Everyone Knows - Public Opinion in Philip Roth's Contemporary Tragedy The Human Stain

Purdue University Press
Everyone Knows: Public Opinion in Philip Roth's Contemporary Tragedy <em>The Human
Stain</em>
Authors(s): José Carlos del Ama
Source: Philip Roth Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 93-110
Published by: Purdue University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/philrothstud.5.1.93
Accessed: 27-03-2016 11:10 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Purdue University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philip
Roth Studies
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 195.221.71.48 on Sun, 27 Mar 2016 11:10:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Everyone Knows: Public
Opinion in Philip Roth’s
Contemporary Tragedy
The Human Stain
José Carlos del Ama
ABSTRACT. The downfall of Coleman Silk, main character of The Human

Stain, resembles the fate fallen upon the heroes of the ancient Greek tragedy.
In Philip Roth’s contemporary tragedy, public opinion plays the role of a
judging and condemning chorus. The omnipresent threat that flows from
this chorus is perfectly expressed in the vague, but devastating “everyone
knows” that precedes the accusations that will demolish the career, the family
and almost the mental health of the protagonist. Roth intertwines the fiction
with the historical reality the novel arises from. In this way, he reveals the
strict social control public opinion works, as well as its common punishment
mechanisms.
When Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
(2000), meets Coleman Silk for the first time, the ex-dean of Athena Col-
lege is in a state of extreme mental agitation. Zuckerman does not have the
impression of being in front of the magnificent dean that set high academic
standards at Athena College, but rather in front of “the amputated rest of him
spinning out of control” (11). Coleman’s desperation puzzles the apathetic
narrator—“apathetic” in the original sense of the word, a man who voluntarily
turned away from any kind of pathos—emotionally castrated through his
voluntary isolation, and sexually castrated through prostate surgery. Coleman
asks him, as a professional writer, to record the testimony of his case. In his
exasperation, Roth’s protagonist blames those who he thinks caused his down-
fall: “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
93
a real biological aversion” (19). Coleman Silk also uses the third pronominal
person to point out those accountable for the death of his wife, the first mor-
tal victim of the hate campaign against him: “These people murdered Iris! […]
They meant to kill me and they got her instead” (12-13).
The author of the melodramatic anonymous letter Coleman received
denouncing his affair with the janitor at the Athena College uses an indefinite
pronoun to refer to the faceless collective: “Everyone knows you’re sexually
exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (38). The same source of
authority, anonymous but irrefutable, is invoked by Jeff, Coleman’s oldest son,
when, in the middle of the scandal, the father tries to gain the support of his
family back: “[E]veryone in Athena knew. That’s how it got to us” (173). And
although it seems evident that the indefinite “everyone” corresponds to the
personal pronouns used by Silk, he responds by asking his son, “But just who
is this everyone?” (173). This study shall try to identify the powerful force that
drives the fate of Roth’s protagonist as the social-psychological conception of
public opinion. We need, therefore, to examine who the referent of this col-
lection of pronouns is, to throw some light on the anonymous collective that
plays a key role in the development of Coleman Silk’s tragedy.
The Spirit of Tragedy

The Human Stain tries to rescue the spirit that animated the classic genre of
the tragedy and to transfer it into contemporary America. References and
hints to the genre are constant throughout the novel. Silk is himself a profes-
sor in the Classics Department at Athena College, a program of study that can
be regarded almost as an anachronism. As such, Coleman Silk must be con-
scious of the dimensions and paradoxes of his fate. He knew, as Zuckerman
states, “from the wrath of Achiles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations
of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of
Prometheus” (63). Silk’s heroic character is closer to the Greek classic model
than to our modern idea of heroism. We can hardly imagine a hero with no
cause. And Coleman Silk, despite his profound heroism, does not seem to
have an identifiable cause to fight for. However, it would have been easy for
Silk to find one.
Throughout The Human Stain, Roth exploits the expressive potential of
paradox. Silk, the professor accused of having discriminated against African
American students, is black himself. The unusual fairness of his skin allows
him to enlist as a white private during World War II. After the war, Silk does
not undo the confusion. He decides to be a white man, even if this means a
break with his family. Neither his wife nor his children suspect anything about
their father’s past. From this fact, we might infer that Silk is a conformist. He
renounces his own race, which is subject to persecution and discrimination.
Thus, he accepts the status quo and gives up the fight against prejudice and
discrimination, an attitude that is characteristic of conformity. In the eyes of
his brother Walt, Coleman is a coward, a traitor to the family, the race and,
94 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009
above all, a traitor to the cause. Walt Silk is aware that “there was a fight to
fight then, and Coleman didn’t want to fight it” (327).
However, it is evident that we cannot simply label Coleman Silk with such
an adjective as “conformist.” Silk’s rebelliousness goes beyond the limits of
race, ideology or class struggle. He prefers to assert his individuality over any
social or political cause; and therefore, his rebelliousness is deeper and more
radical. It is the rebelliousness of the individual who defies his own fate. He,
Coleman Silk, is the cause. His ambition is, in the words of the narrator of
his drama, the ambition of “the man who decides to forge a distinct historical
destiny” (335). His battle is no less formidable than the civil rights battles his
brother Walt decides to fight. To define his heroic mission, Coleman Silk also
makes use of the mysterious pronouns: “The boundless, self-defining drama
of the pronouns we, they, and I” (109).
It is at Howard College, an educational institution traditionally associated
with the African American community, where Coleman, all of a sudden, feels
the intimidating presence of this we that threatens to absorb him, “the we’s
overbearing solidity” (109). From the very moment he gains consciousness
of the we, the idea of dissolving his identity into a personal pronoun seems
“oppressive” to him. He reacts angrily because of, according to the narrator,
“his insolent, arrogant ‘I am not one of you, I can’t bear you, I am not part of
your Negro we’ credo” (183).
Patrice Rankine has explored the tragic connotations of passing in The
Human Stain. The rejection of one’s own race, a substantial part of the indi-
vidual’s identity, seems to Rankine to be a form of suicide, for the individuals
who decide to pass as white break all bonds with their affective world. In this
sense, Coleman is dead to his entire family after that fateful moment. He van-
ishes from their lives and becomes just a memory. Still, the analogy with the
suicide, even if this is only symbolic, does not necessarily fit Coleman Silk’s
decision to pass. Suicide is an act of self-destruction, whereas Silk’s rejection
of his colored past is a form of radical self-construction, as Rankine acknowl-
edges (104). Perhaps both ideas do not necessarily exclude each other, for the
process of self-construction might demand, in some cases, the destruction of
the existing self.
Rankine further links the patricide in Sophocles’s Oedipus King with Silk’s
rejections of his mother (104). Coleman is aware that his heroic deed may
metaphorically kill his mother, “Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarat-
ing notion of freedom” (Human Stain 138). Yet, he does not hesitate after
he became resolved. Even the atrocity of the act seems to reinforce and to
stress the importance and necessity of his “savage” idea of freedom: “But only
through this test can he be the man he has chosen to be, unalterably sepa-
rated from what he was handed at birth, free to struggle at being free like any
human being would wish to be free” (139).
The comparison with Oedipus does not seem, however, to be the most
appropriate to understand the heroic nature of Roth’s character. For Oedipus
del Ama Philip Roth Studies 95
is not aware of the transgression against the divine order he was perpetrating.
In Die Geburt der Tragödie, Friedrich Nietzsche describes Oedipus as “edlen
Menschen …, der zum Irrtum und zum Elend trotz seiner Weisheit bestimmt ist
[a noble man who is doomed to error and misery in spite of his wisdom]”
(55). Oedipus never had the heroic ambition of challenging the divine order.
He became a tragic figure in spite of himself. When he resolved the enigma
of the Sphinx, Oedipus demonstrated his brightness and wisdom, but the
tragedy of his story, as Nietzsche emphasizes, is that intelligence and wisdom
became the source of his agony. Wisdom turns out to be, as Nietzsche put
it, a “Verbrechen an der Natur” [crime against nature]” (57). This is the very
curse of the human species.
Thus, Oedipus is, as Nietzsche points out, the hero of the passivity (57).
And it does not seem proper to include passivity among the characteristics
of Roth’s hero. Coleman Silk is much closer to Aeschylus’s Prometheus, who
is presented by Nietzsche, as opposed to Oedipus, as the active tragic hero.
Coleman Silk owns a titanic will, and his heroic act is to defy the fate that his
biological heredity may have determined for him. As the Titan Prometheus
did when he decided to steal the fire and give it to the humans, Roth’s hero
challenges the will of the gods with the decision of passing as white. And also
resembling Prometheus, Silk is perfectly aware of the enormity of his decision
and the tragic consequences it would have for his family.
The act of passing represents in Roth’s fiction the attempt to escape one’s
own fate. The theme of the individual who rises up against the destiny the
gods have arranged for him is very common in the classic Greek tragedy. The
transgression that most upset the Greek gods was when the heroes ignored the
divine will and tried to construct their own destiny. That was also the sin of
Sophocles’s Ajax, the arrogant warrior who thought himself the most valuable
among the Greek heroes and deserving of Achilles’ weapons. As punishment,
the gods blinded his understanding, and he attacked a herd of sheep. As a
predecessor of Don Quixote, Ajax slaughtered the animals and made a fool of
himself in front of the other Greek warlords. The shame forced him to throw
himself on his own sword.
In the very moment of the matricide, Coleman’s mother cannot imagine
that her son will be a victim of the most ironic destiny: a camouflaged Negro
accused of discriminating against black students. Still, she seems to be aware
that the battle her son is going to fight is hopeless: “Now, I could tell you that
there is no escape, that all your attempts to escape will only lead you back to
where you began” (140). The fight against the we is lost before it starts. At
the end, another we, in this case his colleagues in the academic environment,
will roll over him. Philip Roth uses public opinion, the powerful and yet
anonymous we’s and they’s of the novel, as an invisible entity that observes and
judges the behavior of the individual. In some regards, the use of this narrative
element can be compared with the role of the chorus in the genre of the Hel-
lenic tragedy. In some regards, it deviates from the classical model, too.
Friedrich Nietzsche sees in the ancient Chorus (mostly in Aeschylus’s and
Sophocles’s works, not in Euripides’s), “das Symbol der gesamten dionysisch
erregten Masse [the symbol of the broad Dionysianly excited mass]” (53). To
participate in this Dionysian mass presupposes the dissolution of the aware-
ness of individuality. Nietzsche, borrowing Arthur Schopenhauer’s vocabulary,
describes the process as the “Zerreißung des principii individuationis [the tear-
ing apart of the individuality principle]” (27). Public opinion also devours indi-
viduality and manifests itself as common and anonymous voice, ghostly and
phantom like, as Walter Lippmann described it in his classic Public Opinion.
In this sense, public opinion rapturously—in the Dionysian trance of giving
up one’s own individuality—incarnates the “Urwahrheit [original truth]” of
the community.
Public opinion dynamics, as we will see later, do not involve any rational
moment. They occur outside reason. The original (ursprünglich) chorus also
shares this characteristic with public opinion. According to Nietzsche, the Attic
tragedy, and the tragic chorus as its sublimation, is “Etwas recht Unvernünftiges
[something rather irrational]” … “mit Ursachen, die ohne Wirkungen, und mit
Wirkungen, die ohne Ursachen zu sein schienen [with causes that seemed to be
without effects, and effects without causes]” (78). In spite of such similarities,
Nietzsche’s conception of the chorus resolutely denies any social or politi-
cal function, which is evident in the social force that drives Coleman Silk’s
tragedy. Instead, Nietzsche ascribes to the chorus a deep creative energy that
constitutes the essence of the Dionysian art.
As a chorus, public opinion is in The Human Stain the partial spectator of
the human drama developing in front of its eyes. They cannot understand it.
They cannot even imagine the dimensions, depth and scope of that drama.
Still, they judge it. In this regard, the invisible chorus in Roth’s novel comes
closer to Friedrich Schiller conception of the tragic chorus. Schiller, in the
famous prologue to his play Die Braut von Messina, describes the chorus as
“lebendige Mauer [living wall]” (7). The anonymous members of the chorus
act, in Schiller’s view, as “ein richtender Zeuge [a judging Witness]” (12) of the
action of the heroes, and this is exactly the function of the omnipresent we’s
and they’s in Coleman Silk’s ordeal. However, public opinion in Roth’s novel
cannot be totally identified with Schiller’s conception of the chorus either. In
its incessant activity, we miss the “Lehren der Weisheit [lessons of wisdom]”
(10) that according to the German author were inherent in the statements of
the ancient chorus. It is then necessary to study in depth the singularity of this
invisible chorus in The Human Stain because it will help us understand the
nature and dimensions of its hero’s fate.
Contemporary Inquisition
From practically the very beginning of the novel, Roth establishes a parallel
between Coleman Silk’s case and the ordeal suffered by Bill Clinton in 1998. It
does not seem extravagant to assume that the reaction of the American society
during the scandal inspired Roth’s fiction. In both cases, actual and literary, we
find the same inquisitorial power behind the process of public demolition.
The first sphere of influence of this inquisitorial power is language. In
The Human Stain, public opinion reveals itself as an instrument of linguistic
inquisition in the service of omnipresent political correctness, a contempo-
rary manifestation of the conventional control over thinking, behavior, and
language. It creates a pressure to homogenize thinking and to establish moral
standards that characterize a society and allow its members to identify them-
selves with it. The violated, or supposedly violated, principle in Roth’s novel
is racial equality. Coleman Silk, a university professor with a brilliant career,
suffers bitter persecution because he calls two of his students “spooks” during
a routine attendance list check up. Actually, Silk does not know the race of
the two absent students and uses the term in its literal and primary sense, as
synonym of “ghost.” Yet the students, who happen to be African American,
interpret the racist connotations of the term as a deliberate and contemptuous
allusion to their race. When confronted by the dean who is dealing with the
charge of racism laid against him, Silk denies the accusation, which he deems
to be not just false, but “spectacularly false” (7).
Yet, the spectacular falsehood is not enough to stop the inquisitorial pro-
cess. This insignificant incident triggers a chain reaction that progressively
intensifies the gravity of the offense. The attitude of Silk, who does not show
any intention of spending time trying to clear up the confusion, is an inap-
propriate answer to the storm that is forming. Some characters in the novel
use the turbulent public to feed their own ambitions. For example, Herb
Keble, the first African American professor at the Athena College brought to
the institution by Coleman Silk, refuses to speak in favor of his mentor and
friend in spite of being aware of the injustice of the accusations. He chooses
to be with, again, the feared and eerie pronoun, them (16).
Coleman’s sister, when she learns of the incident that destroyed his brother’s
career and reputation, asks herself, “One has to be so terribly frightened of
every word one uses?” (329). And this question expresses the suffocating feel-
ing of danger and threat created by the inquisitorial phantom they. Indeed,
one has to be frightened of the words used and the behaviors adopted in
public settings. Coleman Silk neglects this basic rule not once, but twice. He
starts his relationship with Faunia Farley without taking care of what they
may think or say about it. When the second public storm is about to burst,
Silk’s lawyer warns him: “I think I know what it’s like now, and I believe I
know what it will be like in the future, when the whole county is privy to the
sexcapades of the guy who left the college under the racist cloud” (76). Silk’s
lawyer is warning against the same threat of social persecution and media
pillory. If we identify this power, always anonymous and phantom-like, with
public opinion, then we will have to conclude that this phenomenon actually
acts as social coercion to the detriment of individual sovereignty.
Still, the concept of public opinion presents two different, even opposed
meanings. On the one hand, we find the notion promoted by the German
sociologist Jürgen Habermas in his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit [The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere]. Habermas places the dawn
of public opinion (öffentliche Meinung) in the British enlightened society of
the eighteenth century. According to him, this society generated a Öffentlich-
keit [public sphere] which is necessary for the apparition of public opinion.
Public opinion, according to Habermas, originated from the free exchange of
ideas among intellectual elites in this ideal public sphere, free from any kind
of political or ideological pressure. In this sense, public opinion became a
counterpart of political or social power, a parallel discourse, which, through a
public use of individual reasoning, could supervise the use of power.
Opposed to this enlightened and elitist version of public opinion, another
understanding of the phenomenon co-exists. The most ardent advocate of this
second conception is Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann who argues that public opin-
ion, although also a correlate to political power, works in a totally different
way. In her work Die Schweigespirale [The Spiral of Silence], one of Noelle-
Neumann’s main concerns is to introduce a definition of the phenomenon
that could also serve as basis for empirical public opinion research: “Opinions
on controversial issues that one can express in public without isolating oneself.
[…] in the field of consolidated traditions, morals, and, above all, norms, the
opinions and behaviors […] that one must express or adopt if one is not going
to isolate oneself ” (63-64, emphasis in original). This definition points at the
individual fear of isolation as the amalgamating element of public opinion.
Noelle-Neumann completes her definition with an addendum that stresses
the importance of what she considers the “correlate of fear of isolation” in
public opinion processes: the social agreement: “Public opinion is an under-
standing on the part of people in an ongoing community concerning some
affect- or value-laden question which individuals as well as governments have
to respect at least by compromise in their overt behavior under the threat of
being excluded or losing one’s standing in society” (179).
The two-step definition helps us understand the persecution Coleman
Silk suffers in The Human Stain. We witness, first of all, how public opinion
watches over opinions and attitudes (the “spooks” episode) and also over
behaviors (the affair with Faunia Farley). Then, Roth describes in detail the
process of Silk’s isolation as a consequence of the real or supposed trespasses
against public opinion. Finally, the social significance of appearances, a key
element in the second step of the definition, also develops into a crucial
motive in the novel.
Public opinion is, according to Noelle-Neumann, a “pankulturelles Phe-
nomen [pan-cultural phenomenon],” (Öffentliche Meinung ii), a social reality
that appears in every cell of human coexistence. It has the power of any other
form of authority. Still, this authority is based on a merely tacit agreement.
Public opinion manifests itself in the form of a complex network of social
rules that determine the behavior that people adopt and the ideas they express
in public, as well as the linguistic means to articulate those ideas. Tradition,
morals, political correctness, property and etiquette rules, even fashion are
manifestations of the same unspoken and unwritten legislation dictated
by public opinion. Here, Noelle-Neumann borrows American sociologist
Edward A. Ross’s concept of “social control” to define the main function of
public opinion. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Ross included
public opinion in his comprehensive repertoire of social control sources.
Social Control is, by the way, the title of his most emblematic book. Com-
pared with other means of social control, public opinion is, according to Ross,
“flexible” and “cheap” (102). It is flexible because of its ability to constantly
change without any formal pronouncement, and it is cheap because it does
not require any established institution.
Noelle-Neumann frequently uses the word “tyranny” in reference to the
molding effect of public opinion (124-26). The very same word, tyranny, is
also used by Roth to describe the relentless harassing endured by the hero of
his novel. Again, it is a matter of pronominal tyranny: “You can’t let the big they
impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little they become a
we and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of the we and its we-talk
and everything that we wants to pile on your head” (Human Stain 108). At
another place in the novel, Roth refers to the “tyranny of property.” Property
is a corpus of rules, tacit rules, spontaneously generated by any articulated
or unarticulated group, any we or they. Roth also emphasizes that there is no
way to escape from this tyranny because any social group, at any cultural or
economic level, develops its own formulas of property: “As a force, propriety is
protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civil
responsibility, WASP dignity, women’s rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance,
or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity” (153). Submission to any of these
sets of rules is the fee charged by the we to accept the individual.
Hypersensitive to everything that constrains thinking, Coleman Silk gets
upset when one of his students, again bowing to political correctness, suggests
that he read Euripides’s Alcestis from a “feminist perspective” (191). He would
have reacted the same way if the proposed “perspective” had been Marxist,
existentialist, structuralist, constructivist, deconstructivist, or “even from the
fashionable Nietzschean perspective about perspective” (191). Any ideological
lens or any academic fashion to interpret Euripides may have seemed to him
equally criminal. Roth links the intellectual hypersensitivity of his hero to a
very American tradition. American individualism has become a cultural myth.
Still, the forces that oppose this ideal have also achieved mythical dimensions.
Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, or Sinclair Lewis, whose Main Street can be
regarded as a detailed description of the molding effect of public opinion, are
mentioned in the novel as references in the very American fight for individual
autonomy.
One of the most shocking statements we find in Tocqueville’s always
refreshing travel book Democracy in America is that in no other country of the
civilized world had the author yet found so little individual freedom as in the
United States of America. The statement is startling because the author was
witnessing a democratic experiment that would be imitated in most Western
countries. This democratic regime based its legitimacy upon a system of
individual freedoms that had no comparison in the eighteenth century, the
time Tocqueville visited the United States, and has no equal even now. It
seemed especially remarkable to Tocqueville that the lack of freedom was not
the consequence of any institutional repression, as is commonly the case in
most despotic regimes, but that in the United States the repression spontane-
ously arose from public opinion. Public opinion played in American society,
according to Tocqueville, the role of the main inquisitor of ideas, manners,
behaviors, and language. The French author, descendant of an aristocratic
family, found the oppression of public opinion suffocating, as overpowering as
any merciless tyranny. The fact that this tyranny stemmed from the majority
of the population did not comfort him: “[A]nd I am not the more disposed
to pass beneath the yoke, because it is held out to me by the arms of millions
of men” (2: 13).
It may seem paradoxical to find lack of material freedoms in the Land of
Freedom, to witness the persecution of individualism in the individualist
country par excellence. However, this circumstance is rather the logical con-
sequence of a regime based upon a constituted system of civil freedoms. For
the less repressive state and religions are, and the more lenient the civil and
divine law—the two other sources of social order identified by John Locke in
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding—the more strict will have to be
the third law, which Locke called “law of opinion or reputation” (230) or “law
of fashion” (231), in order to hold the social building intact.
We can see this in the example of Herb Keble, the African American profes-
sor who denied Silk his support during the hurricane of the “spooks” affair,
makes a public atonement during the funeral of Roth’s hero. In his speech,
Keble contrasts Silk’s “moral authority” with the “moral stupidity” of those
who fell on him: “Yes, it is we, the morally stupid censorious community,
who have abased ourselves in having so shamefully besmirched Coleman Silk’s
good name” (311). According to Locke, the power of public opinion derives
from its capacity to set up standards of what is morally acceptable and what
must be repudiated from a moral point of view. Locke defines the law of
opinion, fashion, and reputation as “secret and tacit consent” that every social
body inevitably generates according to the “judgment, maxims, or fashions”
of the place. Social praise and blame are, in Locke’s view, its executing vehicles
(230). Even if there is no rational consistency in the values established by pub-
lic opinion, even it they might deserve the adjective used by Roth, “stupid,”
their power is not less obliging.
The effect of public opinion is a homogenizing pressure, an urge to con-
form to the established thinking. Coleman Silk, who is not depicted by Roth
as a “radical” or a “revolutionary, not even intellectually or philosophically,” is
not willing to tolerate that pressure. And this is exactly what the anonymous
we finds unacceptable, “to believe that disregarding prescriptive society’s most
restrictive demarcations and asserting independently a free personal choice
that is well within the law was something other than a basic human right […]
to refuse to accept automatically the contract drawn up for your signature at
birth (155). Society does not condemn Coleman Silk for the rejection of his
own family, the treason to his race and the holy cause of his race, or the sym-
bolic murder of his mother. Nobody, ever, found out. What they perceive and
do not seem to accept is Silk’s failure “at being conventional” (41).
Public opinion, as a source of social control, also executes its own forms
of punishment. The individual who becomes a target of public wrath starts
perceiving signs of isolation. Such signs, which are subtle at the beginning of
the process, become more evident and painful if the individual does not opt
to go along with the expectations of the group. Locke describes the process
as follows:
Nor is there one of ten thousand, who is stiff and insensible enough, to bear up
under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a
strange and unusual constitution, who can content himself to live in constant
disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude many men have
sought, and been reconciled to: but nobody that has the least thought or sense of
a man about him can live in society under the constant dislike and ill opinions of
his familiars and those he converses with. This is a burden too heavy for human
sufferance. (231)
Silk suffers the harassment described by Locke. He has to stand the “constant
dislike and condemnation of his own club,” to “live in constant disgrace and
disrepute with his own particular society,” to bear the “constant dislike and
ill opinions of those he converses with.” The public attacks follow one after
another. The spooks episode is enriched with new details brought about by
further rumors. And these rumors confirm and reaffirm the image that public
opinion has already formed. Life on campus, the usual interaction with other
faculty or staff members at Athena, is overshadowed by the allegation of rac-
ism. At the end of this process, as Edward L. Ross puts it, “the dead member
drops from the social body” (102).
Coleman Silk loses everything. First of all, he loses his wife (“his formi-
dable wife,” whose brain literally explodes due to the pressure exerted on her
husband by the collective stupidity), his career, and his reputation. He loses
“all that was playful in him” (26). Finally, he loses his children, who also give
him the cold shoulder when rumors about his relationship with Faunia start
circulating (172). Although he does not leave New England, Silk is as isolated
as Philoctetes was on the island of Lemnos.
The Social Skin

Coleman Silk is no exception to the rule stated by John Locke, “Nor is there
one of ten thousand” (231). Noelle-Neumann refers to our Soziale Haut
(social skin), a metaphor that we have to interpret as the sensitiveness of the
human being toward the judgments of our neighbors. And this social skin
is just one manifestation, probably the most relevant, of our social nature.
Individuals, as stated by Noelle-Neumann, require human acceptance and
feel authentic panic from isolation, hatred, contempt, and the mockery of
their neighbors (Spiral of Silence 40). Coleman Silk, in spite of his strong
will to forge his own destiny, in spite of all his contempt toward those who
are vilifying him, has a “social skin.” The public attacks do not allow him to
remain indifferent or unconcerned. He suffers, and suffers a great deal. After
the death of his wife, Silk becomes obsessed with the case. The only goal in
his later years seems to be the reparation of his damaged honor.
Nathan Zuckerman clearly perceives the consequences of the hate cam-
paign in Silk’s character. The reclusive author also appreciates the narrative
potential, the aesthetic dimensions of the story: “There is something fascinat-
ing 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” (12). The allure of Silk’s fate is powerful enough to shake off
the lethargy of its narrator.
Silk gives up his position at the Athena College and the honors his career
presumably may have made him eligible for. The constant harassment of pub-
lic opinion weakens his strength of mind and sinks him into the obsession of
proving his innocence to the world. And this obsession is probably the worst
symptom of his defeat. His arrogant detachment from the rest of the world
and his contempt for the common opinions are followed by the obsession
for showing the world, which he loathes, his innocence. After an intense life
fighting to be the master of his own destiny, aloof from what was happening
around him in terms of personal emotions, family, or what we simply call
history, Coleman Silk would never have thought he could become a victim of
this obsession for the opinions of the rest of the world. His whole obsession is
filed and organized in boxes with the label “Spooks” (17).
Crepuscular Eros
What gives Coleman Silk his mental health back, his sanity, and frees him
from the obsession with the opinion of others—the humiliating dependency
on their judgments—is the episode of crepuscular eroticism with Faunia
Farley, which is made possible by the miraculous effects of Viagra. This affair
also has all the necessary elements of a transgression against the unwritten
order imposed by public opinion. A college professor is not often associated
in this way with a person at a much lower economic and cultural level. This
time, the broken taboo is the abuse of a privileged economic, social, and
professional position. The professor starts a relationship with a woman who
is working as a janitor at the university where he is a respected scholar. The
janitor is thirty years his junior and has a past that offers serious doubts about
her mental stability. Several times, Roth alludes to the agony of Gustav von
Aschenbach, Thomas Mann’s morbid hero in Der Tod in Venedig (51, 64).
Coleman Silk, like von Aschenbach, abandons himself to what Mann called
“the late adventure of feelings” (Human Stain 64). In both cases, although due
to quite different causes and circumstances, eros, the love, ends blending with
thanatos, the death.
Coleman finds in the abused woman relief from the pressure and escape
from the insanity that had seized his life. He learns from Faunia how to bridle
the propensities of his social nature, for if there is a character in The Human
Stain with no social skin at all, it is Faunia Farley. And this indifference is
not something innate but the result of a disturbing vital experience. Faunia
reaches her social ataraxia (impassiveness) after having suffered all kind of
abuses, humiliations, beatings, and after having lost her two sons by asphyxia.
Faunia’s only apparent emotional bond is to the canister under her bed where
she keeps the ashes of the boys. Therefore, she has no patience with or too
much respect for Coleman’s suffering. It seems to her to be somewhat exag-
gerated and superfluous. Zuckerman dissects Faunia’s wrath against his elderly
lover: “What does she hate most? That he really thinks his suffering is a big
deal. He really thinks that what everybody thinks, what everybody says about
him at Athena College, is so life-shattering. It’s a lot of assholes not liking
him—it’s not a big deal. […] That’s what she hates about him—the privile-
gedness of his suffering” (234).
Defying public opinion—or at least ignoring it—Faunia puts herself at the
lowest social stage: an illiterate woman who earns her life “sweeping up peo-
ple’s shit” (235). The apparently unbalanced relationship, when it becomes
public, arouses a new wave of public indignation. The same people—the
faceless they—who hounded him because of the “spooks” incident see in the
affair a new abuse by the unscrupulous ex-dean: “Everyone knows you’re
sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (38), reads the
anonymous letter written—Coleman never doubts it—by the ex-colleague
Delphine Roux.
Roux may seem, at first glance, a mirror image of Coleman Silk. She also
has—or had—the ambition “to be independent” (274). This ambition was
the reason she leaves her familiar world, her comfortable life and the sophis-
ticated environment in France and decides to move to the United States.
Still, the result of Roux’s audacity is that she finds herself “in a desperate state
of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces
defining her as the enemy. And all because she’d gone eagerly in search of an
existence of her own. All because she’d been courageous and refused to take
the prescribed view of herself ” (272). Her heroic impulse, the search for the
prestige and glamour of the American adventure, leads her to a dead end of
unhappiness.
Of course, the ambition of independence is in Roux’s case only a façade.
Coleman Silk swims against social streams to reach singularity: “The passion-
ate struggle for singularity. The singular animal,” as Coleman calls it (108).
Yet, the ambition of singularity is not, in Roux’s case, a vital and visceral
reaction against the standardizing pressure of the they’s and we’s. Rather, it
is another manifestation of the social streams through which our existence,
according to Emile Durkheim, flows away. Gilles Lipovetsky explores in The
Empire of Fashion this urge for singularity, which, as a matter of fact, is one of
the major paradoxes of our time and culture. To stand out, to be original—or
simply noticeable—has developed into a fashion, a social expectation (33).
Still, singularity, when regarded as a social must, becomes a caricature of
the true meaning of the word. Delphine Roux, in her elitist and intellectual
fashion, is a victim of public opinion as well. The discontent with her own
life is the reason she starts the crusade against Coleman Silk. In this cause
she finds refuge from the wreckage of her life. To Silk, Zuckerman interprets
in mythological style her attacks against his friend in this way: “By defining
you as a monster, she defines herself as a heroine. This is her slaying of the
monster” (42).
Actually, Coleman Silk embodies everything Roux has not been able to
become and everything she longs for. Her true nature and her true feelings
become evident during the panic attack she suffers after having sent by mis-
take an e-mail to the members of the department with an “ad in quest of a
Coleman Silk duplicate or facsimile” (277). When she imagines the conse-
quences of the involuntary disclosure, she decides to put the last rumor into
circulation: the calumny that ex-dean Silk broke into her office and sent the
e-mail to the rest of the faculty.
The Power of Rumor

Rumors play a key role in the development of Coleman’s fate. Roth refers to
the phenomenon as “the Devil of the Little Place” (290). The rumor, as stated
by Gordon Willard Allport, normally deals with issues of special importance
for the community (33). Generally, rumors contain a manifest or latent
threat for the moral integrity of the community. Nonetheless, they show, as
evidenced in the spooks case, a high degree of ambiguity. This ambiguity refers
to the facts, to the residual truth, that is at the bottom of the rumor, not to
the interpretation, which is always easy and straight.
In The Human Stain, the authority of rumor derives from the fact that,
although nobody knows exactly the origin of the information, in fact, everyone
knows. This infuriates Nathan Zuckerman, who sees in it “the invocation of
the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience” (209). And
thus, since everyone knows, even if no one knows who everyone is, the rumor
acquires the status of fact. Vox populi, reads the maxim, vox dei. Zuckerman
uses the word cliché in order to reveal the nature of the contents of rumors.
This term could be regarded as a synonym of what Walter Lippmann, in his
classic Public Opinion, calls stereotypes. Lippmann points out the importance
of stereotypes as one of our basic perception categories. As such, they prove
to be the natural vehicle of public opinion, for they reduce the inevitable
complexity of issues making them easier to judge.
We cannot expect deep elaboration of ideas in processes of public opin-
ion. Neither is thorough analysis or accurate diagnosis necessary to set the
opinion-generating machine in motion. Any critical moment is sidestepped.
The judgment happens, as Robert Ezra Park remarks, “at the perception
stage of awareness-development” (57). The label, as Zuckerman states in the
novel, replaces the thinking process: “Only a label is required. The label is the
motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic” (290).
Public opinion finds in Coleman Silk’s relationship to Faunia Farley perfect
material for rumor. Without intention, even without being aware of it, Faunia
creates her own label. The janitor at Athena College becomes the “prototype
of female helplessness” (Human Stain 194), a woman “who cannot fight
back” (198). Therefore, the rumors about the alleged abortion or the suicide
attempt are absorbed as facts by Athena’s public opinion. Even the final
gossip, especially filthy, about the “scandalous death” (284) of the ex-dean,
which is at some point presented as “staged murder-suicide” (291), is eagerly
seized by public opinion. In spite of the absurdity of the accusations, in spite
of all evidence, in spite even of the police statement, credence is given to the
rumor by those who constitute the third person plural pronoun they. And
they believe it, as Zuckerman states, because “they want to believe it, they
can’t wait to repeat it” (289). Appearances alone set in motion this inquisito-
rial process. No cognitive moment seems to be required. Faunia, the janitor,
is not depicted as a vulnerable being, but rather as an ill-treated person who
was able to find refuge from the multiple hazards of life in her job and in the
appearance of illiteracy. Nothing is what it appears to be; but what appears to
be is what finally sets in motion the roller of public opinion.
In the middle of Coleman Silk’s funeral service, Nathan Zuckerman reflects
on the nature of the plural pronoun they, which is an inquiry into the car-
riers of public opinion. He concludes that most of the attendants to the
service, Coleman Silk’s former colleagues, could be put into the pronominal
bag. And he finds somewhat astonishing that such an educated bunch could
have contributed to the absurd annihilation process: “It was strange to think
[…] that people so well educated and professionally civil should have fallen
so willingly for the venerable human dream of a situation in which one man
can embody evil. Yet there is this need, and it is undying and it is profound”
(307). This select group of university professors and administrators could
rather have been regarded as candidates for participating in the public sphere
envisioned by Jürgen Habermas, which would necessarily lead to his paradi-
siacal “Moderne,” a society in which all the ideals of the Enlightenment would
finally come true. However, the members of that intellectual elite at Athena
rather represent Noelle-Neumann’s version of public opinion, the irrational
authority that watches over any given social order. Also the social researcher
has to confront the paradox of pronouns when trying to identify the carriers
of public opinion. In fact, in the social-psychological sense of the term, every-
one is bearer of public opinion. Still, in this case, as Noelle-Neumann often
repeats, everyone is not each one.
Delphine Roux appears in the novel as the embodiment of the anonymous
everyone who accuses and judges. Roth depicts her mimetic character, her
need and her ability to adapt to her environment, her immersion into it, by
listing her cultural inventory, that is the books and movies she is supposed to
know: “all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonio-
nis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmüllers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René
Clairs, all the Wim Wenderes, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols,
the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs” (188). Through the Alcestis episode,
Roth also makes clear that, in controversial issues, Roux adopts the positions
and attitudes that a university professor is supposed to adopt. This is a posi-
tion belonging to a member of the intellectual elite, a scholar who must know
and understand what is really going on.
From this point of view, The Human Stain can be regarded as an attack
against the academic and intellectual establishment, which also produces its
own particular discourse. Roth has never been a comfortable author for this
particular audience, although they constitute his natural readership. In Ameri-
can Pastoral, for example, certain passages directly confront the ambiguous,
vague, and empty rhetoric of modern abstract art (322). Roth does not seem
to be afraid of laughing in public at the nakedness of the emperor.
The character of Delphine Roux helps us explain yet another elemental
feature of public opinion. As an individual perfectly integrated in her specific
milieu, she is subordinated to the rigor of the judgments of her social circle.
On the other hand, she is also the most ardent voice in the anti-Silk cam-
paign. This dichotomy is also characteristic of the carrier of public opinion,
for everyone is at the same time victim and executive agent of such homogeniz-
ing pressure.
What maniac conceived it?

When Jeff, Coleman’s oldest son, unable to endure the titanic wrath of his
father, hangs up the phone in their last conversation, the isolation process of
Roth’s hero is completed. The dead member, to put it in Ross’ words, finally
drops from the social body. In the same scene, Silk sees at the campus of his
former university a group of elderly people—close to his age—who are par-
ticipating in some summer program of continuing education. In their merry
docility, Silk recognizes what society expects from him, the behavior that
would be regarded as appropriate, “looking as they should look and sounding
as they should sound” (174). In them, the ex-dean sees the sheerest contrast
to his savage independence. At this very moment, Silk is aware of his complete
detachment. He feels wrecked and even has the temptation to yield.
Still, he does not yield. The social “death” also brings advantages. The
detachment from the group, if the individual possesses the inner strength to
stand it, is the way to reach a superior level of freedom. Zuckerman, who also
escaped from social or emotional attachments, points outs to Silk the positive
side of a life beyond the “bounds of the communal academic society” (41).
Isolation is the price to pay for this freedom from the pressure of public opin-
ion, from the obsession with the judgments of the neighbors. This seems to
be the lesson that the ironic and whimsical gods wanted Coleman Silk to learn
from the ordeal they created for him. That such an iron will could break down
as a result of the absurd episode around a single word, “spooks,” is interpreted
by the narrator as “[t]he ridiculous trivialization of this masterly performance
that had been his seemingly conventional, singularly subtle life” (335). Cole-
man Silk’s tribulations lead him to an upper level of independence, to the
“savage” freedom—“blissfully free”—he always strived for (335).
However, Roth’s vision of the tragedy of human existence is deeper and
goes beyond the constraints of social life. In this regard, the author’s vision of
the literary genre comes close to Nietzsche’s, the theorist par excellence of the
Greek tragedy. The divine irony reaches its culmination with Coleman Silk’s
death. For it makes irrelevant the wisdom acquired by the hero through his
public torment, and trivializes the freedom he finally gained from the yoke of
public opinion. When he could have started taking pleasure in his new life,
Silk becomes the victim of yet another victim of the rollercoaster of society
and history, Faunia’s ex-husband Les Farley. Coleman Silk’s whole suffering
makes no sense. And this is the deepest meaning of the tragedy of human
existence, the devastating message of the classic genre.
While Apollonian art bases its effect on the creation of an appearance of
beauty that, in Nietzsche’s words, turns into the “Vergötlichung des principii
individuationis [idolatry of the individuality principle]” (33), Dionysian art
reaches its artistic ecstasy tearing apart that principium individuationis and
going beyond the beautiful appearance. What the Dionysian art reveals
beyond the threshold of the appearance is the transitory nature and sense-
lessness of human existence. The classic tragedy, the pieces of Aeschylus and
Sophocles as Nietzsche constantly remarks, reaches its climax and finds its
raison d’être in the “Vernichtung des Individuums [the destruction of the indi-
vidual]”. Through the fate of the tragic hero, the spectator becomes aware of
the “Schrecken der Individualexistenz [horrors of the individual existence],”
and this awareness produces in the individual a “metaphysischen Trost, [meta-
physical comfort]” (93).
Nietzsche refers to the cathartic effect of the tragedy experienced by those
original spectators of the Greek tragedy. To witness the desolation of human
existence, “den Urschmerz,” can help us find solace. This is the sense of the
Greek concept catharsis, purification. The tragedy, the awareness of the
“Urschmerz,” purifies the spectator from their own human condition—which
is necessarily individual.
Roth’s novel also helps the reader find comfort in the middle of desolation.
It leads us to an “uralt” purification, the purification from that human stain
Faunia Farley invokes without being able to further articulate its meaning. At
that point in the novel, Roth lent her the aid of his narrator to explain the
content of our common human stain: “[W]e 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. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do
with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent.
Defining” (242). The tragedy creates awareness. It does not help escape the
stain because there is no escape at all. Still, the awareness, as Nietzsche points
out, gives us solace.
Conclusions
Public opinion acts in Coleman Silk’s fate as an invisible chorus that shows
some of the features of this stylistic element in the genre of the Hellenic
tragedy. The public opinion that appears in Roth’s novel absorbs individual-
ity in a faceless mass that is impervious to reason. In this sense, it is related
to Nietzsche’s understanding of the original tragic chorus. Public opinion
also fulfills in The Human Stain the narrative function Schiller attributes to
the chorus in the Greek tragedy: a “living wall” that prevents transgressions
against the moral standards of the community. The public opinion that
appears in Roth’s fiction corresponds to the social-psychological conception
of the phenomenon: an anonymous tribunal that accuses and judges. Public
opinion smoothes the edges of individuality and promotes conformity. In this
way, it contributes to the reinforcement and cohesion of the community.
Roth, through his narrator Nathan Zuckerman, offers a series of synonyms
that try to reveal the source of the inquisitorial power: “The we that is ines-
capable: the present moment, the common lot, the current mood, the mind
of one’s country, the stranglehold of history that is one’s own time. Blindsided
by the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything” (335). Such we’s or they’s
help the individuals to create their own identity. Still, they also limit indi-
vidual freedom of action, expression and thought. The anonymous collective
devours the individuality in the personal (they/we) or indefinite (everyone)
pronouns. While watching with inquisitorial zeal over the values consecrated
by the zeitgeist, the anonymous tribunal harasses Coleman Silk and puts him
beyond the borders of society.
Philip Roth’s tragic fiction, perfectly integrated in a social reality, allows us
to witness the change of moral standards. Even though a public opinion will
always exist that will safeguard the cohesion of the group, the contents of this
omnipresent phenomenon will be necessarily different. In 1998, racial pass-
ing would probably make no sense in American society, as Coleman’s sister,
one of the victims of his indomitable character, states in the novel: “People
age. Nations age. Problems age. […] Today, if you’re a middle-class intelligent
Negro and you want your kids to go to the best schools, and on full scholar-
ship if you need it, you wouldn’t dream of saying you are not colored. […]
White as your skin may be, now it’s advantageous not to do it” (326). Public
opinion is—and I am borrowing the adjective Roth uses to define property—
protean. Its façade, the property rules we perceive and follow, is constantly
metamorphosing. Still, its basic function as guardian of social order, as well
as the way it exerts its pressure, hardly change. A collective consciousness, the
we’s and they’s that are omnipresent in The Human Stain, will always arise.
Public opinion will establish behavior patterns and determine the ideas that
are convenient to express—or to repress—as well as the linguistic formulas
with which to express them.
Works Cited
Allport, Gordon Willard. The Psychology of Rumor. New York: Russel and Russel 1947. Print.
Childs, Harwood Lawrence. Public Opinion: Nature, Formation, and Role. Princeton: van Nos-
trand, 1945. Print.
Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwander der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bür-
gerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1965. Print.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1994. Print.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Print.
Locke, John. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”. Great Books of the Western World:
Locke, Berkeley, Hume. Ed. Robert M. Hutchins. Vol. 35. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1952.
Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Werke in Drei Bänden. Ed. Karl Schlechta.
München: Verlag, 1954. Print.
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1993. Print.
—. Öffentliche Meinung. Die Entdeckung der Schweigespirale. Frankfurt: Ullstein,1996. Print.
Park, Robert Ezra. The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972.
Print.
Rankine, Patrice. “Passing as Tragedy: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain: The Oedipus Myth and
the Self-made Man.” Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47 (2005): 101-12. Print.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order. Cleveland: P of Case
Western Reserve U, 1969. Print.
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Print.
—. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.
Schiller, Friedrich. Die Braut von Messina oder die feindlichen Brüder. Ed. Arthur H. Palmer and
Jay Glover Eldridge. New York: Henry Holt, 1901. Print
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 2 vols. New York: Vintage, 1945. Print.

Everyone Knows - Public Opinion in Philip Roth's Contemporary Tragedy The Human Stain

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Everyone Knows - Public Opinion in Philip Roth's Contemporary Tragedy The Human Stain

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Purdue University Press

ABSTRACT. The downfall of Coleman Silk, main character of The Human

The Spirit of Tragedy

94 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 95

96 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 97

98 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 99

100 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 101

The Social Skin

102 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 103

104 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

The Power of Rumor

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 105

106 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

What maniac conceived it?

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 107

108 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

del Ama Philip Roth Studies 109

110 Philip Roth Studies Spring 2009

You might also like