The Human Stain: Encyclopedia II - The Human Stain - Plot summary

The Human Stain - Plot summary

The Human Stain takes place in the late 1990s in rural New England. The first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, a character in previous Roth novels, including The Ghost Writer (1979) and Zuckerman Bound (1981). He is largely an observer rather than the protagonist of the novel. He had prostate cancer and, consequently, was operated on, an operation that has left him both impotent and incontinent. Now he has embarked on the final part of his life and lives as a recluse in the Berkshires in New England. His neighbor is Coleman Silk, but the two men do not know each other until Silk's life is turned upside down and he asks Zuckerman to help him. The name Coleman Silk is a play on many archetypal colors. Cole (like coal) is black. The word man is placed between that and silk, a soft, white substance known for its delicacy. The man, Coleman Silk is literally a man in balance between black and white.

In April 1996, at 69, Coleman Silk is still professor of classical literature at Athena College, Athena being a small town in the area. He is presented to the reader as an assimilated Jew who has a wife, Iris, and four grown-up children: two sons, both college professors of science on the west coast, married with children, and the twins, Mark — who has become an Orthodox Jew writing religious poetry and hating his father — and Lisa, a burned-out teacher in New York. What happens to Coleman Silk one day out of the blue is that he is accused of having made a racist remark to two African-American students who were absent from his class and whom he had never seen before (This part of the novel is reminiscent of David Mamet's play Oleanna). He called them "spooks" — literally, because they just were not there, not considering the fact that spooks is also an old-fashioned epithet for blacks. In the ensuing upheaval, several of his colleagues turn against Silk and openly support the African-American students. Silk feels monstrously wronged, but there is nothing he can do about it. Although he could have gone on teaching, he eventually decides to resign, which again is misinterpreted by many people and also the local press. Suddenly, at the height of his trouble, his vigorous wife Iris dies of a stroke. Silk is devastated and accuses those who have been persecuting him as murderers. It takes him about two years to calm down and adapt to the new situation: being retired and single. He wants Zuckerman, who is a professional author, to write a book about the whole affair, but the latter refuses. So Silk spends several months writing an account he calls Spooks, but when he has finished he realizes that it is not really intended for publication. Nevertheless the two men become friends.

Gradually, we learn about Coleman Silk´s past. As a young man, even during the first years of his marriage to Iris, he was a womanizer. Now, as a widower, his old yearning for women flares up once again, and, at 71, he starts an affair with Faunia Farley, a 34-year-old cleaning woman from the college who also works on a dairy farm. To increase his potency, he starts taking Viagra. The trouble is that Faunia, who enjoys their relationship as much as he does, has been victimized all her life: She grew up rich but was sexually molested by her stepfather. She escaped his clutches, married Lester Farley, a Vietnam War veteran ("a trained killer thanks to the government of the United States"), and had two children with him. As a dairy farmer, Farley has not been successful, mainly due to his never having coped with what he saw and did in the war and, as a result, his drinking problem. As a husband, he seems to be hopeless. In a terrible accident their two children — eight year-old Rawley, a girl, and five year-old Les Junior — die: Their house catches fire while Faunia is out having an affair with someone else. Farley, who has been stalking them, is right there when he sees the fire but it is too late: The two children are asphyxiated. Years later, when she meets Coleman Silk, she, at 34, is seemingly an illiterate who hardly has any worldly possessions except her kids' ashes, which she keeps under her bed.

Now that Farley realizes that his wife is having an affair with a "kike" twice her age ("Who else has a wife sucks off an old Jew? Who else!"), he starts stalking them, too. Time and again Silk sees a grey pickup truck near his home but each time he is unable to identify the make or the driver. Eventually, Farley attacks the lovers, but nothing much happens.

Other things go wrong as well for Coleman Silk. He realizes that he is losing touch with his children. When he phones his favorite child, 38-year-old Lisa, she sounds detached and for the first time answers her father's question with a "Nothing", which upsets and hurts him. Also, he gets an anonymous, handwritten letter from one of his former colleagues, a certain Delphine Roux, accusing him of sexually exploiting an underprivileged woman and thus, according to Silk, clearly invading his privacy. Silk is almost as enraged as during the "spooks" affair.

Only gradually does the reader realize that Silk has been "passing", that he comes from an African-American family, the descendants of Southern slaves. His father used to be an optician but lost his business — probably during the Depression years — and had to work up to his premature death as a dining car waiter, while his mother was promoted to "first colored head nurse on any floor of any hospital in the city of Newark." Through various inter-racial unions for several generations, however, Silk´s complexion is "of a very pleasing shade, rather like eggnog".

In a reflective moment, we are given a glimpse of Silk's first sincere love, Steena Paulsson. Her ethnicity is purely Scandinavian, and symbolizes the ultimate of white, racial purity. She doesn't know about Silk's race, though initially Silk fears that she knows his secret because of a poem she pens about him. After two years he decides to reveal his origin by taking her home to meet his family. During the meal everybody behaves politely and no tensions arise. After the train ride back however, Steena runs off with the words, "I can't do it," thus ending the relationship.

In a tangent, we discover Silk as an extremely skilled and victorious boxer, a fact that he hides from everyone, from Steena Paulsson to his own father. For Silk, boxing is all in the "mind" and not his body, as he describes it to his father. In this light, Coleman has a penchant for skilled and impressive violence, but in the symbollic arena, his ability to exert both power and control become his venue for freedom and power. Tragically, his freedom comes only in hiding his skill. "Freedom", is what Silk truly wants. Freedom socially, sexually, physically and mentally...in every conceivable way.

From an early point in his life, Silk keeps personal secrets from both his parents and his girlfriends (and from everybody else as well). He takes up amateur boxing, even turning professional later in life, without ever having to walk around with bruises — as he is so skilled never to be hit &mash; so that no one finds out. Similarly, he takes the "decision to identify himself as white", to "play his skin however he wanted, color himself just as he chose": He does "not allow his prospects to be unjustly limited by so arbitrary a designation as race". Only by posing as a white man is he able to join the U.S. Navy, and in those days he is continually afraid of being found out and court-martialled for lying about his race.

When he meets Iris Gittelman he, like a chameleon, changes his identity again: She is Jewish (but by no means Orthodox), and so he pretends also to be a Jew. As a consequence, he decides that she must never meet his family and pretends to Iris that they are all dead. Coleman Brutus Silk (think betrayal), prefers filial dislocation to loyalty, which underscores his willingness to deny not only himself, but his lineage and heritage, because it prevents him from creating his own self beyond the category of race. He is most brutal towards his mother, who realizes that if her son is really going to marry Iris, she will never in her life be able to see, let alone touch, her grandchildren unless she comes to his house posing as a cleaning woman ("Taking the blow was all she could do."). Silk thinks he has no other choice and tells Iris that all his family are dead. This is a complete break, and there is no way back now. The last he hears of his brother Walt, in 1953, is the latter's furious voice over the telephone, telling Coleman that he never wants to see his brother's "lily-white face" again.

In his private life, he has to keep on lying all the way, too, telling his children (and also Iris, his wife) whenever they ask him about their grandparents and great-grandparents that they were Russian Jews — the Silberzweigs — and that they are all dead, that all their worldly belongings, including photo albums and the like, were lost. All of his four children turn out to be white, so after the birth of the twins he realizes that he is safe now. This is the point when he almost tells Iris, but at the last moment he decides against it.

Delphine Roux is a member of the faculty at Athena College. She was born in France in the late 1960s to rich parents who could afford to send their daughter to the best schools and universities. Petite and most attractive, she spent the years of her higher education as a Marxist-oriented lycée student and had quite a number of love affairs, including one of her professors, whom she just could not resist . Eventually, also to escape from her complicated love life, she goes to the U.S.A. and embarks on her postgraduate studies at one of the prestigious American universities. Absolutely career-oriented, she considers her job at Athena as nothing but a stepping-stone to something much better. When she is hired by Silk, who is Dean at the time, she realizes that from the very moment they first lay eyes on each other they start sizing each other up -- she in her carefully chosen short kilt, wearing an oversized ring, he an athletic man in his sixties who does not look older than 50.

Very soon, however, Silk starts regretting hiring Roux. This is the age of political correctness, and whenever a female student complains about Silk, even if the accusation is wholly ridiculous, Roux automatically supports the student against Silk. Whereas Silk resigns over the "spooks" affair, Roux steadily climbs up the academic career ladder, achieving early tenure and, at only 27, being appointed Head of the newly-created Department of Languages and Literature.

For reasons we do not really learn, she is still frightened of Silk two years after his resignation. He might be able and willing to harm her as he probably still has connections in the academic world. Roux's moral outrage about Silk's affair with Faunia Farley causes her to write him an anonymous letter — handwritten but unsigned — which she carries around in her handbag for several weeks until finally posting it at a moment when her mental stability has left her: On a weekend trip to New York, she sees a man in the public library whom she fancies at once. She desperately wants to be picked up by him (or any other man, for that matter), but a girl clearly younger than herself approaches him and they leave together.

In the early morning of 1 November 1998, after having stayed for the first time overnight at Silk's instead of driving home as usual, Faunia Farley drives to the remote headquarters of the Audubon Society, where a crow is kept in a cage — a crow Faunia knows which could no longer survive in her natural surroundings. This is when she talks about "the human stain": "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." There is a reference to the cycle of life and the "ceaseless perishing" that goes on on our planet — this is what Zuckerman, himself in his sixties, thinks when he watches old people gathering to listen to a concert. Also, he observes "the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs".

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Plot summary", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki