The Human Stain
Primary Category: Literature / Fiction
Genre: Novel
Annotated by: Coulehan, Jack
Date of entry: May-08-2006
Last revised: Dec-04-2008
Summary
The Human Stain is the third of Philip Roth's trilogy of novels that explore the relationship between public and private life in America during the second half of the 20th century. As in American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's favorite alter ego, serves as the narrator. After a prostate operation rendered him impotent, Zuckerman has retired from the world to become writer in residence at idyllic Athena College.
There he meets Coleman Silk, a former dean and classics professor who was forced to resign because of a supposed racial slur, in which he asked whether two students who had registered for his course but never attended a lecture were "spooks." They were African-Americans. Hence, political correctness dictated that Silk's academic career was history.
Zuckerman enters the scene a couple of years later, when the septuagenarian Silk is having an affair with an illiterate college janitor. This liaison has revitalized the old professor, whose wife died during the period of disgrace after his "racism" was exposed. However, Silk's enemies at the college, led by a bitterly proper young deconstructionist, have gone on the warpath again, this time condemning him for exploiting the young janitor.
The real story, though, lies deep in Coleman Silk's past. We eventually learn that Silk is a light skinned African-American who gradually drifted across the American racial divide and for 50 years has successfully passed as a white Jew. The irony in this situation is complex. A black man thought by the world to be Jewish is publicly disgraced for uttering the word "spook" in its correct denotation. (This is reminiscent of a case a few years ago in which a public official in the United States was chastised for using the word "niggardly" with reference to an inadequate budget allocation.)
The situation is doubly ironic because Silk has chosen to live his life as a white man, thereby in a sense establishing his own racism. Silk's original goal had been to live as an individual, and not as a representative of his race, but in choosing to deny his roots, perhaps Coleman Silk's guilt is deeper and more complex than his pursuers at Athena College realize.
Commentary
What is "the human stain" of the book's title? An obvious candidate is the racism that compromises public and private morality in America. But racism is only one example of the overall problem of evil. In his work here as elsewhere, Roth tells us that evil originates in the human quest for purity. When people commit themselves to becoming pure--e.g. by which Roth means better, more noble or sincere than the next person--whether it is through political correctness, racism, anti-Semitism, religious fanaticism, utopianism, or even restrictive sexual morality, they sow seeds of evil. There is no question that "purity" in this sense is the archfiend that stalks Roth's moral world.
Roth is a terrific stylist. His language is complex, expansive, mellifluous, literate, and remarkably impure. As is the case with Saul Bellow, Roth's sentences are a world of their own, a joy to read. However, despite the wit and beauty of his writing, I often find Roth's novels difficult to take. While Roth might consider fanaticism the root of evil, his persona (in the voice of Zuckerman or otherwise) is anything but moderate.
Sometimes his voice is fanatical; e.g. Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath's Theater (1995), who incessantly declaims the primacy of sexual experimentation over all other forms of experience or value in life. Roth's "in your faceness," while bracing in moderate doses, can become overweening. However, I didn't have that feeling in reading The Human Stain. In this and the other novels of his trilogy, Roth has his style-to-story ratio under control. In fact, they may be his finest works.
Editor's note (12/4/08): an interesting article about this novel appeared in Publications of The Modern Language Association, vol. 123/5, pp. 1465-1478 (October, 2008): "The Jew in the Canon: Reading Race and Literary History in Philip Roth's The Human Stain," by Jennifer Glaser. She discusses Roth's "vision . . . of a new kind of multicultural literature, a literature situated at the intersection of races rather than in a system of racial binaries" (1476).
Publisher
Vintage International
Place Published
New York
Edition
2000
Page Count
361
The Human Stain (film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Human Stain
Theatrical release poster
Directed by
Produced by
Screenplay by
Based on
Starring
Music by
Cinematography
Edited by
Production
company
Distributed by
Release dates
October 31, 2003
Running time
106 minutes
Country
United States
Germany
France
Language
English
Budget
$30 million
Box office
$24,863,804
The Human Stain is a 2003 American drama film directed by Robert Benton. The screenplay by Nicholas Meyer is based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Philip Roth. The film stars Anthony Hopkins andNicole Kidman.
Contents
[show]
Plot summary[edit]
In the late 1990s, writer Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise) has settled in a lakeside New England cabin following his second divorce and a battle with prostate cancer. His quiet life is interrupted by Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a former dean and professor of classics at local Athena College, who was forced to resign after being accused of making a racist remark in class. Coleman's wife died suddenly following the scandal, and he wants to avenge his loss of career and companion by writing a book about the events with Nathan's assistance.
The project is placed on the back burner when Coleman has an affair with Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), a considerably younger, semi-literate woman who supports herself by working menial jobs, including at the college. Their relationship is threatened by the faculty members who forced Coleman from his job and by Faunia's stalker ex-husband Lester (Ed Harris), a mentally unbalanced Vietnam War veteran who blames her for the deaths of their children in an accident. Flashbacks of Coleman's life reveal to the audience his secret—he is an African American who has passed as a white Jewish man for most of his adult life.
Cast[edit]
Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk
Nicole Kidman as Faunia Farley
Gary Sinise as Nathan Zuckerman
Ed Harris as Lester Farley
Wentworth Miller as Young Coleman Silk
Jacinda Barrett as Steena Paulsson
Mimi Kuzyk as Delphine Roux
Clark Gregg as Nelson Primus
Anna Deavere Smith as Dorothy Silk
Phyllis Newman as Iris Silk
Mili Avital as Young Iris
Harry Lennix as Clarence Silk
Tom Rack as Bob Cat
Lizan Mitchell as Ernestine Silk
Danny Blanco-Hall as Walter Silk
Release[edit]
The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival. It was shown at the Toronto Film Festival, the Bergen International Film Festival, and the Hollywood Film Festival before its theatrical release in the US.
Box office[edit]
The film grossed $5,381,908 in the US and $19,481,896 in foreign markets for a total worldwide box office of $24,863,304 against a budget of $30 million.[1]
Critical reception[edit]
The Human Stain received mixed reviews. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 41% of 148 professional critics gave the film a positive review, with a rating average of 5.5 out of 10. The site's consensus is that "Though the acting is fine, the leads are miscast, and the story is less powerful on screen than on the page."[2]
In his review in the New York Times, A.O. Scott called it "an honorable B+ term paper of a movie: sober, scrupulous and earnestly respectful of its literary source . . . The filmmakers explicate Mr. Roth's themes with admirable clarity and care and observe his characters with delicate fondness, but they cannot hope to approximate the brilliance and rapacity of his voice, which holds all the novel's disparate elements together. Without the active intervention of Mr. Roth's intelligence . . . the story fails to cohere . . . At its best - which also tends to be at its quietest - The Human Stain allows you both to care about its characters and to think about the larger issues that their lives represent. Its deepest flaw is an inability to link those moments of empathy and insight into a continuous drama, to suggest that the characters' lives keep going when they are not on screen."[3]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed, "We have to suspend disbelief over the casting, but that's easier since we can believe the stories of these people. Not many movies probe into matters of identity or adaptation. Most movie characters are like Greek gods and comic book heroes: We learn their roles and powers at the beginning of the story, and they never change. Here are complex, troubled, flawed people, brave enough to breathe deeply and take one more risk with their lives."[4]
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle called it "a mediocre movie . . . [that] falls victim to a fatal lack of narrative drive, suspense and drama. Kidman and Hopkins are wrong for their roles, and that, combined with a pervading inevitability, cuts the film off from any sustained vitality. The result is something admirable but lifeless."[5]
David Stratton of Variety described it as "an intelligent adaptation of Philip Roth's arguably unfilmable novel powered by two eye-catching performances . . . A key problem Benton is unable to avoid is that Hopkins and Miller don't look (or talk) the least bit like one another. Miller, who gives a strong, muted performance, convinces as a light-skinned African-American in a way Hopkins never does, which is not to suggest that the Welsh-born actor doesn't give another intelligent, powerful portrayal. It's just that the believability gap looms large."[6]
In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said, "Hopkins and Kidman . . . are both as mesmerizing as they are miscast . . . The Human Stain is heavy going. It's the flashes of dramatic lightning that make it a trip worth taking."[7]
The Times of London called it "sapping and unbelievable melodrama . . . an unforgivably turgid lecture about political correctness."[8]
Awards and nominations[edit]
Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress (Anna Deavere Smith, winner)
Black Reel Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture (Smith, winner)
Black Reel Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Wentworth Miller, nominee)
Black Reel Award for Best Breakthrough Performance (Miller, nominee)
