1

Trials and Errors as Points of Departure in Disgrace and The Human Stain

“Desire is rupture, not exchange.”

—J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country

1.

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was published in late 1999 to immediate acclaim in

England, the United States and much of the English-speaking world. Shortly after its release it was awarded the Booker Prize, making Coetzee the first writer to win it twice and redirecting the American hardcover into multiple printing runs, reading groups, and college classrooms all over the country. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain appeared in the spring of 2000 to an equally eager audience. Roth, unlike Coetzee – or any other contemporary author I can think of, for that matter – had already been producing literary bestsellers for over four decades, many of which have since entered the canon of American classics. (Portnoy’s Complaint made the Random House top

100 English novels of the twentieth century around the same time as The Human

Stain’s appearance.) “Our feet,” laments John Leonard of Roth’s tenacious staying power in the consciousnesses of his fellow readers and writers, “are stained with the gripes of Roth” (6).

The concluding novel of his recent trilogy of American life was wholly contemporary in 2000, its title alluding of course to the recent trial of a President then completing his final year of office. The Human Stain, like Disgrace, is an ambitious, telling, and provocative commentary on the state of the nation at the turn of the millennium. Both novels begin with the accusation of a professor charged with racism or sexual harassment; enraged and bewildered, the character refuses to bow to the demands of his inquisitors (whose outrage is a stand-in for the general public) and is subsequently hounded out of his position. Most reviews acknowledged correctly that 2 the charges of harassment levied against the protagonists were not in themselves central to the novels, but rather a point of departure, an “overture” (Banville 23) for demonstrating how “the public zeitgeist can shape” or “even destroy an individual’s life” (Kakutani).

Disgrace is Coetzee’s first fictional depiction of post-Apartheid South Africa.

John Banville registers “mild shock” in response to the book’s uncharacteristic topicality; it is, for a Coetzee novel, particularly “crowded with the burning, or at least smoldering, and in some cases barely sputtering, issues of the day” (23). The Human

Stain, like American Pastoral and I Married a Communist before it, turns narrator

Nathan Zuckerman’s analytic acuity outward in a close examination of postwar

American life. This is accomplished with the assistance of three characters whose tales he researches, imagines, and recounts. In this manner Roth provides his narrator the distance needed to capture the historical currents of an era and, more importantly, its profound determination over the lives of its individual participants.

If The Human Stain, then, is about the United States after the fall of the Soviet

Union and Disgrace aims to depict South Africa after the ANC’s rise to power, why do both novels share so many uncanny parallels? What is the significance of originating their plots in a provincial college crucible? How can the Aschenbachian transformation of a respected professor in the Humanities help us recognize the new realities of a post-Apartheid, post-Cold War world? This paper will attempt to answer such questions by examining four points of their shared resemblance: first, the interwoven fates of individuals and their countries; second, an authorial contempt for the general stupidity of the age, most clearly expressed in their condemnation of what transpires in the universities; third, a moral concern for the shame, disgrace, and 3

humility of the individual in the face of society’s unjust censure; and finally, a

pessimistic evaluation of human nature and its humanist aspirations.

Coetzee and Roth are by no means alone in their suggestion that travesties of

political correctness are representative of that historical moment. As literary work set

in the latest fin-de-siècle continues to appear (especially those begun before the events

of late 2001 inexorably altered one’s perspective) it is evident that this subject was not

the exclusive terrain of septuagenarian giants.1 Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, for

instance, which also aims to portray the United States at the end of the century, opens

with the shameful episode of the youngest Lambert son, who is for similar reasons

disgraced and expelled from his position at a small liberal arts college in New

England.

With the passage of time, the final years of the twentieth century begin to

crystallize, gradually improvising a coherent singularity of their own from the (albeit

low-lying) perspective of our twenty-first century perch; the music, fashions, and

idiomatic expressions of the nineties, like all decades before them, cluster together

and acquire their perceptibly time-encoded pattern. “It wasn’t going to be 1953

forever,” says Ernestine, Coleman Silk’s estranged sister in The Human Stain:

“People age. Nations age. Problems age” (326). When we consider today’s problems

and contrast them against those confronting us only five years ago, we are confronted

by how both nations – and the challenges of an earlier time – have aged. It is therefore

from the vantage point of the present that I will try to understand why the trials and

errors of both protagonists resemble one another so closely.

2.

1 Roth has been especially fixated with it, incorporating it into all three of his most recent novels. I would be more likely to consider Roth’s complaints idiosyncratically disproportionate – I cannot recall a cause célèbre of the time resembling that of his characters’ since the Clarence Thomas hearings (not that the motives charted by Roth might be implausible) – were it not for the topic’s appearance in other books as well. 4

“… [T]he fate of millions is often most apparent in those who by profession note changes in themselves, i.e., the writers.”

—Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind

The symbolic linkage of the fate of an individual to that of his country is nothing new for either writer. It may well be that J.M. Coetzee is, as Banville asserts,

“conscious that it is precisely by virtue of its timelessness that art contributes to its time, and to times to come” (23), but even the most generally ambiguous setting in his novels – say, the mythical landscape of Waiting for the Barbarians – is clearly representative of the South Africa whose historical, recurrent outbreaks of cruelty infiltrate even the smallest village, penetrating its inhabitants completely.2 Philip

Roth’s counterpart of old, Nathan Zuckerman, first breaks out of his egoistic shell

after traveling to Prague and becoming extensively engaged with Eastern European

fiction; his discovery of the paradox under which its writers live, the oppressive

climate of occupied Czechoslovakia where “nothing goes and everything matters” –

the very reverse of what had precipitated his writer’s block and consequential

breakdown in The Anatomy Lesson – opens his fiction to the outside world beginning

with The Prague Orgy, an “epilogue” to Roth’s Zuckerman Bound trilogy. This

fictional universe expands to encompass Israel and England in The Counterlife before taking aim at the hopes of postwar America in his most recent trilogy.

“A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE”: these are the words draped from one end of the White House to the other in a dream Zuckerman relates at the beginning of

The Human Stain. In a magnificent opening recapitulating the events of that “summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind, and life, in all its shameless

2 Cf. critic Michael Gorra’s claim that Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer stand in opposition to one another regarding their approach to writing; the former is allegoric, mythic, and unspecific, while the latter names names in her realistic depiction of current historical events. Coetzee’s strategy is visible, of course, in all of Kafka’s work. 5 impurity, once again confounded America” (3), Roth draws the curtain on the United

States in 1998, a time when the arguably most powerful man in the world was publicly reduced to his phallus, and nothing but. Clinton’s impeachment trial is mentioned alongside Zuckerman’s introduction of the novel’s protagonist. The narrator asserts that the “persecuting spirit,” a spirit “no less exacting” and “in behalf of no less exalted ideals” than those of an Ayatollah Khomeini (2-3), is ubiquitous, a mania to which Coleman Silk, former Dean and Professor of Classics at a small college in rural New England, has fallen victim.

The first ten pages of Disgrace are a miniature prelude to the longer one that follows, the brief affair with a student that exiles Professor David Lurie onto his daughter’s small farm in the Eastern Cape province. When Lurie accidentally confronts his weekly escort in the street with her two sons, it alters the business relationship that till then had “to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1).

After a brief attempt to track her down (despite her having already terminated all contact with him quite adamantly), Lurie yearns to fill the void left in her absence.

The reckless insistence of his desire, a compulsion without which Lurie can conceive of no other alternative than to prepare for death, leads to a number of failed encounters, one of them with his department’s new secretary. Their conversation over lunch is eerily prescient in its description of the problems many South Africans now confront:

… she complains about her sons’ school. Drug-pedlars hang around the

playing-fields, she says, and the police do nothing. For the past three

years she and her husband have had their name on a list at the New

Zealand consulate, to emigrate. ‘You people had it easier.’ [she says] ‘I

mean, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, at least you 6

knew where you were.’ ‘You people?’ he says. ‘What people?’ ‘I mean

your generation. Now people just pick and choose which laws they

want to obey. It’s anarchy. How can you bring up children when

there’s anarchy all around?’” (8-9)

Lurie is of course too preoccupied with compensating the loss of his “moderate bliss”

(6) to process her resentment, but her last sentence hints at a untrusting skepticism

regarding the nation’s future, one powerful enough to compel her and her husband to

emigrate in order to raise their children safely. It additionally poses the question –

“how can you bring up children when there’s anarchy all around?” – whose lack of an

answer will haunt Lurie for the duration of the novel.

3.

“Their feat, after years of etymological meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a virtue.

—J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron

Roth’s creation of Silk was probably inspired by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s

1996 article about the life of Anatole Broyard.3 Broyard, the main reviewer of the

New York Times Book Review throughout the 1970s, was, like his fictional protégé, a

light-skinned black who passed for white in his desire to bypass the impediments of

race. Severing every link to his family after his father’s death, he keeps the secret to

his grave: even his own children learn of it only after the funeral. (Ever the ingenious

hyperbolist, Roth has Silk additionally pass as a Jew.) The irony is therefore all the

more biting when Silk is accused of racism after addressing the following question to

the classroom regarding two students on the attendance list who have not once in six

3 Published originally in the New Yorker under the title “White Like Me,” it is now a chapter in Gates’s full-length study Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. 7 weeks shown up: “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” (6). The raging furies of stupidity and self-righteousness introduced at the beginning of the book descend on the campus, destroying the life of Silk, who, believing the public responsible for his wife’s death, is propelled into a frenzy of rage that leads him to ask Zuckerman to re-compose the manuscript he has written detailing the history of wrongs committed against him. A measure of peace returns to his life, so to speak, only after the kindling of a sexual affair – yet another secret – with a thirty-four year old custodial assistant at the school.

Secretly revisiting Athena after his resignation, Silk overhears a coarsely playful conversation among a chorus of junior faculty reciting their grievances about the current trial in Washington. Its content reinforces the idea that the brainlessness of the pundits has its mirror below as well. Monica Lewinsky is, for them, a “part of that dopey culture … ,”

Part of this generation that is proud of its own shallowness. … They fix

on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and

end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how

knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing,

conventionalizing, anchorman cliché.” (147)4

The art of critical inquiry, the thoughtful application of reason one would expect to find in a liberal institution of higher education – the ostensible home, after all, of the humanities – fails to be seen. There is simply no longer any interest for it.

The structural departmental changes occurring in both novels suggests that the dumbing-down of the universities is symptomatic for their large-scale overhaul into a

4 “The human desire for a beginning, a middle, and an end—and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle—” the novel concludes, “is realized nowhere so thoroughly as in the plays that Coleman taught at Athena College. But outside the classical tragedy of the fifth century B.C., the expectation of completion, let alone of a just and perfect consummation, is a foolish illusion for an adult to hold” (315). 8 feel-good transitional preparation for (or last stop before embarking upon) a lifetime of full-time work in the educated middle and upper classes. At Athena College, the

Department of Classics where Silk once taught has since – along with Russian,

Italian, Spanish, German, and French – been absorbed “under the aegis of the

“combined languages and literature program” (5, 190-191). David Lurie, we learn,

“earns his living at the Cape Technical University, formerly Cape Town University

College. Once a professor of modern languages, he has been, since Classics and

Modern Languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization, adjunct professor of communications” (3).

The “great rationalization” is both cause and effect: the departments are changing because the needs for them have changed. The importance of the liberal arts to a well-rounded education has been subsumed by the demand for the greater simplicity, usefulness, and economically more promising Communications. By and large, those who do enroll in literature classes have little to no passion for the great books of the past. Melanie Isaacs, the “clever enough, but unengaged” young woman from Lurie’s course on the Romantic poets – with whom he nevertheless finds himself

“mildly smitten” (11) after a chance meeting in the midst of his sexual frustration – has chosen it, she says, “mainly for the atmosphere”; besides, she would prefer not take another Shakespeare course, having attended one the previous year (14).

Isaacs’ interest in drama – she is “taking a diploma in theatre” (14) and will appear in a comedy about the new South Africa where “all the coarse prejudices” are

“brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter” (23)5 – is as shallow as that of the students’ in Coleman Silk’s courses, where the only response to classical tragedy he can elicit is one Elena Mitnick’s complaint that the plays are

5 The title of the play is Sunset at the Globe Salon [!]. 9

“degrading to women” (184). “Almost without exception,” remarks Silk to

Zuckerman, “… our students are abysmally ignorant.”

They’ve been incredibly badly educated. Their lives are intellectually

barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing

nothing. … Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching

what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is

the same as walking up Broadway … talking to yourself, except

instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to

yourself, they’re all in the room. They know, like, nothing.” (191-192)

Compare this to what Coetzee (who was until very recently, like Roth, a professor) writes of David Lurie: “He has long ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday” (32).

The chain of “postliteracy” appears unbroken at every level. “With every passing day,” Coleman’s sister, a high school teacher, tells Zuckerman, “the words I hear spoken strike me as less and less of a description of what things really are” (328); one suspects that the transformation of Modern Languages into Communications 101 will do little to stem the tide of collective thoughtlessness and imprecise language.

“In East Orange High they stopped long ago reading the classics,” she continues

(329), “Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it’s the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege” (331). The portraits of many, if not all, of the college’s other instructors is not flattering either. Both novels, and Roth’s to a far more explicit extent, assert that this incapacity can be found at all levels, from the illiterate to the so-called literary elite.

4. 10

“[E]s war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.”

—Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß

I have already suggested that the harassment trials undergone by Lurie and

Silk are but preludes to greater concerns, among them, for instance, the inseparability

of an individual from his time. The epigraph for The Human Stain derives from

Sophocles and consists of one single exchange. “What is the rite of purification?” asks

Oedipus, “How shall it be done?” “By banishing a man,” answers Creon, “or

expiation of blood by blood.” David Lurie and Coleman Silk are initially exiled, but

by the conclusion of each novel will pay an even higher price for their transgressions,

as if they are not only due to pay penance for their own crimes, but for those of their

country as well.6 Roth and Coetzee are unsparing in their unflinching portrayal of

“what moral suffering can do to someone” (12); it is no coincidence that one of the

novels is titled after the state to which both protagonists are bound.7 The reader, like

Zuckerman, witnesses at close range the effects of “humiliating disgrace … still

eating away at someone … still fully vital” (18).

There is one episode in Coetzee’s book that is thematically paradigmatic for

understanding how both characters perceive their relations to desire. Now in Salem

with his daughter Lucy, Lurie attempts to account for his actions, illustrating them –

not unlike the author in The Lives of Animals and other public lectures turned into

quasi fictions over the past seven years – by telling a story.

‘When you were small, when we were still living in Kenilworth, the

people next door had a dog, a golden retriever. … It was a male.

Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and

6 Lurie attempts, unsuccessfully, to console Lucy after her rape by arguing that the hatred of her attackers was not personal, but “history speaking through them … a history of wrong” (156). 7 “Disgrace,” as Michael Gorra correctly notes, is a word – and a sentence – that remains in the present tense throughout the novel. 11

unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it.

This went on until the poor dog didn’t know what to do. At the smell of

a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail

between its legs, whining, trying to hide. … There was something so

ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it

seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper. A dog will accept

the justice of that: a beating for a chewing. But desire is another story.

No animal will accept the justice of being punished for its own nature.’

(89-90)

It’s not that the feelings of Lurie or Silk are unconflicted: only moments after

accounting for his behavior with Melanie Isaacs thus, Lurie concedes quite frankly

that he has also “felt just the opposite. That desire is a burden we could well do

without” (90). Desire is a reckless catalyst of metamorphosis, often unwanted,

transforming the professor who is a respectable society man into the feverish animal-

like creature who makes a fool of himself in his improper pursuits.8 Both authors

explore the unresolved parameters of this conflict relentlessly. “Laws are made for

one purpose only,” Cruso tells Susan Barton in Coetzee’s earlier Foe: “to hold us in

check when our desires grow immoderate” (36). And yet the very ability of the law to

govern Eros when it does emerge is questionable – even the President (A HUMAN

BEING) cannot contain it. When “the natural thing that was the brute” is unleashed

by Faunia Farley and enabled by Viagra, Coleman Silk himself is astonished by the

immediacy with which everything can be willfully sacrificed for one last Dionysian

thrill. What he undergoes is nothing less than “the onslaught of freedom at seventy-

8 Many of Roth’s readings of Kafka, the latter’s paradoxes of guilt in particular, occur through such an interpretive lens. Cf., for example, David Kepesh in The Professor of Desire. 12

one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind—known also as Aschenbachian madness”

(171).9

Nathan Zuckerman, whose conceptual framework for interpreting the world

derives, naturally, from literature, thinks here of Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig,

recognizing the similar way in which “a man [is] taken over by a force so long

suppressed in him that it had all but been extinguished,” a figure become victim to

“the resurgence of its stupefying power.” Zuckerman watching Silk watching Faunia

milking the cows corresponds to “Aschenbach feverishly watching Tadzio—his

sexual longing brought to a boil by the anguishing fact of mortality” (51). There can

be no doubt that for both men, once in the throes of this passion, corporal desire

stands in opposition to nothing less than death itself.10

The punishment for submission under socially opprobrious conditions are

twofold: public censure and, depending on the context, self censure, i.e., incessant

guilt. The mediator between these two poles is a fearful brand of humiliation, a

demeaning form of degradation not unlike that imposed upon – then internalized by –

the Kenilworth retriever. And yet the paradox remains; in Zuckerman words, “How

can one say, ‘No, this isn’t part of life,’ since it always is? The containment of sex,

the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species and keeps us everlastingly

mindful of the matter we are” (37). This is the very reason Lurie can concede guilt to

the committee of inquiry regarding his conduct, but finds it impossible to “express

contrition” (54) – the reason why the hypocritical viciousness of an enraged public so

unjustified.

9 It is worth recalling the original inspiration for Mann’s story, which was to be based on Goethe’s foolish behavior after falling in love with a teenager during his later years. 10 As one embarrassing failure follows another in his attempt to restore some equilibrium to his sexual life, David Lurie even considers castration; “ageing,” he reminds us, “is not a graceful business.” The “proper business of the old” is singular: “preparing to die” (9). Cf. Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, for whom all sex takes the form of a rebellion against death. 13

5.

It’s the same in the shady grove of academe: / Cold eye and primitive beak and callused foot / Conjunctive to destroy / all things of high repute, / Whole epics, Campion’s songs, Tolstoy, / Euclid and logic’s enthymeme, / As each man whets his saber, / As though enjoined to his neighbor. // And that’s not the worst of it; there are the Bacchae, / The ladies’ auxiliary of the raptor clan / With their bright cutlery, / sororal to a man. / And feeling puckish, they foresee / An avian banquet in the sky, / Feasting off dead white European males, / Or local living ones, if all else fails.

—Anthony Hecht, “Rara Avis in Terris”

“Everyone knows,” follows the [comparatively] prosaic cascade of words Silk receives in the mail one day, “you’re / sexually exploiting an / abused, illiterate / woman half your / age” (38). With the receipt of this ostensibly anonymous message

(ostensible because he recognizes the handwriting without difficulty), the private affair of mutual consent between Silk and Faunia Farley is threatened to outside exposure. Indeed, the poison pen letter asserts that this is already the case. Silk’s fury of the spooks period is thus resurrected; like Achilles after the death of Petrocles, he is, if such a thing is possible, even more inconsolable. When warned by his lawyer that it is dangerous for him to continue the affair, that once made public “what you started out with is going to bear no resemblance to the malevolent puritanism with which you will be tarred and feathered” (76), Silk angrily responds to the smugness of

Nelson Primus’s prolixity – to their mutual surprise – by calling him “lily-white” and terminating their business relationship.

Though Primus’s advice is prudent, the ardour with which he (albeit condescendingly) warns his client of the possible consequences – the danger to Silk that Farley’s unstable ex-husband poses – only further enrages Silk. He is, we are led to believe, at some level aware that the warnings are legitimate, that a number of serious risks are involved. The reason he cannot control his indignation is not, however, because of Primus’s attitude but the “tyranny of propriety” itself, a 14 phenomenon Zuckerman knows, of course, from first-hand experience: “As a force,” he writes, “propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women’s rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. … all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley” (153-

154).

As his trial – he will be examined by a “committee of inquiry” – is set in to motion, Lurie too is infuriated by “the gossip-mill … turning day and night, grinding reputations. The community of the righteous, holding their sessions in corners, over the telephone, behind closed doors. Gleeful whispers. Schadenfreude. First the sentence, then the trial” (42). He also has a conversation with a prudent lawyer, who recommends him, much to his distaste, to “take a yellow card [and] Minimize the damage” by volunteering to undergo sensitivity training, community service, or counselling (42-43). What distinguishes the charges leveled against Silk from what

Lurie faces in his trial is that the latter has actually abused his position by having sex with one of his current students, turning in a false record of her attendance, and giving her a seventy for a mid-term she did not show up to take.11 To these allegations, though, he readily admits his guilt – too readily, in fact. The committee, the public, and many of the students demand a “rite of purification,” as Creon explains in Roth’s epigraph; nothing short of “exile or the expiation of blood for blood.” This is much more than the reluctant apology Lurie is willing not so much as to offer as to concede.

His arrogant aloofness only damages his cause further; when offered suggestions by

11 The indifference with which Isaacs submits to the affair combined with her surprise when Lurie tells her that she will need to make up the exam leads one to wonder whether she may have gone through with everything precisely because of the advantages it might present in the class. She is clearly not attracted to him, and short of passively allowing everything to happen against her will out of shock or indifference alone – though either seems plausible – might explain her compliance, especially during the early stages of his courtship. (If one can even call it a courtship.) 15

his colleagues that might allow him to keep his job – and more importantly, his

pension –, he becomes angrier. He considers the idea of submitting himself to

counselling demeaning; it is incomprehensible. What is the point of the whole tirade, he wonders, of the need for contrition? “’To fix me? To cure me? To cure me of inappropriate desires?’” (43). As a horde of student reporters and onlookers surround him after his predictably catastrophic hearing, he wonders what Silk wonders, what

Zuckerman wonders, what everyone in the United States during the spectacle of

Kenneth Starr’s three-ring circus wonders: “Confessions, apologies: why this thirst for abasement? A hush falls. They circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off” (56).12

The buzzards of calumny travel quickly. In no time Lurie’s ex-wife draws

another direct parallel to Silk’s provincial Athena: “’People talk, David. Everyone

knows about this latest affair of yours, in the juiciest detail’” [my italics] (43). And

“everyone knows,” of course, is not so much an empirical observation as a moralizing

condemnation. Everyone does finally know about Silk’s relationship with Faunia –

not much about it though, and this is Roth’s point: they only know that some kind of

intimate relationship existed after their tragic demise, and even then know nothing

about its dynamics. Malice is nevertheless set loose as if to confirm the worst of

Faunia’s earlier suspicions. An on-line eulogy (“death of a faunia”) posted –

anonymously, of course – to Athena’s faculty news group outrageously claims that

Silk is responsible for a calculating murder-suicide, for abusing and exploiting her

sexually in order to settle his own scores with the school (293). A Pandora’s box of

lies is opened, lies that remind the reader of the weakness inherent in all human

beings, the weakness that is the stain itself. “An epidemic had broken out in Athena,”

12 He will later comprehend their outraged demands when confronting Petrus, a relative of one of the boys who has raped Lucy: “Yes, it was a violation, he would like to hear Petrus say; yes, it was an outrage” (119). Petrus, of course, holds Lurie in contempt and is entirely dismissive towards him. 16

writes Zuckerman, now himself a participant in the events narrated, “… the pathogens

were out there. In the ether. In the universal hard drive, everlasting and undeletable,

the sign of the viciousness of the human creature” (291).

The human stain of the novel’s title is typically Rothian in its allusive

flexibility. It recalls Monica’s blue dress literally, the color of one’s skin

metaphorically. Mostly, though, it stands in for the blemish of human imperfection.

Zuckerman imagines one of the novel’s most pivotal monologues for Faunia. She

recites it while visiting a crow kept at the Audubon Society, having inexplicably

stormed away from the breakfast table when Silk reads “something from the Sunday

paper about the President and Monica Lewinsky” (234). In this passage she

acknowledges, resigned, that “we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint.

Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen—there’s no other way to be here.”

“The fantasy of purity is appalling,” she concludes, “It’s insane. What is the quest to

purify, if not more impurity?” (242). The tune performed by contemporary American pipers like William Bennett or William Buckley is led in the name of a purifying mission all the more repulsive given the backdrop of the twentieth century’s horrors, events that have made it unthinkable for any person to deny the durability of real, unquestionable evil in the world.

6.

“All of the education and nothing helps. Nothing can insulate against the lowest levels of thought.”

—Nathan Zuckerman in The Human Stain

17

In the early nineties the completed portion of Anatole Broyard’s memoirs was published (Gates 79).13 The final product, titled Kafka Was the Rage, was not so much

a biographical revelation of one self’s history as a celebratory reminiscence of

postwar Greenwich Village.14 The presiding spirit of the time is one of hope and

rebirth. It is the starting point for Roth’s recent trilogy of novels, whose puncturing of

this hope begins (chronologically) with the destructive blacklisting of the fifties and

concludes with a crucible of propriety at the end of the century. If Age of Iron was a

tentative prelude to the metamorphosis – not elimination – of the cruelty consuming

the land’s inhabitants, Disgrace was its damning confirmation. Despite all the ostensible progress and promise sired by the fall of the Soviet Union and the National

Party at the beginning of that decade, both authors imply that the human stain – that telltale trail of “cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen” – persists.

At the heart of Coetzee and Roth’s recent fiction lies the hopeless, complex irresolvability all things human. The charge of harassment is but a symptom of the greater, universal issues at hand. “It was strange to think,” observes Zuckerman at

Silk’s funeral, “that people so well educated and professionally civil should have fallen so willingly for the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man can embody evil. Yet there is this need, and it is undying and it is profound” (306). This need is so all-encompassing that even the “well educated and professionally civil” are not immune to the poison when it becomes part of the zeitgeist.

13 The book was cut short by the intervention of an inoperable cancer that prompted a late study on the literature of illness and death. 14 Broyard does well in his attempt to redress the stature of New York City after the war, which despite having been the home to an equally formidable number of artists and intellectuals is often overshadowed by the legend of the Left Bank in Paris. On the other hand, many readers were disappointed by his steadfast secrecy about the past. “’Anatole,’” remarked his editor Daphne Merkin, “’there’s something odd here. Within the memoir, you have your family moving to a black neighborhood in Brooklyn. I find that strange—unless they’re black. You can do many things if you’re writing a memoir. But if you squelch stuff that seems to be crucial about you, and pretend it doesn’t exist…’” (qtd. In Gates 77-78). 18

Disgrace and The Human Stain begin with travesties of political correctness for precisely this reason. Its failure to function properly is representative of the failure of good intentions, hence the parallel to the somewhat inflated hopes of the nineties.

The bête humain lurks beneath the facade; people will always find new ways to mistreat one another. The disposition is indestructible, unyielding, and part of the human core. What better way to prove it than to demonstrate its thriving under even the most humanistic of ideological umbrellas? “What on earth is less reprehensible,” asks Roth of the Swede Levov’s innocuous hopes in American Pastoral – and indeed, what could be less reprehensible than the wish to root out racism or sexual harassment?15 If hope has a place in the outlook of these two authors and the nations

depicted in their books, it is of the sort Max Brod once attributed to Franz Kafka.

Having asked him whether it might exist in a world beyond ours, Kafka replies

affirmatively: there is hope, he answers, for God there is an infinite quantity of hope – but not for us.

15 Professor Delphine Roux thus rightly feels “the humanist is the very part of her own self that she … feels herself betraying” (266).