Professor Amy
Hungerford: All right. So, today I'm going to give my
second and final lecture on The Human Stain.
My first lecture focused on identity, and my final argument
about the novel in relation to the question of identity is that
the first half of the novel comes down on the definition of
identity through secrecy, that what makes you who you
are--anyway what makes Coleman the person he is--is his
secrecy. "Who he really was was his
secret." So, I did that little reading
of that phrase. Today I want to talk about what
happens in the second half of the novel to the question of
secrecy, and how that relates,
then, into the question of desire and narrative.
So, that's where I'm going today.
If you'll recall, on page 47 (and I don't think
we need to turn to this), desire is said to be generated
by the human discrepancies, the difference between Faunia,
with her illiterate vocabulary, and Coleman,
with the vocabularies of two ancient languages and his
language of English. So, discrepancy,
difference, is understood as the engine of desire.
So, this shouldn't be surprising, when you think about
what desire is. Many psychological theories of
desire agree on one thing, and that is that desire is
reaching towards a lack. Desire is generated by lack,
so you can think of difference as one version of what it means
to lack. What you are not,
you then desire; what you have not,
you then desire. So, you don't desire that thing
which you already have. So, it's just a simple
structure of desire that I want you to keep in mind.
Now, I want to note, in the second half of the
novel, something that you probably noticed.
At the beginning of Chapter 4, we are plunged back in to
Nathan's first-person voice. So, that "I" of Nathan comes
back very strongly at the very beginning of that chapter.
We haven't seen it for a while. We've been embedded in Faunia
and Les and Delphine and Coleman, inside all their minds,
using that technique of free indirect discourse,
where the narrative voice just, sort of, seamlessly allows you
to look at the world through that character's eyes and in
that character's mind. So, that technique is
highlighted as a technique in Chapter 4 when we
are reminded so suddenly that this is all being written by
Nathan, that the illusion of these
characters' voices is just that; it's an illusion.
The second half of the novel, then, sets up the source of the
story--how does Nathan know all that he knows to give us that
story--sets up the problem of that source,
and then it finally answers it in the person of Ernestine Silk.
Ernestine, Coleman's sister, answers some of those basic
questions about Coleman's background,
first of all revealing his racial secret simply by her
presence at the funeral and her resemblance to his daughter,
Lisa. So, her body is a kind of
revelation to Nathan, and then she fills in some
details that we can see recapitulate material that has
come in an imaginative form, different imaginative form,
earlier in the novel. So, I would note (and I
will come back to this point), Ernestine is kind of a stock
character. There are some characters in
this novel--Delphine, to some extent Les,
and Ernestine-- who are stereotypes of one kind or
another. There are various ways of
thinking about this problem in Roth's fiction,
but the critical way of thinking about is that his
fiction is uneven, that he cannot somehow truly
inhabit the complexity of some kinds of characters.
And he has said about his own work that he writes novels about
the lives of men, very clearly masculine fiction,
so that should come as a surprise to none of you.
So, that's one way of understanding the sort of
clichéd quality of characters like Ernestine.
I'm going to offer a slightly different way of understanding
that by the end of the lecture, so be looking for that.
But, for now, I just want to focus on the
structure of the second half of the novel,
setting up the problem of knowledge and then producing a
part of an answer to it. But, even though you have that
partial answer, there is still a residue of
fictionality within the logic of the novel.
Of course, it's all fiction. But, within the logic of the
novel, we know that there is a lot that Nathan is making up.
So, Ernestine's story doesn't get you Steena dancing at the
end of Coleman's bed, for instance,
a very important scene in Nathan's construction of
Coleman. So, there are scenes like
that, that are purely the product of Nathan's imagination.
You have the final spasm of this kind of imagining when
Nathan stands at Coleman's grave and asks him to speak to him one
last time and tell him the story of telling Faunia his racial
secret. So, you have that last scene
where we enter fully in to the minds and voices of those
characters. One question that you want to
ask, here, is how we should understand this move.
Is there something, perhaps, duplicitous about the
way Nathan suggests he's related to this enterprise of imagining?
We're told on page 337, right before that graveside
scene, that it was Ernestine's speaking to him that caused him
to be seized by his story. This is in the middle of the
page: "I was completely seized by his story,
by its end and by its beginning, and then and there I
began this book." So, we get an account of its
start. So, he's "seized" by the story.
It puts him in a position much like he is at the very beginning
of the told story that you've just arrived at the end of,
when Coleman shows up at his door demanding that he write the
story of the unjust dismissal from Athena College.
So, there are two moments when Nathan claims to be seized by
Coleman and his story. It puts Nathan in a very
passive position. It suggests that he's not the
active party here, that somehow he has been drawn
into this enterprise, into this narrative,
maybe against his will. I think you can see this as
duplicitous, so I want to look a little bit at how this is
duplicitous, and this is where desire comes
back into the braid of my argument.
There is a sentence on page 164 I want to direct your attention
to. Desire, that urge to inhabit or
fill the lack of whatever it is, has a structural relation to
language in Roth's work. So, desire has a structural
relation to language. And I think there is no better
example of it--and there's perhaps no better example of
Roth's ecstatic sentence structure--than this sentence on
164, and I will read the whole of it.
It starts "The kid." You see it about a quarter of
the way down, halfway through a line,
"The kid." This is about Faunia.
The kid, whose existence became a
hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen,
and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither
a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor,
but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the
undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother,
the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in
everyone and yet is protected against nothing,
whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous,
and yet whose purchase on life is minute,
misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom
everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose
luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses
him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally
speaking the least repellant person he knows,
the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for
so long in the opposite direction,
because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction,
and because the underlying feeling of rightness that
controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him
now, the unlikely intimate with whom
he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union,
who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings
his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature,
who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else
on earth. Wow.
That's quite a grammar. What you see in that sentence
is language trying to embody desire by its very excess.
It's acting out, formally, just how far Coleman
has to reach from where he was, to arrive at Faunia as his
object of love and desire. And you see that missing lack
is thematized in the middle of this sentence:
"because of all he has missed by going in the opposite
direction." She embodies everything he
isn't--and the grammar of that sentence relentlessly tries to
fill in, to reach towards who she is.
And that's why I think it's--it's a repeated noun
phrase; that's the grammar of his
sentence, a repeated noun phrase.
So, you just have piles of descriptions of Faunia,
and--now let me see if there is, no--there is no verb.
This is a sentence fragment. People, this is a sentence
fragment. You can't find a verb for the
subject. So, it's quite a remarkable
feat of grammar, and it embodies the formal
quality of language as desire. But, it's more than just at
the level of grammar, or at the structural level of
language, that desire and language coincide.
It's also there in the way sex is imagined as
anti-metaphorical, if you look on page 203.
This is when Faunia is dancing for Coleman, and she insists,
when Coleman wants it to mean something--I guess she is just
about to dance for him--when he wants their sex to mean
something, she says, "No.
It's just what it is." "He said to her,
'This is more than sex' and flatly she replied,
'No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is.
This is sex all by itself. Don't fuck it up by pretending
it's something else.' " What Coleman's urge is,
is to use language to make sex into something other than it is,
to make meaning out of it. That's a fundamentally
linguistic enterprise. By insisting that it can't be
made into something else, it puts sex not so much outside
of language, as it elevates sex to the equal of language.
So, just as the grammar of the sentence reaches out to fill
that lack, sex does that, too.
But it doesn't require the resources of language to be
successful, so you don't need the language.
Really, all you need is sex to produce that human connection
that desire seeks. So, it elevates sex.
Sex is the analog to writing in other ways,
too. On page 37, Nathan talks about
sex as "the mania to repeat the act," and he also talks about
the language tasks that go along with it.
This is on the top of 37, when he is talking about why he
withdrew from life: I couldn't meet the costs
of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the
wit, the strength,
the patience, the illusion,
the irony, the ardor, the egotism,
the resilience or the toughness or the shrewdness or the
falseness, the dissembling, the dual being,
the erotic professionalism to deal
with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.
So, sex always comes along with those meanings,
and Nathan could not separate out the two in the way that
Coleman succeeds in doing with Faunia,
in finding an illiterate woman. I think it's her illiteracy,
in a sense, that enables the separation of sex from language.
But that "mania to repeat the act" looks a lot,
actually, like Roth's writing. Roth is an extremely
repetitious writer, across his novels.
His novels often engage the same kinds of characters,
sometimes the same character: lots of Nathan Zuckerman
novels. Even the ones that are not
Nathan Zuckerman novels look like Nathan Zuckerman novels.
You usually have someone who looks like Nathan.
The women often look the same. They often rant in similar ways.
So, there is something about Roth's writing that is close to
that mania to repeat the act; so, there you get that
parallelism again. So, the distance between
one person and another is crossed by language and by sex
in two equal tracks. But it's also crossed,
in this novel, by the imagination.
And this is where the entering into Coleman's story comes into
play. Now, you will have noticed,
at a few jarring points, that suddenly you'll be in free
indirect discourse, in the third person,
and suddenly the "I" of that character appears.
And there's an example on 165. This is Faunia,
at the bottom of the page. She is thinking about the crow. That crow's voice.
She remembers it at all hours day or night,
awake, sleeping or insomniac. Had a strange voice,
not like the voice of other crows, probably because it
hadn't been raised with other crows.
Right after the fire I used to go and visit.
You see that "I" coming very suddenly there.
So, why does it appear? Well, this is a moment when
Nathan, as the writer, takes an unusual liberty,
makes an unusual claim on us as readers, by entering directly
into the first person of this character,
violating what has been the formal habit of the novel,
up until that moment, or the formal habit of that
scene. It happens on a few occasions.
So, he becomes the eye of Faunia.
Now, you might say that this is just to emphasize the
imaginative work that's required for Nathan to tell this story.
But I want to suggest that there is a structural
relationship between Nathan and Faunia that we have to attend
to, and to excavate this I want to
go back to that first dance scene, on page 27,
with Coleman and Nathan. This is when they start to talk
about sex. And this is Nathan's
reflection: "The moment a man starts to tell you about sex,
he's telling you something about the two of you."
It's quite a remarkable statement.
Its homoeroticism should not be lost on you.
He's telling Nathan about sex with Faunia, but how Nathan
hears it, is that it's about him and Coleman.Now,
I don't mean to say that it literally becomes about the
fantasy of sex between--literal sex between--Coleman and Nathan.
But, I will point out a couple of things.
One is that Nathan, if you recall,
has been rendered impotent by his surgery.
So, his only relation, in that physical way,
to Coleman, is not really as a man as such.
I think he's imagined to be unmanned in this scene.
So, then you get, on page 43, an even fuller
description of this. He's talking,
Coleman is talking, again, about Faunia,
and Nathan is very much responding in the conversation.
We were enjoying ourselves, now,
and I realized that in my effort to distract him from his
rampaging pique by arguing for the primacy of his pleasure,
I had given a boost to his feeling for me,
and I exposed mine for him. I was gushing and I knew it.
I surprised myself with my eagerness to please,
felt myself saying too much, explaining too much,
over-involved and overexcited in the way you are when you're a
kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the new boy down
the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the
courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more
openly than you may even want to.
But ever since he had banged on my door the day after Iris's
death and proposed that I write Spooks for him,
I had, without figuring or planning on it,
fallen in to a serious friendship with Coleman
Silk. The language of courtship and
of gushing, of that overeagerness,
suggests a crush. It reinforces the homoerotic
charge of their dance, and the way Nathan observes his
virile body as they dance together.
And it gives it that emotional dimension.
So, we're told of Coleman, in another spot in this basic
scene, that he's contaminated by desire alone.
Nathan, if he is seized by Coleman's story,
as we're told at the end of the book, is contaminated,
too, by that story, and by desire for Coleman.
So, just as that stepping over into the first person from free
indirect third-person discourse, stepping over in to the "I" of
his character, represents crossing a certain
kind of boundary, so does the erotic charge that
is given to his relationship with Coleman.
Now, there are a couple ways of thinking about that
homoerotic structure. One is through the work of a
critic named Eve Sedgwick, and if you've taken any women's
and gender studies courses, or studied feminist
interpretations or queer interpretations of literature,
she should be a familiar name. She wrote a famous book called
Between Men, and her argument is that,
in a lot of--I think her subject was Victorian
fiction--in a lot of Victorian fiction,
the homoerotic or the homosocial bond between men is
channeled through a woman, and the perfect example of
that, in this novel, is when Coleman and Nathan go
to the dairy farm to watch Faunia.
So, it's as if, by both watching Faunia
together, through her their desire for one another is
channeled. So, they're able to experience
desire together, and it's safely not for each
other because Faunia is right there as a mediating point of
the triangle. But I think we can say some
other things about the structure, too,
and not just that it's there. Essentially,
Sedgwick's theory allows us to see how it works,
to see that it's there. But then, we want to ask, why?
And this is related to another feature of the text that you
might have noticed, and that is the repeated
reference to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.
Did you notice that? It comes back.
Tadzio and Aschenbach are the two characters from Mann's
Death in Venice. This is a
mid-twentieth-century German novelist.
This is a small novel, a little novella.
It's about an older man named Aschenbach who goes to Venice
for a vacation. And he's a scholar and a
writer, and he goes to Venice, and he suddenly finds himself
transfixed by a beautiful young boy that he sees at the hotel.
And he spends the novel chasing Tadzio, the boy,
all around the city and trying to get close to him.
And the mother realizes, the mother of Tadzio realizes
there is this sort of lecherous man coming after her boy and
warns him, Tadzio, to stay away from
Aschenbach. In the end Aschenbach is taken
with, I think it's tuberculosis or some disease--I can't
remember what the disease is--and he dies in Venice.
This passion for the boy is described, and this is the part
that Roth quotes in this novel, as "a late adventure of the
feelings." So, in those quotations
Roth is directing us to think about the lateness of that
desire as its characteristic quality.
It's an older man suddenly waylaid by an unexpected surge
of passion. Now, what I find interesting
about that is that Roth could have chosen any number of
romantic stories to characterize this.
Humbert would be one: a late adventurer of the
feeling, an older man, younger woman.
Why does he take a homoerotic structure?
Why does he choose this story, a story of same-sex desire,
rather than a heterosexual desire?
Why is this the model that he chooses?
So, I would suggest it's important that the novel is
called Death in Venice, that
Aschenbach dies. There is something about
homoerotic desire--and this is a characteristic of fiction that
features it over the centuries--that it seems deadly.
Somehow it's deadly. It's imagined as being deadly.
Of course, this is a product of its unconventionality in older
times, the fear that a heterosexual person,
or a person who conceives themselves as heterosexual,
might experience if they are taken by a homoerotic urge.
So, there's somehow that death gets wound into stories of
homoerotic desire, and The Human Stain is
no different. I just want to point out a
couple of examples. You can see it in the
difference between the way Nathan describes his decision to
dance with Coleman and the way Faunia describes hers.
This is Faunia on 226. This is just right in the
middle of the page. She's playing with her
hair and thinking that her hair is like seaweed,
a great trickling sweep of seaweed saturated with brine,
and what's it cost her anyway? What's the big deal?
Plunge in, pour forth. If this is what he wants,
abduct the man and snare him. It won't be the first one.
That's Faunia, sort of thinking,
why not? Why not dance as he's asking me?
Why not? What's the big deal?
What does it cost her? Contrast that with,
on 25 and 26, the way Nathan thinks.
"What the hell?" I thought, "We'll both be dead
soon enough." And so, I got up and there on
the porch, Coleman Silk and I began to dance the fox trot
together. And, if you look on 26,
you get another description where death comes back up as a
reason. Maybe why it didn't even
cross my mind to laugh and let him, if he wanted to,
dance around the porch by himself, just laugh and enjoy
myself watching him, maybe why I gave him my hand
and let him place his arm around my back and push me dreamily
around that old bluestone floor, was because I had been there
that day when her corpse was still warm--[that's Iris'
corpse] and seen what he'd looked
like. The corpse pops up in the
middle of this reflection on why he's dancing.
So, two times in the space of a page, death accompanies his
decision to dance with Coleman. So, why then is homoerotic
desire such a threat, a threat in this way?
Well, one structural reason could be that homoerotic desire
threatens to collapse the engine of desire, which is difference.
The novel has set up difference being the engine of desire.
So, if it's desire for the same--understood as gender,
the important sameness being gender--then it looks like a
self-canceling desire, a desire that can't sustain
itself, somehow, or that lacks that fundamental
structure of difference that the whole novel seeks to set up.
If desire is the engine of the sentence, as well as the engine
of the narrative, as well as the engine of human
connection in the novel, its collapse is a great threat,
not just to human connection, to human life,
but to writing. So, this is one way to
understand the problem, and it goes back to speak to my
point about inhabiting, or being a parasite upon,
Coleman's story. Nathan inhabits the "I," and
finally begins to conflate himself with Coleman,
or with Coleman's lovers, and we get various versions of
this. So, while Faunia and Coleman
dance, he replaces--let's see--he replaces Les.
So, while they're dancing in the cottage--Do you remember
this scene? I can't find my page number in
my notes right now -- while they are dancing in Coleman's house
privately--this is after Coleman stops seeing Nathan--he's
outside in his car lurking on the road.
The only other person who does that is Les Farley.
So, he comes to be in the position of Faunia's other
lover. Okay.
So, that's one way he enters into his characters,
as he starts to occupy, structurally,
the same spot as they do, but it actually gets much more
complicated. This is on 326,
in Ernestine's conversation, in her scene.
She is very helpful to say: "Well,
then" [because Nathan has said, "I've been trying to figure out
Coleman"] "Well,
then," she says, "you are now an honorary member
of the Silk family." So, there he is,
taken right into the Silk family, so he starts to replace
Coleman after Coleman's death. At the very end,
as he's getting into the car to drive down to New Jersey for
dinner with the Silks, he says--let's see--"Like
Steena Paulsson before me," he was going to sit with his East
Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner.
He becomes Steena in that passage.
He becomes Faunia when he dances with Coleman.
He leeches into all the aspects of Coleman's life.
So, it's not just inhabiting imaginatively,
but there are these structural ways that he comes to double
Coleman and also to double his lovers. It's by virtue of a blankness
that Nathan sees in Coleman and in Faunia that he can pull this
off, and this is very noticeable in
my favorite scene of the novel, the Tanglewood scene,
which I think is quite beautiful.
This is on 209,210. He's writing about music,
here, and the feeling that all the people in the audience were
going to be swept away by death. That's sort of the overwhelming
sense of mortality in the beginning of the,
in the middle of the page, there, and he says:
And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day,
a perfect day lacking nothing, in a Massachusetts vacation
spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on
earth. I would suggest that it's
precisely that "lacking nothing" that makes it deathly,
because if you lack nothing, there is no desire.
So, it's the very stasis of the day and the solidity of that
music that brings him into this mood.
And then Bronfman appears, the pianist,
and you get this wonderful description of what he does,
how he attacks the piano and banishes death with his
contention with the piano. And it should remind you of all
that's said about life being an argument.
Remember, I mentioned last time Coleman saying that all Western
literature begins with a fight, with an argument between
Achilles and Agamemnon, Coleman's fight with the
college, Coleman's fight against the
racial contract drawn up for him at birth, Nathan's contention in
the world of desire which he then withdraws from.
He implants in his own narrative of his thoughts what
Coleman will later say. This is on 211.
Coleman says, "I was telling Faunia that he
took ten years at least out of that piano."
Nathan had said on the previous page that they "would have to
throw that thing out after Bronfman's finished with it."
He plants in the narrative the shared thought,
asserting that somehow Coleman's mind is
Nathan's mind; that collapse is written right
into the realist assumption of the novel.
We, sort of, read along in those passages
thinking, "oh, let's take this at face value,
oh, yes, they're thinking the same thing."
But, of course, it's Nathan who plants that;
it's Nathan who's making it up. We don't know how honest Nathan
is. So, he claims to have the same
thoughts. It's the blankness.
He describes--Nathan--Faunia and Coleman as a pair of blanks,
and it's precisely that blankness that allows Nathan to
inhabit Coleman. This is,
in fact, a quality that he finally attributes to the,
as he says, "negroes," in the photograph of Coleman's family.
And this is on 337, the very bottom of 336.
"They were pale but they were Negroes.
How could you tell they were Negroes?
By little more than that they had nothing to hide."
This is quite an astonishing sentence.
If identity is, in its ideal form,
secrecy, if you have nothing to hide, then you don't have an
identity. There are two things,
two implications that flow from that.
One is that racial secrecy is really the only kind of secrecy
that matters, because being Negro is the only
thing that one would hide. It also means that these people
are just as blank as Faunia and Coleman; so there is a somewhat
pernicious racial simplification going on, here.
It's somewhat related to the simplification of thinking that
homoerotics is the desire for the same.
What both of these logics leave out is that point that is
insisted upon, actually,
earlier in the novel, which is that the other fellow
always has a life you can't know,
that it's simply the otherness of any individual person that
keeps you from knowing more than you can see on the surface.
It's the otherness, not the racial otherness,
necessarily, but just the otherness.
So, in these last pages, otherness gets collapsed back
into racial otherness, and I think perhaps this is why
Ernestine emerges as a stereotyped character.
He is folding an analysis of identity back into racial
stereotype, an analysis of identity as blank.
They have no interiority. One question that you could ask
is whether this constitutes a critique of Nathan.
Is Nathan being brought to task for stealing the story of
Coleman Silk? Is this making passing,
racial passing, into the ultimate form of
identity, that to be interesting as a character you've got to be
passing? Is it indicting Nathan?
Is it suggesting that Nathan really does desire Coleman?
These are all kinds of questions that you can think
about. One thing, I think,
it does do, though, is highlight the
constructedness of the narrative, across the board.
Coleman says about his Spooks narrative that he
could not do the creative remove that the pros do because the
creative remove, he says, "It's still the raw
thing." It's a bad book because it's
still the raw thing. He has no self-distancing.
So, what the critique of Nathan does, the implicit
critique of Nathan, does is distance us from him,
to some degree. It allows us to see him as an
unreliable narrator. It also, I think,
models Roth's own relation to Nathan Zuckerman.
Nathan Zuckerman is the creative remove,
is the medium of the creative remove, that Roth requires in
order to write about his own life.
Most of the Nathan Zuckerman novels draw very heavily on
Roth's life, and in fact at one point Roth writes an
autobiographical nonfiction book called The Facts.
And it's all, mostly, about complaining,
about the response to Portnoy's Complaint,
and also caviling against his ex-wife,
a very happy habit that Roth has.
At the end of The Facts there is a letter to Roth
from Nathan Zuckerman where he says, "You idiot.
Why are you doing autobiography? This is not your style.
Facts: it's just not your thing. Forget it.
It's terrible. Don't publish this.
Go back to what you do best, which is making stuff up."
Roth has played with this dynamic between autobiography
and fiction throughout his career.
And I think the threat, the deathly threat,
of the collapse that's figured in the homoerotic element of
this novel is the threat of--it sort of doubles the threat
of--Roth collapsing into Nathan Zuckerman. And, in another sense,
it doubles the threat of writing really only about men, that what's weak about the
novel is the way that it inhabits the subjectivities of
women especially. Delphine Roux is just a
caricature, really, and in many small ways Faunia
is a caricature, too.
I've talked about Ernestine. Les can be seen as a caricature.
So, it's not something exclusive to his female
characters, but it does suggest, as I mentioned a little while
back in the lecture, a certain kind of limit to
Roth's project. So, I will finish by saying
Roth is an extremely important writer in this period because of
the very complexity with which he makes the texture of his
novels speak to the question of fiction's relationship to life,
writing's relation to life, and the relationship between
the writer and what he or she writes,
the writer and the work. These are questions that vex
writers in this period. We have seen many writers in
this syllabus who worry about these things:
Barth, Morrison, so many of them,
Maxine Hong Kingston. Roth does it in a way that
nobody else particularly does. He's also widely admired.
When The New York Times had this feature a few years
ago--I think it was 2004--on the best novels of the last
twenty-five years, and they polled about 125
public intellectuals, writers, professors of
literature, reviewers, and asked what is
the one best novel. They asked--they made it hard.
They said, "What's the one best novel of the last twenty-five
years?" Well, number one was
Beloved, number two was Blood Meridian,
but if you added up all the Roth novels together that people
chose, Roth was the winner.
So, he's highly regarded, although there is split
opinion, as you can see, there, about which of his
novels is really the best one. So, I will say to you that
we're tracking, in what we're reading,
writers who are making an enormous impact on what American
fiction looks like in the latter part of the twentieth century.
It's very interesting to me to see the very ambivalences that
are at the heart of this fiction.
Now, I'll stop there for Roth. Let me just say,
as we go into Edward P. Jones, the novel that I don't
have on the syllabus is Beloved.
It's always a novel that I hope that you've read.
I used to teach it routinely, but it's fun to shake it up and
put some different things on, knowing that a lot of you will
have read it. When you read Edward P.
Jones, if you have read Beloved I'd like you
think hard about the relationship between those two
writers and the two novels. If you haven't read Beloved,
I urge you: just go to Wikipedia,
and just get a plot summary, or open it up,
even better. I won't ask you to read it on
the side, extra, although I would love to.
Find out a little bit about it, just so that you have it in
your head as you begin to read. Okay. Thank you.
