"Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or in Between": Fictions of Race in Philip Roth's The Human Stain

Abstract

As early as 1948, almost a decade before the hipster came to prominence in Norman Mailer's notorious essay Negro,1 Anatole Broyard, in his Partisan Review piece A Portrait of the Hipster, defined this genuinely American rebel figure as a keeper of enigmas, ironical pedagogue, a self-appointed exegete (724).2 In his secrecy-infused pedagogical capacity as both former professor of classics and once well-respected dean of Athena College, Coleman Silk, the protagonist of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, seems to match perfectly Broyard's description of the hipster,3 This mapping of the hipster discourse on Silk's personality, however, is a doubly ironic one, for Silk's genealogy is certainly not the genealogy of a white hipster traceable back to a subculture-and yet it is. Insofar as Silk's major aim of life is to reject the very existentialist synapses of the that the hipster so ardently absorbs while modeling his prospects on the plight of the American black, the identification with this same figure has to be repudiated. In particular for Mailer's so-called practical purposes of life, Silk could not be considered a white Negro (White 341). What puts him, probably unwillingly, on equal footing with the hipster nevertheless is his desire to pass racial boundaries of some sort by assuming the characteristics of the opposite race. In Silk's case, of course, this pass is additionally backed up by his physical appearance. His light skin and white features both facilitate and radicalize his decision to pass. Contrary to the hipster, though, he will not want anybody to know about his passing. Ned Polsky's critique of Negro, in which he accuses Mailer of ignoring the fact that whereas the white member of the hipster subculture is attracted to the member of the latter's Negroness, [. . .] the Negro [. . .] is attracted to the white precisely because of his whiteness, points to another crucial difference between the two figures, and works in Silk's favor as far as it differentiates him from the hipster (Mailer, Note 368). But as much as Polsky's attack on Mailer remains confined within the logic of passing-taken as the core of the hipster figure-the figure of Silk remains imprisoned within the racial discourse of the hipster. Within this particular logic, it does not seem to make a big difference whether Silk is a whitened Negro instead of a white Negro; nor does it seem to matter much if one prefers to call him a blackened Jew in his decision to masquerade in the particular disguise of a Jewish white man. For Coal Man Silk, neither Jewish nor white, attempts-however differently from the hipster-to pass, just like the hipster. All he needs to do is to replace the black man's code to fit [his] facts for the white man's code (Mailer, White 341). Unfortunately, although his originally successful acts of self-creation in his professional as well as his personal life (even his white wife Iris Gittelman dies unaware of his skin color) have particularized him as a white man, Silk turns out to be very different from Broyard's discrete, critical, and self-defining entity. Insofar as the hipster (Jewish in most cases) could be viewed as an inauthentic Jew, Silk, in denying his blackness, could then be regarded as an inauthentic Negro (Broyard, Inauthentic 56-64). Whatever ethnic denominator one chooses, they both have in common an implicit questioning of what it means to be American. Being American seems to always already presuppose an act of self-fashioning and the assumption of a mask, whether or not this mask may be configured as a racial disguise, or disguised as a racial configuration. Being American in Roth means the creation of a set of fictions about his black, white, and Jewish protagonist, and the hipster figure is only one of them. The point of this article is that Roth's specific use of humor undermines the fictions he sets up-which in many ways are America's racial fictions-from within his own fiction about America. …