The Human Stain

The book The Human Stain is the one of the Roth’s trilogy, and as the specialists consider, it must be viewed in the complex with these two books – “American Pastoral” and “I  married Communist”. In these books as in the historical process Roth shows the changes that happened in American society and culture during the second part of the twentieth century. In these books the problems that are truly American are depicted so they may be difficult for understanding of other cultures. That is why we can call Roth truly American author. I n his works we can find influence of other world and American writers. As for me, his style reminds much that of Nabokov, with his way of narrative and usage of time switch and the back-and-forth style. This creates the mystery and the interest of the reader and makes him read the story till the end.

The novel ”The Human  stain” handles many problems, the main of them are: freedom, question of race, sex, feminism, family relations, etc. Roth gives a genuine picture of the modern American society and tackles such questions of American culture as racism, political correctness, American dream; there are also problems of universal significance such as the right of a person for personal freedom, the question of relations, and the human stain – the purity and a natural sin. 

There are many references to the situation in America during that time. The narrator, Nathan Zuckerman gives a picture of the society in the beginning of the novel, making many references to news, weather of that year, sports, etc. It becomes real when we read about news of baseball, Miss America, and of course about Impeachment of Bill Clinton. Because it is the centre of the novel: the events happen in the 1998,in the summer of impeachment, and Zuckerman writes how much place it took in the minds of the people. It has the symbolic role in the novel – we can draw parallels between the private tragedy of the main character Coleman Silk and the public story of Bill Clinton. They both got  into the public scandals, and their charges were similar. Silk was accused of  racism, betrayed by his colleague, and somehow it resembles the story of the President. The both of them loose  their positions, their careers, their respect in the eyes in the eyes of the society – the position they strived for so long is upset because of the private mistake of which somebody make a public issue. Coleman Silk looses his dean position at the college, and later all his life tumbles down.

Even the name of the novel – the human stain, the stain on the whole human race – is associated with the stain  on the Monica’s dress, that was the important evidence  in the process of accusing the President.

This problem and parallelism helps also for discovering one of the main ideas of the novel: the freedom of private life. Nathan Zuckerman mentions he had a dream of banner around the White House with the words “Human Being lives here”. This is the essence of the idea of freedom thus, the novel says about the right of everyone for private life and personal experience. The words of Silk about the missing students became the object of public gossip and brought to the scandal in the college – as well as the affair of Clinton with Monica Levinski became the food for the press, news and gossips, and that brought to the collapse of the presidential career. Their behavior was wrong, that is easily understood by the people – but they are humans as well, they also bear “the human stain” and have right for mistake – this is what is hard to comprehend by the public opinion. The public did not let them space for mistakes. And this is how Philip Roth touches the universal question of  forgiveness – personal and public. The society could not forgive both Clinton and Silk – so it ended in the personal tragedies for both of them.

The problem of forgiveness lies not only in the difficultness of the case, and in the evil of the committed sin – but also in ability of the people to see this sin in themselves, to understand the one who committed it, and to forgive. To accept the wrong in others is often to acknowledge it in us. And it is the most difficult for the humans because we are all proud and do not want to acknowledge our mistakes. This is where the title “The Human Stain” converts the idea of the novel – that all of us bear the human stain, this inborn ability to make mistakes  and the desire to choose wrong.

This is presented in the words of Faunia Farley when she watches the girl feeding the snake, and the words of Roth: “It is human stain. We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave an imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke ”. Roth views the standards and the rules  as the means of introducing the wrong ideas into the human minds. Without the prohibit the people would not get the idea to break this prohibit, without the law they would not get idea to break it – thus the law dictating not to do certain things also prompts people to do it. Roth at the example of the political correctness shows this where it can exceed  to the absurdness. The existence of this principle brings to many comic and tragic cases, which do not happen in other countries though the multicultural and racial problems exist there as well. But the case of political correctness comes to such accession only in the USA. And one of the tragic stories is that of Colonel Silk accused of being politically incorrect.

This what Philip Roth means by saying that the impurity is deep-rooted in the human race and all the cleansing  is unreal and a joke. In Roth’s study of good and evil the source of evil is the temptation to purity.

This problem is not only one of American society that is why the novel of Roth has the universal importance. The human stain can be called the inborn sin, or human weakness, but it all is about the eternal category of philosophy, culture, and literature – the opposition of good and evil. This is where “The  Human Stain” can be compared to the book of Indian author Salman Rushdie “Satanic Verses”. This book is very symbolic, with the unusual fusion of narrative and the philosophic meditations, and its subject is the same – the study of good and evil.

Another pure American problem of this novel is Roth’s genuine description of “the state of American soul” as the magazine Booklist writes. It also writes of Coleman Silk as of the embodied ambition, paradox, anger and futility of American dream. Through the character of Silk, through his broken career, and abandoned hopes the whole category of discouraged people is introduced – people who hoped and longed for something, and put all their efforts into this -  what is called American dream  - and either they did not achieve their dream, or they achieved it but got disillusioned when the fulfillment of their dreams  failed to make them happy.

Another problem of the novel is racism, and it is viewed at the different levels. The conflict of the book is based on the charge in racism to Coleman Silk  which is rather ironical. The core of it were the words of Silk about his two missing students “Does anyone know this people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” – and these two students turned out to be black. Upon this phrase the accusation is built.  But the truth is that he used the word in the right meaning: the first meaning is ghost, and the secondary is related to the black person. The irony is also in that Coleman Silk is African American and he is accused of racism towards the black students.