philip roths great books: a reading of the human stain

Philip Roth’s Great Books: A Readingof The Human Stain

Kasia Boddy

AS PHILIP ROTH APPROACHES the fifty-first year of his career as a novelist,it has come to seem natural to him to measure his own achievementagainst that of those other writers whose work, in his view, most requiresbeing measured against. Roth belongs to the first generation of Americannovelists for whom a university education in the liberal arts was the norm.It is no surprise, therefore, that the literature he has measured himselfagainst should include classical Greek tragedy and epic: the starting-pointfor any Great Books course in any American university in the early1950s. For Roth, however, such reckonings have never just been aboutreputation. From the very start, they enabled him to explore, from theoutside, what it is he has been trying to do as a novelist. This essay willchart Roth’s developing acquaintance with classical literature and theimplications of his understanding of the difference in scope and purposebetween the two representative classical genres for our understanding ofhis fiction. It will focus on The Human Stain (2000), the novel in which hemost directly reflects upon what tragedy and epic once did, and whatmight happen to novels if they became more like one or the other. Whenit comes to thinking about literary history and form, Roth the student andRoth the celebrated novelist are perhaps not all that far apart.

Oedipus the King

In The Human Stain, the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, attends the funeralof a newish friend, Coleman Silk, a professor of Greek at a smallMassachusetts college called Athena. Observing Silk’s estranged son Mark

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in ‘wild . . . lamentation’, Nathan is less than generous in imagining whatmight be going on in the young man’s head.

He [Mark Silk] thought Coleman was going to stay here until thewhole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman hadbeen set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenianacropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before theeyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigor-ously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually.1

Whatever Mark himself thinks (and we never discover), Zuckerman – anovelist by trade – is clearly interested in considering whether the pro-fessor of Greek’s life can be viewed in terms of classical tragedy, ormore particularly, as a version of Oedipus the King. As several critics havepointed out, Silk resembles Oedipus in that he willingly performs aseries of actions which lead to his own ruin. Unlike Oedipus, though,Silk has always known more about his own identity than anyone else.2

Born and raised in a black family, in 1948 he decides to pass as a Jewin order to pursue an academic career. Fifty years later, he wondersaloud in class if two perpetually absent students were ‘spooks’. Hisintention is to speak of ghosts but, because the students concerned areblack, he is understood to be making a racist slur and forced to resign.Following the death of his wife Iris (which he attributes to the shame ofthe scandal), Silk is hounded by a vituperative French feminist colleague(Delphine Roux) who exposes his affair with a young woman janitor(Faunia Farley). Faunia and Coleman die when their car is run off theroad, possibly by her ex-husband Lester. ‘The passionate struggle forprecious singularity, his revolt of one against the Negro fate – and justlook where the defiant great one had ended up!’, reflects Zuckerman(HS, p. 183). If Coleman Silk might be compared to Oedipus, then theadministrators of Athena College seem to resemble the citizens ofThebes in their dedication to the task of cleansing the community ofthe ‘pollution grown ingrained within’.3 Zuckerman draws a furtherparallel between Athena’s attempt to rid itself of purported racismand sexism, and America’s concurrent determination to impeach

1 Philip Roth, The Human Stain [HS] (London 2001) p. 314.2 Geoffrey Bakewell argues that one of Roth’s ‘greatest innovations is to invert

the epistemological structure’ of Sophocles’ play. ‘Philip Roth’s Oedipal Stain’,Classical and Modern Literature, 24/2 (2004) pp. 29–46: 30.

3 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 97, in David Grene, Three Greek Tragedies inTranslation (Chicago 1942) p. 90.

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Bill Clinton following his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The novel’sepigraph from Oedipus the King makes this explicit:

OEDIPUS. What is the riteOf purification? How shall it be done?

CREON. By banishing a man, or expiationof blood by blood . . . 4

Citing the parallels outlined above – and there are several others –Geoffrey Bakewell concludes that Zuckerman has given ‘the events inColeman’s life their tragic shape’, ‘casting’ him ‘as a Greek tragic hero’.The ‘most explicit analogy to Greek tragedy’, he says, comes whenZuckerman imagines Mark Silk’s thoughts at his father’s funeral.5 ButBakewell does not quote the passage in full. Zuckerman goes on:

The human desire for a beginning, middle, and an end, – and anend appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle – is rea-lized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught atAthena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth centuryB.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfectconsummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold. (HS, p. 315)

In a footnote, Bakewell argues that this ‘coy disclaimer’ should be ‘readwith a jaundiced eye’. ‘If it is truly “a foolish illusion” to apply to “reallife” the forms and patterns of Greek tragedy’, he asks, ‘why does Nathanmake this mistake so frequently?’6 In trying to answer this question, I willlook at some of the other literary forms and patterns by means of whichNathan Zuckerman tries to shape Coleman Silk’s life story. In particular,I will argue that a particular certain reading of Homer’s Iliad providesZuckerman with an alternative, and to him in many ways more appeal-ing, classical model.

The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction

First, however, I would like to consider in greater detail whyZuckerman, and Roth, might both be interested in ‘completion’, andyet hold it to be a ‘foolish illusion’. The Sophocles epigraph derivesfrom David Grene’s Three Greek Tragedies in Translation, the standard

4 Three Greek Tragedies, p. 90.5 Bakewell, ‘Philip Roth’s Oedipal Stain’, pp. 42–3.6 Ibid., p. 43 n. 48.

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college text of Roth’s youth. A look at some of his other college readingmight also be instructive. In the early 1950s, Philip Roth was a studentat the University of Chicago, and his exposure there to ‘the standardmaster’s degree program in literature’ feeds into many of his novels.7 InThe Human Stain we can see his continuing engagement with not onlyGrene’s translation of Sophocles, but also, among others, H. D. F.Kitto’s 1951 bestseller The Greeks and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, firstpublished in America in 1953. Roth also took classes from the‘neo-Aristotelian’ Elder Olson, for whom the critic’s task was to identifythe ‘wholeness, completeness, and unity’ of the work, and then to con-sider how its ‘subordinate parts’ contributed to that wholeness. The‘pleasure’ we feel in response to poetry, Olson wrote, is ‘commensurate. . . with the beauty of the poetic form’.

By ‘beauty’ I mean the excellence of perceptible form in a compositecontinuum which is a whole; and by ‘excellence of perceptible form’I mean the possession of perceptible magnitude in accordance with amean determined by the whole as a whole of such-and-such quality,composed of such-and-such parts.

A poem or play (Olson tended not to talk about novels) was successful tothe degree that it formed ‘an ordered and complete whole’.8

Roth graduated in 1955, went to New York, and then returned toChicago to teach freshman composition from 1956 to 1958. He makessure that Zuckerman’s dates don’t exactly coincide with his own –Zuckerman seems to have gone to Chicago as an undergraduate in 1949,and left ‘four years later, age twenty, with five cartons of the classics,bought secondhand out of his spending money’.9 But like Roth, he tooreturns to Chicago to teach English composition, beginning his coursewith a lecture on ‘The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction’, which he laterdescribes as ‘replete with lengthy (and I had thought) “salient” quotationsfrom Aristotle’s Poetics, Flaubert’s correspondence, Dostoevsky’s diaries,and James’s critical prefaces – I quoted only from the masters, pointedonly to monuments’.10 These two moments in Nathan Zuckerman’s bio-graphy emerge in two different novels – the first is from Zuckerman

Unbound (1981), set in 1969, and the second from ‘Courting Disaster (or,

7 Philip Roth, ‘Just a Lively Boy’, in Molly McQuade (ed.), An UnsentimentalEducation: Writers and Chicago (Chicago 1995) pp. 123–9: 125.

8 Elder Olson, ‘An Outline of Poetic Theory’, in R.S. Crane (ed.), Critics andCriticism (Chicago 1952) pp. 546–66: 559, 556, 554.

9 Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound [ZU] (Harmondsworth 1983) p. 39.10 Philip Roth, My Life as a Man [MLAM] (Harmondsworth 1985) p. 61.




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Serious in the Fifties)’, a short story which he narrates but which, welearn, was written by a novelist called Peter Tarnopol, the protagonist ofMy Life as a Man (1974). ‘Courting Disaster’ ends with Nathan drawingattention to the gulf between ‘the story of that Zuckerman in thatChicago’ (a story inhabited by Great Books and which fits a ‘traditionalnarrative mode’) and the ‘flamboyant American present’ whose ‘extrava-gant fictions’ require another writer, better able ‘to treat the implausible,the preposterous, and the bizarre in something other than a straightfor-ward and recognizable manner’ (MLAM, p. 87). That other writer was tobe Roth himself who, in creating this multilayered metafiction, ‘seemedtruly to have entered postmodern literary territory’.11

Five years later, in 1979, Roth began a trilogy of novels in which(among other matters) Zuckerman explores the strategies and intentionsof his own fiction-writing practice. In the second of the series, Zuckerman

Unbound, he returns to the Poetics. He tells his date that as a student in1949, a ‘good boy . . . in my Peter Pan collar’, he had ‘believed everythingAristotle taught me about literature’.

Tragedy exhausts pity and fear by arousing those emotions to theutmost, and comedy provides a carefree, lighthearted state of mind inthe audience by showing them it would be absurd to take seriouslythe action being imitated. (ZU, p. 69)

But in the spring of 1969, after the publication of his ‘notorious’ novelCarnovsky, Zuckerman declares that ‘Aristotle let me down’ (ZU, p. 13). Heoffers two reasons for this that go beyond an awareness of the ‘flamboyantAmerican present’ proposed in ‘Courting Disaster’. First, he observes thatreaders of Carnovsky do not seem able to distinguish between an actionand an imitation of an action. Secondly, and consequently, they areunable to achieve any sense of completion – either tragic or comic – onfinishing the novel. Wherever he goes Zuckerman is pursued by readershailing him as if he were Carnovsky. It is as if the whole of New York‘had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to acharacter who lived in a book’ (ZU, p. 13).12 Aristotle, Zuckerman com-plains, ‘didn’t mention anything about the theater of the ridiculous inwhich I am now a leading character – because of literature’ (ZU, p. 69).

But it is not only Aristotle who lets Zuckerman down. In everyZuckerman novel that follows, we find him railing against genres that

11 David Brauner, Philip Roth (Manchester 2007) p. 52.12 The confusion of Zuckerman with Carnovsky re-enacts the popular

confusion of Roth with the narrator of his third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969).




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offer the ‘foolish illusion’ of unity and purification. Worst of all, perhapsbecause most pervasive in American ideology, is the pastoral – otherwiseknown as the ‘goyish wilderness of birds and trees where America beganand had long ago ended’.13 Athena College is set in the Berkshire hills ofwestern Massachusetts, close to the nineteenth-century home of NathanielHawthorne, the author of many tales about stains and Puritan purging.It’s a setting that originally appeared in the first Zuckerman novel, The

Ghost Writer (1979); the 23-year-old Nathan pays a visit to a ‘famous ruralrecluse’, the eminent novelist Emanuel Isidore Lanoff.14 By the end of The

Counterlife (1986), Zuckerman feels confident that pastoral, with its claimthat ‘we may finally be “ourselves” ’ and its inability to ‘admit contradic-tion or conflict’, is ‘not . . . [his] genre’.15

After an interval writing other works, Roth returned to Zuckerman in1997 for a second trilogy of novels. Nathan now becomes the Conradianchronicler of the central ‘historical moments in postwar American life’:late 1960s radicalism in American Pastoral (1997), the McCarthy witch huntsof the 1950s in I Married a Communist (1998), and their equivalents in thelate 1990s ‘culture wars’ in The Human Stain (2000).16 The final novel’sallusion to John Dos Passos’s 1930s national trilogy U.S.A. suggests Roth’sinterest in the ‘encapsulating fiction’ that is the Great American Novel, aphenomenon he had roundly mocked back in 1973 (HS, p. 148).17 DosPassos’s trilogy, for all its modernist interventions of Camera Eye andNewsreel perspectives into the tale, is a straightforward chronological nar-rative – beginning with hope and ending with the unambiguous declara-tion ‘we stand defeated America’.18 Roth’s trilogy has no straightforwardchronology – it begins in the 1960s, moves back to the 1950s, and thenforward to the 1990s – nor does it have recourse to any form of panora-mic or summarising view. Its unifying principles are allusion and rep-etition: Zuckerman tells three stories of athletes, each of whom issurrounded by an ‘aura of heroic purity’ and each of whom is markedwith an all-too-human stain.19 Dialectic, or to use Roth’s preferred word‘antagonism’, also occurs on the formal level. To choose to write a trilogy

13 Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (Harmondsworth 1980) p. 8.14 The college is called Athene in The Ghost Writer (pp. 8, 21). The slight shift is

a characteristic Roth signal of unreliable narration.15 Philip Roth, The Counterlife (Harmondsworth 1988) pp. 326–7.16 Charles McGrath, ‘Zuckerman’s Alter Brain: An Interview with Philip Roth’,

New York Times Book Review, 7 May 2000, p. 8.17 Philip Roth, ‘On The Great American Novel’, in Reading Myself and Others

(Harmondsworth 1985) pp. 75–92: 92.18 John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (London 1950) p. 1084.19 Philip Roth, I Married a Communist [IMC] (London: 1999) p. 54.




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is surely to encourage the development through antagonism towardsresolution, but any ‘expectation of completion . . . of a just perfectconsummation’ is what The Human Stain actively resists (HS, p. 315).

At the start of I Married a Communist Zuckerman has settled into theBerkshire hills in which he first encountered Lonoff, enduring the ‘pallia-tive of the primitive hut’, living the life of an Thoreauvian ‘man byhimself in the woods’ (IMC, pp. 72, 320). He is still there in The Human

Stain, but at that novel’s end he is ready to leave again, his disenchantmentwith the ideology and aesthetic of pastoral as seemingly complete as hisdisillusionment with tragedy’s promises of catharsis. In telling ColemanSilk’s story, however, Zuckerman tests the conventions of pastoral in muchthe same way as he tried out those of tragedy. Pastoral arrives in the formof Silk’s lover, his ‘Voluptas’, Faunia (HS, p. 47). Faunia is literally a milk-maid, and her organic produce attracts city folk searching not only for ‘atasty drink’ but also for ‘the embodiment of a freshening, sweeteningcountry purity that their city-battered idealism requires’. Zuckerman issceptical of those who believe that ‘downing a glass of Organic Livestockmilk were no less a redemptive religious rite than a nutritional blessing’.In poor imitation of Aristotelian tragedy, organic milk promises ‘whole-ness’ as well as purity – testimonials to its goodness promise ‘our body,soul, and spirit are getting nourished as a whole’. A parallel can also bedrawn between the ‘otherwise sensible adults’ who, accepting theseclaims, ‘spend a pleasant few minutes . . . pretending they are seven yearsold’, and those who persist in the ‘foolish’ expectation of sub-Sophoclean‘completion’ (HS, p. 46). Of course, ‘thin-legged, thin-wristed, thin-armed’Faunia, ‘with clearly discernible ribs and shoulder blades that protruded’,turns out to be the antithesis of a bucolic milkmaid (HS, p. 49). As DavidBrauner points out, ‘far from living out a rustic idyll, we discover that shehad endured childhood abuse, the loss of both her children and theviolence of her ex-husband’.20

In ‘The Purifying Ritual’, the novel’s final chapter, Roth bringsAristotle and American pastoral together.21 The book ends with an imageof ‘perfect consummation’, a ‘pure and peaceful vision’ of ‘a solitary man

20 Brauner, Philip Roth, p. 175.21 Farley’s description of the lake as a ‘clean place’ ironically recalls

Hemingway’s ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place’, and his desire to find peace after warby fishing recalls ‘Big Two-Hearted River’. The urban Coleman, meanwhile,fishes for women in the subway (HS, pp. 347, 21). Pastoral and tragedy alsocombine in the figure of David Grene, from whose translation of Oedipus Rothquotes. Grene taught Greek at the University of Chicago while maintaining afarm in Lemont, Illinois. A posthumous memoir, Of Farming and Classics, waspublished in 2006.




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on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice on a lake that’sconstantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America’(HS, p. 361). Again things are not what they at first seem. The manfishing is Faunia’s ex-husband, Lester Farley, a Vietnam veteran withPTSD, a wife-beater and the man who Zuckerman is ‘sure’ killed Silkbecause he believed him to be a Jew (HS, p. 350). Zuckerman hurriesaway in case Farley decides to ‘do [him] in’ too (HS, p. 360). But first thetwo men have a brief conversation about literature. Farley begins bytelling him what Zuckerman recognises as a conventional ‘war story’,about how what happened to him in Vietnam has ‘doomed’ hissubsequent life. Then he starts to interrogate the man he has been told isan ‘author’.

What kind of books do you write? Whodunits?’‘I wouldn’t say that.’‘True stories?’‘Sometimes.’‘What? Romance?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Not pornography, I hope.’ . . .‘I write about people like you,’ I said. (HS, pp. 352–3, 356)

The various genres that Farley mentions – whodunits, romances, porno-graphy, even the war story – share with American pastoral andAristotelian tragedy an ‘expectation of completion’, ‘wholeness’, andrelease. None, however, is, in itself, adequate to Zuckerman’s purpose. Hisaim is not to capture, once and for all, the essence of Coleman Silk oreven Lester Farley. Even while he trembles with fear, Zuckerman knowsthat Farley is doing a Vietnam vet ‘act’ (HS, p. 348).22 As he pointed outin American Pastoral (1997), ‘getting people right is not what living is allabout. . . . It’s getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, oncareful reconsideration, getting them wrong again’.23

Without the ‘Ends Tucked In’

In The Counterlife, Zuckerman proposes an alternative to pastoral.Circumcision, he says, is ‘everything that the pastoral is not’; an expulsion

22 Complaints that Lester Farley is a caricature miss the point. For Nathan’simagining of his war experiences, see HS, pp. 64–70, and for Farley’s ownversion, see pp. 351–3. Farley identifies Zuckerman as a fellow Melvillian ‘isolate’(p. 356). Roth may have borrowed his surname from James Farley, who alsoserved as a helicopter door gunner. He was famously photographed staring inshock at his dying co-pilot by Life magazine in 1965.

23 Philip Roth, American Pastoral (London 1998) p. 35.




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from the ‘womb-dream’ of living ‘unencumbered by man-made ritual’.The ritual of circumcision initiates the child into the historical world: ‘theheavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, markingyour genitals as its own’ (Counterlife, p. 327). And if birth requires thehuman touch of ‘archaic ritual’, so too does death.24 For the last twentyyears, Roth’s novels have been full of funerals. The Counterlife has two –one at the beginning and one at the end. In each of the novel’s two narra-tives, one of the Zuckerman brothers struggles to provide an appropriateeulogy for the other. They ‘look like twins’ but have ‘alien’ minds. Theeulogies allow ‘fratricide without pain’ rather than any kind of tidy sum-mation (Counterlife, pp. 224, 237, 231). Funerals are rituals which promptthe living into action, into what, in The Human Stain, Zuckerman terms‘professional competition with death’ (HS, p. 338).

The Human Stain begins and ends with a funeral. The second isColeman Silk’s. Standing at the graveside, Zuckerman says, ‘I was com-pletely seized by his story, by its end and its beginning, and then andthere, I began this book’ (HS, p. 337).25 The ‘proper presentation of[Silk’s] secret’ has become his own ‘problem to solve’ and Silk’s lifebecomes ‘closer’ to him than his ‘own’ (HS, p. 344). But the book thatZuckerman writes is not the apologia that Silk wanted. Nathan does notdraw inspiration from ‘Spooks’, a Swiftian ‘screed’ of ‘raging misery’ thatColeman has presented to him (HS, p. 19).26 Nor does he want to turnhis friend’s life into an American pastoral, a romance, a whodunit, porno-graphy, or, ultimately, an Aristotelian tragedy. So what does he do? A cluecomes as he prepares to write. Coleman’s sister, Ernestine, his source forinformation on Silk’s childhood, sends him ‘a faded black-and-whitephotograph measuring about four by five inches, a blown-up snapshot,more than likely taken originally in somebody’s backyard with a Browniebox camera’, of the 15-year-old boy in his boxing gear, gloves ‘at the readyin the classic position’ (HS, p. 343). Ritualistically placing this photographin a frame on his writing desk, Zuckerman begins The Human Stain.

24 Philip Roth, Everyman (London 2007) p. 60.25 Roth began Everyman in similar circumstances. Finding Saul Bellow’s death

‘very hard to accept’, he ‘began to write this book the day after his burial’. ‘It’snot about him – it has nothing to do with him – but I’d just come from acemetery, and that got me going.’ Charles McGrath, ‘Roth, Haunted by Illness,Feels Fine’, New York Times, 25 Apr. 2006, E6. It might be argued, however, thatThe Human Stain pays a kind of homage to ‘Squire Herzog’, ‘The Graf Pototsky ofthe Berkshires’. Saul Bellow, Herzog (London 1964) p. 76.

26 ‘I hate the bastards the way Gulliver hates the whole human race after hegoes and lives with those horses’, says Silk (HS, p. 19).




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He will, it seems, draw inspiration from Coleman Silk’s career as a fighteras well as his career as a classics professor.

Zuckerman and Roth, beyond the Zuckerman novels, have frequentlyused boxing metaphors to dramatise the many arguments, debates, andoppositions that make up their stories. Studying at Chicago, forexample, allowed the ‘raucous’ to take on the ‘serious’: ‘Superego fightsId to Fifteen-Round Draw; Blood Drawn’.27 ‘My impulse’, Roth oncesaid, ‘is to problematize material. . . . I like when it’s opposed by some-thing else, by another point of view.’28 What Roth here calls an‘impulse’ is, I would suggest, a fully developed aesthetic – one thatrejects the Aristotelian unities in favour of ‘variousness, possibility, com-plexity and difficulty’. This latter formulation is not Roth’s but LionelTrilling’s – proposed at the outset of The Liberal Imagination (1950f?g).29

For Trilling, the value of literature lay precisely in its ability to resist thekind of closed readings and ‘systematic certainties’ that he associatedboth with the ‘ideological age’ and with the ‘modern highly trained lit-erary sensibility’.30 In 1950, he wondered of Oedipus the King whether‘the famous sense of cathartic resolution is perhaps the result of glossingover terror with beautiful language rather than an evacuation of it’31

and predicted that the ‘novelist of the next decades [would] not occupyhimself with questions of form’:

For the modern highly trained literary sensibility, form suggests com-pleteness and the ends tucked in; resolution is seen only as all contra-dictions equated, and although form thus understood has its manifestcharm, it will not adequately serve the modern experience.32

27 McQuade (ed.), An Unsentimental Education, p. 128. For more on boxingmetaphors in Roth, see Kasia Boddy Boxing: A Cultural History (London 2008)pp. 377–81.

28 Quoted in Mervyn Rothstein, ‘From Philip Roth, “The Facts” as heRemembers Them’, New York Times, 6 Sept. 1988.

29 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (London 1951) p. xv.30 Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (London 1955) p. 37; Liberal Imagination,

p. 272.31 Liberal Imagination, p. 55. Roth’s source for Oedipus, David Grene, argued that

‘the more we study it’, the play ‘becomes a picture of the complexity and chaos oflife itself ’, ‘a tangle of events which has no good reason for beginning and ending’(Three Greek Tragedies, pp. 85, 86).

32 Liberal Imagination, pp. 272–3. English instructor and ‘creative writer’ PaulHerz, in Roth’s Letting Go (first published 1962), is also fed up with ‘all that formcrap’ and worries that ‘the student goes around thinking that writing is liketapestry-weaving; a kind of construction work’. Roth’s novel itself worries about,and tries to ‘let go’ of, tapestry-like form. Letting Go [LG] (London 1964) pp. 239,297.




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Twenty years later, in Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling returned to theseformal questions in a discussion of ‘inauthenticity of narration’, with its‘assumption that life is susceptible of comprehension and hence of man-agement’. For every beginning implies an end, ‘which is not merely theultimate event, the cessation of happening; it is a significance or at leastthe promise, dark or bright, of a significance’. ‘Can we, in this day andage,’ he asked in 1972, ‘submit to a mode of explanation so primitive, soflagrantly Aristotelian?’ The answer was yes, inevitably. Narration ‘cannothelp telling how things are and even why they are that way’; so Trilling’sown argument against narrative explanation itself was reliant on the con-ventions of narrative explanation.33 Such a paradox was not surprising. AsTrilling often said, art was ‘nothing if not a dialectic’ and the best artiststhose who contained ‘a large part of the dialectic within themselves, theirmeaning and power residing in their contradictions’.34 An ‘active litera-ture’ was the ideal.35

The importance of these ideas for novelists of Roth’s generation cannotbe overestimated (for all their personal fallings in and out with oneanother).36 In 1947 Trilling ended his only novel, The Middle of the Journey,the story of a summer spent in ‘Socratic’ debate, with the protagonistswondering why they have had ‘so many disagreements’.37 In 1953 SaulBellow’s Augie March celebrated the ‘opposition in me, and great desireto offer resistance and say “No!”’ ‘What are you supposed to do’, he con-cludes, ‘but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the conditionas found’.38 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) also ends with a realis-ation that ‘I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and sayno. . . . I approach it through division.’39 And for Nathan Zuckerman,

33 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass. 1972) pp. 135–6.34 Liberal Imagination, p. 9; see also The Opposing Self, pp. 37, 108. What makes

Huckleberry Finn, for example, a great book for Trilling, is the ‘dialectic of Huck’sgreat moral crisis’ (Liberal Imagination, p.121).

35 Liberal Imagination, p. 300.36 Ross Posnock is rare in making the connection: Philip Roth’s Rude Truth

(Princeton, NJ 2006) pp. 52–3, 216.37 Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (New York 2002) pp. 348, 360.38 Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York 1960) pp. 117, 260.

Herzog quotes from Blake, ‘opposition is true friendship’ (Herzog, p. 125).39 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York 1995) pp. 579–80. On Ellison as a

possible partial model for Silk, see Timothy L. Parrish, ‘Ralph Ellison: TheInvisible Man in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain’, Contemporary Literature, 45 (2004)pp. 421–59. Another much-discussed model is Anatole Broyard, ‘a man abouttown . . . who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips’ andwho passed as white. Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man(New York 1997) pp. 180–214: 181.




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only ‘antagonism’ will ‘get the story smoking’ (Counterlife, p. 320).Advocates of division and opposition, of antagonism, Bellow, Ellison,Trilling, and Roth all repeatedly asserted that ‘the work of the novel’ (touse another phrase from Trilling) was to resist claims of authenticity andinstead to dramatise the contradictions of a culture.40 Another subscriberto this theory of the liberal novel was Milan Kundera – ‘I invent stories,confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions’, he oncetold his friend Roth.41 Coleman’s nemesis, Delphine Roux, has a crush onKundera; drawn to his ‘poetically prizefighterish looks’, which are to her‘an outward sign of everything colliding within’ (HS, p. 262).

Another poetic prize fighter who attracts and antagonises Delphine isSilk himself. His two careers – boxer and then classicist – meet in hischoice of a ‘favorite book about the ravening spirit of man’ – not Oedipus

but the Iliad (HS, p. 335). He is presented quoting freely from the poem,although not in his own words (as surely a classicist in the classroomwould do) but from a translation that his biographer Zuckerman mayhave read at the University of Chicago, as it appeared in Kitto’s The

Greeks.42 There Kitto presents a reading of the Iliad’s ‘tragic note’ as emer-ging from the ‘tension’ that it creates between ‘two forces’ – ‘passionatedelight in life, and clear apprehension of its unalterable framework’. Thepoem’s outlook, he maintains, is ‘remarkably free of illusion’.43 In theseremarks at least, Kitto’s Homer sounds a lot like the dialectical Trilling orRoth, and not at all like the ‘uniformly illuminated’ Homer whom ErichAuerbach presented in another seminal book of Roth’s youth, Mimesis.44

Written in the early 1940s, Mimesis was translated into English and pub-lished in America in 1953. The opening essay, ‘Odysseus’ Scar’, whichfirst appeared in Partisan Review in 1950,45 presents the biblical-Judaic

40 Liberal Imagination, p. 257.41 Philip Roth, Shop Talk (London 2002) p. 100. Compare Lonoff-Bellette’s

definition of fiction as ‘rumination in narrative form’ in Philip Roth, Exit Ghost[EG] (London 2007) pp. 200–1. Kundera explores the individual’s doomedattempt to ‘leave nothing but an unstained age of an unstained idyll’: The Book ofLaughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York 1999) p. 33. See Posnock,Philip Roth’s Rude Truth, pp. 61–3, 157, 188–92.

42 HS, p. 4; H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth 1951) p. 45.43 Kitto, The Greeks, pp. 60–1. Like Roth, Kitto compares Sophoclean and

Elizabethan drama. See H. D. F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama (1956).44 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.

Willard R. Task (Princeton, NJ 1953) p. 11. In Letting Go Roth gives the nameEdna Auerbach to the chair of his fictional Chicago English Department (p. 63).

45 Erich Auerbach, ‘The Scar of Ulysses’, trans Joseph Merseve, Partisan Review(May/June 1950) pp. 411–32.




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tradition in sharp, and favourable, contrast to that of Homeric epic. JamesPorter recently summarised what he terms its ‘willful perversity’:

Homer is simplicity itself, charming, always coherent, overseen byprudential divinities, while the Bible is riven with conflict and fraughtwith complication, disunity and doubt, characterized by a lack ofobvious coherence.46

For Auerbach, an important difference between the two traditions con-cerns characterisation. Homer’s characters, he says, ‘wake everymorning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, thoughstrong, are simple and find expression instantly’. The protagonists of theOld Testament, on the other hand, live lives that are ‘entangled’, ‘darkand incomplete’; Homer’s characters occupy the foreground; those ofthe Old Testament, he says twice, are ‘fraught with background’.Homeric style is that of legend, ‘displaying unmistakable meanings’; theOld Testament style is that of history, presenting but not resolving ‘mul-tiplicity of meanings’.47 That Roth’s mode resembles Auerbach’s novelis-tic Old Testament more than his legendary Homer hardly needs saying.But if, as Porter argues, Auerbach was engaged in the process of‘Judaizing’ German classical philology, perhaps it could also be arguedthat Roth is Judaizing Homer; rethinking the Iliad as an Old Testamenttale, rewriting the superficial Homeric scar as a ‘problematic psychologi-cal’ human stain.48

Allusions to the Iliad begin at the very outset of Zuckerman’s tale. It is1996 and, following’s Silk’s dismissal for purported racism, his wife Irishas died. ‘Directly from making arrangements’ for her burial, Colemandrives to Zuckerman’s house and ‘all but order[s]’ him to write a book‘about how his enemies at Athena, in striking out at him, had insteadfelled her. Creating their false image of him . . . they had killed his wife’(HS, p. 11). Coleman likes to tell his students about ‘adrenal Achilles: themost highly flammable of explosive wildmen any writer has enjoyed por-traying’ (HS, p. 5). When he comes to Zuckerman’s house, Coleman is ina highly flammable mood himself. Indeed, he seems to have becomeAchilles after the death of Patroclus, the warrior who goes to battle in

46 James I. Porter, ‘Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology’, Critical Inquiry(Autumn 2008) pp. 115–47: 115, 129. Thanks to Jas Elsner for pointing out thisarticle and for a very helpful discussion about Roth’s likely classical education.

47 Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 12, 15, 18–19, 23.48 Ibid., p. 12. James Joyce, of course, Judaized Homer in Ulysses, but his

understanding of what that process involved was very different from that ofAuerbach or Roth.




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Achilles’ armour and whom Hector kills, thinking he is killing Achilles.‘They meant to kill me and they got her instead’, says Coleman of Iris,once his ‘comradely lover’ (HS, p. 13).49

Coleman’s assumption of a heroic role is hardly surprising, for asZuckerman noted long ago, however much one believes in the ‘raw I’,none really exists (HS, p. 108). Instead ‘one impersonates best the self thatbest gets one through’ (Counterlife, p. 324). Coleman may think that ‘self-discovery – that was the punch to the labonz’; after all, says Nathan, it is the‘drama that underlies America’s story’ and, we might add, that of Oedipus(HS, pp. 108, 342). In Zuckerman’s view, however, Silk’s whole life – likehis own – has been based on playing a part. ‘I am a theater and nothingmore than a theater’, Zuckerman declares at the end of The Counterlife

(p. 325).50 Twenty years later, he modifies this. Character is not merely per-formance, character is competitive performance, and so sport is in some waysa better analogue than drama. According to Martin Seel, ‘by watchingsports, we can enjoy, in our imagination, certain lives that we have neitherthe talent nor the time to live’.51 What we really enjoy in our imagination,Zuckerman might counter, are the competitions between those various lives.As a young boxer Coleman Silk specialised in counterpunching, a style thatZuckerman believes he also adopted outside the ring.

All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But thatwasn’t where the power was or the pleasure either. The power andpleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfes-sional in the same way you were a counterpuncher. (HS, p. 100)

The culture (the ‘other kids’) requires the declaration or exposure of anovertly marked identity. It jabs Coleman with its demand for confession.Silk replies (as his name suggests he should) by ‘slipping the punch’ andoffering, in return, a counterlife – an identity that is neither black norwhite, but Jewish.52 He refuses the binary that is on offer.

49 Again Roth is interested in names. Thanks to Rachel Bowlby for remindingme of Iris, the divine messenger, who delivers bad news in Iliad, Book II, and whohelps Achilles in Book XXIII, 198 ff. The first part of Iris Silk’s maiden name,Gittelman, means ‘good’ in Yiddish.

50 Another of Roth’s recurrent characters, David Kepesh, reports having playedTiresias in Oedipus Rex while a freshman at Syracuse University. Philip Roth, TheProfessor of Desire [PD] (Harmondsworth 1985) pp. 10–11.

51 Martin Seel, quoted in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In Praise Of Athletic Beauty(Cambridge, Mass. 2006) pp. 255–6.

52 ‘Slipping the Punch’ is the title of chapter 2 of The Human Stain; Silk’s boxingcoach is the first person to suggest he passes as Jewish.




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In the months that follow Iris’s death, Coleman–Achilles furtherattempts to slip the punch of grief. He too enters into ‘professional com-petition with death’, or, to put it another way, he embarks on a series offuneral games (HS, p. 338). The first game is to dance the foxtrot withZuckerman in his kitchen. The next is to have an affair with FaunaFarley, whom he calls his Helen of Troy. If Fauna is Helen, thenColeman seems to be finding a new role – no longer Achilles but Paris,dismissed by Hector as having ‘no strength, no courage’, only ‘hand-some’ looks and skill on the lyre.53 ‘All of European literature springsfrom a fight’, Coleman tells his students cheerfully, ‘a brutal quarrel overa young girl and her young body and the delights of sexual rapacity’(HS, pp. 4–5).

But Zuckerman switches the roles again. In the final instance, Colemanis neither Achilles nor Paris, but himself Patroclus to Zuckerman’sAchilles. Although they only meet as old men, it transpires that ColemanSilk and Nathan Zuckerman grew up less than five miles apart and nearlycoincided in after-school boxing classes. The connection is reinforced bythe game Roth seems to be playing with their names: the story of a blackman – cole/coalman – is presented in parallel to that of a Jewish –Zucker or, with further boxing connotations, Sugar – man.54 Roth alsomakes much play with Coleman’s surname – he is Silky Silk, smooth andslippery in the ring and in life.55 Here, I suggest, perhaps rather speculat-ively, that he might have another source: Professor Michael Silk of King’sCollege, London. Not only are both professors of Greek and lovers ofjazz, Michael Silk is the author of another book on the Iliad that Rothmay have read.56 Michael Silk proposes that reading or hearing Homer’spoem is less like watching tragic drama than watching rule-governedsport. In many ways, he suggests, ‘Homer’s characters are more likeplayers on the field than players on a stage. . . . Their great configurations

53 Iliad, III. 43, 54, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago 1951) p. 101. This isprobably the translation that Roth would have encountered at the same time asKitto’s The Greeks.

54 Michael Silk has suggested that Roth may have been thinking of ColemanHawkins. Concealing his race, Coleman Silk’s interest in jazz is strictly confined towhite jazz, mainly swing, artists (HS, pp. 14–15). Coleman’s ambition is to be‘better’ than Sugar Ray (HS, p. 99).

55 One of Portnoy’s many names for his penis is ‘the silky monster’, whileKepesh has an affair with a cheerleader called Marcella ‘Silky’ Walsh. Philip Roth,Portnoy’s Complaint (London 1969) p. 127; PD, p. 24.

56 Thanks to Professor Silk for discussing his possible fictional counterpart withme. Probably coincidentally, David Kepesh was a Fulbright scholar at King’sCollege London (PD, p. 26).




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are like great sporting contests.’57 Silk (Michael) goes on to stress theimportance of the funeral games as ‘one of the representative moments ofthe Iliad’ – ‘the games tend to be vaguely ignored by modern critics as adistraction from the poem’s “real” issues. On the contrary’, he argues,‘they represent a situation in which the heroes appear as their “real”selves.’58

And if a microcosm of the Iliad’s configurations can be found in thefuneral games, a microcosm of the funeral games themselves can befound in what is arguably their most representative contest, the boxingmatch between Epeios and Euryalos (XXIII. 653–99). Reading The

Human Stain in this light, Coleman’s counterpunching in the boxing ringemerges as a microcosm, or ‘representative moment’, for Zuckerman’sstory. From the very start, the gods are at competitive play: ‘ninety eight inNew England’ is introduced as the ‘summer of mythical battle between ahome-run god who was white and a home-run god who was black’ (HS,p. 2). From then on The Human Stain presents numerous analogues ofsport – Dionysiac two-person contests of music or literature or dancing orsex.59 Coleman–Paris may see Faunia as his Helen, but Zuckerman notesa ‘virility’ in the way she keeps her chin up (HS, p. 49). He imaginesFaunia telling her lover that pleasure isn’t ‘owning the person’, just having‘another contender in the room with you’ (HS, p. 232). Toughened by her‘fighting life’, she is another ‘comrade-in-arms’ (HS, pp. 29, 337).

Zuckerman too must stage funeral games – in memory of his friend,but also to ward off fears of his own demise. Overwhelmed by thethought that ‘death is sweeping us all away’, he goes to listen to the vir-tuoso piano playing of Yefim Bronfman. Bronfman is yet another boxertype, ‘conspicuously massive through the upper torso’, and Zuckermannotes that he plays Prokofiev ‘with such bravado as to knock morbidityclear out of the ring’ (HS, p. 209). Knocking morbidity out of the ring iswhat Nathan (incontinent, impotent, and deeply depressed) most wants todo in telling this story. Coleman Silk is not just tragically fated, he is alsofiercely joyful.60 All ‘allure’ and dancing ‘magnetism’, a ‘goat-footed Pan’,he dances Nathan back to life (HS, pp. 25, 210). After meeting Silk,Zuckerman observes, ‘I ceased being able to live apart from the

57 Michael Silk, Homer: The Iliad (Cambridge 1987) p. 103.58 Ibid., p. 104.59 Jasper Griffin notes that Homer sometimes refers to fighting as dancing:

Homer on Life and Death (Oxford 1983) p. 194.60 These are Kitto’s terms. He finds in the Iliad a ‘shadowy Necessity’ and an

‘almost fierce joy in life’, an ‘exultation in human achievement and in humanpersonality’. The Greeks, pp. 60–1.




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turbulence and intensity that I had fled. I did no more than find a friend,and all the world’s malice came rushing in’ (HS, p. 45). Coleman Silk, inother words, is Nathan Zuckerman’s Patroclus, the man who imitatedhim on the battlefield and who, by dying in his name, can make himwant to fight again. Of course the analogy between The Human Stain andthe Iliad is incomplete. Zuckerman does not avenge Silk’s death by killingFarley (the novel’s Hector) – already an old man, it is too late for him toopt for a short, heroic life – but he does re-enter a battle of sorts. Aftereleven years in the Berkshire hills, Zuckerman decides to returnNew York and re-engage with the ‘antagonism that is the world’ (HS,p. 316). What he finds in that most ‘worldly-in-the-world place’ is thesubject of the ninth and final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (2007).61

‘Unrealized Possibilites’62

‘For a Jew a broken jaw is a terrible tragedy. It was to avoid this thatso many of us went into teaching rather than prizefighting.’63

If we accept that Coleman Silk was, among other things, Zuckerman’sPatroclus, another question arises: what aspect of Zuckerman’s self, whatcounterlife, was he acting out? Zuckerman’s once potent sex life? Hisethnicity? His abandoned academic career? Silk dies because he has beensleeping with another man’s ex-wife, but also, if Zuckerman is ‘speculatingcorrectly’, because that man is an anti-Semite and thinks Silk is a ‘disgust-ing old Jew’ (HS, p. 71). Passing as Jew (the very act that was meant tosave him) first lost Silk his job and then his life. Listening to the Kaddishat Silk’s funeral, Zuckerman hears only, ‘Another Jew is dead. As thoughdeath were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been aJew’ (HS, p. 314). Silk has not passed as just any Jew, however; more

61 EG, p. 279. The book presents New York as a battleground of literaryreputation. Zuckerman takes on all the old ghosts and celebrates the pugnaciousmen of his generation, from Mailer (‘always in quest of a quarrel’) to Plimpton (afellow ‘affronter’ whose eulogy forms a large part of the final chapter). Happy tobe ‘back in the drama’, even though he can ‘only end up bloodied’, Nathanstruggles not to punch young Richard Kliman, who, he observes, presents a‘passing rendition of me at that stage’. Kliman, meanwhile, wishes thatZuckerman wasn’t ‘entirely antagonistic’ (EG, pp. 255, 254, 103, 104, 48).

62 Again Kundera is relevant. ‘The characters in my novels’, says the narratorof The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), ‘are my own unrealized possibilities.’Trans. Milan Kundera (New York 2004) p. 221.

63 Philip Roth, ‘Interview with The Paris Review’, in Reading Myself and Others,p. 163.




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particularly, he has passed as the Jewish literature professor thatZuckerman or Roth might have been. In 1955 Philip Roth went to gradu-ate school because he thought he ‘would be a professor and had to get aPh.D’.64 Instead he became a novelist. Nathan Zuckerman also spendssome time teaching English composition at Chicago where, to hischagrin, his parents would proudly send letters ‘addressed, without irony,to “Professor Nathan Zuckerman” . . . mailed solely for the sake of addres-sing them’ (MLAM, p. 46). But he too becomes a novelist. Coleman Silk,on the other hand, completes his Ph.D. and becomes not just a professor(‘perhaps among the first of the Jews permitted to teach in a classicsdepartment anywhere in America’) but the ‘first and only Jew to serve atAthena as dean of faculty’ (HS, p. 5). In order to achieve this, Silk hashad to perform a double impersonation. He has had to pretend to be thekind of Jew who was pretending pretends to be an Englishman. He hashad to counterpunch, or as Irving Howe put it, learn how to ‘beat thegoyim at their own game’.65

Recalling his experience as a graduate student at the University ofChicago, Roth explained that ‘so many bright Jewish boys of mygeneration – and background – gravitated to literature because it was aprestigious form of assimilation that didn’t look like assimilation’. ‘Notthat I have any argument with what’s called assimilation,’ he added, ‘I’mall for Jews reading Milton.’66 What Jonathan Freedman has dubbed the‘assimilation-by-culture project’ was well established in the mid-1950s,with Trilling – not merely the ‘Jewish Matthew Arnold’, but the first Jewpromoted to tenure in the Columbia University English Department –as the model to emulate.67 But not everyone could land the role of the‘Jewish Matthew Arnold’, and Roth worried that, ‘by virtue of “literarystudies”’, he might instead turn into ‘a kind of caricature NoelCoward’.68 In telling the story of Coleman Silk, the first Jewish dean ofa New England college, Zuckerman is telling a story that might have

64 McQuade (ed.), Unsentimental Education, p. 124.65 Irving Howe, quoted in Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein, Creators

and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York (New York 1982) p. 284.66 McQuade (ed.), Unsentimental Education, p. 128).67 Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in

Literary Anglo-America (New York 2000) p. 13. Susanne Klingenstein describesTrilling’s appointment as the ‘fall of the WASP bastille’. Jews in the AmericanAcademy, 1900–1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation (New Haven 1991)p. 198.

68 Ted Solotaroff, quoted in Rosenberg and Goldstein, Creators and Disturbers,p. 409; McQuade (ed.), Unsentimental Education, p. 124. Roth had noted the ‘quietfussiness’ and ‘decided Anglomania’ of academia in Letting Go (p. 168).




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been his.69 On one reading, Silk’s life is tragic; on another, it is bathetic.His crimes are nothing more than an imagined linguistic faux pas and alittle sexual impropriety. He sacrificed his family and identity to becomedean of a college populated by dull students who ‘fix on the conventio-nalised narrative, with its beginning, middle and end’. Zuckermanremembers Silk’s complaint about classroom discussions in which ‘everyexperience, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to thisnormalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche. Any kid who says“closure” I flunk’ (HS, p. 147). Had Silk retired ‘without incident’,Zuckerman drily notes, he would have been ‘officially glorified forever’through the usual academic channels of Festschrifts, lecture series, achair, or perhaps even a building in his name (HS, p. 6). Surely,Roth asks, what Zuckerman offers instead – the immortality of Homericsong – is to be preferred?70

‘The End of the Literary Era’

Roth’s references to the Iliad can be read in many ways: as a mock-heroicgesture, suggesting that the battles of the twentieth century are ‘increasinglytawdry manifestations’ of fundamental struggles; as an indication of Roth’sawareness that engaging with one’s predecessors is part of the ‘epicist’sremit’;71 as an example of the ‘style of old age’, adding gravitas to perennialpreoccupations.72 Indeed one way of thinking about Roth’s novels of the lastten years might be as attempts to find a suitably abstract ‘late style’.73 Thesubject is made explicit in the insistently allusive Exit Ghost, where

69 Asked why the critic Milton Appel becomes ‘a punching-bag’ in The AnatomyLesson, Roth replied, ‘If I were not myself, if someone else had been assigned therole of being Roth and writing his books, I might very well, in this otherincarnation, have been his Milton Appel’ (Reading Myself and Others, p. 163).

70 The ‘only real hope of immortality’ that existed for Homer’s heroes, saidKitto, ‘was that one’s fame may live on in song’. The Greeks, p. 60.

71 Catherine Morley, ‘Bardic Aspirations: Philip Roth’s Epic of America’,English, 57/218 (2008) pp. 171–98: 192, 187.

72 Hermann Broch identified ‘abstractism’ as the dominant feature of the ‘styleof old age’. Dissatisfied with the ‘conventional vocabulary provided him by hisepoch’, Broch said, the ageing artist ‘must find a point beyond it’. For Broch, theIliad epitomises the ‘style of old age in all its greatness, coolness, and abstracttransparency’. ‘The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff ’ (1947), inSimone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy(New York 2005) pp. 101–21: 104–5, 116.

73 Roth’s interest in styles of old age long preceded the 2006 publication ofEdward Said’s influential On Late Style. Subsequent novels experiment withdifferent versions of such a style.




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Zuckerman listens to Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’ and observes that ‘the com-poser drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before younaked’ (EG, p. 124). Of course Roth’s method is the opposite of this ‘dra-matically elegiac, ravishingly emotional’ work: not the stripping away of artto reveal the naked self but a receding of the self until all that remains is artat its most ‘serious’, that is when it defines, and is defined by, antagonism –in conflict with, which is to say in relation to, another (EG, pp. 34, 183).

A more immediate context within which to consider The Human Stain’suse of Homer, however, is that of the 1990s ‘culture wars’. While Rothhad always been an allusive writer, allusiveness became a kind of moral(or even political) project in works such The Human Stain or Exit Ghost,demanding that the reader undertake a literary education in the directdefiance of the declared ‘end of the literary era’.74

As a 1950s-educated humanist, Silk’s view of ‘why the classics matter’differs considerably from that of his younger colleagues, such as the FrenchHigh Theorist Delphine Roux (HS, p. 193).75 Indeed, Silk’s belief that hisstudents should understand where ‘the great imaginative literature ofEurope begins’ (and that they need her ‘prestigious academic crap . . . like ahole in the head’) seems to align him with popular conservative defences ofthe traditional canon, such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind

(HS, pp. 190, 5).76 For Bloom, the university’s first task is to maintain the‘permanent questions front and centre’; ‘primarily by preserving – keepingalive – the works of those who best addressed the questions’.77 The valueof the kind of undergraduate courses which focused on ‘Great Books’ wasparticularly at issue in the 1990s ‘canon wars’, and if Bloom was not theonly Jewish critic to fear that the classics were a threatened species, Rothwas not the only Jewish novelist to take such anxieties as a theme. ‘Whatbetter way to triumph for people who were traditionally excluded from theGreat Tradition’, asks Freedman, ‘than to define themselves as its onlyremaining faithful priests?’78 The year 2000 also saw the publication of

74 The ghost of Lonoff dictates this phrase to Amy Bellette (EG, p. 186). Rothhimself is quoted as saying that ‘the literary era has come to an end’. DavidRemnick, ‘Into the Clear: Philip Roth Puts Turbulence in its Place’, New Yorker, 8May 2000, pp. 76–89: 86.

75 I’m borrowing the subtitle of Simon Goldhill’s Love, Sex and Tragedy: Why theClassics Matter (London 2005).

76 The Lonoff-Bellette letter is another attack on the ‘ideological simplificationsand biographical reductivism’ of literary criticism (EG, p. 182).

77 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York 1987) p. 252.78 Freedman, The Temple of Culture, p. 216. For an alternative reading, see

Jennifer Glaser, ‘The Jew in the Canon: Reading Race and Literary History inPhilip Roth’s The Human Stain’, PMLA, 123/5 (2008) pp. 1465–78.




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Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s roman-a-clef about Allan Bloom, his friend from theUniversity of Chicago Committee on Social Thought (another friend, andfounding member, was the translator of Oedipus, David Grene). WhileColeman Silk complains that students no longer read Homer, Ravelsteinbemoans the fact that a ‘real education’ is no longer possible in Americanuniversities. For both, education is less about following an ‘academicprogram’ than it is about using literature ‘to think’.79 Neither Roth norBellow mourned the passing of the New Criticism and its reliance on ‘thatmanageable netherworld of narrative devices, metaphorical motifs, andmythical archetypes’ (PD, p. 183).80 Roth’s protagonists, from Paul Herz (inLetting Go, 1962) to David Kepesh (in The Professor of Desire, 1977) toColeman Silk (in The Human Stain, 2000), have always insisted that whatgives literature value is its ‘scrutiny’ of ‘being human’ (IMC, p. 185; LG,p. 297). What ‘scrutiny’ seems to involve is a taking account of contradic-tion and complexity, an acknowledgement of life’s most ‘puzzling and mad-dening aspects’: the self and the other, eros and thanatos, the serious andthe raucous (PD, p. 184). It was that taking account, Roth and other writersof his generation may have felt, which high theory and identity politics hadcombined to preclude.

Scrutiny is the task that unites readers with writers and teachers. Thebest kind of novelist is really the best kind of teacher. Coleman Silk knowshow to teach, but he struggles with unresponsive students. Zuckerman’shigh school English teacher Murray Ringold is luckier in at least one ofhis pupils. It is Ringold who first teaches Zuckerman how to read, andthus to write, properly, ‘as though something were at stake in a book’:‘Not opening up a book to worship it or to be elevated by it or to loseyourself to the world around you. No, boxing with the book’ (IMC, p. 27).The Great Books project that so influenced Bellow, Trilling, and Roth wasboxing with the book on a grand scale: not worshipping the works ofHomer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Hemingway, DosPassos, and others, but demanding that each participate in a continuingand continuous Socratic debate, with the reader and with each other.81

79 Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (London 2000), 26; EG, p. 181.80 For a description of this ‘humanist’ view, and a comparison with the New

Critics’ own later position on ‘the Gallic “theorists”’, see Frederick Crews, TheCritics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (New York 1992) p. xv.

81 Introducing his own ‘liberal’ take on American fiction, Frederick Crewsdissociates himself from the ‘cultural nostalgics’ in similar terms: ‘I want keendebate, not reverence for great books; historical consciousness and self-reflection,not supposedly timeless values’ (The Critics Bear It Away, pp. xxi, xiv). Crews andRoth, both born in 1933, were also both products of the Great Books teachingmethodology initiated by John Erskine at Columbia in 1920 and then developed




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In The Human Stain, Zuckerman stages a ‘Great Conversation . . . on uni-versal themes’ between both generic modes (including pastoral, tragedy,satire, biography, the war story, and detective fiction) and individual works(including Oedipus Rex, The Scarlet Letter, and U.S.A.).82 Finally, however, theIliad emerges as the exemplary Great Book – not simply because itinitiates ‘all of European literature’, but because, like Auerbach’s Bible,Trilling’s liberal imagination, and Roth’s own fiction, Homer’s poem con-tains all the complexity, conflict, entanglement, antagonism, and collisionthat the scrutinising reader could require.83 Roth’s Iliad boxes with itself.

by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at Chicago in the 1930s: ‘Two teacherssat in a classroom with about twenty or twenty-five students and launched adiscussion, Socratic style.’ ‘Teachers were selected for their disposition to disagreewith each other’, recalled Erskine. In 1990 Adler objected to the suggestion thathis project was the same as that of neoconservatives Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom.They ‘teach the Great Books as if they were teaching the truth’, he maintained;‘when I teach them I want to understand the errors’. Alex Beam, A Great Idea at theTime: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (New York 2008) pp. 18,128.

82 Mortimer Adler, quoted in Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An InstitutionalHistory (Chicago 2007) p. 163. ‘The Great Conversation’, a phrase coined by JohnErskine, became the title of the introductory volume of the 54-volume GreatBooks set published in 1952. Hutchins and Adler hoped that the ‘ordinary reader’would come to feel ‘a member of the species and tradition that these books comefrom’. Richard E. Miller, Writing at the End of the World (Pittsburgh, Pa. 2005)p. 163.

83 In 1994 David Denby revisited the Columbia University ‘Lit.Hum.’ classesthat he had first taken in 1961. Dismayed by the ‘use both left and right weremaking of “the canon”’, Denby singled out the Iliad as an ‘unsettled’ and‘self-critical’ work that resists any single interpretation, remaining ‘in tension withitself, questioning and subverting its own ethos’. ‘Does Homer Have Legs?’,New Yorker, 6 Sept. 1993, pp. 52–69.




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philip roths great books: a reading of the human stain

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