinely surprising development (well, surprising unless you have previously read a review or you read what comes next in this here blog post). Silk had lived his entire adult life deceiving everyone. He is Black. His skin is light enough that when he joined the army, he changed his race and when he got out of the army, he walked away from his family, and proceeded to live his life as if he was a white Jew. He got married, had children and none of them ever knew any different.
So, when the furor erupts at Athena College, Silk cannot say that he is not just some old white professor hurling racial slurs. He has spent his whole life trying to escape from his past. In the end, his attempt to avoid his past becomes the very reason he cannot solve the problems of the present. Cue Oedipus.
The story is set against the backdrop of the national news story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And in a conversation Silk overhears in a local café, three young men are discussing how Clinton’s problem is that now that he was on the President, he could not escape his Arkansas past.
Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him….What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you’re still back in Arkansas, you don’t fall from a very great height…the scale was right in Arkansas. Here it was all out of whack. And it must have driven him crazy. President of the United States, he has access to everything, and he can’t touch it. This was hell.
Silk cannot escape his past. Clinton cannot escape his past. And as soon as you notice the pattern, you realize that nobody in this book can escape their past. Everyone is stamped with the Human Stain. “We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint.” There is nothing that can be done about it.
As the tale of Oedipus shows, it is impossible to cure ourselves of the fact that we leave that stain on the world. There is no purification possible. The attempt to cleanse is a joke. But, that is not enough for Roth. He goes even further: “The fantasy of purity is appalling. It’s insane. What is the quest to purify, if not more impurity?”
Because Roth is thinking about the Oedipus story, this conclusion follows. Oedipus is doomed. Indeed, the whole of Greek tragedy teaches the same lesson. We are all doomed. Our flaws define us and we fall and there is nothing that can be done. It you attempt to cure the stain, you make things worse.
The Human Stain perfectly captures the underlying tone of all of Roth’s novels. There is a fatalism in Roth. He cannot escape his own past. He cannot escape the moral outrage he feels when seeing the effects of the Human Stain, of original sin. And so, he turns to satire, to that comic art, to being the clown talking endlessly about sex, but underneath the clowning is that outrage that we are all Oedipus and we are all doomed.
How deeply does the Human Stain mark us? Consider: What if Roth is wrong? What if there was a way to purify yourself from the Human Stain? Would you even be interested?
