Remembering Roth: The Sharp Mustard Flavor of <em>The Human Stain</em>

Abstract

Remembering RothThe Sharp Mustard Flavor of The Human Stain Ann Basu (bio) Philip Roth intrigued, provoked, amused, and absorbed his readers for more than fifty years. Challenging and delighting us, his novels have generated an intellectual response from writers and scholars that has created one of the most vibrant literary fields in modern literary criticism. Roth declared that he would write no more fiction after Nemesis, published in 2010. Now he is gone, and we can only await his official biography written by Blake Bailey and continue to speak amongst ourselves about his great literary legacy. Roth was an American to his core. His Jewish family and upbringing shaped his vision of a nation whose culture he never stopped exploring and whose flaws he dissected in ever more powerful ways. The nature of Roth's contribution to his national culture is perhaps best expressed in Roth's conversation with Primo Levi in 1986, when Roth asks Levi to explain "the tension between your rootedness and your impurity" as a Jew and an Italian. Levi returns: I see no contradiction between "rootedness" and being (or feeling) "a grain of mustard." To feel oneself a catalyst, a spur to one's cultural environment [. . .] it is an advantage to belong to a (not necessarily racial) minority [. . .] don't you feel yourself, you, Philip Roth, "rooted" in your country and at the same time "a mustard grain"? In your books I perceive a sharp mustard flavor (Shop 13). There is much truth in Levi's observation. Roth's novels are sharp and pungent granules within American culture at the same time as being thoroughly within the grain of that culture; they are incisive, provocative, and sometimes outrageous. His scrutiny of his country and its culture will be desperately missed. My love for Roth's fiction began with The Human Stain (2000), the third novel of his American trilogy published after American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Before this novel cropped up on my English [End Page 33] Literature masters reading list, the only contact I had had with Roth's work was his first short story collection, Goodbye Columbus, and his notorious Portnoy's Complaint that I didn't know how to make sense of in the lurid light of its celebrity. I was little-prepared for the mature, sweeping, masterly accomplishment that was The Human Stain. I became immersed in the story of the racially-passing Coleman Silk and of Coleman Silk's America, to a depth that I have rarely experienced. The fascination with The Human Stain that drew me to Roth's work began with the shock of finding out that its "Jewish" and "white" protagonist, Coleman Silk, was a light-skinned black man who, in his youth, had made a fateful decision to pass as white, using Jewishness as a cover identity to explain features like his curly hair. Crucially, Roth hides the fundamental fact about Coleman's "passing" for the novel's first eighty-five pages. The revelation about Coleman's race highlights the truth that when we read we complete the meanings of the text from our own imaginations—an activity that Roth continually problematizes. His work, to a greater degree than many writers', induces an imbalance or oscillation in readers' minds as we establish predictive patterns from the text but are nevertheless made jarringly aware of other temporarily excluded meanings, like Coleman's "alien" blackness. We are thus continually brought to test our own judgments about Roth's novels. My own reaction to Coleman's blackness startled me. I was disoriented by the revelation. The knowledge of Coleman's secret brought me right up against my preconceptions about the character, reconfiguring my category of "what-is-Coleman." I was knocked off-balance, compelled to revisit scenes from the book in the light of my new knowledge. This act of re-reading also made me reflect long, deeply, and uncomfortably on my understanding of race and racial categories. Philip Roth challenged me to do some real work on his text and on myself and hooked me on his writing. The Human Stain's exploration of American identity under pressure boils down to the word...