Professor Amy Hungerford: Now, what's coming up? As I mentioned last week, on Wednesday I'm going to give my censorship lecture, and in preparation for that I would like you to go to a local bookstore, any one, and just observe how it's laid out, what you see, what your attention is called to, what your attention is not called to, and here's a difficult question: What isn't there? Think about that, and I'll talk a little bit about what isn't there on Wednesday. Also, in order to keep up, please try to read at least to page 202--that's the next chapter division in The Human Stain--so that you're on track to finish it--it's 361 pages--for next Monday. And so, next Monday, a week from today, I will give my second lecture on The Human Stain. And I will talk about The Human Stain a little bit on Wednesday, because some of what I have to say about censorship does pertain, so that's what's coming up.
I hope you all thought about the Identity Plot as you read this novel. It's hard not to. When I gave that lecture, I suggested that when a genre gains a certain credence, a certain widespread use in the culture, it requires more and more innovations on it to make a fresh story out of it. It also gets us to the point where that set of conventions is available to writers in a new way, to be transcended in a new way. So, one thing that I want to ask about this novel is, does it transcend the genre? Does it do more than provide the certain dramas and satisfactions that we come to expect from a novel about identity? In this sense, because it is so deeply embedded in those kinds of narratives, Roth is taking a kind of risk here. He's playing it safe because he knows that this is a topic of interest, but he's taking a risk as an artist because he's working in very well-trodden territory.
I suggested that, also, when a genre reaches a certain point of saturation, writers tend to change the subject. I didn't say this when we talked about Blood Meridian, but I think in part Blood Meridian is that kind of change of subject. So, this returns to the genre, and we want to ask what it's doing with the genre. Before I go in to my meditation on that question today, I just want to call your attention to another element that does relate back to Blood Meridian, and that's its status as a historical novel. This novel places itself with certain kinds of historical markers at the very opening. It was the summer of 1998, the summer of the Monica Lewinsky affair, the summer when Viagra takes off in the marketplace. Those are very contemporary historical markers.
Now, think back to the way Blood Meridian opens with its historical markers. Do you remember this line? It's the father talking about the kid's birth. He says, "Night of your birth, '33. God, how the stars did fall." I think I've got that correct. What he's talking about is the Leonid meteor showers in 1833 that mark the night of the kid's birth. For all that McCarthy is interested in--and mining--the historical detail of the 1830s, '40s, '50s, that novel favors historical markers that seem like cosmic markers of time. So, contrast the stars falling in, yes, a historically specific meteor shower, but nevertheless in something that looks like a cosmic communication of meaning. Contrast that with the relatively mundane, debased historical markers that Roth chooses, Viagra, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. You want to ask yourself, what kind of history is each writer invoking?
I want to suggest to you that if you press on the markers that Roth chooses, you will find something more than trivia, more than contemporary trivia, that Roth has in his sights an equally universal, trans-historical kind of truth in this novel, that's brought up by those little details of history. And that trans-historical history is the history of desire, of which both those things are indicative. I will say a lot more about desire and its relationship to the history of literature and to writing in this novel in my Monday lecture, but as you go on I would like you to think about how history functions as a set of contexts for the story that Roth tells you.
Now I want to talk about identity. So, does this novel conform to the form of the Identity Plot? There are certain ways I think it does, and it does so in a very explicit way. Remember how I mentioned that tension in the Identity Plot is produced by the individual's relationship to the group and the way that's vexed. It isn't a very exciting Identity Plot if the protagonist just discovers that he or she is whatever categorizable identity and says, "Oh, good. I'll be that," and then goes on. The tension comes from feeling that either such an identification would be coercion, or that it comes with all kinds of attendant suffering. There are all kinds of tensions that are produced in making that not an easy identification, and you can see that very explicitly in this novel on page 108--106, 108--when Coleman talks about being at Howard University, and along with that, the experience of being called a "nigger" for the first time. This is on the top of 106:
Especially when he began to think that there was something of the nigger about him, even to the kids in the dorm who had all sorts of new clothes, and money in their pockets, and in the summertime didn't hang around the hot streets at home, but went to camp, and not Boy Scout camp out in the Jersey sticks, but fancy places where they rode horses and played tennis and acted in plays. What the hell was a cotillion? Where was Highland Beach? What were these kids talking about? He was among the very lightest of the light-skinned in his freshman class, lighter even than his tea-colored roommate, but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand, for all they knew that he didn't. He hated Howard from the day he arrived. Within a week he hated Washington, and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30th Street station in Philadelphia for Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished with that college.
Right there in that sentence, in this little set of scenes about Howard and his experience in D.C., you see him at first being asked by his family to identify with a certain version of the black middle class, and then finding he is revolted by his own difference from that middle class. He feels like a black field hand, the darkest of the dark field hand, "for all they knew that he didn't," and on 108 we get it in very abstract terms. "You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find another we, another place that's just like that, the substitute for that."
The problem of the Identity Plot is the problem of the "I" and the "we." Here is Coleman laying out exactly how he feels about that, and so what he's going to favor there, again on 108, is the raw "I," all the subtlety of being Silky Silk. So there you have encapsulated, in a very short amount of prose, a major form--narrative form, narrative dynamic--of the Identity Plot as a genre. On 144, you get another version of that, slightly more personalized to his family. This is another version of identity and what Coleman thinks about it. This is after we get the history of Coleman's family, his ancestors, and we're told that he is not the first to pass as white or to disappear from the black family in to which he was born:
"Lost himself to all his people" was another way they, the family, put it. Ancestor worship, that's how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing. The idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else. The hell with that imprisonment.
So, this version of identity on 144, this vision of it, is identity as ancestor worship and imprisonment in that family, imprisonment in that way of thinking, a radical un-freedom. So, this is one version of identity, radically individual, rising out of the difference that you feel from the various "we" groups you are asked to join. But there are other versions of identity that are imagined here, and they track pretty clearly with scholarly ways of thinking about identity at this same time.
So, in one sense identity is this radical individual humanist version that I've been tracing in the last few minutes. Another is that identity is a constantly changing performance, and we get that too in Coleman. You see it, again, right in the section about Howard on 109, and I want you to note the words that Roth chooses here, 109 in the middle: "He could play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose."
"Play his skin any way he wanted." Now, remember that his father is a great devotee of Shakespeare and tries to communicate to his children, not only through their Shakespearian middle names, but through every verbal interaction he has with them, that the grandeur of the English language will somehow fill them and make them who they are, that this is the source of their dignity and their power. He takes that lesson and transforms it. It's about playing on the model of drama, but it's about playing color, and this is an artist's vocation, "color himself just as he chose." He's like a painter, in this sense, so this is identity as performance. There are many instances of this. On page 115, 116, there is just a little description of Steena's dance for Coleman. I'm going to just read a little bit of it.
All at once, with no prompting from him, seemingly prompted only by Eldridge's trumpet, she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a Fergus Falls girl after a little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song, prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song. There to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness, that big, white thing. "Someday he'll come along, the man I love, and he'll be big and strong, the man I love." The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending, to cover her shame.
The history of jazz that's concentrated in to that tiny, little passage has been unpacked by a critic by the name of Jonathan Freedman. He does a whole history, which I can't produce here, of how Artie Shaw and various players played Gershwin, and used black musicians in their ensembles, and how this very dance, when Steena, here, we're told, in a way, inhabits most fully her whiteness, she does that by performing to a music that is radically hybrid, black and Jewish. So, Freedman argues that in this passage we get identity as a vision of absolute fluidity, absolute performance and fluidity, and that the whole history of American jazz stands behind that imagined state. It's the very difference between the hybrid music and the pure whiteness of Steena's body that creates what's so provocative to Coleman, the spectacle of whiteness in the context of hybridity.
The father's obsession with the English language, though, has taught Coleman to categorize relentlessly. Do you remember this little detail? This is on page 93 when Coleman is describing or we're having described to us exactly how Coleman's father taught them to speak. This is on 93.
Growing up they never said, "See the bow-wow." They didn't even say, "See the doggie." They said, "See the Doberman. See the beagle. See the terrier." They learned things had classifications. They learned the power of naming precisely."
The father, for all that he is imbuing them with the most elite version of a white literary tradition, Shakespeare, he is also teaching them relentlessly to see classification and categorizing. In Coleman this comes to mean something quite different, and you see it in this funny, little passing moment on 107, the very top of the page. This is talking about his father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays, the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel.
The son felt his father's majesty as never before, the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the grandeur that as a college freshman away for barely a month.--[And then it quotes from Shakespeare.]

..../.... to be continued