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December 17, 2003 [feather]
Roth, realism, and campus culture

Quote for the day:


There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you're in its grip, it's as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

That's from Philip Roth's The Human Stain, the novel that has become a definitive document in the small but growing body of literature that addresses the human cost of the culture of campus speech codes. If you haven't already read the book, do. You know from the film trailers what the basic premise is: Coleman Silk, a former classics professor who has been passing for white his whole adult life, is conducting a fatally restorative love affair with the college janitor two years after his career was ruined by a student's spurious accusation of racism. But what you can't know from the film--because it can't be filmed--is the depth and nuance of Roth's portrait of what academic witch hunts do to those who are unfortunate enough to be the hunted. You need Roth's language for that, not least because much of the point of the book is that the kind of pain the Coleman Silks of the world feel is peculiarly, pointlessly discursive.

Silk's teaching career ends because of how two students choose to misinterpret his use of a single word (when, five weeks into the semester, he asks his class whether the two students who have never shown up are "spooks," those students, who happened to be black but whom Silk had never seen, file charges of racism that the college, in its lust to prove its racial sensitivity and its reluctance to be included in the accusation, pursues). The Human Stain opens two years later, as Silk completes his manuscript of Spooks:


Finished a first draft yesterday, spent all day today reading it through, every page of it made me sick. The violence in the handwriting was enough to make me despise the author. That I should spend a single quarter of an hour at this, let alone two years .... Who will believe it? I hardly believe it myself any longer. To turn this screed into a book, to bleach out the raging misery and turn it into something by a sane human being, would take two years more at least. And what would I then have, aside from two years more of thinking about 'them'? Not that I've given myself over to forgiveness. Don't get me wrong: I hate the bastards. I hate the fucking bastards the way Gulliver hates the whole human race after he goes and lives with those horses. I hate them with a real biological aversion.

Destroyed by an entire institution's willing collusion with two students' wilfully stupid and punitive reading of a single word, Silk responds with a self-imposed Sisyphean sentence of trying to write his way out of the unreason that others have imposed on his life. Roth's novel begins with Silk's realization that he needs to abandon the intellectual mindset that led him to try to order his tragedy through writing: "I read it and it's shit and I'm over it," he announces. "Writing about myself, I can't maneuver the creative remove. Page after page, it is still the raw thing. It's a parody of the self-justifying memoir. The hopelessness of explanation." Part of Roth's point in The Human Stain is that the aftermath of the academic witch hunt can be its own new layer of hell for the person who must now live out a humiliating legacy of communal ostracism, undeserved contempt, and illogical injustice all for something he didn't do. The nature of that hell is that the analytical skills of the trained academic only make it worse; when one's life becomes the nonsensical symptom of others' irrational need for scapegoats, no amount of thought is going make the madness of it make sense. There is no explanation that truly explains.

There are quite a few people out there living lives that resemble Coleman Silk's during the two years after he was symbolically strung up for saying "spooks." I know some of you personally; I'd love to hear from more.
posted on December 17, 2003 8:56 AM