TY - JOUR
AU1 - Boddy, Kasia
AB - Abstract Philip Roth belongs to the first generation of American novelists for whom a university education in the liberal arts was the norm. This essay charts Roth's developing acquaintance with classical literature, the starting point for Great Books courses in the 1950s, and the implications for his fiction of his understanding of the difference in scope and purpose between the two representative classical genres. It focuses on The Human Stain (2000), the novel in which he reflects most directly upon what tragedy and epic once did, and what might happen to novels if they became more like the one or the other. 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 achievement against that of those other writers whose work, in his view, most requires being measured against. Roth belongs to the first generation of American novelists for whom a university education in the liberal arts was the norm. It is no surprise, therefore, that the literature he has measured himself against should include classical Greek tragedy and epic: the starting-point for any Great Books course in any American university in the early 1950s. For Roth, however, such reckonings have never just been about reputation. From the very start, they enabled him to explore, from the outside, what it is he has been trying to do as a novelist. This essay will chart Roth's developing acquaintance with classical literature and the implications of his understanding of the difference in scope and purpose between the two representative classical genres for our understanding of his fiction. It will focus on The Human Stain (2000), the novel in which he most directly reflects upon what tragedy and epic once did, and what might happen to novels if they became more like one or the other. When it comes to thinking about literary history and form, Roth the student and Roth the celebrated novelist are perhaps not all that far apart. Oedipus the King In The Human Stain, the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, attends the funeral of a newish friend, Coleman Silk, a professor of Greek at a small Massachusetts college called Athena. Observing Silk's estranged son Mark in ‘wild … lamentation’, Nathan is less than generous in imagining what might be going on in the young man's head. He [Mark Silk] thought Coleman was going to stay here until the whole play could be performed, as though he and Coleman had been set down not in life but on the southern hillside of the Athenian acropolis, in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, where, before the eyes of ten thousand spectators, the dramatic unities were once rigorously observed and the great cathartic cycle was enacted annually.1Whatever Mark himself thinks (and we never discover), Zuckerman – a novelist by trade – is clearly interested in considering whether the professor of Greek's life can be viewed in terms of classical tragedy, or more particularly, as a version of Oedipus the King. As several critics have pointed out, Silk resembles Oedipus in that he willingly performs a series 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 Jew in order to pursue an academic career. Fifty years later, he wonders aloud in class if two perpetually absent students were ‘spooks’. His intention is to speak of ghosts but, because the students concerned are black, 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 of the 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 the road, possibly by her ex-husband Lester. ‘The passionate struggle for precious singularity, his revolt of one against the Negro fate – and just look where the defiant great one had ended up!’, reflects Zuckerman (HS, p. 183). If Coleman Silk might be compared to Oedipus, then the administrators of Athena College seem to resemble the citizens of Thebes in their dedication to the task of cleansing the community of the ‘pollution grown ingrained within’.3 Zuckerman draws a further parallel between Athena's attempt to rid itself of purported racism and sexism, and America's concurrent determination to impeach Bill Clinton following his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The novel's epigraph from Oedipus the King makes this explicit: OEDIPUS.    What is the rite  Of purification? How shall it be done? CREON. By banishing a man, or expiation  of blood by blood … 4 Citing the parallels outlined above – and there are several others – Geoffrey Bakewell concludes that Zuckerman has given ‘the events in Coleman's life their tragic shape’, ‘casting’ him ‘as a Greek tragic hero’. The ‘most explicit analogy to Greek tragedy’, he says, comes when Zuckerman imagines Mark Silk's thoughts at his father's funeral.5 But Bakewell does not quote the passage in full. Zuckerman goes on: The human desire for a beginning, middle, and an end, – and an end appropriate in magnitude to that beginning and middle – 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. (HS, p. 315)In a footnote, Bakewell argues that this ‘coy disclaimer’ should be ‘read with a jaundiced eye’. ‘If it is truly “a foolish illusion” to apply to “real life” the forms and patterns of Greek tragedy’, he asks, ‘why does Nathan make this mistake so frequently?’6 In trying to answer this question, I will look at some of the other literary forms and patterns by means of which Nathan Zuckerman tries to shape Coleman Silk's life story. In particular, I will argue that a particular certain reading of Homer's Iliad provides Zuckerman with an alternative, and to him in many ways more appealing, classical model. The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction First, however, I would like to consider in greater detail why Zuckerman, and Roth, might both be interested in ‘completion’, and yet hold it to be a ‘foolish illusion’. The Sophocles epigraph derives from David Grene's Three Greek Tragedies in Translation, the standard college text of Roth's youth. A look at some of his other college reading might also be instructive. In the early 1950s, Philip Roth was a student at the University of Chicago, and his exposure there to ‘the standard master's degree program in literature’ feeds into many of his novels.7 In The Human Stain we can see his continuing engagement with not only Grene's translation of Sophocles, but also, among others, H. D. F. Kitto's 1951 bestseller The Greeks and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, first published in America in 1953. Roth also took classes from the ‘neo-Aristotelian’ Elder Olson, for whom the critic's task was to identify the ‘wholeness, completeness, and unity’ of the work, and then to consider 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 composite continuum which is a whole; and by ‘excellence of perceptible form’ I mean the possession of perceptible magnitude in accordance with a mean 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 to the degree that it formed ‘an ordered and complete whole’.8 Roth graduated in 1955, went to New York, and then returned to Chicago to teach freshman composition from 1956 to 1958. He makes sure 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 too returns to Chicago to teach English composition, beginning his course with a lecture on ‘The Strategies and Intentions of Fiction’, which he later describes as ‘replete with lengthy (and I had thought) “salient” quotations from Aristotle's Poetics, Flaubert's correspondence, Dostoevsky's diaries, and James's critical prefaces – I quoted only from the masters, pointed only to monuments’.10 These two moments in Nathan Zuckerman's biography emerge in two different novels – the first is from Zuckerman Unbound (1981), set in 1969, and the second from ‘Courting Disaster (or, Serious in the Fifties)’, a short story which he narrates but which, we learn, was written by a novelist called Peter Tarnopol, the protagonist of My Life as a Man (1974). ‘Courting Disaster’ ends with Nathan drawing attention to the gulf between ‘the story of that Zuckerman in that Chicago’ (a story inhabited by Great Books and which fits a ‘traditional narrative mode’) and the ‘flamboyant American present’ whose ‘extravagant fictions’ require another writer, better able ‘to treat the implausible, the preposterous, and the bizarre in something other than a straightforward and recognizable manner’ (MLAM, p. 87). That other writer was to be Roth himself who, in creating this multilayered metafiction, ‘seemed truly 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 intentions of 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 in 1949, a ‘good boy … in my Peter Pan collar’, he had ‘believed everything Aristotle taught me about literature’. Tragedy exhausts pity and fear by arousing those emotions to the utmost, and comedy provides a carefree, lighthearted state of mind in the audience by showing them it would be absurd to take seriously the action being imitated. (ZU, p. 69)But in the spring of 1969, after the publication of his ‘notorious’ novel Carnovsky, Zuckerman declares that ‘Aristotle let me down’ (ZU, p. 13). He offers two reasons for this that go beyond an awareness of the ‘flamboyant American present’ proposed in ‘Courting Disaster’. First, he observes that readers of Carnovsky do not seem able to distinguish between an action and an imitation of an action. Secondly, and consequently, they are unable to achieve any sense of completion – either tragic or comic – on finishing the novel. Wherever he goes Zuckerman is pursued by readers hailing 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 a character who lived in a book’ (ZU, p. 13).12 Aristotle, Zuckerman complains, ‘didn't mention anything about the theater of the ridiculous in which I am now a leading character – because of literature’ (ZU, p. 69). But it is not only Aristotle who lets Zuckerman down. In every Zuckerman novel that follows, we find him railing against genres that offer the ‘foolish illusion’ of unity and purification. Worst of all, perhaps because most pervasive in American ideology, is the pastoral – otherwise known as the ‘goyish wilderness of birds and trees where America began and had long ago ended’.13 Athena College is set in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, close to the nineteenth-century home of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 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 rural recluse’, the eminent novelist Emanuel Isidore Lanoff.14 By the end of The Counterlife (1986), Zuckerman feels confident that pastoral, with its claim that ‘we may finally be “ourselves” ’ and its inability to ‘admit contradiction or conflict’, is ‘not … [his] genre’.15 After an interval writing other works, Roth returned to Zuckerman in 1997 for a second trilogy of novels. Nathan now becomes the Conradian chronicler of the central ‘historical moments in postwar American life’: late 1960s radicalism in American Pastoral (1997), the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s in I Married a Communist (1998), and their equivalents in the late 1990s ‘culture wars’ in The Human Stain (2000).16 The final novel's allusion to John Dos Passos's 1930s national trilogy U.S.A. suggests Roth's interest in the ‘encapsulating fiction’ that is the Great American Novel, a phenomenon he had roundly mocked back in 1973 (HS, p. 148).17 Dos Passos's trilogy, for all its modernist interventions of Camera Eye and Newsreel perspectives into the tale, is a straightforward chronological narrative – beginning with hope and ending with the unambiguous declaration ‘we stand defeated America’.18 Roth's trilogy has no straightforward chronology – it begins in the 1960s, moves back to the 1950s, and then forward to the 1990s – nor does it have recourse to any form of panoramic or summarising view. Its unifying principles are allusion and repetition: Zuckerman tells three stories of athletes, each of whom is surrounded by an ‘aura of heroic purity’ and each of whom is marked with 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 is surely to encourage the development through antagonism towards resolution, but any ‘expectation of completion … of a just perfect consummation’ is what The Human Stain actively resists (HS, p. 315). At the start of I Married a Communist Zuckerman has settled into the Berkshire hills in which he first encountered Lonoff, enduring the ‘palliative of the primitive hut’, living the life of an Thoreauvian ‘man by himself 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 disenchantment with the ideology and aesthetic of pastoral as seemingly complete as his disillusionment with tragedy's promises of catharsis. In telling Coleman Silk's story, however, Zuckerman tests the conventions of pastoral in much the same way as he tried out those of tragedy. Pastoral arrives in the form of Silk's lover, his ‘Voluptas’, Faunia (HS, p. 47). Faunia is literally a milkmaid, and her organic produce attracts city folk searching not only for ‘a tasty drink’ but also for ‘the embodiment of a freshening, sweetening country purity that their city-battered idealism requires’. Zuckerman is sceptical of those who believe that ‘downing a glass of Organic Livestock milk were no less a redemptive religious rite than a nutritional blessing’. In poor imitation of Aristotelian tragedy, organic milk promises ‘wholeness’ as well as purity – testimonials to its goodness promise ‘our body, soul, and spirit are getting nourished as a whole’. A parallel can also be drawn between the ‘otherwise sensible adults’ who, accepting these claims, ‘spend a pleasant few minutes … pretending they are seven years old’, 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 David Brauner points out, ‘far from living out a rustic idyll, we discover that she had endured childhood abuse, the loss of both her children and the violence of her ex-husband’.20 In ‘The Purifying Ritual’, the novel's final chapter, Roth brings Aristotle and American pastoral together.21 The book ends with an image of ‘perfect consummation’, a ‘pure and peaceful vision’ of ‘a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice on a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America’ (HS, p. 361). Again things are not what they at first seem. The man fishing is Faunia's ex-husband, Lester Farley, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, a wife-beater and the man who Zuckerman is ‘sure’ killed Silk because he believed him to be a Jew (HS, p. 350). Zuckerman hurries away in case Farley decides to ‘do [him] in’ too (HS, p. 360). But first the two men have a brief conversation about literature. Farley begins by telling him what Zuckerman recognises as a conventional ‘war story’, about how what happened to him in Vietnam has ‘doomed’ his subsequent life. Then he starts to interrogate the man he has been told is an ‘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, pornography, even the war story – share with American pastoral and Aristotelian tragedy an ‘expectation of completion’, ‘wholeness’, and release. None, however, is, in itself, adequate to Zuckerman's purpose. His aim is not to capture, once and for all, the essence of Coleman Silk or even Lester Farley. Even while he trembles with fear, Zuckerman knows that Farley is doing a Vietnam vet ‘act’ (HS, p. 348).22 As he pointed out in American Pastoral (1997), ‘getting people right is not what living is all about. … It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful 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 from the ‘womb-dream’ of living ‘unencumbered by man-made ritual’. The ritual of circumcision initiates the child into the historical world: ‘the heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own’ (Counterlife, p. 327). And if birth requires the human touch of ‘archaic ritual’, so too does death.24 For the last twenty years, 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 narratives, one of the Zuckerman brothers struggles to provide an appropriate eulogy for the other. They ‘look like twins’ but have ‘alien’ minds. The eulogies allow ‘fratricide without pain’ rather than any kind of tidy summation (Counterlife, pp. 224, 237, 231). Funerals are rituals which prompt the 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 is Coleman Silk's. Standing at the graveside, Zuckerman says, ‘I was completely seized by his story, by its end and its beginning, and then and there, 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 life becomes ‘closer’ to him than his ‘own’ (HS, p. 344). But the book that Zuckerman writes is not the apologia that Silk wanted. Nathan does not draw inspiration from ‘Spooks’, a Swiftian ‘screed’ of ‘raging misery’ that Coleman has presented to him (HS, p. 19).26 Nor does he want to turn his friend's life into an American pastoral, a romance, a whodunit, pornography, or, ultimately, an Aristotelian tragedy. So what does he do? A clue comes as he prepares to write. Coleman's sister, Ernestine, his source for information on Silk's childhood, sends him ‘a faded black-and-white photograph measuring about four by five inches, a blown-up snapshot, more than likely taken originally in somebody's backyard with a Brownie box camera’, of the 15-year-old boy in his boxing gear, gloves ‘at the ready in the classic position’ (HS, p. 343). Ritualistically placing this photograph in a frame on his writing desk, Zuckerman begins The Human Stain. He will, it seems, draw inspiration from Coleman Silk's career as a fighter as well as his career as a classics professor. Zuckerman and Roth, beyond the Zuckerman novels, have frequently used boxing metaphors to dramatise the many arguments, debates, and oppositions that make up their stories. Studying at Chicago, for example, allowed the ‘raucous’ to take on the ‘serious’: ‘Superego fights Id to Fifteen-Round Draw; Blood Drawn’.27 ‘My impulse’, Roth once said, ‘is to problematize material. … I like when it's opposed by something else, by another point of view.’28 What Roth here calls an ‘impulse’ is, I would suggest, a fully developed aesthetic – one that rejects the Aristotelian unities in favour of ‘variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty’. This latter formulation is not Roth's but Lionel Trilling's – proposed at the outset of The Liberal Imagination (1950{?}).29 For Trilling, the value of literature lay precisely in its ability to resist the kind of closed readings and ‘systematic certainties’ that he associated both with the ‘ideological age’ and with the ‘modern highly trained literary sensibility’.30 In 1950, he wondered of Oedipus the King whether ‘the famous sense of cathartic resolution is perhaps the result of glossing over terror with beautiful language rather than an evacuation of it’31 and predicted that the ‘novelist of the next decades [would] not occupy himself with questions of form’: For the modern highly trained literary sensibility, form suggests completeness and the ends tucked in; resolution is seen only as all contradictions equated, and although form thus understood has its manifest charm, it will not adequately serve the modern experience.32Twenty years later, in Sincerity and Authenticity, Trilling returned to these formal questions in a discussion of ‘inauthenticity of narration’, with its ‘assumption that life is susceptible of comprehension and hence of management’. For every beginning implies an end, ‘which is not merely the ultimate event, the cessation of happening; it is a significance or at least the promise, dark or bright, of a significance’. ‘Can we, in this day and age,’ he asked in 1972, ‘submit to a mode of explanation so primitive, so flagrantly Aristotelian?’ The answer was yes, inevitably. Narration ‘cannot help telling how things are and even why they are that way’; so Trilling's own argument against narrative explanation itself was reliant on the conventions of narrative explanation.33 Such a paradox was not surprising. As Trilling often said, art was ‘nothing if not a dialectic’ and the best artists those who contained ‘a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power residing in their contradictions’.34 An ‘active literature’ was the ideal.35 The importance of these ideas for novelists of Roth's generation cannot be overestimated (for all their personal fallings in and out with one another).36 In 1947 Trilling ended his only novel, The Middle of the Journey, the story of a summer spent in ‘Socratic’ debate, with the protagonists wondering why they have had ‘so many disagreements’.37 In 1953 Saul Bellow's Augie March celebrated the ‘opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and say “No!”’ ‘What are you supposed to do’, he concludes, ‘but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found’.38 Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) also ends with a realisation that ‘I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. … I approach it through division.’39 And for Nathan Zuckerman, 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’ (to use another phrase from Trilling) was to resist claims of authenticity and instead to dramatise the contradictions of a culture.40 Another subscriber to this theory of the liberal novel was Milan Kundera – ‘I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions’, he once told his friend Roth.41 Coleman's nemesis, Delphine Roux, has a crush on Kundera; 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 is Silk himself. His two careers – boxer and then classicist – meet in his choice 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 classroom would do) but from a translation that his biographer Zuckerman may have 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 emerging from the ‘tension’ that it creates between ‘two forces’ – ‘passionate delight in life, and clear apprehension of its unalterable framework’. The poem's outlook, he maintains, is ‘remarkably free of illusion’.43 In these remarks at least, Kitto's Homer sounds a lot like the dialectical Trilling or Roth, and not at all like the ‘uniformly illuminated’ Homer whom Erich Auerbach presented in another seminal book of Roth's youth, Mimesis.44 Written in the early 1940s, Mimesis was translated into English and published in America in 1953. The opening essay, ‘Odysseus’ Scar', which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1950,45 presents the biblical-Judaic tradition in sharp, and favourable, contrast to that of Homeric epic. James Porter recently summarised what he terms its ‘willful perversity’: Homer is simplicity itself, charming, always coherent, overseen by prudential divinities, while the Bible is riven with conflict and fraught with complication, disunity and doubt, characterized by a lack of obvious coherence.46For Auerbach, an important difference between the two traditions concerns characterisation. Homer's characters, he says, ‘wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly’. The protagonists of the Old Testament, on the other hand, live lives that are ‘entangled’, ‘dark and incomplete’; Homer's characters occupy the foreground; those of the Old Testament, he says twice, are ‘fraught with background’. Homeric style is that of legend, ‘displaying unmistakable meanings’; the Old Testament style is that of history, presenting but not resolving ‘multiplicity of meanings’.47 That Roth's mode resembles Auerbach's novelistic 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 argued that Roth is Judaizing Homer; rethinking the Iliad as an Old Testament tale, rewriting the superficial Homeric scar as a ‘problematic psychological’ human stain.48 Allusions to the Iliad begin at the very outset of Zuckerman's tale. It is 1996 and, following's Silk's dismissal for purported racism, his wife Iris has died. ‘Directly from making arrangements’ for her burial, Coleman drives 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 instead felled her. Creating their false image of him … they had killed his wife’ (HS, p. 11). Coleman likes to tell his students about ‘adrenal Achilles: the most highly flammable of explosive wildmen any writer has enjoyed portraying’ (HS, p. 5). When he comes to Zuckerman's house, Coleman is in a highly flammable mood himself. Indeed, he seems to have become Achilles after the death of Patroclus, the warrior who goes to battle in 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 as Zuckerman noted long ago, however much one believes in the ‘raw I’, none really exists (HS, p. 108). Instead ‘one impersonates best the self that best 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 – like his own – has been based on playing a part. ‘I am a theater and nothing more than a theater’, Zuckerman declares at the end of The Counterlife (p. 325).50 Twenty years later, he modifies this. Character is not merely performance, character is competitive performance, and so sport is in some ways a better analogue than drama. According to Martin Seel, ‘by watching sports, we can enjoy, in our imagination, certain lives that we have neither the 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 that Zuckerman believes he also adopted outside the ring. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves. But that wasn't where the power was or the pleasure either. The power and pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counterconfessional in the same way you were a counterpuncher. (HS, p. 100)The culture (the ‘other kids’) requires the declaration or exposure of an overtly marked identity. It jabs Coleman with its demand for confession. Silk replies (as his name suggests he should) by ‘slipping the punch’ and offering, in return, a counterlife – an identity that is neither black nor white, but Jewish.52 He refuses the binary that is on offer. In the months that follow Iris's death, Coleman–Achilles further attempts to slip the punch of grief. He too enters into ‘professional competition with death’, or, to put it another way, he embarks on a series of funeral games (HS, p. 338). The first game is to dance the foxtrot with Zuckerman in his kitchen. The next is to have an affair with Fauna Farley, whom he calls his Helen of Troy. If Fauna is Helen, then Coleman seems to be finding a new role – no longer Achilles but Paris, dismissed by Hector as having ‘no strength, no courage’, only ‘handsome’ looks and skill on the lyre.53 ‘All of European literature springs from a fight’, Coleman tells his students cheerfully, ‘a brutal quarrel over a 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, Coleman is neither Achilles nor Paris, but himself Patroclus to Zuckerman's Achilles. Although they only meet as old men, it transpires that Coleman Silk and Nathan Zuckerman grew up less than five miles apart and nearly coincided in after-school boxing classes. The connection is reinforced by the game Roth seems to be playing with their names: the story of a black man – cole/coalman – is presented in parallel to that of a Jewish – Zucker or, with further boxing connotations, Sugar – man.54 Roth also makes much play with Coleman's surname – he is Silky Silk, smooth and slippery in the ring and in life.55 Here, I suggest, perhaps rather speculatively, that he might have another source: Professor Michael Silk of King's College, London. Not only are both professors of Greek and lovers of jazz, Michael Silk is the author of another book on the Iliad that Roth may have read.56 Michael Silk proposes that reading or hearing Homer's poem is less like watching tragic drama than watching rule-governed sport. In many ways, he suggests, ‘Homer's characters are more like players on the field than players on a stage. … Their great configurations are like great sporting contests.’57 Silk (Michael) goes on to stress the importance of the funeral games as ‘one of the representative moments of the Iliad’ – ‘the games tend to be vaguely ignored by modern critics as a distraction 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 the funeral games, a microcosm of the funeral games themselves can be found in what is arguably their most representative contest, the boxing match between Epeios and Euryalos (XXIII. 653–99). Reading The Human Stain in this light, Coleman's counterpunching in the boxing ring emerges as a microcosm, or ‘representative moment’, for Zuckerman's story. From the very start, the gods are at competitive play: ‘ninety eight in New England’ is introduced as the ‘summer of mythical battle between a home-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 of sport – Dionysiac two-person contests of music or literature or dancing or sex.59 Coleman–Paris may see Faunia as his Helen, but Zuckerman notes a ‘virility’ in the way she keeps her chin up (HS, p. 49). He imagines Faunia 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 the thought that ‘death is sweeping us all away’, he goes to listen to the virtuoso piano playing of Yefim Bronfman. Bronfman is yet another boxer type, ‘conspicuously massive through the upper torso’, and Zuckerman notes that he plays Prokofiev ‘with such bravado as to knock morbidity clear out of the ring’ (HS, p. 209). Knocking morbidity out of the ring is what Nathan (incontinent, impotent, and deeply depressed) most wants to do in telling this story. Coleman Silk is not just tragically fated, he is also fiercely 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 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, in other words, is Nathan Zuckerman's Patroclus, the man who imitated him on the battlefield and who, by dying in his name, can make him want to fight again. Of course the analogy between The Human Stain and the Iliad is incomplete. Zuckerman does not avenge Silk's death by killing Farley (the novel's Hector) – already an old man, it is too late for him to opt for a short, heroic life – but he does re-enter a battle of sorts. After eleven years in the Berkshire hills, Zuckerman decides to return New 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 the subject 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 that so many of us went into teaching rather than prizefighting.’63If we accept that Coleman Silk was, among other things, Zuckerman's Patroclus, another question arises: what aspect of Zuckerman's self, what counterlife, was he acting out? Zuckerman's once potent sex life? His ethnicity? His abandoned academic career? Silk dies because he has been sleeping with another man's ex-wife, but also, if Zuckerman is ‘speculating correctly’, because that man is an anti-Semite and thinks Silk is a ‘disgusting old Jew’ (HS, p. 71). Passing as Jew (the very act that was meant to save him) first lost Silk his job and then his life. Listening to the Kaddish at Silk's funeral, Zuckerman hears only, ‘Another Jew is dead. As though death were not a consequence of life but a consequence of having been a Jew’ (HS, p. 314). Silk has not passed as just any Jew, however; more particularly, he has passed as the Jewish literature professor that Zuckerman or Roth might have been. In 1955 Philip Roth went to graduate school because he thought he ‘would be a professor and had to get a Ph.D’.64 Instead he became a novelist. Nathan Zuckerman also spends some time teaching English composition at Chicago where, to his chagrin, his parents would proudly send letters ‘addressed, without irony, to “Professor Nathan Zuckerman” … mailed solely for the sake of addressing 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 classics department anywhere in America’) but the ‘first and only Jew to serve at Athena as dean of faculty’ (HS, p. 5). In order to achieve this, Silk has had to perform a double impersonation. He has had to pretend to be the kind of Jew who was pretending pretends to be an Englishman. He has had to counterpunch, or as Irving Howe put it, learn how to ‘beat the goyim at their own game’.65 Recalling his experience as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Roth explained that ‘so many bright Jewish boys of my generation – and background – gravitated to literature because it was a prestigious form of assimilation that didn't look like assimilation’. ‘Not that I have any argument with what's called assimilation,’ he added, ‘I'm all 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 Jew promoted 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 “literary studies”’, he might instead turn into ‘a kind of caricature Noel Coward’.68 In telling the story of Coleman Silk, the first Jewish dean of a New England college, Zuckerman is telling a story that might have 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 a little sexual impropriety. He sacrificed his family and identity to become dean of a college populated by dull students who ‘fix on the conventionalised narrative, with its beginning, middle and end’. Zuckerman remembers Silk's complaint about classroom discussions in which ‘every experience, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. 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, a chair, or perhaps even a building in his name (HS, p. 6). Surely, Roth asks, what Zuckerman offers instead – the immortality of Homeric song – 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-heroic gesture, suggesting that the battles of the twentieth century are ‘increasingly tawdry manifestations’ of fundamental struggles; as an indication of Roth's awareness that engaging with one's predecessors is part of the ‘epicist's remit’;71 as an example of the ‘style of old age’, adding gravitas to perennial preoccupations.72 Indeed one way of thinking about Roth's novels of the last ten years might be as attempts to find a suitably abstract ‘late style’.73 The subject is made explicit in the insistently allusive Exit Ghost, where Zuckerman listens to Strauss's ‘Four Last Songs’ and observes that ‘the composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked’ (EG, p. 124). Of course Roth's method is the opposite of this ‘dramatically elegiac, ravishingly emotional’ work: not the stripping away of art to reveal the naked self but a receding of the self until all that remains is art at 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's use of Homer, however, is that of the 1990s ‘culture wars’. While Roth had 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 direct defiance 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 French High Theorist Delphine Roux (HS, p. 193).75 Indeed, Silk's belief that his students should understand where ‘the great imaginative literature of Europe begins’ (and that they need her ‘prestigious academic crap … like a hole in the head’) seems to align him with popular conservative defences of the 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 – keeping alive – the works of those who best addressed the questions’.77 The value of the kind of undergraduate courses which focused on ‘Great Books’ was particularly at issue in the 1990s ‘canon wars’, and if Bloom was not the only Jewish critic to fear that the classics were a threatened species, Roth was not the only Jewish novelist to take such anxieties as a theme. ‘What better way to triumph for people who were traditionally excluded from the Great Tradition’, asks Freedman, ‘than to define themselves as its only remaining faithful priests?’78 The year 2000 also saw the publication of Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's roman-à-clef about Allan Bloom, his friend from the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought (another friend, and founding member, was the translator of Oedipus, David Grene). While Coleman Silk complains that students no longer read Homer, Ravelstein bemoans the fact that a ‘real education’ is no longer possible in American universities. For both, education is less about following an ‘academic program’ than it is about using literature ‘to think’.79 Neither Roth nor Bellow mourned the passing of the New Criticism and its reliance on ‘that manageable netherworld of narrative devices, metaphorical motifs, and mythical archetypes’ (PD, p. 183).80 Roth's protagonists, from Paul Herz (in Letting Go, 1962) to David Kepesh (in The Professor of Desire, 1977) to Coleman Silk (in The Human Stain, 2000), have always insisted that what gives literature value is its ‘scrutiny’ of ‘being human’ (IMC, p. 185; LG, p. 297). What ‘scrutiny’ seems to involve is a taking account of contradiction and complexity, an acknowledgement of life's most ‘puzzling and maddening aspects’: the self and the other, eros and thanatos, the serious and the raucous (PD, p. 184). It was that taking account, Roth and other writers of his generation may have felt, which high theory and identity politics had combined to preclude. Scrutiny is the task that unites readers with writers and teachers. The best kind of novelist is really the best kind of teacher. Coleman Silk knows how to teach, but he struggles with unresponsive students. Zuckerman's high school English teacher Murray Ringold is luckier in at least one of his pupils. It is Ringold who first teaches Zuckerman how to read, and thus 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 lose yourself to the world around you. No, boxing with the book’ (IMC, p. 27). The Great Books project that so influenced Bellow, Trilling, and Roth was boxing with the book on a grand scale: not worshipping the works of Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and others, but demanding that each participate in a continuing and continuous Socratic debate, with the reader and with each other.81 In The Human Stain, Zuckerman stages a ‘Great Conversation … on universal 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, the Iliad emerges as the exemplary Great Book – not simply because it initiates ‘all of European literature’, but because, like Auerbach's Bible, Trilling's liberal imagination, and Roth's own fiction, Homer's poem contains all the complexity, conflict, entanglement, antagonism, and collision that the scrutinising reader could require.83 Roth's Iliad boxes with itself. 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 in Translation (Chicago 1942) p. 90. 4 Three Greek Tragedies, p. 90. 5 Bakewell, ‘Philip Roth's Oedipal Stain’, pp. 42–3. 6 Ibid., p. 43 n. 48. 7 Philip Roth, ‘Just a Lively Boy’, in Molly McQuade (ed.), An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago (Chicago 1995) pp. 123–9: 125. 8 Elder Olson, ‘An Outline of Poetic Theory’, in R.S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism (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. 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). 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. 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 war by fishing recalls ‘Big Two-Hearted River’. The urban Coleman, meanwhile, fishes for women in the subway (HS, pp. 347, 21). Pastoral and tragedy also combine in the figure of David Grene, from whose translation of Oedipus Roth quotes. Grene taught Greek at the University of Chicago while maintaining a farm in Lemont, Illinois. A posthumous memoir, Of Farming and Classics, was published in 2006. 22 Complaints that Lester Farley is a caricature miss the point. For Nathan's imagining of his war experiences, see HS, pp. 64–70, and for Farley's own version, see pp. 351–3. Farley identifies Zuckerman as a fellow Melvillian ‘isolate’ (p. 356). Roth may have borrowed his surname from James Farley, who also served as a helicopter door gunner. He was famously photographed staring in shock at his dying co-pilot by Life magazine in 1965. 23 Philip Roth, American Pastoral (London 1998) p. 35. 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's not about him – it has nothing to do with him – but I'd just come from a cemetery, 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, that The Human Stain pays a kind of homage to ‘Squire Herzog’, ‘The Graf Pototsky of the Berkshires’. Saul Bellow, Herzog (London 1964) p. 76. 26 ‘I hate the bastards the way Gulliver hates the whole human race after he goes and lives with those horses’, says Silk (HS, p. 19). 27 McQuade (ed.), An Unsentimental Education, p. 128. For more on boxing metaphors 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 he Remembers 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 of life 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’ Paul Herz, in Roth's Letting Go (first published 1962), is also fed up with ‘all that form crap’ and worries that ‘the student goes around thinking that writing is like tapestry-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. 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's great 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: The Invisible Man in Philip Roth's The Human Stain’, Contemporary Literature, 45 (2004) pp. 421–59. Another much-discussed model is Anatole Broyard, ‘a man about town … who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips’ and who passed as white. Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York 1997) pp. 180–214: 181. 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 doomed attempt to ‘leave nothing but an unstained age of an unstained idyll’: The Book of Laughter 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 name Edna 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. 46 James I. Porter, ‘Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology’, Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2008) pp. 115–47: 115, 129. Thanks to Jaś Elsner for pointing out this article 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 of Auerbach or Roth. 49 Again Roth is interested in names. Thanks to Rachel Bowlby for reminding me of Iris, the divine messenger, who delivers bad news in Iliad, Book II, and who helps 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 played Tiresias in Oedipus Rex while a freshman at Syracuse University. Philip Roth, The Professor 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 boxing coach is the first person to suggest he passes as Jewish. 53 Iliad, III. 43, 54, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago 1951) p. 101. This is probably the translation that Roth would have encountered at the same time as Kitto's The Greeks. 54 Michael Silk has suggested that Roth may have been thinking of Coleman Hawkins. Concealing his race, Coleman Silk's interest in jazz is strictly confined to white 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’, while Kepesh 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 with me. Probably coincidentally, David Kepesh was a Fulbright scholar at King's College London (PD, p. 26). 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 human personality’. The Greeks, pp. 60–1. 61 EG, p. 279. The book presents New York as a battleground of literary reputation. Zuckerman takes on all the old ghosts and celebrates the pugnacious men of his generation, from Mailer (‘always in quest of a quarrel’) to Plimpton (a fellow ‘affronter’ whose eulogy forms a large part of the final chapter). Happy to be ‘back in the drama’, even though he can ‘only end up bloodied’, Nathan struggles not to punch young Richard Kliman, who, he observes, presents a ‘passing rendition of me at that stage’. Kliman, meanwhile, wishes that Zuckerman wasn't ‘entirely antagonistic’ (EG, pp. 255, 254, 103, 104, 48). 62 Again Kundera is relevant. ‘The characters in my novels’, says the narrator of 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. 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 describes Trilling's appointment as the ‘fall of the WASP bastille’. Jews in the American Academy, 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 ‘quiet fussiness’ and ‘decided Anglomania’ of academia in Letting Go (p. 168). 69 Asked why the critic Milton Appel becomes ‘a punching-bag’ in The Anatomy Lesson, Roth replied, ‘If I were not myself, if someone else had been assigned the role of being Roth and writing his books, I might very well, in this other incarnation, have been his Milton Appel’ (Reading Myself and Others, p. 163). 70 The ‘only real hope of immortality’ that existed for Homer's heroes, said Kitto, ‘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 ‘style of old age’. Dissatisfied with the ‘conventional vocabulary provided him by his epoch’, Broch said, the ageing artist ‘must find a point beyond it’. For Broch, the Iliad epitomises the ‘style of old age in all its greatness, coolness, and abstract transparency’. ‘The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff’ (1947), in Simone 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 of Edward Said's influential On Late Style. Subsequent novels experiment with different versions of such a style. 74 The ghost of Lonoff dictates this phrase to Amy Bellette (EG, p. 186). Roth himself is quoted as saying that ‘the literary era has come to an end’. David Remnick, ‘Into the Clear: Philip Roth Puts Turbulence in its Place’, New Yorker, 8 May 2000, pp. 76–89: 86. 75 I'm borrowing the subtitle of Simon Goldhill's Love, Sex and Tragedy: Why the Classics Matter (London 2005). 76 The Lonoff-Bellette letter is another attack on the ‘ideological simplifications and 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 in Philip Roth's The Human Stain’, PMLA, 123/5 (2008) pp. 1465–78. 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, The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy (New York 1992) p. xv. 81 Introducing his own ‘liberal’ take on American fiction, Frederick Crews dissociates himself from the ‘cultural nostalgics’ in similar terms: ‘I want keen debate, not reverence for great books; historical consciousness and self-reflection, not supposedly timeless values’ (The Critics Bear It Away, pp. xxi, xiv). Crews and Roth, both born in 1933, were also both products of the Great Books teaching methodology initiated by John Erskine at Columbia in 1920 and then developed by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at Chicago in the 1930s: ‘Two teachers sat in a classroom with about twenty or twenty-five students and launched a discussion, Socratic style.’ ‘Teachers were selected for their disposition to disagree with each other’, recalled Erskine. In 1990 Adler objected to the suggestion that his 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 the Time: 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 Institutional History (Chicago 2007) p. 163. ‘The Great Conversation’, a phrase coined by John Erskine, became the title of the introductory volume of the 54-volume Great Books 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 come from’. 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.’ classes that he had first taken in 1961. Dismayed by the ‘use both left and right were making of “the canon”’, Denby singled out the Iliad as an ‘unsettled’ and ‘self-critical’ work that resists any single interpretation, remaining ‘in tension with itself, questioning and subverting its own ethos’. ‘Does Homer Have Legs?’, New Yorker, 6 Sept. 1993, pp. 52–69. © The Author, 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
TI - Philip Roth's Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfp025
DA - 2010-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/philip-roth-s-great-books-a-reading-of-the-human-stain-dG6hcMqBy0
SP - 39
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VL - 39
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DP - DeepDyve
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