Title: A Typical Novel of Postmodern Realism — on Philip Roth's The Human Stain

Author: He Zhaohui is from the College of Foreign Languages, Shaoguan University, specializing in Modern and Postmodern Fiction in British and American Literature.

Title: A Typical Novel of Postmodern Realism — on Philip Roth's The Human Stain

Author: He Zhaohui is from the College of Foreign Languages, Shaoguan University, specializing in Modern and Postmodern Fiction in British and American Literature.

The Human Stain

written by contemporary American writer Philip Roth is well known for its truthful depiction and satirical exposure of the reality of the contemporary American society: the "political correctness" movement, Bill Clinton's sexual scandal, the history of African American, and the trauma of the Vietnam War. What is equally important and significant are such typical postmodernist writing features as Intertextuality and Meta fi ction applied in the novel. The ingenious combination of the social reality theme and the postmodernist writing features renders

The Human Stain

a typical novel of Postmodern Realism, a sort of stylistic poetics which integrates the features of traditional Realistic novel on one hand and of the postmodernist writing techniques on the other.Philip Roth

The Human Stain

Realism Postmodernism Postmodern Realism

Introduction

In "Postmodern Realism", Jose David Saldivar regards such writers as Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver and E.L.Doctorow as the writers of Postmodern Realism; in "Postmodern Fiction", Molly Hite chooses Vladimir Nabokov, John Hawks, John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut as the postmodernist writers.Neither of them has ever referred to Philip Roth as a postmodernist writer or his works as the postmodernist ones. Larry MaCaffery doesn't recognize Philip Roth as an author of postmodern fi ction either while demonstrating the "authors and critics of postmodern fiction". This ignorance, in my view, needs reconsidering, for Philip Roth is without doubt a postmodern writer, due to the postmodern themes and forms fl exibly and skillfully embodied in his writings.

In an interview, Professor Yang Renjing argues that Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo are all "acknowledged postmodernist writers". Similarly, when writing her dissertation, Zeng Yanyu embraces Philip Roth, along with Saul Below, John Barth, E.L.Doctorow, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Ishmael Reed, labeling them "the second generation of postmodernist writers". This recognition and labeling of Philip Roth as a postmodern writer owes much to his novel

The Human Stain

(2000). The novel is well known for its truthful depiction and satirical exposure of the reality of contemporary American society, such as the "political correctness" movement, Bill Clinton's sexual scandal, the history of African American, and the trauma of the Vietnam War. What is equally important and signi fi cant are such typical postmodernist writing features as Intertextuality and Meta fi ction applied in the novel. Accordingly, I con fi rmatively argue that

The Human Stain

is a novel of Postmodern Realism, for it not only bears many traces of the realistic novel in a traditional sense but also shares one or more features of postmodernist novels.

1 Realism and its Representation in The Human Stain

1.1 Realism: History and Definition

As to Realism, there are at least two types of concepts, although there has never been a unanimously agreed definition. According to M. H. Abrams, Realism can be classified into two diverse ways: "① to identify a movement in the writing of novels during the 19th century that included Honoré Balzac in France, George Eliot in England, and William Dean Howells in America, and ② to designate a recurrent mode, in various eras and literary forms, of representing human life and experience in literature."Wallace Martin reiterates Abrams's view in his Recent Theories of Narrative.In "Reading Realism", Elizabeth Ermarth puts Realism in this vein:

Realism belongs to the same effort that produced cartography and exploration, scientific description ranging from botanical classification to Newtonian physics, the rise of representational forms of government, the invention of individuals and societies conceived as entities, and perhaps most powerfully, the convention of historical time. Realism, in other words, is a construct of humanism that has evolved during the last five hundreds years and includes, but is not exclusive to, the more recent temporal constructions evident in the realistic novel.

In Ermarth's view, Realism includes the realistic novel and other forms of expression as well. From the above discussion, one can sense that there are generally two sorts of Realism: Realism in the global sense, which is a philosophical concept, and Realism in the local plane, specifically meaning Realism in literature or the realistic novel. The latter is my concern hereafter.

The appearance of Realism in literature is established in the 18century in the capitalist countries like Britain, France, and Spain. We can say that Cervantes is the first writer of Realism, for in his practice he is "calling for realism in the art of fiction", though the philosophical climate is "not yet right for the development of realistic fiction". Genre is a "cultural artifact", the product of "social action", therefore its rising needs some social conditions. Realism as a genre can not turn up out of nowhere. The rise of Realism needs some philosophical condition, just as Ian Watt has pointed out, modern Realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses". The rising of capitalism and the philosophical writings of René Descartes (1596-1650), "the founder ofmodern philosophical realism", and of John Locke (1632-1704) in the 17century stimulated the turnup of individualism. Then we find in Britain that the novelist Daniel Defoe "established himself as the first significant practitioner of realism in fiction and as the 'founder' of the modern novel". After Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne all contribute a lot to the advancement of the modern realistic novel. In the 19century, realistic novel in England has turned out to be one of the most important literary genres, to which Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, W.M.Thackeray and George Eliot have made a great contribution. The Critical Realism especially drew more attention than others at that time. There is no doubt that Karl Marx, in analyzing the capitalist development, considers Critical Realism as the literary form of the fi rst period of capitalism, that is, the period of capitalist primitive accumulation.

In American, such important writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, W.D.Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James all play a signi fi cant role in the establishment of the realistic novel or Realism. In particular, Hawthorne in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) made a distinction between the realistic novel and romance, which has been adopted and expanded by a lot of later critics.

Since there are a lot of writers practicing the novel of Realism, it will take different forms or types. This is a much complicated matter, just as one critic asserts that Realism "can be a tricky one". Damian Grant also holds that "the word realism […] must surely be the […] most elastic, most prodigious of critical terms,"and then he lists 26 types of Realism in his work Realism, including Naturalist Realism, Critical Realism and Psychological Realism, which on my part are the most popular three. But his list is not a complete one, for now such terms as Experimental Realism and Postmodern Realism have come into sight for not a few years.

Realism per se is the key word, although there are different kinds of Realism in literature. One thing that is extremely important is what makes a novel realistic or what features a novel as that of Realism, to which a lot of critics have dedicated themselves. In a letter to Margaret Harkness, Friedrich Engels on Realism has made a classical definition that "Realism to my mind implies, besides the truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances". Henry James in his famous article "The Art of Fiction" (1884) argues for the "truth of detail" and points out that "the air of reality" is the "supreme virtue of a novel". Howells chastises "the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than of their fi delity to it."George J.Becker contends that Realism "is a formula of art which, conceiving a reality in a certain way, undertakes to present a simulacrum of it."Still, other critics hold that "new fi ction [novel of Realism] aimed at accuracy—it used plain words to represent plain things" and the artist's duty is "to confront life honestly and to represent it". Terry Eagleton notes that "art [including realistic novels] reflects social reality, and must portray its typical features". In addition, Wang Shouren and Tong Qingsheng contend that "the realistic novels aim at reflecting and representing the real life" and in the meantime, a good novel of Realism should "have interesting plots, vivid characters and bear the sense of verisimilitude through the detailed depiction". From these critical views about the characteristics of Realism, I would argue that "the representation of reality" or "vivid and detail description of real life" or "typical representation of typical circumstances" turns to be the unique characteristics of the realistic novel.

1.2 The Human Stain: A Novel with Typica

l

Realistic Features

Then we can scrutinize

The Human Stain

in the light of "representation of reality" or "vivid and detail description of real life". This novel is unfolded against the backdrop of the "political correctness" movement which culminated in 1990s in America and of the American former president Bill Clinton's sexual scandal. Philip Roth presents us with a speci fi c detail that starts the story:

It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean of faculty—confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college.

In this long sentence, the narrator informs the reader of time, place, characters and fabula of this novel; this narrative description is quite consistent with that of the traditional realistic novel. The touch of being realistic from the very beginning is crystal for the reader. Immediately after this, Roth describes the "rural post office" where Faunia Farley works is "a small gray clapboard shack that […], sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town" (1). From this, a common reader will in his or her mind have a vivid picture of the typical American town. Then the narrator tells us that the summer is "the summer, fi ttingly enough, that Bill Clinton's secret emerged in every last mortifying detail" (2). Later this information is again revealed through several unnamed teachers' conversation about Clinton's scandal (146-151).

This social background indicates the sexualscandal theme of the novel and is quite obvious for us to perceive, whereas another one that is not so apparent but can be sensed is the movement of "political correctness" in American university campus. With no idea of two absent students in his class being African Americans, Coleman Silk asks that "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?" (6) The word "spook" also denotes the meaning of the blacks, while Coleman uses it as a specter or a ghost, for these two students never attended his class. The two students immediately fi le a protest against Coleman for his racism. The faculty doesn't let Coleman go through it easily and requires him to apologize for his racial discrimination. Coleman Silk, proud enough, defies the authorities and resigns from Athena College. In 1998, the aura of "political correctness" has already extended into the American academic community, which, as Mark Shechner states, "has swallowed whole the apple of political correctness". Coleman Silk becomes a victim of it, so to speak. By this "spooks incident", Roth pours scorn on the academic culture of America in the 1990s.

Still, there are another two things relevant to the contemporary American social reality. One is the trauma of Vietnam War lingering in people's especially those soldiers' mind, representing in Leslie Farley, ex-husband of Faunia Farley and a veteran of the War. The War has been over, but its trauma is inevitably incurable. Leslie Farley gets a sort of disease called PTSD and cannot live a normal life. All the time he is imagining or recollecting the War scenes and the enemies. The War has destroyed his psyche and mind. Later Faunia breaks up with him and two children are suffocated to death because of their carelessness and hatred to each other. His craziness also accounts for the death of Coleman Silk and Faunia Farley, which is only perceivedlater by Nathan Zuckerman the narrator. Without this war background, there will be no craziness of Leslie Farley, and then no tragedy of Coleman Silk. Another fact is the absence of the education about the African American history in American schools and universities. In his talk with Coleman Silk's sister Coleman Ernestine, the narrator is shamed that he knows little about "Black History", although he is a writer (328-336). Roth's purpose here is apparent—one can fi nd one's true identity from past and to forget past will result in such tragedy as death.

The novel also contains richly detailed portraits of people, besides the realistic depiction of social reality. At the very beginning, Philip Roth depicts Faunia as "a thin, tall, angular woman with graying blond hair yanked back into a ponytail and the kind of severely sculpted features customarily associated with the church-ruled, hardworking goodwives who suffered through New England's harsh beginnings, stern colonial woman locked up within the reigning morality and obedient to it." (1) The narrator continues like this, "Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent" and "She'd had two years of high school education." (2) Several sentences are enough to present a real person before us.

If Faunia is just a fictional character and has no specific prototype, then Coleman Silk is indeed originated from a real person, former New York Times book editor Anatole Broyard, for Roth models Coleman Silk in part on him.According to Mark Shechner, "Broyard's early life conforms in many of its details to Coleman Silk's, including his denial of his family in order to forge a separate identity, having been a boxer and a womanizer in his youth, and wanting to step outside of […] the prison house of race, to spring afresh from his own brow."This description suggests the authenticity of the fictional Coleman Silk, hence a sense of reality. There are lots of descriptions in the novel about Coleman such as his teaching, his furies and the fine descriptions of his growing-up, attracting great sympathy from the reader. For instance, when Coleman for the fi rst time visits Nathan Zuckerman the narrator (a characterbound narrator), the former is seized by insanity—"He got up, sat down, got up again, roamed round and round my workroom, speaking loudly and in a rush, even menacingly shaking a fi st in the air," (11) for Coleman thinks the faculty murdered his wife Iris. Herein a real person emerges with no much description.

Leslie Farley is also a no small character in the novel. With no doubt, he is a victim of the Vietnam War and a miniature of thousands of the veteran. The depiction of his struggling to contain his lethal rage (213-224, 247-256) in some sense opens up the story's emotional range. Still, some other characters are adumbrated in a moving and vivid way, which also indicates the realistic touch of the novel.

Through the above discussion, Roth presents us with a lot of realities about American social life. They are based on the real life and reflect such social problems as racial identity, the movement of "political correctness", the violence on the female, the remaining trauma of the Vietnam War and certainly the sexual scandals in American society. Accordingly, I quite agree with a critical view that Roth "as a serious writer, always concerns for the social reality…, his novel conveys the insightful views about times and life, which makes his works have certain social significance and edifying function,"and therefore I contend that

The Human Stain

represents the social reality to a great extent—whether one reads it according to the traditional standard of the realistic novel or in a globally philosophical sense, one can not ignore in it the accuracy of detail description, therepresentation of contemporary American social life and reality.

2. The Postmodernist Features in The Human Stain

2.1 Postmodern Realism: Concept and Definition

However, the "reality" in Philip Roth's writing is not the common sense "reality" but the postmodern "reality", for this "reality" is not narrated or unrolled in the traditional way of the realistic novel. It bears some aura of postmodernist novels. In consequence, the "realism" in

The Human Stain

is not the common sense "realism", but some "Postmodern Realism", on which some critics have elaborated in their writings. In their article, Wang and Tong argue that Postmodern Realism is "a new development of contemporary literature under the postmodern context". It is, as it were, a new form of Realism under the postmodern circumstances. Then they further in a specific way that the novel of Postmodern Realism is a sort of novel that "on one hand maintains the tradition of the realistic novel of the 19century and on the other hand combines 'self-consciousness' featuring in the modernist novels and 'reflection on the writing of the novel itself' in the Avant-garde novels as its own characteristics."This view is insightful, though it doesn't refer to Postmodernism literally. W. H. Thornton presents his idea more clearly by holding that "[…] traditional literary realism is indeed obsolete", and any "viable realism must now be postmodern in form and post-disciplinary in scope."Postmodern Realism now in my understanding is this kind of Realism, although Postmodern Realism can be a kind of "postmodern discourse" or "a poetics" or "a politics": Albert Borgmann de fi nes Postmodern Realism as "an orientation that accepts the lessons of the postmodern critique and resolves the ambiguities of the postmodern condition in an attitude of patient vigor for a common order centered on communal celebrations,"and W. H. Thornton argues that this is framed around the postmodern discourse but in a roundabout way; T. V. Reed's term "postmodernist realism" denotes "the integration of realist objectives with modernist techniques", which remains a stylistic device, thus accountable for a sort of poetics; Thornton's view is that Postmodern Realism indicates "a superstructural response to the infrastructural reality of postindustrialism,"hence a sort of politics.

"Postmodern in form" as a feature of Postmodern Realism is not all too easy for me to locate; therefore I'd like to define Postmodern Realism in this way: because of its postmodernist features or narrative techniques and with regard to its realistic representation, the novel in postmodern condition turns to be postmodern realistic novel or the novel of Postmodern Realism. Thus, Postmodern Realism on my part is a sort of stylistic poetics which integrates the features of traditional Realism and of the postmodern/ist writing techniques.

2.2 The Postmodernist Features in The Human Stain

With reference to Postmodernism, a lot of critics have made efforts to explore its common features. In general, techniques such as Meta fi ction, Anti-genre, Word-play, Parody, Collage, Montage, Black Humor and Labyrinth have universally been acknowledged as the writing techniques or strategies used by postmodernist novelists. Ihab Hassan lists 33 distinctions between modernist and postmodernist features, among which postmodernist features such as "Participation" [of the author], "Text/Intertext" [Intertextuality], "Irony" and "Indeterminacy"are the most familiar features of postmodernist novels.Here I will focus on such postmodernist techniques as Intertextuality and narrative techniques of Meta fi ctionPhilip Roth uses in

The Human Stain

to testify the postmodern/ist features of the novel.

Through the voice of Coleman Silk, Roth tells us that "the great imaginative literature of Europe begins" with "a brutal quarrel over a young girl [Helen in Greek mythology] and her body and the delights of sexual rapacity" (5). At the outset and in the third chapter, Clinton-Lewinsky scandal as the setting of the novel is disclosed twice. Coleman's story starts with an affair with an illiterate woman Faunia Farley. Faunia's life, particularly, is replete with childhood molestation, adult abuse and goatish sexuality. Delphine Roux, the new dean of the faculty, who is promoted by Coleman and eventually drives him out of Athena College, also has a close relation with an Arthur. The whole novel is full of sexual scandals. Through Greek mythology down to Clinton and the characters in the novel, past and present, mythology and social reality, fi ctional characters and real fi gures are inter-textually correlated, which constructs the Intertextuality of/inside the novel.

If the feature of "Intertextuality" is just a way by Roth to condemn today's American society and is not exclusive to Postmodernism, then the metafictional narrative techniques in the novel is pretty much a hint of postmodernist novels.

Metafiction, according to Patricia Waugh, is "a term given to fictional writing which selfconsciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fi ction and reality."After reading this novel, I contend that it is a very good illustration of this view about Meta fi ction. In general, the narrator comments for many times on the progress of his writing Coleman Silk's story and on the fate of his characters. The narrator seems to know everything of the characters, but he comes to a halt before Faunia's secret diary and Leslie's life of fishing, for he doesn't get Faunia's diary and fails to get closer to Leslie to understand him. The fi rst person narrator is in some degree omniscient but he is aware of the fact that he is writing the novel and can not know everything about the characters, so he tells the reader what he just knows. His self-consciousness therefore results in the fi ctionality of the novel.

Here is a typical instance about the narrator's comment on his writing. Coleman Silk asks the narrator to write his spooks incident, and the narrator comments like this:

I had to write something for him—he all but ordered me to. If he wrote the story in all of its absurdity, altering nothing, nobody would believe it, nobody would take it seriously, people would say it was a ludicrous lie, a self-serving exaggeration, they would say that more than his having uttered the word "spooks" in a classroom had to lie behind his downfall. But if I wrote it, if a professional writer wrote it…(11)

In the novel, Nathan Zuckerman the narrator is a professional writer and is asked to write Coleman's story by Coleman himself. The novel is about Coleman's story and also about how Nathan Zuckerman writes of Coleman's story, and in reality it is Philip Roth who is writing the story, thus we can say Nathan Zuckerman is an alter ego of Philip Roth the real writer. A more direct and apparent instance concerning the feature of Meta fi ction is the conversation between Nathan Zuckerman and Leslie Farley at the near end of the novel:

"[...] I think I recognize you anyway. Aren't you the author?"

"That I am."

[...]

"What's the name of one of your books?"

"

The Human Stain

." (349-356)

This further testifies the metafictive devicethat a person is writing a novel and self-consciously telling the reader "who" is the author of the novel. Literally, Nathan Zuckerman is the writer of Coleman Silk's story but Philip Roth is the very writer behind. Therefore it is Philip Roth who is telling how he writes the story of Coleman Silk. Hence the characteristics of Meta fi ction embodied in the novel.

Conclusion

Without regard to its postmodernist meta fi ctional narrative techniques,

The Human Stain

can be a novel of Realism. However, one critic argues that it is "pretty much a moral romance, a Scarlet Letter about race". This critic demonstrates that there are three scarlet letters concerning Coleman Silk, that is, a red "R" for Racist, an "E" for "Exploiter", and a "J" for Jew. It is inviting and insightful, but the novel is likely to be a miniature of the contemporary American society and is drawn on by Philip Roth to satirize the society he lives in. What's more, its realistic traces outmatch its romantic features. Therefore, I argue that it will be a realistic novel even if its postmodernist traits are ruled out. Similarly, in a wrong direction are those who hold that Philip Roth is not a postmodernist writer, which I have mentioned at the very beginning. Roth's Jewish achievements in some sense shadow his postmodernist writing skills in his works, which is accountable for some critics' acknowledgement of Roth as a non-postmodernist writer.All in all, my conclusion is that

The Human Stain

is a typical novel of Postmodern Realism, a novel inheriting the realistic writing tradition on one hand and with postmodernist self-conscious narrative touch on the other.

注解【Notes】

① 本文为韶关学院高层次引进人才科研启动费资助项目的阶段性成果（项目编号：99000603）。

② Roth, Philip.

The Human Stain

. New York: Houghton Mif fl in Company, 2000, p.1. The page numbers of the subsequent quotations from this novel will be indicated in parentheses, with no further notes one by one.

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Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth

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后现代现实主义小说的典范之作——评菲利普 • 罗斯的《人性的污秽》

何朝辉

当代美国作家菲利普·罗斯的《人性的污秽》以真实地再现和讽刺性地揭露当代美国社会的各种现实问题而广受关注；涉及的社会现实包括“政治正确性”运动、美国前总统克林顿的性丑闻、美国黑人种族历史和越南战争带来的创伤等。小说中同样重要且引人关注的是运用了诸如互文性和元小说等具有明显的后现代主义小说创作特征的叙事策略。对社会现实主题的深度挖掘和后现代主义小说创作手法的灵活运用是小说的显著特征；它一方面继承了经典现实主义小说的写实传统，另一方面又在小说叙事上大胆地采用后现代主义小说的创作方法；它们的巧妙结合使《人性的污秽》成为后现代现实主义小说的典范之作。

菲利普·罗斯 《人性的污秽》 现实主义 后现代主义 后现代现实主义

何朝辉，韶关学院外语学院，研究方向为现代与后现代英美小说。