Professor Amy
Hungerford: Now, what's coming up?
As I mentioned last week, on Wednesday I'm going to give
my censorship lecture, and in preparation for that I
would like you to go to a local bookstore, any one,
and just observe how it's laid out, what you see,
what your attention is called to,
what your attention is not called to, and here's a
difficult question: What isn't there?
Think about that, and I'll talk a little bit
about what isn't there on Wednesday.
Also, in order to keep up, please try to read at least to
page 202--that's the next chapter division in The Human
Stain--so that you're on track to finish it--it's 361
pages--for next Monday. And so, next Monday,
a week from today, I will give my second lecture
on The Human Stain. And I will talk about
The Human Stain a little bit on Wednesday,
because some of what I have to say about censorship does
pertain, so that's what's coming up. I hope you all thought
about the Identity Plot as you read this novel.
It's hard not to. When I gave that lecture,
I suggested that when a genre gains a certain credence,
a certain widespread use in the culture, it requires more and
more innovations on it to make a fresh story out of it.
It also gets us to the point where that set of conventions is
available to writers in a new way, to be transcended in a new
way. So, one thing that I want to
ask about this novel is, does it transcend the genre?
Does it do more than provide the certain dramas and
satisfactions that we come to expect from a novel about
identity? In this sense,
because it is so deeply embedded in those kinds of
narratives, Roth is taking a kind of risk here.
He's playing it safe because he knows that this is a topic of
interest, but he's taking a risk as an artist because he's
working in very well-trodden territory.
I suggested that, also, when a genre reaches a
certain point of saturation, writers tend to change the
subject. I didn't say this when we
talked about Blood Meridian, but I think
in part Blood Meridian is that kind of change of subject.
So, this returns to the genre, and we want to ask what it's
doing with the genre. Before I go in to my meditation
on that question today, I just want to call your
attention to another element that does relate back to
Blood Meridian, and that's its status
as a historical novel. This novel places itself with
certain kinds of historical markers at the very opening.
It was the summer of 1998, the summer of the Monica
Lewinsky affair, the summer when Viagra takes
off in the marketplace. Those are very contemporary
historical markers. Now, think back to the way
Blood Meridian opens with its historical markers.
Do you remember this line? It's the father talking about
the kid's birth. He says, "Night of your birth,
'33. God, how the stars did fall."
I think I've got that correct. What he's talking about is the
Leonid meteor showers in 1833 that mark the night of the kid's
birth. For all that McCarthy is
interested in--and mining--the historical detail of the 1830s,
'40s, '50s, that novel favors historical markers that seem
like cosmic markers of time. So, contrast the stars falling
in, yes, a historically specific meteor shower,
but nevertheless in something that looks like a cosmic
communication of meaning. Contrast that with the
relatively mundane, debased historical markers that
Roth chooses, Viagra, the Monica Lewinsky
scandal. You want to ask yourself,
what kind of history is each writer invoking?
I want to suggest to you that if you press on the markers
that Roth chooses, you will find something more
than trivia, more than contemporary trivia,
that Roth has in his sights an equally universal,
trans-historical kind of truth in this novel,
that's brought up by those little details of history.
And that trans-historical history is the history of
desire, of which both those things are indicative.
I will say a lot more about desire and its relationship to
the history of literature and to writing in this novel in my
Monday lecture, but as you go on I would like
you to think about how history functions as a set of contexts
for the story that Roth tells you.
Now I want to talk about identity.
So, does this novel conform to the form of the Identity Plot?
There are certain ways I think it does, and it does so in a
very explicit way. Remember how I mentioned that
tension in the Identity Plot is produced by the individual's
relationship to the group and the way that's vexed.
It isn't a very exciting Identity Plot if the protagonist
just discovers that he or she is whatever categorizable identity
and says, "Oh, good.
I'll be that," and then goes on. The tension comes from feeling
that either such an identification would be
coercion, or that it comes with all kinds of attendant
suffering. There are all kinds of tensions
that are produced in making that not an easy identification,
and you can see that very explicitly in this novel on page
108--106,108--when Coleman talks about being at Howard
University, and along with that,
the experience of being called a "nigger" for the first time.
This is on the top of 106: Especially when he began
to think that there was something of the nigger about
him, even to the kids in the dorm
who had all sorts of new clothes, and money in their
pockets, and in the summertime didn't
hang around the hot streets at home, but went to camp,
and not Boy Scout camp out in the Jersey sticks,
but fancy places where they rode horses and played tennis
and acted in plays. What the hell was a cotillion?
Where was Highland Beach? What were these kids talking
about? He was among the very lightest
of the light-skinned in his freshman class,
lighter even than his tea-colored roommate,
but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field
hand, for all they knew that he didn't.
He hated Howard from the day he arrived.
Within a week he hated Washington, and so in early
October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on the
Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30^(th)
Street station in Philadelphia for Wilmington,
and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he
was finished with that college.
Right there in that sentence, in this little set of scenes
about Howard and his experience in D.C.,
you see him at first being asked by his family to identify
with a certain version of the black middle class,
and then finding he is revolted by his own difference from that
middle class. He feels like a black field
hand, the darkest of the dark field hand, "for all they knew
that he didn't," and on 108 we get it in very abstract terms.
"You finally leave home, the Ur of we,
and you find another we, another place that's just like
that, the substitute for
that."The problem of the Identity Plot is the problem of
the "I" and the "we." Here is Coleman laying out
exactly how he feels about that, and so what he's going to favor
there, again on 108,
is the raw "I," all the subtlety of being Silky Silk.
So there you have encapsulated, in a very short amount of
prose, a major form--narrative form, narrative dynamic--of the
Identity Plot as a genre. On 144, you get another version
of that, slightly more personalized to his family.
This is another version of identity and what Coleman thinks
about it. This is after we get the
history of Coleman's family, his ancestors,
and we're told that he is not the first to pass as white or to
disappear from the black family in to which he was born:
"Lost himself to all his people" was another way they,
the family, put it. Ancestor worship,
that's how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing.
The idolatry that is ancestor worship was something else.
The hell with that imprisonment.
So, this version of identity on 144, this vision of it,
is identity as ancestor worship and imprisonment in that family,
imprisonment in that way of thinking, a radical un-freedom.
So, this is one version of identity, radically individual,
rising out of the difference that you feel from the various
"we" groups you are asked to join.
But there are other versions of identity that are imagined here,
and they track pretty clearly with scholarly ways of thinking
about identity at this same time.
So, in one sense identity is this radical individual
humanist version that I've been tracing in the last few minutes.
Another is that identity is a constantly changing performance,
and we get that too in Coleman. You see it, again,
right in the section about Howard on 109,
and I want you to note the words that Roth chooses here,
109 in the middle: "He could play his skin however
he wanted, color himself just as he chose."
"Play his skin any way he wanted."
Now, remember that his father is a great devotee of
Shakespeare and tries to communicate to his children,
not only through their Shakespearian middle names,
but through every verbal interaction he has with them,
that the grandeur of the English language will somehow
fill them and make them who they are,
that this is the source of their dignity and their power.
He takes that lesson and transforms it.
It's about playing on the model of drama, but it's about playing
color, and this is an artist's vocation, "color himself just as
he chose." He's like a painter,
in this sense, so this is identity as
performance. There are many instances of
this. On page 115,116,
there is just a little description of Steena's dance
for Coleman. I'm going to just read a little
bit of it. All at once,
with no prompting from him, seemingly prompted only by
Eldridge's trumpet, she began what Coleman liked to
describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by
a Fergus Falls girl after a little more than a year in New
York City. She could have raised Gershwin
himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang
the song, prompted by a colored trumpet
player playing it like a black torch song.
There to see, plain as day,
was all the power of her whiteness, that big,
white thing. "Someday he'll come along,
the man I love, and he'll be big and strong,
the man I love." The language was ordinary
enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade
primer, but when the record was over,
Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning,
half pretending, to cover her shame.
The history of jazz that's concentrated in to that tiny,
little passage has been unpacked by a critic by the name
of Jonathan Freedman. He does a whole history,
which I can't produce here, of how Artie Shaw and various
players played Gershwin, and used black musicians in
their ensembles, and how this very dance,
when Steena, here, we're told,
in a way, inhabits most fully her whiteness,
she does that by performing to a music that is radically
hybrid, black and Jewish.
So, Freedman argues that in this passage we get identity as
a vision of absolute fluidity, absolute performance and
fluidity, and that the whole history of American jazz stands
behind that imagined state. It's the very difference
between the hybrid music and the pure whiteness of Steena's body
that creates what's so provocative to Coleman,
the spectacle of whiteness in the context of hybridity. The father's obsession with
the English language, though, has taught Coleman to
categorize relentlessly. Do you remember this little
detail? This is on page 93 when Coleman
is describing or we're having described to us exactly how
Coleman's father taught them to speak.
This is on 93. Growing up they never
said, "See the bow-wow." They didn't even say,
"See the doggie." They said, "See the Doberman.
See the beagle. See the terrier."
They learned things had classifications.
They learned the power of naming precisely."
The father, for all that he is imbuing them with the most elite
version of a white literary tradition,
Shakespeare, he is also teaching them
relentlessly to see classification and categorizing.
In Coleman this comes to mean something quite different,
and you see it in this funny, little passing moment on 107,
the very top of the page. This is talking about his
father's cherished volume of Shakespeare's plays,
the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that,
when Coleman was a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker
spaniel. The son felt his father's
majesty as never before, the grandeur of both his rise
and his fall, the grandeur that as a college
freshman away for barely a month.--[And then it quotes from
Shakespeare.] The cocker spaniel: Why?
Why choose that as what the little boy thinks of when he
looks at that floppy volume? It's a moment when being
trained to classify and to categorize causes him to see the
source of that linguistic precision,
the book of Shakespeare, in very demeaning terms,
or reductive terms or--I'm not getting quite the precise word I
want--in deflating terms. So that, instead of grandeur,
the book of Shakespeare becomes the source for the names of
dogs. And the way the child's
imagination blends grandeur and the ordinary,
I think, gives us Coleman,
who can imagine the details of everyday life,
the life he lives, as a grand play. Doc Chizner furthers this
transformation of the father's lesson in this very crucial
passage, that I'm going to talk more
about later, when Coleman passes as white or Jewish for the first
time. And that's when he's boxing for
the pit coach: "If nothing comes up,"
Doc said [this is the bottom of 98]
"you don't bring it up. You're neither one thing or the
other. You're Silky Silk.
That's enough. That's the deal."
"You're neither one thing or the other.
You're Silky Silk." This takes the question of
categorization--are you colored? Are you not?--it negates it:
you're neither one thing nor another, but then reinstates it
in a different mode: you're Silky Silk.
Make up a new category for yourself.
So, Doc Chizner takes that transgressing use of precision
that we see in the cocker spaniel metaphor in the child's
imagination, and he shows Coleman how to
apply that to living race in America, living his race in
America. You are Silky Silk.
You're not a race. You're a proper name,
the irreducible singularity of a person. There is a third way of
thinking about race, and that, of course,
is as biology. That, too, is present in this
novel. The body is relentlessly
present, and I hope that you picked up on that.
It's not hard to pick up on it. The very matter and specificity
of the body is everywhere in this novel, and so I want to
look back at 21 and 22. This is in that wonderful scene
when Coleman dances with Nathan. So, we get a whole description
of Coleman's body and what it is that Nathan sees in it,
suddenly, now that he's shirtless on this hot summer
night, and also now that he is no longer talking about the
"spooks" business. This is 21.
On display were the shoulders, arms and chest of a
smallish man still trim and attractive,
a belly no longer flat, to be sure, but nothing that
had gotten seriously out of hand,
altogether the physique of someone who had seemed to have
been a cunning and wily competitor at sports rather than
an overpowering one. And all of this had previously
been concealed from me, because he was always shirted,
and also because of his having been so drastically consumed by
his rage. What you see there is the
revelation of certain things we will find out to be true about
Coleman, that he was a cunning and wily
competitor rather than an overpowering one,
that he is still fit and virile,
that he has himself in hand, nothing that had gotten out of
hand, seriously out of hand. Coleman very much still has
himself in hand. He is still the maker of
himself, the presenter of himself to the world in a
deliberate way. But then we go on,
and there are some things that we see that perhaps tell us
something different. Rather than the body revealing
the truth about Coleman-- certain kinds of truth,
not a racial truth, other kinds of truth--we see
marks on his body that don't produce that knowledge.
Also previously concealed was the small,
Popeye-ish blue tattoo situated at the top of his right arm just
at the shoulder joining, the words "U.S.
Navy" inscribed between the hooklike arms of a shadowy
little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the deltoid
muscle, a tiny symbol if one were
needed of all the million circumstances of the other
fellow's life, of that blizzard of details
that constitute the confusion of a human biography,
a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must
always be, at best, slightly wrong.
What's revealed when Coleman is shirtless is the very sign that
he cannot be known in any kind of complete way.
It's the mark of a history on his body, that he was in the
navy, a history we'll learn a little bit about,
but not a lot, but for Nathan it is the mark
of an irreducible difference between persons,
that always there are details that are not accessible,
circumstances of the other fellow's life. In this moment Nathan
recognizes Coleman as a cipher, a sign that can be projected
upon with meanings of his own. I would suggest to you that we
don't see the full flowering of this until quite a bit later in
the novel, but I think this is the first
moment where, in Coleman revealing his body,
he suggests to Nathan the possibilities of that body as a
sign. So, he is no longer,
in this moment, entirely "in hand" anymore.
So, if his physique hasn't gotten out of hand,
his circulation as a sign certainly has.
In this case, he has now become a blank
canvas for Nathan. Certainly, up until this moment
at the beginning of the novel, what's most on the surface of
the plot is how he has become the victim of rumor,
how his self-presentation got completely out of hand,
taken over by other people's erroneous readings of his words.
So, if the body seems to be in his control, himself as a
signifier is not. Here Nathan is invited into it,
but in a very different way than the rumormongers who
surround him at Athena College and in the town. So, the body is not going to be
a place of revelation. Speech, as I've noted,
is a problematic moment of revelation, but it can be that.
And on 81,82, we see an example of that when
his speech formally in the novel touches off what will be some of
the most important revelatory passages in the novel.
And this is when Nelson Primus, having berated Coleman and
advised him in his clever, authoritative,
arrogant way not to pursue anything against Lester Farley
or Delphine Roux, has offended him and enraged
him so much as to become the target of Coleman's rage.
Coleman said, "I never again want to hear
that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug,
fucking, lily-white face," and the question becomes why--and we
see Nelson ask it the next page--why "white,"
why does "lily-white" become the insult that he hurls at
Nelson? And formally,
even though there's a little bit of an interlude here about
Athena College and Coleman's rage,
this is the moment when we launch into the tale of
Coleman's childhood, and we learn for the first time
what kind of family he comes from,
and what the history of his passing has been,
how he made that decision to abandon his family of birth.
So, speech can be revealing, but only in those
moments when it is out of Coleman's control.
Here, in this moment, "lily-white" is inspired by his
rage. He is out of control,
in that sense, and of course,
"lily white" is the term his brother,
Walt, applies to him in a similar moment of anger,
after Walt discovers that he has told his mother that he is
essentially estranging himself permanently from the family in
order to marry Iris. Walt says, "Don't ever show
your lily-white face here again."
So, he's reproducing Walt's language, and,
from that, it indicates to Nelson Primus and for us,
in the unfolding of the novel, that there is a mystery here to
be told. And then we get the telling of
that mystery. So, from that little word,
all of this unfurls, and I would just note,
just in passing, that this is quite a contrast
to Delphine Roux. On 38 and 39,
you can look at: Coleman is very surprised that
she has made no effort to hide the identifying marks of her own
handwriting. Delphine Roux--though her name
suggests the Delphic, the oracular,
the mysterious, the secret--Delphine is someone
who cannot conceal herself. The very material of her
language, of her writing, of her letters,
puts her identity on the page to be read,
and it seems as if she hasn't even tried to conceal it.
So, Delphine's lack of depth, her lack of complexity as a
character, her basic despicableness is summed up in
that inability to conceal herself,
whereas Coleman only reveals himself in moments when he is
unguarded, or when he has become,
not a person in control of his own representation of himself,
but rather a sign at large among other representers
(Nathan, Delphine, other people). Secrecy,
then, is at the very heart of what identity means in this
novel, and now I want to get to this crucial passage on page
100. For me, this is where we learn
really what identity means in this novel. So, he says he wants to be in
this fight with--in front of the Pitt coach--with Ray Robinson. It wasn't just that [This
is on 99.] It wasn't just that Coleman
weighed some seven pounds more than when he'd boxed on the
amateur card at the Knights of Pythias.
It was that something he could not even name made him want to
be more damaging than he'd ever dared before,
to do something more that day than merely win.
Was it because the pit coach didn't know he was colored?
Could it be because who he really was was entirely his
secret? He did love secrets,
the secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head,
thinking whatever you wanted to think, with no way of anybody's
knowing. All the other kids were always
blabbing about themselves, but that wasn't where the power
was, or the pleasure either. The power and the pleasure were
to be found in the opposite, in being counter-confessional
in the same way you were a counter-puncher,
and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without
his having to think about it. That's why he liked shadow
boxing and hitting the heavy bag, for the secrecy of
it. And I'm going to skip down a
little bit. He talks about concentrating,
and how the secrecy is produced by the concentration,
or is related to the concentration on the one thing
that you're doing. Whatever is to be
mastered, he becomes that thing. He could do that in biology,
and he could do it in the dash, and he could do it in boxing,
and not only did nothing external make any difference;
neither did anything internal. That little example right
there: He could do it in biology, on a biology exam he
could focus exclusively on that thing,
become that thing, in the dash,
in boxing in the ring, but why choose that example?
Why not mathematics? Why not chemistry?
Well, here again, it's Roth's craft coming
through. Roth chose that because what
Coleman does is precisely to overcome biology.
It's the biology of who his parents are, of who their
parents are. That biology,
the biology of American race, is what he takes hold of and
transforms. It becomes his secret.
Biology becomes his secret, not as an academic subject,
but as a lived experience. Boxing is the sport of
concealment for him, thinking ahead,
observing his opponent, watching how slow the punch is: All the answers that you
came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself,
and when you let the secret out, you let it out through
everything but your mouth. For all Coleman's training in
the English language from his father, his mode of revelation,
his mode of communication, is not verbal.
It is somehow physical, as a physical performance,
as a damaging physical performance. That term
"counter-confessional," being--the pleasure and the
power were in--being counter-confessional in the same
way you were a counter-puncher, in not telling--this is quite a
remarkable term for Roth to use. The history of Roth's writing
from the very first story collection, Goodbye,
Columbus published in 1960, through the many,
many novels in the next five decades,
that trajectory, which I'm going to talk a
little bit about on Wednesday, is defined by the confessional
quality of many of these works.So,
Roth is widely known for drawing on his own life in his
fiction, and for making Nathan Zuckerman track his biography in
significant ways. And, in this novel,
it happens to be true that Philip Roth went through
prostate cancer surgery and now lives up in the Berkshires and
has been very secluded up there and very productive writing
novels in the last ten years. So, in this novel already,
anybody who knows even those basic facts knows that Roth
himself as a writer is confessional,
in some sense of the word. One question we might want to
ask is: is he counter-confessional the way
that Coleman is, the way that you can be a
counter-puncher, and what would it mean to be
that? Why does it matter?
In fact, does it matter? And then, why does it matter,
if it does, that his novels track his life?
This is a long-term question for anyone who thinks about
Roth's writing, and I will get more to it in my
second lecture on The Human Stain next Monday,
but it's something to think about.
But let me pause, again, on that rhetorical
question. "Was it because the pit coach
didn't know he was colored? Could it be because who he
really was was entirely his secret?"
There are two ways of reading that last question.
"Who he really was was entirely his secret."
If we read that, "who he really was" as a
colored guy from East Orange, then we'll see it as that being
his secret. But you can read it,
you can parse that grammar, a different way.
"Who he really was was his secret."
Could it be because who he really was was "his secret,"
secrecy as the essence of identity?
It doesn't matter what's in that hidden box.
It doesn't mean that we have to fill it in.
It doesn't mean, even, that it can be known.
And you think back to the way the anchor on his arm,
the tattoo on his arm, reminds Nathan of how little
you can ever know about the other fellow.
The very fact of the person's other-ness to you means that
there is always something fundamentally hidden about them,
and that arises from the simple difference between one
consciousness and another. This returns the meditation
on identity to a universalist, humanist version of what
identity would be. It's simply private
consciousness. Private consciousness is what
defines us as persons, and then, radiating out from
that, all the things that one can do
with a private consciousness, which then encompasses these
other modes of identifying that the novel rehearses,
and then critiques or sometimes endorses, plays with,
jumbles, juggles. We have a private consciousness.
You can decide to decide. This is something that Coleman
does on a number of occasions, and it's a phrase that Roth
repeats when he's deciding to decide to be done with the
spooks business, deciding to decide not to be
worried about Lester Farley. You have the power to form your
self-presentation. You have the power to make your
identity an artistic performance.
That's what private consciousness does for you,
but it does a couple other things,
too, and I want to track those, or suggest them just briefly
before I end today, in one sense by following the
theme of difference, and in the other sense by
following the word "secrecy" in the novel.
First, on the question of pure difference,
on 47, in that wonderful scene of Faunia with the cows, this is Nathan reflecting on
the desire that he sees enacted there.
And again, remember, Coleman is not primarily a man
of words, but a man of being, and he has just stood in
silence with Nathan watching Faunia milk the cows. It was enough to be able
to conduct themselves like two people who had nothing
whatsoever in common, all the while remembering how
they could distill to an orgasmic essence everything
about them that was irreconcilable,
the human discrepancies that produced all the power.
It was enough to feel the thrill of leading a double
life. And what this passage,
the sentences above, emphasize, is that Faunia is a
woman of thirty-four, a "wordless illiterate," and
that Coleman is a man replete with the vocabularies of two
ancient tongues, as well as his own native
tongue. So, the very difference between
them, this time limned in terms of education and language,
vocabulary, literacy, here it's that difference that
is invoked as the engine of desire.
So, if desire is always that looking towards the other thing,
the thing that you are not, the thing that you do not have,
the thing that is absent from you: that's the definition of
desire. You can't have desire if you
already have the thing. Desire is that force that's
always reaching toward something that is separate from you.
Difference between human beings is just that,
in this scene, just the engine of desire.
So, here, for all the meditations on
race, the social construction of race, race as performance,
race as essence, race as biology,
race as secret, it's secret that gets to that
over-arching concern with desire in the novel.
And this is a moment where I think Roth is transcending the
genre. He's taking the dramas of the
Identity Plot, and he's driving them to an
extreme and pushing them over in to another subject matter.
So, in this sense, identity as secrecy pushes us
over in to the subject matter of desire and mortality,
which is at the heart of Roth's writing from beginning to end.
Now, I will not say that identity is not also a subject
matter he's working with from beginning to end of his career.
That's definitely true, and I'll say more about that on
Wednesday when I talk about the shape of his career.
But especially as Roth moves later in his career these
questions of desire and mortality take the upper hand.
Now, the last thing I want to do, just very quickly,
is point to page 44, another use of that word
"secret," the very top of the page.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a
minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to
string along with your delusions.
The trick of living alone up here, away from all agitating
entanglements, allurements,
and expectations, apart especially from one's own
intensity, is to organize the silence,
to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital,
silence as wealth exponentially increasing,
the encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and
your only intimate. The trick is to find
sustenance, this is quoting Hawthorne again,
the communications of a solitary mind with itself.
The secret is to find sustenance in people like
Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.
Now, one question I, myself, as a reader have
struggled with about this novel is whether Roth imagines that
Nathan's state, when he describes it that way,
is a false one or a weak one, one to be rejected.
Is it a withdrawal from life? I think that last sentence,
"The secret is to find sustenance in people like
Hawthorne," gives us the answer that I'm content with.
And that is: yes, it's a withdrawal from
life if you don't understand Hawthorne as a person,
as someone with whom you can become entangled.
It's the very act of thinking of a literary forebear as a
person rather than a text that allows this to be a productive
state, one that Nathan will be drawn
out of by Coleman, but yet one that the novel does
not reject. It's when Coleman becomes for
Nathan a character, the person becomes this living
representation, that he is drawn out of his
solitude. So, in a way,
it's not even Coleman the person that draws him out,
but his world when he encounters Coleman and his
story, when he sees Coleman's body
during that dance as a cipher, as the sign of all that you
can't know about the other fellow.
When he sees that about Coleman, that's when he comes
out of one productive state of communing with the brilliant
dead and comes in to the world of Coleman who will be
dead very, very shortly. So, on Monday next I will talk
about that relationship between desire and the literary,
between persons and characters, between life and novel.
Think about those things as you read.
