The Human Stain

"This book emanated out of the era when Washington was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal. Roth was a great enemy of political correctness. He was particularly upset about the changes underway in university life. He always oriented himself around universities. He taught at a long list of universities, including Iowa, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Hunter. He’s buried at Bard. He loved the university but hated any restrictions on its freedoms. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The Human Stain is based on actual experience. A close friend of Roth’s, who was a very distinguished professor of sociology at Princeton, said something that resulted in his ruination. To see ‘cancel culture’—to use today’s phrase—inhibit university life and limit the expression of ideas that we may not want to hear was, to Roth, an anathema. The Plot Against America is about how easily American history can be rewritten. It’s a vivid book. The characters are very bold, but they are based on actual historical figures. It’s about what would’ve happened if someone sympathetic to Hitler had been elected president. It’s part of what I once called, in an essay, “The American Roth.” Roth has, almost from the beginning, written about American values. Another way of looking at Goodbye Columbus is as an account of American values. The Plot Against America shows American values very susceptible to corruption. It’s about how democracy and freedom are always threatened. Roth’s treatment of history could be a topic for another hour. We talked about language and Roth, psychology and Roth, women and Roth and the lyrical Roth. There are multiple Roths. That is why Roth is a writer that we will continue to read and talk about continuously."

"This is a novel set in a New England university. The main focus of the novel is a professor of Classics and faculty dean called Coleman Silk. It is a liberal university, and the reason why I chose this novel is to show how doing things in the name of tolerance can lead to a right old mess. What happens is that Coleman Silk complains about two students who never turn up to any of his lectures. He says that they are “spooks” because they are never there, and he is accused of racism for using that word. As an academic he is interested in the use of language, and he cannot understand how this can happen to him. He didn’t even know what colour the students were, but because they are African-American it is assumed that he was being racist. The whole faculty turns against him, led by a woman called Delphine Roux, a professor in French Literature – a deconstructionalist in a way, so an archetypal enemy of free speech. He loses his job, and he blames the loss of his job and his public disgrace for the death of his wife. The irony is that as the novel progresses, we realise that in fact he himself is black. Because he is a light-skinned black man he passed himself off as a Jew for many years, as when he was a young student he was refused service and called a nigger. He doesn’t want to be defined by identity or colour, because he knows that he will always need to be protected by someone else. He says, “I don’t want to be part of the oppressed we, but my own I.” The sub-plot to the novel is that Coleman, aged 71, is having an affair with a young cleaner at the college. Delphine Roux is disgusted by this as well. She thinks he is exploiting this illiterate, disadvantaged, oppressed woman who is the victim of domestic abuse. So Delphine is all about labelling people. She thinks that it is about feminist protection of a vulnerable young woman. The irony is that the cleaner isn’t illiterate and doesn’t see herself as a victim. Yes. Someone like Delphine assumes oppression is happening, defines people through victimhood labels, gets it completely wrong and ruins people’s lives."

"I think this is one of the great novels of all time. Scruton shows what religion does in terms of building a group. Roth shows the absolute dangers of the creation of groups. It’s about the tragedy of assimilation. When you create a group, of course you create an out-group and the out-group can react in many different ways. But one of them, as we know all too well, is the desire to become part of the in-group in some way. This book is about a black man who passes himself off as white, because he is very light-skinned. (Of course you can’t help thinking it’s actually a story about Jewish assimilation to the dominant majority rather than black assimilation, but it doesn’t really matter). It’s about a black man who cuts off his roots with his family. There’s this most moving passage where he talks to his mother and she realizes and she says to him, ‘You want to cut me off and pass off as white. I’ll even work as your cleaner just so I can see you and your children.’ But he won’t have that. He cuts himself off completely. It could just as well be a Jew who is doing the same thing, and he talks about the Jews as Indian scouts who show the way to assimilate for the black people in America. The book is about the violence that you do to yourself, and to your identity, when you try and imitate the in-group, the majority. Coleman Silk, who is the hero/anti-hero of this story never admits to the fact he is black. And yet he is hounded out of his university for allegedly making a racist insult to two black students. He calls them “spooks.” What he means is that they’re a ghostly presence because they never turn up at his lectures. He doesn’t mean they’re spooks in the racist sense. “Stupid though its beliefs might be, religion does give us a meaning, which we so desperately need.” The wonderful analogy in this book is to this caged crow who escapes from his cage and is then virtually pecked to death by his fellow crows, the free ones. The onlooker explains this by saying that this is a crow that doesn’t know how to be a crow. The crow has learned its own caw by aping humans, the children who imitated it. In trying to assimilate to the humans it has lost all identity and it is loathed. You can’t live without a group, is what Roth is saying. The group is so dangerous, because you want to belong to the majority group. You cannot but belong to a group, and you cannot wash out the human stain, which is both the stain of your own race, but also the stain of existence, that you leave a stain on the world. You can’t not do that. That’s our tragedy. It’s simply a wonderful book about the desire to be free of all groups, the inevitability of having to belong to a group, and the tragedy of trying to belong to a group of which you aren’t really a part — and never will be. It’s just because this is what religion does so well. This is, in a sense, its danger, which the New Atheists are right to point out — how viciously it can create an in-group and an out-group. Christians have done that with the Jews, and similarly whites do that with blacks. We cannot but do it, I think. Religion has been, in the past, certainly the best way. It’s religion and race that are the two absolute in-group out-group supremos."