It wasn't just that [This is on 99.] It wasn't just that Coleman weighed some seven pounds more than when he'd boxed on the amateur card at the Knights of Pythias. It was that something he could not even name made him want to be more damaging than he'd ever dared before, to do something more that day than merely win. Was it because the pit coach didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets, the secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to think, with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about themselves, but that wasn't where the power was, or the pleasure either. The power and the pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counter-confessional in the same way you were a counter-puncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having to think about it. That's why he liked shadow boxing and hitting the heavy bag, for the secrecy of it.
And I'm going to skip down a little bit. He talks about concentrating, and how the secrecy is produced by the concentration, or is related to the concentration on the one thing that you're doing.
Whatever is to be mastered, he becomes that thing. He could do that in biology, and he could do it in the dash, and he could do it in boxing, and not only did nothing external make any difference; neither did anything internal.
That little example right there: He could do it in biology, on a biology exam he could focus exclusively on that thing, become that thing, in the dash, in boxing in the ring, but why choose that example? Why not mathematics? Why not chemistry? Well, here again, it's Roth's craft coming through. Roth chose that because what Coleman does is precisely to overcome biology. It's the biology of who his parents are, of who their parents are. That biology, the biology of American race, is what he takes hold of and transforms. It becomes his secret. Biology becomes his secret, not as an academic subject, but as a lived experience. Boxing is the sport of concealment for him, thinking ahead, observing his opponent, watching how slow the punch is:
All the answers that you came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself, and when you let the secret out, you let it out through everything but your mouth.
For all Coleman's training in the English language from his father, his mode of revelation, his mode of communication, is not verbal. It is somehow physical, as a physical performance, as a damaging physical performance. That term "counter-confessional," being--the pleasure and the power were in--being counter-confessional in the same way you were a counter-puncher, in not telling--this is quite a remarkable term for Roth to use. The history of Roth's writing from the very first story collection, Goodbye, Columbus published in 1960, through the many, many novels in the next five decades, that trajectory, which I'm going to talk a little bit about on Wednesday, is defined by the confessional quality of many of these works.
So, Roth is widely known for drawing on his own life in his fiction, and for making Nathan Zuckerman track his biography in significant ways. And, in this novel, it happens to be true that Philip Roth went through prostate cancer surgery and now lives up in the Berkshires and has been very secluded up there and very productive writing novels in the last ten years. So, in this novel already, anybody who knows even those basic facts knows that Roth himself as a writer is confessional, in some sense of the word. One question we might want to ask is: is he counter-confessional the way that Coleman is, the way that you can be a counter-puncher, and what would it mean to be that? Why does it matter? In fact, does it matter? And then, why does it matter, if it does, that his novels track his life? This is a long-term question for anyone who thinks about Roth's writing, and I will get more to it in my second lecture on The Human Stain next Monday, but it's something to think about.
But let me pause, again, on that rhetorical question. "Was it because the pit coach didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret?" There are two ways of reading that last question. "Who he really was was entirely his secret." If we read that, "who he really was" as a colored guy from East Orange, then we'll see it as that being his secret. But you can read it, you can parse that grammar, a different way. "Who he really was was his secret." Could it be because who he really was was "his secret," secrecy as the essence of identity? It doesn't matter what's in that hidden box. It doesn't mean that we have to fill it in. It doesn't mean, even, that it can be known. And you think back to the way the anchor on his arm, the tattoo on his arm, reminds Nathan of how little you can ever know about the other fellow. The very fact of the person's other-ness to you means that there is always something fundamentally hidden about them, and that arises from the simple difference between one consciousness and another.
This returns the meditation on identity to a universalist, humanist version of what identity would be. It's simply private consciousness. Private consciousness is what defines us as persons, and then, radiating out from that, all the things that one can do with a private consciousness, which then encompasses these other modes of identifying that the novel rehearses, and then critiques or sometimes endorses, plays with, jumbles, juggles. We have a private consciousness. You can decide to decide. This is something that Coleman does on a number of occasions, and it's a phrase that Roth repeats when he's deciding to decide to be done with the spooks business, deciding to decide not to be worried about Lester Farley. You have the power to form your self-presentation. You have the power to make your identity an artistic performance. That's what private consciousness does for you, but it does a couple other things, too, and I want to track those, or suggest them just briefly before I end today, in one sense by following the theme of difference, and in the other sense by following the word "secrecy" in the novel.
First, on the question of pure difference, on 47, in that wonderful scene of Faunia with the cows, this is Nathan reflecting on the desire that he sees enacted there. And again, remember, Coleman is not primarily a man of words, but a man of being, and he has just stood in silence with Nathan watching Faunia milk the cows.
It was enough to be able to conduct themselves like two people who had nothing whatsoever in common, all the while remembering how they could distill to an orgasmic essence everything about them that was irreconcilable, the human discrepancies that produced all the power. It was enough to feel the thrill of leading a double life.
And what this passage, the sentences above, emphasize, is that Faunia is a woman of thirty-four, a "wordless illiterate," and that Coleman is a man replete with the vocabularies of two ancient tongues, as well as his own native tongue. So, the very difference between them, this time limned in terms of education and language, vocabulary, literacy, here it's that difference that is invoked as the engine of desire. So, if desire is always that looking towards the other thing, the thing that you are not, the thing that you do not have, the thing that is absent from you: that's the definition of desire. You can't have desire if you already have the thing. Desire is that force that's always reaching toward something that is separate from you. Difference between human beings is just that, in this scene, just the engine of desire.
So, here, for all the meditations on race, the social construction of race, race as performance, race as essence, race as biology, race as secret, it's secret that gets to that over-arching concern with desire in the novel. And this is a moment where I think Roth is transcending the genre. He's taking the dramas of the Identity Plot, and he's driving them to an extreme and pushing them over in to another subject matter. So, in this sense, identity as secrecy pushes us over in to the subject matter of desire and mortality, which is at the heart of Roth's writing from beginning to end. Now, I will not say that identity is not also a subject matter he's working with from beginning to end of his career. That's definitely true, and I'll say more about that on Wednesday when I talk about the shape of his career. But especially as Roth moves later in his career these questions of desire and mortality take the upper hand.
Now, the last thing I want to do, just very quickly, is point to page 44, another use of that word "secret," the very top of the page.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions. The trick of living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing, the encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance, this is quoting Hawthorne again, the communications of a solitary mind with itself. The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.
Now, one question I, myself, as a reader have struggled with about this novel is whether Roth imagines that Nathan's state, when he describes it that way, is a false one or a weak one, one to be rejected. Is it a withdrawal from life? I think that last sentence, "The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne," gives us the answer that I'm content with. And that is: yes, it's a withdrawal from life if you don't understand Hawthorne as a person, as someone with whom you can become entangled. It's the very act of thinking of a literary forebear as a person rather than a text that allows this to be a productive state, one that Nathan will be drawn out of by Coleman, but yet one that the novel does not reject.
It's when Coleman becomes for Nathan a character, the person becomes this living representation, that he is drawn out of his solitude. So, in a way, it's not even Coleman the person that draws him out, but his world when he encounters Coleman and his story, when he sees Coleman's body during that dance as a cipher, as the sign of all that you can't know about the other fellow. When he sees that about Coleman, that's when he comes out of one productive state of communing with the brilliant dead and comes in to the world of Coleman who will be dead very, very shortly. So, on Monday next I will talk about that relationship between desire and the literary, between persons and characters, between life and novel. Think about those things as you read.