I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.
I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.
Phillip Roth was one of those writers I heard about when I was young. He was famous for being a writer. Particularly known for books like Goodbye, Columbus and The Breast. I do not think my mother would have appreciated me reading a novel titled The Breast. He stayed famous and living in the periphery of my world through book reviews and interviews. Nothing indicated any need existed for reading him. There came a time, over 40 years ago now, that I decided I could never be a serious writer; that I needed to make money, not art. That project did not turn out well.
I found his books in prison when I decided to fill in the holes of literary education. They were the later novels; I still have not read The Breast. And I came to lament not reading him when I was much, much younger. I credit Saul Bellow with making me think I could never be a serious reader. Roth gave me the antidote to Bellow.
See, Roth came from a New Jersey factory town, just like I came from an Indiana factory town. Yes, I am not Jewish, but there is also a Hoosier tradition.
I am experimenting with some of these videos, and the following are examples of this. They are college lectures from a course on the American novel from 1945. I read Roth's The Human Stain while in prison. It is Roth plunging into the most vexatious issue in America: racism. My notes on that are in a box in this apartment, so forgive me doing this from memory. I thought what Roth did was brilliant, but as with Roth contentious - was he a natural-born contrarian? Brilliant because the approach makes us think about who is a racist and the twists racism needs to make itself seem rational.
The experiment is to find out what I understood (or not) about the novel in question, and to see if academia might touch off some ideas for my own writing.
I do wish the videos had better sound. What came across to my ears is identity. The Good Lord knows we hear enough about that nowadays. Everyone has something that defines their identity to such an extent any questioning raises a prickly defensiveness. I saw that yesterday in the group session when I raised Elon Musk as an example of a billionaire as a salesman/grifter living off of government subsidies rather than a creator of value; the counselor rallied to Musk's defense, implying I was making an ad hominin attack on Musk. The counselor's identification with capitalism as embodied by Musk seems to be so important, even necessary, to his personality. A bit of a bore when it comes to conversation. Still, this is what, it seems to me, Roth drives at with this novel - undermining our easy understanding of ourselves and others. Identity we can create for ourselves. Why we create our identities should be open to our examination. This has been known since the days when the Greeks admonished, "Know thyself."
After shooting my mouth off in the preceding paragraph, I decided I ought to check out what might have been written about The Human Stain.
Book Review: The Human Stain by Philip Roth (Full of Lit) (July 21, 2024)
While I was reading The Human Stain by Phillip Roth, I felt like I had to talk about it with someone, so I explained the premise to my brother, and my brother said something along the lines of, “How did he write so much—an entire novel—about that?!” Which basically sums up my feelings about this book. The central concept of the novel is very topical in our age of cancel culture and the rampant sanctimonious hypocrisy, and how Roth fleshed it out is mind-blowingly outrageous in an enjoyable way, but the story did drag on, and I think both the length and the structure of the novel were a disservice to the book.
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Roth’s prose is simultaneously extremely wordy, very easy to read, and emotionless. At times, the writing would be on a roll, but then it would transition into a rant or equally uninteresting exposition. And the emphasis on lust and sex was so banal to me. Also, there were intentional POV switches that were jarring. The novel is written in first person, but “I” is used many times by more than just the narrator. I think the idea is that us readers are supposed to be so absorbed in that character’s stream-of-conscious thoughts that we don’t notice the switch that makes it more personal, but it didn’t work. Whenever another character would start being written in the first person “I” without dialogue to justify it, I would think it was a mistake until it happened too often with too many characters to be unintentional.
But the actual story was fascinating and the social commentary often poignant and incredibly bold. And all the characters had a lot of depth. At times perhaps too much depth since not all of it pertained to the story. But it was impressive nonetheless. I thought Les Farley, the Vietnam veteran who was the most violent villain of the novel and the most tortured, was impressively characterized. Though he had so much PTSD he turned into a violent man, Roth made him a sympathetic character. I’m not sure if that was entirely on purpose, perhaps Roth was just trying to explain Farley’s motivations, but that alone made him into a human worthy of sympathy if not pardonable.
Reading The Human Stain (Ploughshares, April 10, 2019)
First impressions can be misleading. My initial reaction at reading the first page of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain was, “Ugh.” His famous narrator/stand-in, Zuckerman, was, right off the bat, lecturing me about how puritanical it was of the American people to condemn Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The tone was cold and condescending. I was considering putting down the book and surreptitiously giving the stink eye to my husband, who had described it as “amazing.”
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I came to find Roth’s book to be an in-depth, punch-in-the-gut study of the notion of judgment and blame-laying. It is the strange tale of a self-invented man who abandons his own personal history to reconceive himself and rise up the ranks of academia, only to be felled by a misspoken word that pegs him as racist, costs him the deanship, and leads to his resignation and withdrawal from society. In it, Roth (via Zuckerman) deals with questions of personal merit, morality, freedom of speech, and self-definition. He attempts to depict each of the characters honestly—the shamed professor; his hard-knock, illiterate lover; the lover’s murderous Vietnam veteran ex-husband; the professor’s estranged sister—only to keep coming up against a trait that just doesn’t fit, forcing him to go back to the drawing board and rethink his assessment of them. Philip Roth seems to be concerned with the very question of how we judge certain actions and phenomena in their time and through the lens of years passed.
The genius of The Human Stain (Lesley Chamberlain, August 7, 2018) is the longest, most detailed, and the most thought-provoking of these reviews:
Would they have given Philip Roth a Pulitzer prize for such an indictment of the state of America as his great novel, The Human Stain, turned out to be? It wasn’t published until 2000 but maybe it was in gestation when Roth collected his award for American Pastoral (1997).
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Stain tells the story of the fate of Roth’s intellectual and culturally liberal but still male-dominated generation; essentially how that European-minded golden age of the 1950s/1960s, and which had such great hopes of a liberal America, came to an end; and it tells it magnificently.
Roth, born in 1933, from the outset wanted to write American literature informed by the Jewish-American community in which he grew up in New Jersey. But the influence of Thomas Mann, and of the Greek tragedians, was so strong, and was so much part of the culture of secular emancipation that came his way by virtue of family and education, that they had to become part of his work. The European influence was complex, pessimistic and Freudian. The writer Erica Wagner recently quoted Roth in an interview with her in 2009 as saying that the novelist as an artist must ‘not deny…the tormented human being’ but ‘allow for the chaos…otherwise you produce propaganda.’ Of course there were other literary influences, Jewish and Russian above all, but it was Mann and the Greeks who delivered the high-minded vitalist pessimism at work in the Stain.
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Think again then of the chaos that in 2009 Roth told Erica Wagner no writer worth his or her art should exclude from the human narrative. That other humanizing value, of chaos, is what Roth learned from Nietzsche and Freud and Mann. You have to acknowledge it. It is also our human existence. Silk engages in a two-year orgy of physical love with Faunia Farley, a college cleaner. It is most certainly a redeeming love they have for each other, though the choice doesn’t fit his college self at all. The cultural hallmark of Faunia, repeated over and over, is her illiteracy. I want to write about that lack of basic learning separately so I won’t dwell on it here. But in Stain illiteracy may be the punishment of the gods for the way America has re-formed itself since the Vietnam War. It has not acknowledged the chaos but hidden behind its monuments.
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Roth’s contempt is for an America driven by ‘what the Europeans unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan call America’s core values…it’s not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler had never happened… it’s as though not even the most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race…and here in America either it’s Faunia Farley or Monica Lewinsky!…This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with.’ (pp.153-54)
The distant background to the novel is the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, but that’s not what leaves Roth aghast.
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Political correctness over race, and patriotic lies covering the tragedy and the terrifying futility of defeat by the Vietcong, are intertwined in the Coleman/Faunia story as surely as their limbs are threaded together, and their ecstasy is the only antidote. She doesn’t care whether he’s white or black. He doesn’t care whether she’s a whore, whether she can’t read, whether she caused the death of her children in a fire. Faunia’s victimized life is almost impossible to lead, but, like Silk’s after his ousting, its redeeming quality is it’s not a lie.
***
Now, not only is this a sentence, in English, of Mannian proportions. It seems to describe and almost physically to evoke, with that sustained metaphor of what must be dragged to the surface and interwoven with the unintellectual quotidian, the task Roth set himself as an American writer mindful of the most powerful European literary heritage. Writing ostensibly of Bellow in the year in which The Human Stain was published, and when his own great trilogy meditating on American life was complete, Roth seemingly got so carried away by his own literary passion that his description of it almost failed to cohere. I still have trouble with that ‘flatly unproblematized’ every time I read it. Yet I think it refers to ‘making transparently ideological claims’ and therefore repeats the point Roth made in that 2009 interview, that the literary art cannot be a matter of propaganda but must let in the chaos from the nasty human depths. It is almost a sociological reading of Nietzsche and Freud and Thomas Mann, and a European modernist must see that as a deviation. It is a travesty for the European modernist literary product, in which the agony is formal, and a matter of individual consciousness, to be democratized into an American epic where the tensions are puritanical and racial. And yet one might say that in the year 2000 Roth re-embodied the Apollonian-Dionysian tension in a great novel for the first time in decades, and so enabled that tradition to live on, like the great-grandchild of one of Hitler’s long ago German exiles, like Mann himself, on the other side of the Atlantic.
What I would not have done with the scant information available to me in prison would be joining Thomas Mann and Philip Roth. But being exposed to the idea, it does seem so plausible. Balancing The Magic Mountain against what I have read of Roth, Magic Mountain seems so much heavier than Roth. And Roth seems far more disruptive than Mann. Which feels akin to what the last quote calls democratizing.
Chaos runs rampant through our public life, while what I can get to read of current writers suppresses chaos. Rough edges feel sanded down. Frankly, for all Roth admires Bellow, I did not see the chaos in Bellow as rough as what Roth wrote about; Roth's chaos was the kind I knew; and that familiarity led to my attachment to Roth.
The Human Stain (Slate, April 25, 2000)
Roth may think he’s wandering into Ralph Ellison territory (Invisible Man is one of his favorite American novels), but personally, I suspect that he’s no more interested in the black experience than he ever was, which is to say, not very. Roth is rarely able to work up passion for anything that doesn’t touch him directly. What appeals to him about Coleman’s story, I think, is this idea of passing as something that’s both necessary for Coleman’s survival as an individual and an act of incomprehensible cowardice and betrayal, particularly of his silently suffering mother. In other words, Coleman is there to give concrete expression to Roth’s guilt at his own earlier rebellions, a remorse that has been palpable in his writing since at least Patrimony, a memoir of his father’s death published in 1991.
Now, appropriating other people’s experiences and turning them into representations of your own may not be a bad thing–it’s what novelists do, after all. And before I even let you respond to this question, I’ve got to get one other thing out there. I may seem to be criticizing Roth for repeating himself, or creating characters who are less than fully realized, or being hopelessly self-involved, but I don’t mean to. Roth is who he is, and more power to him. He’s an egomaniacal genius whom I’d rather read than just about any other American writer I can think of. No one writes sentences like his, propelled by an unstoppable urgency but structured, mordant, and always animated by just the right detail. No one is less apologetic or more fervent about his moral seriousness, an admirable quality at a time when irony is the more pervasive mode, even if Roth does tend to hector his readers, as New Republic critic James Wood points out in his review of The Human Stain. No one subjects dangerously autobiographical material to as much will and intelligence and mastery, thereby redeeming what in the hands of anyone else would come off as self-pity or vengefulness. Wood is skeptical of this overexplicitness: Roth, says Wood, is “determined to illuminate what might better be crepuscular, to color what might better be gray, to haul into speakability the wordless.” That’s true, except I think that this obsessive, almost rabbinical love of exegesis lies at the heart of Roth’s accomplishment. Roth’s novels may not always work (in my opinion, The Human Stain is nowhere near as great as American Pastoral or Sabbath’s Theater, my two favorite late-Roth books), but I won’t stop reading and rereading them anyway.
The second part of the Yale lecture is here:
One last thing about The Human Stain: its plot and its details elude my memory in a way that American Pastoral does not, but its moral remains anchored in my brain.
sch 7/18
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