I
just finished reading the novel The Human Stain by Philip Roth. The novel is
set in a quaint New England college town, in Vermont. The story is intriguing
in that it is framed in the late 90’s just following the President Clinton,
Monica Lewinsky scandal and is told as if written by the writer Nathan
Zuckerman. The plot is exceptional. There are more twists and turns in this
novel than one could imagine. Roth is an excellent social critic. No one seems
to escape his eye, especially the those in the tolerance movement.
Here
is a short summary of what happens (Warning—I’m going to expose one major theme
of the book so if you don’t want to lose the intrigue, stop reading this blog
now). The distinguished and brilliant classics professor Coleman Silk offends
some African American students, in his class by referring to them as spooks, as ghosts, since they’d never attended his lectures. The students got wind of
it and charged him with racism. It’s a bogus charge, and one many on the
faculty saw as such, but he ended up losing his job and his wife, over the
whole affair. The book is built around that event and his reaction to it. What
comes out, as the plot unfolds, is that everyone of the main characters has a
secret. A secret so deep, and in some cases, so profoundly disturbing, that it
acts like a stain on their humanity. It colors their perception of reality and
yet also defines them. Roth’s secret is he’s African American himself. The term
spooks couldn’t have possibly been used in a racially charged way. But no one
ever finds out—except Nathan Zuckerman.
Roth,
describing the stain through the lens of one of the characters says this, “The
human stain…we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity,
cruelty, abuse, error, … there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with
disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in
everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its
mark. The stain that proceeds disobedience and perplexes all explanation and
understanding. It’s why all the cleansing is a joke…its inescapable.”(pg. 242)
I
won’t take time to unpack the book. It is not an easy book to digest. I went on
line after reading it to see what others had to say and one critic suggested
that this was the kind of book that should be read by High School students. I don’t
think so. It was pretty graphic at times but the critic was right in one
regard. Everyone should understand that there truly is a human stain, and that
stain, whether we are completely aware of it or not, is inescapable. You can’t
get away from it. You can try to conceal it, but it won’t go away.
The
question then becomes, how can it be dealt with? Roth offers no answer. The
book is a description of human depravity and how that is used to hurt others
and how that eventually hurts us. It’s thought provoking, I’ll say that. As a
Christian, there is really only one answer—Jesus Christ. But there are a lot of
people unwilling to consider that with all its ramifications.
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