爱华网广西师范大学
硕士学位论文
揭示人性污点，呼唤人间真情：——论《人性的污点》中的伦
理思想
姓名：覃双眉
申请学位级别：硕士
专业：英语语言文学
指导教师：张叔宁
20080401
揭示人性污点，呼唤人间真情
——论《人性的污点》中的伦理思想
研究生：覃双眉 年级：2005级 学科专业：英语语言文学 指导老师：张叔宁教授 研究方向：英美文学
中 文 摘 要
菲利普?罗斯是最著名也是最多产的美国当代作家之一。自1959年至今他的28部作品使他几乎囊括了美国所有重要的文学奖项, 包括普利策小说奖。2001年，罗斯被《时代》杂志评选为“美国最佳小说家”。在国外，罗斯的作品一直备受关注，并且在上个世纪90年代开始形成了一股罗斯研究热潮。国内学界在近几年也开始对其作品给予更多关注，但与国外罗斯研究相比，国内对他这样一位重要作家的重视还不够。已有的罗斯研究主要关注其作品的身份及种族问题、历史政治对个人的影响，以及两代人之间的冲突等，国内外鲜有发现从伦理学视角研究罗斯作品。本论文试图从伦理角度、用文学伦理学批评方法探索《人性的污点》中罗斯对人性的刻画，寻找作家在该作品中体现的伦理思想。
论文共分为四章。
第一章是论文的引言部分。该章简单介绍罗斯生平、作品，以及罗斯作品与《人性的污点》的研究现状，提出该论文旨在用文学伦理学批评方法探索《人性的污点》中的伦理思想。
第二章介绍聂珍钊教授等中国学者所倡导的文学伦理学批评的主要观点及罗斯主要作品中的伦理思想。
第三章是论文的主体部分。该章尝试从伦理学视角分析《人性的污点》。首先，从“幽灵事件”、桃色事件及莱斯的痛苦生活分析作品中表现的当代美国社会中的一些伦理及政治现象，包括政治正确性的虚伪、虚伪的道德观及政治活动背后的利益驱动等。其次，从主人公科尔曼由黑人转换为犹太人身份这一现象分析罗斯的伦理思想：既肯定科尔曼对民族不平等的反抗，又谴责他的自私自利。最后，从科尔曼与三个女人的婚恋关系及与父母、子女的关系探讨罗斯的婚恋家庭伦理观：谴责婚恋家庭关系中的利已主义行为，赞扬无私纯洁的爱，渴望理解、宽容。
第四章为论文的结论部分。本论文认为罗斯在作品中揭露了当代美国社会中的种种阴暗面，揭示了人性中的利己本性，表达了他对自由、平等、公正、充满理解与爱的人类社会的渴望。
关键词：菲利普?罗斯；伦理思想；文学伦理学批评；《人性的污点》
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A Call for Love in Revealing the Human Stain:
On the Ethical Ideas in the Human Stain
Postgraduate: Qin Shuangmei Grade: 2005 Major Field of Study: English Language & Literature Supervisor: Prof. Zhang Shuning Orientation: British & American Literature
Abstract in English
Philip Roth is one of the most prominent and prolific contemporary American writers. From 1959 until now his 28 books have won him almost all of the main American literature awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2001, Time magazine chose Philip Roth as “Best American Novelist”. The academia abroad has paid much attention to all of his works, and since the 1990s, there has been an upsurge of Roth studies. The academia at home has also begun to pay more attention to his works in recent years. There have been 2 doctoral dissertations, 8 master theses, and more than 10 journal essays devoted to Roth studies. However, that is not enough for such an important writer, comparing to the Roth studies abroad. The previous Roth studies mainly pay attention to identity and race, individual’s relationship with history and politics, family conflicts, etc. in his writing. There has been little study at home and abroad approaching to Roth’s works from ethical perspective. Therefore, this thesis attempts to explore Roth’s depiction of the human nature in The Human Stain from an ethical perspective, adopting the method of ethical literary criticism, trying to find out Roth’s ethical ideas in the novel.
The thesis is made up of four chapters.
Chapter One is the introduction of the thesis. Firstly it introduces briefly about Philip Roth’s biography, main works and awards, then it reviews the previous studies on Roth and on The Human Stain, finally it proposes that the thesis is to explore the ethical ideas in The Human Stain.
Chapter Two gives an introduction to the main ideas of ethical literary criticism advocated by Professor Nie Zhenzhao and some other Chinese scholars and Roth’s ethical ideas in his major works.
Chapter Three is the main body of the thesis. It tries to analyze The Human Stain from ethical perspective. Firstly it discusses the moral and political problems of contemporary American society in the novel, including the hypocrisy of political correctness, the hypocritical morality and self-interest motivation behind political activities from the “spook incident”，Coleman’s love affair and Lesley’s miserable life. Secondly, it analyzes Roth’s ethical ideas on Coleman’s passing from black as Jewish: praising his fighting for racial equality and condemning his iv
selfishness in doing so. Finally, it explores Roth’s ethical ideas on love, marriage and family by analyzing Coleman’s relationships with three women, with his parents and children and points out that Roth denounces selfishness, praises unselfishness and unconditional love, and longs for understanding and tolerance in love, marriage and family relationships.
Chapter Four is the conclusion of the thesis. In the novel Roth relentlessly reveals the ugly behaviors in contemporary American society, points out the self-interest in human nature, and expresses his longing for a society of freedom, equality, justice, and full of understanding and love.
Key words: Philip Roth; ethical ideas; ethical literary criticism; The Human Stain
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论文独创性声明
本人郑重声明：所提交的学位论文是本人在导师的指导下进行的研究工作及取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容外，本论文不含其他个人或其他机构已经发表或撰写过的研究成果。对本文的研究作出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人承担本声明的法律责任。 研究生签名： 日期： 论文使用授权声明 本人完全了解广西师范大学有关保留、使用学位论文的规定。广西师范大学、中国科学技术信息研究所、清华大学论文合作部，有权保留本人所送交学位论文的复印件和电子文档，可以采用影印、缩印或其他复制手段保存论文。本人电子文档的内容和纸质论文的内容相一致。除在保密期内的保密论文外，允许论文被查阅和借阅，可以公布（包括刊登）论文的全部或部分内容。论文的公布（包括刊登）授权广西师范大学学位办办理。 研究生签名：日期： 导 师签名： 日期： http://www.aIhUaU.com
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, my most sincere thanks go to my supervisor, Prof. Zhang Shuning for his constant encouragement and invaluable suggestions in these three years of graduate study. Without his kind and painstaking guidance over the choice of the subject, the overall design and the drafting of the thesis, it is impossible for me to finish my research.
I am heartily grateful to Prof. Liu Yuhong, Prof. Lu Xiaohong, Prof. Bai Jingze and all the other professors of College of Foreign Studies of Guangxi Normal University for their insightful lectures at the first stage of my study. My special thanks go to Prof. Liu Yuhong and Prof. Xujiwang for their helpful suggestions in the drafting of the thesis. I also owe my thanks to my classmates and friends Liu Jun, Zhao Li, Zhao Suhua, Su Huihui, and Zhong Hui for their suggestions from which I have also benefited a lot.
I also want to acknowledge my thanks to the librarians of Guangxi Normal University Library, for their kind assistance in my research.
I owe my special thanks to my husband Deng Ganran, my son Deng Wenhan, my mother and my parents-in-law for their persistent love and support throughout the time.
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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Philip Roth and His Major Works
Both in the United States and internationally, Philip Milton Roth is respected as one of the most important writers of modern times. He was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, belonging to the third generation of Jewish Americans. His grandparents were among the European Jews who joined the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the city’s lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools. He later attended Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M.A. and taught English. Afterwards, he taught creative writing at both Iowa and Princeton, and for many years he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1992. He has written 28 books and some uncollected stories, essays and reviews. His intelligent stories explore how individuals face the tensions of family, politics, sex and race.
His first book, the short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959), which uses wit, irony and humor to depict Jewish life in post-war America, won him critical recognition—National Book Award for fiction in 1960—and condemnation from some within the Jewish community for depicting what they saw as the unflattering side of Jews. For instance, one of the stories, “Defender of the Faith”, is about a young Jewish soldier training at an American army base at the end of World War Ⅱ, who lies to his Jewish army officer in order to get special treatment. These stories and the novels Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967) are realistic in mode and adopt a traditional narrative method. His comic novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) marked a turn in his career that made him wealthy, famous, or notorious and still more controversial. It depicts a middle-class New York Jewish world in the portrait of Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive mother makes him so guiltily insecure that he can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden Gentile girls. Irving Howe, the eminent Jewish-American critic, famously claimed: “The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice” (Howe, 1986: 82), and regarded it as a vulgar book. In his next several works, Roth experimented with different comic modes, as illustrated in the works Our Gang (1971), a strong political satire aimed at Richard Nixon; The Breast (1972), a Kafkaesque rendering of sexual desire (and in The Professor of Desire (1977), the same protagonist struggles between the attractions of his private lusts and the morality and seriousness manifested in his profession); The Great American Novel (1973), a wild satire of both Frank Norris’s novelistic quest and the great American pastime, baseball. Then Roth began to create a series of fictions which are highly self-reflexive and postmodern. My life as a Man (1974) treats 1
the possibility of dealing with the personal pain of a failed marriage through teaching literature and writing, analyzing the importance of personal experience to a writer of fiction. And in Zuckerman Bound, the Zuckerman trilogy which includes The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound(1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and a novella epilogue, “The Prague Orgy” (1985), Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman first appears and Roth explores the distance between the ideals of rigorous ethnic, familial, and literary traditions and the realities of contemporary life. Then Zuckerman appears again in The Counterlife (1987), an international novel set in the United States, Israel, Switzerland, and Great Britain. His next four books—The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock(1993)—explore the relationship between the lived world and the written world, between “fact” and “fiction”. Through his protagonist in these works, also named Philip Roth, the author questions the genres of autobiography and fiction, and he mischievously encourages the reader to become caught up in this literary game. Roth’s next novel Sabbath’s Theatre (1995) is a novel of sexual obsession. In his next three novels, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), which are called his “American Trilogy”, Roth once again sets Nathan Zuckerman as the narrator to reflect on key moments in late twentieth-century American experience, revealing the social, political, and psychological conflicts that define post-war America. The Dying Animal (2001) is about male’s sexual desire and fear of death. In The Plot against America (2004), Roth imagines what would happen to American Jews if the fascist Charles Lindbergh had won the election over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. The novel, which focuses on the ways in which history is constructed, appears to continue the author’s exploration of American identities, national as well as individual. The protagonist of Everyman (2006) is an anonymous “everyman”, who feels the effects of the decaying body and where it ultimately leads. In his latest work, Exit Ghost (2007), Roth offers what he claims will be the final chapter in the Zuckerman saga. In the work, he revisits many of the same characters and themes that figure in his first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (see Brief biography and awards, 2007).
These books have made a great fortune for Roth. Portnoy’s Complaint was New York Times’ number one best seller for the year 1969 when it was published, and his other books also sell well. Apart from that, these works are highly regarded by many literary critics. Roth is regarded as an American novelist who gets better with age. Derek Parker Royal believes: “Unlike many aging novelists, whose productive qualities wane over time, Roth has demonstrated a unique ability not only to sustain his literary output but even to surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previous writings” (Royal, 2005: 2). His woks have garnered every major American literary honor including Pulitzer Prize for fiction for American Pastoral in 1997, National Book Award 2
(twice) for Fiction for Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories in 1960 and Sabbath’s Theater in 1995. And he has won Time magazine’s Best American Novel of the year for Operation Shylock in 1994, and Time magazine’s Best American Novelist in 2001. And other main awards are: National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction (thrice), PEN/Nabokov Award, PEN/Bellow Award, National Medal of Arts, among other recognitions. The distinguished literary critic Harold Bloom has included more of Roth’s novels (six) in his Western Canon than of any other living American author, and beginning in 2005, Roth joined Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty and became the third living American author to have his works collected by the Library of America. “When Roth was honored with the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to Ameircan Letters in 2002, his place as a major American author was one that no serious critic would be willing to dispute” (Parrish, 2007:
1). Roth receives recognition outside America too. He has won two times of W. H. Smith Award in the United Kingdom for The Human Stain in 2000 and The Plot against America in 2004, and the Prix Medici for the best book of the year in France for The Human Stain in 2000.
1.2 An Introduction to The Human Stain
The Human Stain (2000) is the last volume of Roth’s American Trilogy, the other two of which are American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Roth has called these three novels “a thematic trilogy”. They all deal, he explains, with the “historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation”: the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, and 1998, the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment (qtd. in Safer, 2003). Bill Clinton’s impeachment is the background of The Human Stain. 1998 is the year when the 71-year-old protagonist, Coleman Silk, a former classics professor and faculty dean of Athena College in New England, is accused of “sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (Roth, 2000: 38) because he is having an affair with a 34-year-old cleaning woman of the college. Two years before, Coleman has been forced to resign from the college because he has been accused of making a racist remark about two African-American students who have been absent from his class and whom he has never seen before. Coleman thinks it ridiculous to be charged with racism because he himself is black and has passed for a Jew since his youth. But he can not tell the truth to defend himself. Two years after his resignation and his wife’s death, he begins a love affair with Faunia Farley, the young cleaning woman. His love affair brings him an anonymous letter from his successor, the faculty dean Delphine Roux, his children’s coldness to him and Faunia’s ex-husband Lesley Farley’s hatred. Lesley is a Vietnam War veteran and anti-Semitist, who has got a mental disease called “post-traumatic stress disorder” and is a great threat to them. However, Coleman and Faunia continue their love affair. In the end they are 3
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killed in a car accident caused by Lesley. The novel proves to be well-received both in America and internationally. After it was published in 2000, it won Roth the W. H. Smith Award for best book of the year in the United Kingdom and the Prix Medici for the best book of the year in France, and the second PEN/Faulkner award in 2001 in the United States. And it was made into a film of the same name in 2003 starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. 1.3 Literature Review and the Significance of the Study Roth’s books have always received great concerns and passions not only from ordinary readers but also from literary critics. According to the web site “The Philip Roth Society”, there have been 30 book-length studies and monographs, 3 special issues of journals, about 150 chapters from books, nearly 300 journal Articles and about 50 dissertations dealing with Roth’s works (see Resources, 2007). And since 1990s, Roth studies have become very hot. Derek Parker Royal claims in 2005 that “Roth’s work in the past fifteen years has also spawned what could be called a revitalization of Roth studies within academia” (Royal, 2005: 2). This is the time when Roth created some of his most important novels, including his well-received American Trilogy. The academia at home has also begun to pay more attention to his works in recent years. There have been 2 doctoral dissertations, 8 master theses, and more than 10 journal essays devoted to Roth studies. But that is not enough for such an important writer, comparing to the Roth studies abroad. Many scholars have noticed Roth’s deep concern about the human conditions of individual, community and society. Elaine B. Safer argues that with humor and comedy, “Roth increasingly illuminates and mocks the public events of the age and the private obsessions of its denizens”, and “laughs at the hypocrisies and foibles of our time” (Safer, 2006: 16). He points out that the decline of our society, the stupidity of our behavior, and ultimately, the essentially tragic elements of the human condition are visibly the underlying element of Roth comedy. Timothy Parrish has found out that at the heart of Roth’s fictions are such subjects as “intertwining personal and communal identities, sexual politics and practice, the postmodern world and the place of America in that world, self-invention in the context of human annihilation and acts of terror, and racial and cultural pluralism” (Parrish, 2007: 3). And Debra Shostak points out that Roth has explored deeply and repeatedly “such features of subjectivity as masculinity, embodiment, sexuality, ethnicity, the creative act, and the subject’s embeddedness in history” (Shostak, 2004: 3). Much attention of Roth studies has been paid to Roth’s considerations about the identity of an individual in the society. Some Jewish readers of his early fiction accused him of exploiting 4http://www.aIhUaU.com
Jewish-American culture in order to gain acceptance as an “American” author, but many critics see the Jewish identity in his works differently. Timothy Parrish argues: “It is important to recognize, though, that Roth understands himself as more than just the representative writer of a particular ethnic group … Roth is far more a novelist than he is a Jew” (Parrish, 2007: 2). And Jay Halio and Ben Siegel point out: “One major theme that runs through Roth’s fiction and takes many forms is the nature of the self and the problems of self-worth or self-identity” (Halio & Siegel, 2005: 7). They have found that Roth pays more attention to an individual’s problems in a society than the problems of a certain community.
Timothy Parrish significantly mentions that “Roth’s fiction usually questions the purity of any one character’s motives but it may be such questioning only belies Roth’s hope that a purely moral stance is actually possible” (Parrish, 2007: 6). He guesses that maybe the reason why Malamud has attracted Roth’s critical gaze over twenty-five years is that he represented in his work “the ethical stance Roth most wanted to emulate but instead pretended to destroy through the acts of his shiksa-crazed, sex-crazed, family-betraying, Jewish-son-protagonists” (ibid.).
Critics have explored identity, history, race, and betrayal, etc. in The Human Stain. Timothy Parrish finds in the novel that Roth “makes identity an effect of the history that permeates one’s choices” (Parrish, 2005: 210); Brett Ashley Kaplan argues that the novel tells us “because we are still obsessed by reading race we cannot overcome racism and anti-Semitism in America” (Kaplan, 2005: 173); while Debra Shostak explores “the self-betrayal that stems from an attempt to avert the betrayals of others” (Shostak, 2004: 153) in the novel.
But there are few studies devoted to exploring Roth’s ethical ideas by analyzing his works from ethical perspective. In fact, Roth’s works contain clear ethical ideas. His deep concern about the human conditions of the individual, community and society has shown his resistance to racial inequality and calling for justice in society, his longing for warmth in family relationship, and his yearning for sincerity in individual relationship. And The human Stain contains all these ideas. This thesis is an attempt to explore Roth’s The Human Stain from the perspective of ethics by using the methods of ethical literary criticism and textual analysis, trying to find out Roth’s ethical ideas in it by analyzing the ethical phenomena in the work. For such an important contemporary American writer, the domestic research is far behind the international Roth studies. In the thesis the author tries to introduce this great writer to Chinese readers from a new perspective, and hoping it can do some help for the readers to better understand The Human Stain and Philip Roth.
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Chapter 2 Ethical Literary Criticism and Roth’s Ethical Ideas
2.1 Ethical Literary Criticism as an Approach to Literary Studies
In June 2004, Professor Nie Zhenzhao from Central China Normal University put forward an ethical approach in literary criticism—ethical literary criticism—as a new methodology (Nie Zhenzhao, 2004: 169). He proposed for the first time to analyze literature with ethical methods. Ethical literary criticism is a new approach to literary studies in contemporary era, but the discussion of the relationship between literature and ethics is not new. It has a long history both in China and in the West.
Chinese culture is one that attaches much importance to ethics and morality, and Chinese traditional literature has paid much attention to its moral educational function. This function has been regarded as the purpose of literature. In his Analects, Confucius (551-479 B. C.) believes that poetry can help to stimulate the imagination (xing), to observe social conditions (guan), to associate with others (qun), and to give expression to complaints (yuan) (qtd. in Shankman, 2007). There have been other ideas of ethical criticism in Chinese history (Tong Qingbing, 2001:
21). Cao Pi (187-226) holds the idea that “writing is a great cause of administering a country and a great event of eternity”, pointing out literature’s social function and artistic fascination. Xunzi gives his new explanation to the idea of “poetry expresses one’s intention”: it is the great men’s intention to construct a system of behavioral criterion. In “Grand Preface of Mao’s Book of Odes” of Han Dynasty, poetry is believed to be able to affect people’s thoughts and is very helpful in constructing a harmonious and peaceful society. Liu Xie (465-522) of the Southern Dynasty, a famous critic in the history of Chinese literary criticism, argues that literary creation has to be an organic whole under the control of mind, thought and imagination in his great literary criticism and theoretical work Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind. In the work, he stresses the importance of the writer’s moral integrity and explains the relationship between literature and social change. Zhou Dunyi (1017-1070) of Song Dynasty considers that “the text is the container of Tao”, and Zhuxi (1130-1200) of the same dynasty believes that “Tao is the essence of text, and text is the minor details of Tao”. “Tao” here means morality, justice, and ethics. All these theories regard ethics as an important criterion in literary criticism. They affirm literature’s affect on people’s thought and its social and political function.
In the West, moral literary criticism also has a long history. In his Republic, Plato (428-347
B. C.), the ancient Greek philosopher, senses poetry’s great power of “harming even the good” and refuses to admit “the imitative poet” into his “well-ordered State”, because the poet “awakens and nourishes the feelings and impairs the reason”, and poetry will not be allowed to return from exile unless it is proved to be not only pleasant but also useful to states and to human 6
life (Zhang Zhongzai, 1999: 20-23). His fear of poetry and poets has proved that he admits poetry’s great influence on people’s mind and its great social function. In his Poetics, another famous Greek philosopher and literary critic Aristotle (384-322 B. C.) defines:
Tragedy , then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a
certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. (ibid.: 40)
According to Aristotle, the direct effect of tragedy is pity and fear, and these emotions can purify the audience in soul. Horace (65-8 B. C.), one of the greatest poets of Rome, believes that “the aim of the poet is either to benefit, or to amuse, or to make his words at once please and give lessons of life” (ibid.: 77). He thinks that poetry should have the functions of entertaining and instructing, should instruct through entertaining. And Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) emphasizes literature’s social function and stresses morality in criticism. He thinks literary criticism is “to see the object as in itself it really is” and “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” (ibid.: 332-338).
All these philosophers and critics believe in the social function of literature and its influence upon people’s mind. Some even go to the extreme of concerning too much about literature’s social function and neglecting its artistic form.
When it came to the modern times, there appeared a trend of aestheticism in literary criticism and critical theories. Aesthetes hold the idea of “art for art’s sake”, considering that the purpose of literature is to give people the pleasure of art, literature is literature itself, it has nothing to do with morality and ethics, and it is not a moralistic tool. They disdain to be concerned about the ethics in literature. What they are concerned about is the characteristics of words, structures of literature, and what kind of language and structures will bring better aesthetic feelings to the readers. Oscar Wilde was an important figure of aestheticism in the 19th century. He claims in the preface of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That’s all” (Wilde, 1996: 3). The literary idea that excludes ethical elements in literature has been developed in the formalist literary theories in the 20th century. The formalist theories have occupied a very important position in literary criticism in the 20th century, including New Criticism, Russian formalism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism etc. These theories pay attention to the matters of literary form, such as its language and structure, rather than social or historical content, trying to 7
put the study of literature on a scientific and objective basis. These theories have helped to change the situation of being concerned too much about literature’s social function and neglecting its artistic form, but when they go to another extreme: being concerned too much about the form of literature and neglecting its content, they make literature a mere word game.
Formalist theories’ negative impact on literature has been noticed and there has appeared a cultural turn in the development of literary theories. The critics and writers have found it impossible to completely cut literature’s link with social and historical elements. They regard literature as the product of culture, trying to study literature in a wide perspective of culture. In fact, this cultural turn was an ethical turn (Liu Ying, 2006: 92). Because feminism, post-colonialism and Marxist criticism, which belong to socio-historical and cultural studies, are based on an ethical judgment of power: they are criticizing some kind of inequity between two different interest groups. That is also why the relationship between literature and ethics is considered again in the contemporary era after a long time of being neglected. In America, there appeared a lot of books and essays exploring ethical criticism, including The Ethics of Reading (1987) by J. Hillis Miller, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction by Wayne Booth (1988), Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) by Martha Nussbaum and Ethics, Theory and Novel (1994) by David Parker. In his The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth explores literature’s close relationship with ethics. He argues that the author should not forget his ethical duty and has the duty to make his ethical position clear in his work, and the reader should try to discern the author’s ethical position (qtd. in Liu Ying, 2006:
93). As a philosopher, Martha Nussbaum emphasizes literature’s great impact on ethics. She believes that “literature itself is not only concerned with the subject of ethics, but actually performs an ethical function” (qtd. in Harpham, 2001: 379). And she also tries to explore the link between narrative and ethics in literature. J. Hillis Miller is a member of the “Yale School” of deconstruction. In The Ethics of Reading, he tries to explore the relationship between text and ethics. He argues that reading text and literary criticism are ethical activities since text is the representative of certain ethical principles (qtd. in Liu Ying, 2006: 95). Though the three emphasize differently, they have one point in common: they have all noticed the importance of ethics in literary criticism.
In China, Prof. Nie Zhenzhao and some other scholars have also noticed it and proposed to treat ethical literary criticism as an approach to literary criticism. They have discussed the objects, contents, purpose, importance and necessity of this approach. The main ideas of ethical literary criticism include:
Firstly, it is an approach to literary criticism. “In terms of methodology, ethical literary criticism is an approach to literary criticism developed on the basis of the introduction of ethical 8
methods and the assimilation of them into the texture of literary critical methods” (Nie Zhenzhao, 2006: 627). It means that it is an approach to analyze literature with ethical methods.
Secondly, it is used not only to interpret the moral phenomena recorded in the literature on a historical and dialectic basis, but also to make value judgment of those in the present literature based on the moral values in reality (ibid.). When we analyze the old literature works, we should not judge their quality according to the moral codes of our time; we should interpret the moral phenomena with moral ideas in their relevant social context.
Thirdly, it is open to other contemporary literary theories and methods. That means it can be fused with other critical methods.
Lastly, it emphasizes literature’s function and duty of moral education.
Since literature is created by human beings, it is natural that it depicts human beings or things around or concerned with human beings. Fictions are imagined or invented, but they are imagined or invented on the foundations of human being’s life. Literature represents a human being’s relationships with himself, with other people, with society and with nature. These relationships are the main concerns of ethics as a discipline. Barbara MacKinnon gives a simple definition to ethics: “Ethics, or moral philosophy, asks basic questions about the good life, about what is better and worse, about whether there is any objective right and wrong, and how we know it if there is” (MacKinnon, 2003: 4). That is, ethics tries to find out what one should deal with himself for a good life, what would be better for him to do in his relationships with other people, the society, and the nature. This is also what the readers of literature would do when he is reading, usually unconsciously. So it is almost impossible for literature and literary criticism to avoid ethical questions.
With the introduction of the formalist theories into China, ethics has been ignored to some extent for a long time in literature and literary criticism. Ethical literary criticism can help to change the present situation of “the absence of ethics” in literature and literary criticism. What’s more, literature has the function of cleansing the society. In the present age, with becoming richer in their material life, many people have found their poverty in spirit. In people’s seeking for material things, many good traditional ethical ideas such as love, friendship, kindness, sympathy, justice, equality, credit, faith, etc. are put aside. This trend of “absence of ethics” in the society makes people feel a belief crisis, especially in China, where many people do not believe in any religion and used to believe in morality. However, it is obvious that everyone in the society is longing for the return of the good traditional moral qualities. Good works with deep thought and good ethical sense will help people make moral considerations and improve themselves and thus help to construct a harmonious society. The works by Philip Roth belong to this kind.
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2.2 Roth’s Ethical Ideas in His Major Works
Roth used to be criticized for his depicting the dark side of Jews by people from Jewish community. And “many casual readers of his novels, those who only know him by two or three of his works, may still view Roth as the controversial bad boy of American letters” (Royal, 2005:
2). But when you study his works carefully, you will find that under the cover of this “bad”, and behind his unique comedy, there lie his serious ethical ideas. Roth once told an interviewer that “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends” (Roth, 1975: 111). Roth’s ethical ideas are mainly embodied in his ideas on race, human nature and family.
Unlike his fellow Jewish writer Bernard Malamud who praises the good traditions of Jewishness and claims: “All men are Jews”, Roth stresses an individual’s American identity and the identity as a human being. Roth has ever claimed that “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew” (qtd. in Rabin, 2005: 9), and that he writes about Jewish life just because that is something he is familiar with. He considers himself to be an American who happens to be a Jew. These statements reveal his ethical idea on race: protesting against racial discrimination and emphasizing racial equality in American society. In his works he depicts the Jewish Americans’ persisting efforts and often disappointments in trying to emerge into the mainstream society and shows his resistance to racial inequality and stresses an individual’s right as an American.
As a writer born in a Jewish family and grown up in a Jewish community in America, Roth depicts the obsession and misery of the descendants of Jewish immigrants in their conflicts with their family and the society in their attempting to ingratiate themselves with the gentile American mainstream majority. Their misery makes them transgress their Jewish families and traditions. In the novelette Goodbye, Columbus, the protagonist Neil leaves his parents and lives with his aunt; his girlfriend Brenda, who lives in a new rich Jewish family that has moved to the suburb, has her nose fixed, and has Neil make love to her on the “cruddy sofa” in the basement of her house (Roth, 1959: 69)—a symbol of old Jewish tradition. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth makes his protagonist Alexander Portnoy’s transgression go to an extreme: he indulges in masturbation, and he even masturbates with a piece of liver intended for his family dinner—which is also a symbol of old Jewish tradition since chopped liver is a traditional Jewish dish. He also attempts to “conquer America” by having sex with different Gentile girls. These transgressions reflect these young Jewish people’s great torture which is brought by the racial inequality in the American society. On the one hand, they encounter racial discrimination against Jewish people in the society, which makes them become more eager to be assimilated into mainstream society completely to become a “real” American; on the other hand, they have to meet the strict requirements of traditional Jewish family life. “In fact, what Roth did with Portnoy was to update the immigrant sensibility that Howe championed by showing its inevitable transformation 10
through the immigrants’ descendants’ interaction with American culture” (Parrish 2007: 129). Roth also makes some of his protagonists turn to Israel, the essential Jewish homeland, to seek for the meaning of being an American who is also a Jew. In The Counterlife, the protagonist Nathan’s brother Henry gives up his comfortable life as a dentist in America to live in Israel, hoping that Israel will resolve the identity crisis he suffers as an American-Jewish man. This also proves the existence of racial inequality in American society and the difficulties that Jewish people meet in obtaining an American identity. In Operation Shylock, Roth speaks out people’s prejudice against Jewish people: “For four hundred years now, Jewish people have lived in the shadow of … Shylock … To the audiences of the world, Shylock is the embodiment of the Jew …” (Roth, 1994: 274). And Safer believes that “With Roth in control, Operation Shylock may also become a means of clearing the world of anti-Semitism. The satiric novel itself may be the best method of destroying the enemy” (Safer, 2005: 164).
In his later novels, Roth invents some descendants of Jewish immigrants who seem to have succeeded in their assimilation into mainstream American culture but fail in the end. In American Pastoral (1997), the Jewish protagonist Levov is successful in glove business, has married to a beautiful Catholic girl, and has moved into his dreamy stone house in WASP countryside. He seems to have achieved his dream of living a pastoral life in which he can live as the legendary Johnny Appleseed who “wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant” and “was just a happy American” (Roth, 1997: 316). But his dream is destroyed by his daughter Merry’s terrorist bomb to protest against the Vietnam War. Timothy Parrish argues: “By conflating Merry’s revolt against her father with the social unrest of the sixties that included race riots in the major American cities, Roth suggests that the unrest of the sixties was caused not by American foreign policy but by racial inequities” (Parrish 2007: 138). It means that the existence of racial inequality is something Levov can not escape away from and that his mixed marriage inevitably results in family tragedy. The Plot against America (2004) warns Americans of what could happen if a fascist government became powerful by fictionalizing 1940-42 history. Safer believes that “if alive, Irving Howe and other angry members of the Jewish community would now be proud to have Roth in the tribe” (Safer, 2006: 14) because of the novel. By denouncing the racial inequality for its great harm to the society and people in it, Roth expresses his hope of a society in which everyone is respected and treated as an American and a human being, not as someone with a special ethnic identity.
In many of his works, Roth mercilessly depicts the dark side of his characters. Since most of the characters are Jewish, Roth was accused of self-hating from Jewish community and some Jewish people thought that Roth violated his religion and invited discrimination against Jewish people. However, Roth is not merely concerned with Jewishness though his context is primarily 11
Jewish. He writes Jews because Jews are the part of humanity that he knows best, and therefore he is best equipped to write about them. When he is writing the dark side of characters with Jewish identity, he is not merely writing the dark side of Jewish people; he is writing the dark side of human beings. In his works, Roth shows great concern and sympathy about human being’s living conditions, revealing the weakness of human nature and implying his hope for better human relationships and a harmonious society.
In his first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Roth explores the human nature with satire, comedy and wits. One short story in the book, “Defender of the Faith”, is about Sheldon Grossbart, a young Jewish soldier training at an American army base at the end of World War Ⅱ. He utilizes the kindness of Nathan Marx, the new Jewish sergeant and his Jewish identity to get special treats. Though he does not believe in Judaism, he asks to go to services for Jews on a Friday night to escape from cleaning work; he writes to a congressman by the name of his mother to complain that the food in the army is not suitable for Jewish boys; and he asks for a leave for a Passover dinner at his relatives’ but actually goes out for fun, etc. With the character Grossbart, Roth mocks the utilitarianism and selfishness in human nature. And in the novelette Goodbye, Columbus, Roth reveals people’s admiring of materialism through contradicting the luxurious life of Brenda’s family and the poverty of her uncle’s family, and expresses his hope for a beautiful life without racial discrimination and materialism, like the beautiful picture that the black boy often goes to the library to admire. Roth’s finding faults with ordinary people appears in almost all of his works. He uses his comic style to disclose the weakness of human nature. Safer argues that “Most of his character’s problems are not primarily a result of their Jewishness but of their individual human desires, obsessions, and experiences” (Safer, 2006: 14). It means that Roth shows great concern with human conditions, not merely with Jewish people’s life.
Roth’s exploration of human nature can also be found in his denouncing and satirizing of political issues in his works. Our Gang is a political satire novel. It imitates the American president’s public speeches, television commentators and media presses with farce to reveal and satirize the government’s hypocrisy, showing his concern with “the fine art of government lying” (Roth, 1975: 57). In the interview “On Our Gang”, Roth tells the interviewer that “Satire is moral rage transformed into comic art” (ibid.: 53). With satire, Roth expresses his moral emotions on social and political issues. In his American Trilogy, Roth explores political issues with tragicomic style and denounces the great harm that McCarthyism, the Vietnam War and political correctness have done to American people. As early as in 1974, Roth expresses his ethical idea about politics and the government: “we hadn’t personally to fear for our safety and could be as outspoken as we liked, but this did not diminish the sense of living in a country with 12
a government morally out of control and wholly in business for itself” (Roth, 1975: 11). It is the self-concern in the human nature that controls the ugly political acts.
Family is one of the main themes in Roth’s works. By depicting the younger generation’s misery of being restricted by their parents, and the older generation’s bitterness of enduring the children’s misunderstanding and transgression, Roth reveals to the reader the necessity to give more understanding and love to each other in parent-child relationship. In his earlier works, Roth mainly describes the Jewish young people from the perspectives of the younger generation. They feel restricted and miserable in family because of the differences between the old Jewish traditions and the contemporary society, such as Brenda and Neil in Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint who transgress the family and Jewish tradition with extreme behaviors in their parents’ eyes. In the first book of Zuckerman trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Roth invents a young Jewish writer, Nathan Zuckerman, who is abused by his father for his portrait of bad Jewish characters in his writings. Nathan insists in his search for success in art and refuses to obey his father. In Zuckerman Unbound, the second book of the trilogy, Zuckerman’s brother, Henry, berates him for killing their father with his more controversial new novel. In his nonfiction chronicle about his father’s death, Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Roth depicts the relationship between father and son more movingly than he does in his previous works. In the work, during the days before his father’s death, the father-son relationship has changed “from youthful rebellion to the softened appreciation of middle age, when the son must suddenly reverse nature’s roles and see his father through death” (Hedin, 2005: 147). In his later works, the parent-child relationship is depicted from the perspective of the older generation. In American Pastoral, we can feel the extreme bitterness of a father when we follow the protagonist Levov and find that his daughter, who has become a follower of the old Indian religion of Jainism, is in rags and lives in a dirty house. Years after her violence of killing several people in a bomb to protest against the Vietnam War, now she wears a veil over her face “to do no harm to the microscopic organisms that dwell in the air we breathe”, and she does not wash herself because “she revered all life, including the vermin” (Roth, 1997: 232). The Vietnam War and Jainism have become the excuses for her rebellion to her parents. With the depiction of Levov’s agony, Roth implies his hope of mutual love and understanding in family relationship.
In The Human Stain, Roth shows almost all of these ethical ideas on race, human nature and family. The next chapter, the main body of the thesis, attempts to analyze the complexity of ethical phenomena in the novel and find out Roth’s ethical ideas in it.
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Chapter 3 Roth’s Ethical Ideas in The Human Stain
In The Human Stain, Roth again relies on his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as the narrator to tell the story of the rise and fall of a black who passes for a Jew, exploring a series of serious themes such as race, love and family, political correctness, political activities etc. In the novel, Roth presents the readers with a variety of human being’s ugly behaviors, with ordinary and public people’s moral choices in contemporary American society.
3.1 The Moral and Political Problems of Contemporary American Society In the 1990s, America enjoyed a prosperous and peaceful time. There was no McCarthyism, no Vietnam War, no civil rights movement, no counter-culture, and no economic crisis. But Roth shows the readers a complexity of moral and political problems in this flourishing period of American society. The novel begins in 1998, when the whole country seems to be fury about Bill Clinton’s sex scandal. The protagonist Coleman Silk, who is at the age of seventy-one, confides to the narrator Nathan Zuckerman that he is having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman. Then the story goes back to two years ago and presents to the reader more stories of Coleman, and reveals the human stain of people in contemporary American society.
3.1.1 The Hypocrisy of Political Correctness in the “Spook Incident”
In April 1996, at 69, Coleman Silk is still a professor of classical literature at Athena College though he has retired as a dean the earlier year. He is presented to the reader as an assimilated Jew who has a wife, Iris, and four grown-up children. Once in class he sarcastically asks the rest of the class about two students who have been absent for five weeks from the beginning of the semester: “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks? ” (Roth, 2000: 6), suggesting they are ghosts and expressing his irritation, without considering that “spook” is also an old-fashioned insulting word for blacks. Thus he is brought against a charge of racism by the two absent students who happen to be black. The two students are supported by Coleman’s campus enemies, led by French feminist and new faculty dean Delphine Roux. Here Roth represents the issue of political correctness in the novel.
Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term used to describe language, ideas, policies, or behaviors seen as seeking to minimize offence to groups of people (see Political correctness, 2008). Political correctness is originally a good thing if people want to use the politically correct expressions of their own will because they really feel the need to respect others, trying to avoid words or behavior that may upset homosexuals, women, non-whites, the crippled, the stupid, the fat or the ugly for the purpose of 14
preventing people from being offended. But it became a communal tyranny in the 1980s. It was a spontaneous declaration that particular ideas, expressions and behavior, which were then legal, should be forbidden by law, and people who transgressed should be punished. It started with a few voices but grew in popularity until it became unwritten and written law within the community. Those who were publicly declared as being not politically correct would become the object of persecution by the community, if not by the state. Thus political correctness has gone to an extreme opposite to its original purpose and resulted in people’s great horrors.
The “spook incident” shows how ridiculous and harmful this political correctness is. Coleman Silk has never seen the two students, so he does not know at all if they are white or black and it is impossible for him to insult them on purpose by the remark “spook”, the insulting meaning of which has not been used for some decades. But Silk’s defense is not effective. The racist charge has been taken for investigation not only by the new dean of faculty but by the college’s small black student organization and a local black activist group. Endless interrogations, meetings and hearings have resulted in Coleman’s resignation in fury and disgrace from Athena College, where he has spent almost all his academic life. During the “spook incident”, his wife dies of a stroke, and in his mind, of his being persecuted in the incident.
We can’t help wondering: have the black people in America got so high a social position that a diction which seems offending to them will force a professor to resign? Has discrimination really been eliminated in American society today? The answer is “No”. According to American Ethnicity(Aguirre & Turner, 2001: 56-67), systematic discrimination in housing, employment, education, legacy, health care and virtually every social sphere persists in present-day America, and discrimination remains a central part of the African American experience. In employment and economy, black workers are overrepresented in farm and menial service jobs; they are underrepresented in professional and managerial occupations; they are twice as likely to be unemployed; they earn slightly over one-half the wages of white workers; and they are three times as likely to be poor. In political area, African Americans still constitute considerably less than 2 percent of all elected offices and officials in the United States. In education, even today they are overrepresented in poor, minority-filled schools. In housing, African Americans have been denied home ownership because banks would not lend them the money. And there are still many negative beliefs about African Americans. According to a survey from American Ethnicity, in 1990s, 4 percent of whites hold the idea that blacks and whites should go to separate schools, 13 percent think the whites have the right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods, 33 percent disapprove of intermarriage between blacks and whites, and 80 percent believe that blacks themselves are responsible for white-black inequalities.
In the “spook incident”, the new dean Delphine Roux passionately and firmly supports the 15
two students. But in fact, in her heart there still exists racial discrimination, which we can detect from her thinking when she writes an email of ad to seek for a male partner. She knows if she wants to be politically correct, she should add “Race unimportant” to the ad, but the fact is that she considers that “it wasn’t unimportant; it should be, it ought to be”, and she has been convinced since she is seventeen that “a man of another race was an unfeasible—because an unknowable— partner” (Roth, 2000: 261). Thus the purpose that she attacks Coleman Silk is obvious: it will show her political correctness, which will protect her and win her supports from the faculty and the students of the college and make her position of dean more stable. Coleman’s career “as a successful classicist has been undone through mean-spirited politicking in the guise of political correctness” (Parrish, 2005: 211-212). And it is obvious that the two students bring the racist charge against Coleman just because they want to be absent from class freely and they do not want anyone to say anything about their absence. Apparently their abandonment of themselves has a social reason. Living in a social climate in which most young men have lost hope of finding employment and women are welfare-dependent, it’s difficult for the young blacks to be aggressive and work hard at school. Political correctness and the protection of the blacks’ civil rights have become tools for Delphine Roux to win political interest and excuses for the two black students to abandon themselves.
Although Coleman has successfully served as the dean of faculty for 16 years, nobody at the faculty would defend him, including Herb Keble, the first black brought into the college by Coleman. Herb knows the fact that Coleman is the first man who has the courage to employ a black into the faculty has demonstrated that he has no prejudice against blacks, but he tells Coleman that “I’m going to have to be with them” (Roth, 2000: 16). Herb has to face two moral choices here. One is to support Coleman to respect the truth and pay back his benefactor, and the other is to be on the side of the new dean and the two students for political correctness to get benefits and more rights for himself and other blacks at the college. He has chosen the latter. “These shenanigans were so much jockerying for power. To gain a bigger say in how the college is run. They were just exploiting a useful situation” (ibid.: 17). Nathan sharply points out: “when he was silent and didn’t rise to Coleman’s defense, it was for the reason that people are always silent: because it is in their interest to be silent” (ibid.: 312). Even Coleman’s own sons can not understand him. They think he should have apologized to the two students. They do not care what the truth is. What they care is that they want a father who retires in glory, not a father who resigns in disgrace. They care for their reputation, not for their father’s feeling.
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3.1.2 The Hypocritical Morality and Political Intrigue in People’s Reaction to Coleman and
Faunia’s Love Affair and Clinton’s Sex Scandal
Two years after his resignation and his wife’s death, Coleman Silk has cut his connection with Athena College completely and finds comfort in his love affair with Faunia Farley. She is a cleaning-woman from the college, who claims to be illiterate. Faunia enjoys their relationship as much as he does. But people around them do not understand this love affair. Delphine Roux sends Coleman an anonymous letter: “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (Roth, 2000: 38). Silk believes his privacy has been invaded. At the same time Coleman finds that he is losing touch with his children. When he phones his favorite child, 38-year-old Lisa, she sounds detached and for the first time answers her father’s question with a “Nothing”, which upsets and hurts him. They consider the love affair wrong.
The President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal is the background of Coleman Silk’s love affair. It was a political-sex scandal emerging from a sexual relationship between United States President Bill Clinton and a then 22-year-old intern at the White House，which led to Clinton’s impeachment. After the release of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s compilation of salacious details about Clinton’s sex life with Lewinsky, the scandal swept the nation overnight. Relying on his narrator Nathan Zuckerman, Roth mocks that the scandal has “revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony”, and “In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish…” (ibid.: 2). Behind the apparent defense of morality lay the contending of different political and economic interest groups. The scandal became a battle between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to win political supports and benefits. It is a political struggle in the guise of a sex scandal. And the media are passionate to the scandal for their economic profits. Elaine B. Safer is rather correct in stating that in The Human Stain “the narrator criticizes the hypocritical reverence for ethical behavior in Congress and in the media” (Safer, 2003: 240).
And Roth’s satire on this hypocritical morality is also shown in his depiction of fictional figures in the contemporary society, just like his mocking of people’s over-passionate reaction to President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. Considering from the ethical perspective, Coleman and Faunia’s love affair is nothing immoral. Coleman’s wife has died and Faunia is divorced. Both of them are single. They have the right to love each other. Faunia is much younger than Coleman, who is 71, but she is an adult of 34, she can choose her way of life. She is not forced into the affair. Their relationship does not do any harm to any other people. It is their privacies; others do not have the right to interfere. In Faunia’s words, “it’s nobody’s fucking business” (Roth, 2000: 40). But Delphine Roux does interfere as a self-righteous feminist and “moralist”. 17
She believes that he is taking sexual advantage of his thirty-four-year-old mistress. She predicates that he has managed “to unearth no less than a misogynist’s heart’s desire” in “the perfect woman to crush” and “no one to stop him” (Roth, 2000: 194). Her moral outrage causes her to write him a handwritten but unsigned anonymous letter. Roth depicts her moral hypocrisy with a funny tone. She sends the anonymous letter which she has carried around in her handbag for several weeks on an impulse of mental unbalance. On a weekend trip to New York, she sees a man in the public library whom she fancies at once. She desperately wants to be picked up by him, but a girl clearly younger than her approaches him and they leave together. Then she posts the letter. There is another farcical description of her sexual desire. Lonely and confused, Delphine writes a letter to a singles column in the New York Review of Books though she feels humiliated about placing an ad. Fearful that her colleagues may somehow find out about the personal ad, she decides to delete it. But in confusion Delphine strikes the “send” instead of “delete” key and sends the advertisement to the group address of her whole department. The ad discloses her desire for a man whose characteristics seem to be very close to those of Coleman Silk. It shows that Delphine herself, who is 29 is also attracted by him. All these show how hypocritical she is. “Her hysterical behavior on the campus of Athena College echoes the actions of a Republican-dominated Congress that monomaniacally sought to impeach President Clinton” (Safer, 2006: 7). There lies self-interest under the apparent defense of morality. And Coleman’s children do not approve of their affair just because they believe that it disgraces their father and the family.
3.1.3 Roth’s Denouncement of the Government for the Vietnam War
In The Human Stain, Roth denounces the Vietnam War and the American government with the description of the miserable life of a Vietnam War veteran Lester Farley. Lester Farley is Faunia’s ex-husband, “a loyal American who’d served his country with not one tour but two” (Roth, 2000: 64). When he joins the war for the first time, he is a boy “who put a lot of trust in people and had no idea how cheap life could be … didn’t feel inferior to anyone, happy-go-lucky Les, no threat to society, tons of friends, fast cars, all that stuff” (ibid.: 65). He is a typical healthy, happy and kind-hearted American young man who trusts the government and goes to the war. Lesley does what one does in a war. He is afraid at first, but begins to get easy at cruel killing at the end of his first service. But the second time when he goes back to the war among those “who’d also come back and who hadn’t come back just to kill time or to make a couple extra bucks” (ibid.), he becomes rather cruel. When he goes home, he finds that he cannot get used to the world any more, often confusing the real life with the past war life. But he can get help neither from the Veterans Administration nor from the government. “He’s agitated. He’s 18
restless. He’s drinking. It doesn’t take much to put him into a rage. There are these things going over his head” (Roth, 2000: 66). He has got a disease called “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD), badly mentally ill. Because of this disease, he manages a dairy farm but fails, he gets married but is divorced, and he has ever had two children but they have died. “That fucking Vietnam, you cause this! After all these years the war is over, and you caused this!” (ibid.: 73) This is Farley’s desperate denouncement. With the help of Louie Borrero and some other kind veterans in the local support group, Lesley tries very hard to follow the arrangements of eating at a Chinese restaurant, and then going to the Memorial Wall, hoping he can get over from the disease, but he fails. The war has become his eternal nightmare.
There is a vivid description with black humor of Lesley Farley’s dining at the Chinese restaurant to cure his PTSD. For Lesley, all “gooks” (Asians) are the same. The group leader Louie Borrero encourages him patiently: “We’re gonna start slow” (ibid.: 215). The narrator tells the readers that Lesley did not sleep at all during the week before they visited the Chinese restaurant. It is hard for him even to just sit down to order some food and eat because he fancies the waiter to be his Vietnamese enemy in war. Lesley yells, “Just keep the fucking waiter away”, because just like what he is trained in the war, “from the corner of his eye he’d spotted some movement” (ibid.: 218). Louie tries to keep the waiter at a distance. The waiter does not seem to understand and moves toward them. “Sir! We’ll bring the order to you. To. You,” cries Louie. And Louie tells Lesley: “Okay, Les, we got it under control. You can let go of the menu now ... First with your right hand. Now your left hand ... How about ‘tea leaf’ for the code word? That’s all you have to say and we’re out of here. Tea leaf” (ibid.: 218-220). It seems that Lesley can control himself only by using the words just like those they have used in the Vietnam War. Lesley is really funny with his stiff movements, yet when we are considering the causes of his funny but miserable experience of just eating at a restaurant, we do not know whether to laugh or cry. However, we can get some comfort from people like Louie Borrero for their patient and unselfishness help to the veterans.
Relying on the thinking of Lesley Farley, a man who is mentally ill, Roth blames the American government for the Vietnam War. Many American soldiers went to the war with the belief that they would fight for the freedom of people in Vietnam and they were fighting a war of justice. But then they found that the government had deceived them. They found they had brought war and misery to the Vietnamese. This made them blamed by their conscience. Lesley is confusing the present life with the past for most of the time, but his views about the war seem rather sober and precise. He believes that the death of his two children is “The payback for what he did in Vietnam” (ibid.: 67), revealing his being blamed by his conscience for what he does in the war. He thinks that the government has trained the soldiers to become cruel killers: “you see 19
the enemy, you kill the enemy” (Roth, 2000: 69). But when the soldiers went back to their country, they found they were not welcomed as those back from World WarⅡ. People thought they caused American’s defeat and brought trouble to the country. Without people’s understanding, they lived in trauma with horrible experience of the war lingering in their mind. Lesley cries out in his heart: “it’s the government’s fault” (ibid.: 66). And the government did not care much about the veterans’ miserable lives: “the VA budget goes down the drain” (ibid.: 247). The politicians in the government made the country involved in the war just for their own political interest. Roth sharply points out in an interview:
And if it’s suddenly okey with the United States for eight hundred million people
in China not to be able to determine their own future in free elections, why isn’t it okey for a mere thirteen million more in Vietnam? By comparison, that’s only a drop in the enslavement bucket. (Roth, 1975: 52)
Roth reveals that the government has changed a healthy and happy young man into a threat to the society. In the end, Lesley uses his car to force Coleman’s car into an accident and kills two innocent people: Coleman and Faunia.
3.2 Roth’s Ethical Ideas on Coleman’s Passing as Jewish
As a Jewish writer, Roth has explored race in many of his works. He depicts Jewish people’s anxiety caused by their Jewish identity and their hope to obtain real American identity, and also depicts the racial discrimination that they encounter. But The Human Stain is the only fiction in which Roth makes his protagonist a black. He, a Jewish writer, explores the race problem through the blacks’ racial encounters. After Coleman’s death in the accident, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman finds that his friend, the protagonist Coleman Silk is not a Jew. He has been born and raised as a light-skinned son of an African-American family in New Jersey. He is a black who passes as a Jew. “It is possible that the inspiration for Coleman Silk was Anatole Broyard, attractive, sophisticated, and influential essayist and daily book reviewer for the New York Times for more than ten years and, like Roth’s Coleman, a black man passing as white” (Safer, 2003: 241). The experiences of Broyard, a well-known figure, make the story of Coleman Silk’ passing rather believable. With Coleman’s passing, Roth has explored a series of ethical issues and expressed his ethical thinking concerning race and family relationship.
3.2.1 Discrimination: the Essential Cause of Coleman’s Passing
The first time Coleman passes for Jewish he does it passively. When he is a high school boy, 20
Coleman joins the Jewish dentist Doctor Chizner’s evening boxing class. Coleman becomes extremely skilled and successful in boxing and famous as “Silky Silk”. One day, Doctor Chizner wants the coach of the University of Pittsburgh to see Coleman fight. He is sure that the coach will admit Coleman into his team and get him a four-year scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. But the doctor tells Coleman not to mention that he is colored. He tells him that “if nothing comes up, you don’t bring it up. You’re neither one thing or the other. You’re Silky Silk. That’s enough” (Roth, 2000: 98). He believes that the coach will not know Coleman is black and will presume him as Jewish because of Coleman’s light skin and because he is with a Jewish coach. Coleman does as he is told but he fights rather violently in that match. “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” (ibid.: 99-100). The “something” is the racial discrimination which gives Jews a higher social status than blacks and infuriates Coleman. Though this passing is not a real passing since he does not tell others that he is a Jew, the experience makes him realize the significance of race to a person and the possibility for him to pass for Jewish. Coleman’s actual passing for a Jew happens when he fills in the enlistment forms to join the United States Navy at the age of nearly 18. He identifies himself as Jewish. And for several years from then on, Coleman has been “allowing that he is Jewish”, or “letting people think so if they choose to” (ibid.: 130-131).
Coleman’s thorough passing occurs when he tells his mother about his decision of getting married to a Jewish girl Iris Gittelman and that he has told Iris that his parents are dead and he has no brothers or sisters. And Coleman’s brother Walt forbids him to contact with the mother from then on. “There’s another force in that family, pushing him now all the way over on the other side” (ibid.: 145).
Coleman has been excellent and successful almost in every respect. He is the class valedictorian at East Orange High School, he is an excellent boxer, and he is “the fastest kid in the Oranges” (ibid.: 105). And he has won all these achievements by his efforts. He respects his parents and he is kind-hearted. He has the typical American people’s spirit of individualism. In short, Coleman has grown healthily with self-respect and self-esteem from the perspective of personal ethics. Personal ethics is concerned with individuals’ growth as virtuous people and search for the good life. According to Erik Erikson, one of the first tasks of the young child is the development of self-respect or proper self-esteem. Without developing respect for ourselves, we cannot truly respect and care for others (qtd. in Boss, 1998: 11). In America, the idea of individualism roots deeply in people’s mind. People admire those who are independent and succeed with their own efforts. Coleman works very hard in search for a good life, and to be “someone people would forever look up to” (Roth, 2000: 102). But the reality of discrimination 21
in American society shatters his dream.
According to American Ethnicity (Aguirre & Turner, 2001: 56-66), African Americans were brought to the United States as slaves and were denied access to the most basic resources, even after slavery ended. Discrimination is relatively easy to practice against African Americans because their black skin makes them easy to identify. Historically, African Americans have had to endure some of the most vicious negative believes. In the early period of slavery, black people were viewed as “uncivilized heathens”, “bestial”, “sexually aggressive”, and as suffering the “curse of God” who made them black. After the Civil War, they were portrayed as inferior because they had not been able to take the advantage of the equal opportunities offered by Reconstruction. The black people were believed to be biologically inferior and must be segregated. Between the world wars, some whites even found “scientific facts” from evolutionary theory and results on intelligence tests to confirm the inferiority of blacks, and the prevailing belief continued to advocate segregation as necessary and desirable in order to prevent “black inferiority” from diminishing the white biological stock. In the post-World War Ⅱ period, though some progressive beliefs appeared which believed the black people’s “inferiority” was totally environmental, African Americans were still seen as inferior. These beliefs have been used to justify discrimination in jobs, housing, education and all institutional spheres in American society and thus make the discrimination against blacks institutionalized.
In the Jim Crow period after slavery and up to the 1960s, African Americans had to overcome a combination of laws, court decisions and enforcement practice that sought to deny them access to the resources enjoyed by white Americans (ibid.: 102). Through the first half of the twentieth century, state and local codes discriminated against blacks in many vital areas of life. In education, African Americans in the South attended segregated and inferior schools, a circumstance supported by state and local codes and enforced with actual violence from the white community. In housing, Federal Housing Authority (FHA) codes prevented integration of housing subsidized by the FHA, which confirmed and reaffirmed restrictive covenants in trust deeds and discriminatory lending practices of bankers. In the job market, most craft unions and many industrial unions established rules to prevent African Americans from moving beyond a narrow range of lower-paying jobs. In politics, especially in the South, state and local governments enacted voting laws that were differentially enforced for blacks and whites, a practice that kept African Americans disenfranchised. Across all sectors of society, then, African Americans confronted laws and rules that excluded them into the 1960s. This legal discrimination reinforced and encouraged informal discrimination in housing, schools, jobs, and politics and resulted in the civil rights movement, which won some great victories in the blacks’ fighting against the racial discrimination. Congress passed a series of significant laws to 22
eliminate legal and informal discrimination in employment unions, housing, voting booths and schools. These laws included the 1954 Supreme Court decision which declared segregated schooling inherently inferior and discriminatory, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 (Aguirre & Turner, 2001: 72).
As a black boy, Coleman has encountered discrimination in many ways: the unevenness of acceptance from white teachers, not being invited to some white friend’s birthday parties, not being liked to be touched or contacted with his sweat, and being refused when he offers blood to an injured track team runner. He has also heard of the insults that his father and elder brother Walt have experienced. His father tells the family: “Any time a white deals with you, no matter how well intentioned he may be, there is the presumption of intellectual inferiority … he will always talk to you as though you are dumb, and then, if you’re not, he will be astonished” (Roth, 2000: 103). However, Coleman has been relatively calm at these insults. Maybe it is because of his excellent performance at school, his good look and the protection provided by his parents and his brother Walt, and because these insults are made with some covering.
But when he is called “nigger” and refused a hot dog at Woolworth’s with his roommate one day as a college student of Howard University, he is in fury but can do nothing. This makes him recognize “the enormous barrier against the great American menace that his father had been for him” (ibid.: 106), realizing that his father has been protecting him from the great menace of racial discrimination.
And the second blow Coleman gets from discrimination is his father’s death. Though college-educated, intelligent, quick in mind, tough, calm, Coleman’s father has taken farming and animal husbandry before he has an optician’s store. After the failure of the store, he can only get a job as a waiter on a dining car. And at last he dropped dead serving dinner on the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car. After his father’s death, Coleman decides to choose his way of life, wanting to be “Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneers of the I”, because “He saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn’t having it. Grasped it intuitively and recoiled spontaneously” (ibid.: 108). He realizes what fate a black has: no matter how hard you try, your life is far worse than the whites’. He does not want to have a life like his father’s. This is an important motivation of his passing. He quits his study at Howard University and later enlists in the navy as Jewish in 1944.
His next blow from discrimination is Steena’s refusal to marry him. Steena Palsson is “bright and game and beautiful” (ibid.: 114), with the ethnicity of Scandinavian, the symbol of ultimate white racial purity. Though he has passed for Jewish for several years by allowing others to think that he is a Jew, Coleman does not have the courage to tell Steena about his black identity. Two years later, he decides to reveal his origin by taking her to his home to meet his family because 23
he wants to get married to her. He wants her to find out by herself that the blacks are not “the kind of Negroes she saw in the movies or knew from the radio or heard about in jokes” (Roth, 2000: 118). And he believes that she will understand his passing for Jewish because they love each other so much. During the meal everybody behaves politely and no tensions arise. However, after they have got back, Steena breaks down in tears and tells Coleman: “I can’t do it!” and ends the relationship. Steena’s refusal makes Coleman realize what the identity as a black means. It can even decide whether you can marry the girl who loves you and whom you love. So when he decides to marry Iris, a Jewish girl, Coleman lies to her about his race, and has to break away from the family completely.
3.2.2 Coleman’s Passing: a Fight for Freedom against the Racial Inequality in American Society
The process of his passing is the process of his discovering the prevailing impact of black identity to a black. The more he finds the power of discrimination, the more decisive he becomes to get rid of his identity as a black. Roth makes the readers feel sympathetic to this protagonist, because “Coleman’s life must be comprehended not by Coleman’s choice alone but by the history that Coleman’s choice cannot change” (Parrish, 2005: 213). The young Coleman is so excellent in studying, boxing and running that it seems that a great expectation is waiting ahead for him. But his father’s death makes him recognize the reality. His father’s life is a mirror of the future life of himself. From the trace of his father’s life, he can predict what his life will be like. His father wants him to go to Howard University, at which “Coleman’s tremendous advantage of intellect and of appearance would launch him into the topmost ranks of Negro society, make of him someone people would forever look up to” (Roth, 2000: 102). However, Coleman is not his father; he does not want his black identity to decide his future. He does not want to be “someone people would forever look up to” as a black, but as an American, as a human being. He discovers at Howard, “he is among the very lighted of the light skinned in the freshman class … but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field hand for all they knew that he didn’t” (ibid.: 106). Coleman encounters the reality of social hierarchy in black community. He is looked down upon among the blacks because he is not as rich as his roommates. The discrimination between social classes makes Coleman more eager to achieve success in his future life. He tells himself: “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” (ibid.: 108). He does not want to be a black viewed from the whites’ perspective, accepting the reality of racial discrimination, nor does he want to be a black viewed from the blacks’ perspective, striving for the civil rights of blacks and equality with the whites. His success in boxing, running, and studying convinces him that he is 24
“everything else as well” (Roth, 2000: 108) besides he is a Negro. This reveals his reluctance to be a black—someone special, inferior, discriminated, depressed, etc. “He was Coleman, the greatest of the great pioneers of the I” (ibid.). “Everything else” and “the I” demonstrate his confidence in the fact that his seeking for his right as an individual in American society is something that nobody can prevent. The reason of his getting rid of his black identity is not that he despises the blacks, and the reason of his taking the Jewish identity is not that he thinks Jews are better people. He chooses to be a Jew because he believes that only by passing can he obtain his due rights as an individual in American society. Not to be a black, even not to be a white, just to be an American, to be yourself. This is Roth’s ethical idea on race. He advocates a kind of complete racial equality in the society. In this society, race should be an unimportant, insignificant characteristic of individuals. This idea is praiseworthy. In his “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”, Henry Louis Gates points out:
So here is a man who passed for white because he wanted to be a writer and he did
not want to be a Negro writer … In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. (qtd. in Shechner, 2003: 186)
Roth expresses the same idea on race as Anatole Broyard’s in this novel and in many of his works.
Viewed from the perspective of ethics, racial discrimination is wrong because it is unjust or unfair. The principle of equality is a moral principle which follows this formulation: “It is unjust to treat people differently in ways that deny to some of them significant social benefits unless we can show that there is a difference between them that is relevant to the differential treatment” (MacKinnon, 2003: 241). The discriminators do not want to treat African Americans equally with the whites because they believe the blacks are innately inferior. By portraying Coleman’s success in academic career, Roth has demonstrated that the idea of the inferiority of the blacks is false and the blacks’ “inferiority” is totally environmental. Coleman is not the stereotyping black in a white’s eyes who is lazy and stupid. Instead, he is smart and aggressive. He has succeeded not because he is a Jew, but because he is regarded as a Jew. Coleman’s passing is a resistance to racial inequality, seeking for justice and freedom in the society. That is why this character can arouse the reader’s feeling of sympathy and understanding.
3.2.3 Coleman’s Passing: a Behavior of Utilitarianism, Deceit, Betrayal and Selfishness
Coleman’s racial passing is a fight for freedom against the racial inequality in American 25
society, but on the other hand, it is also a behavior of utilitarianism, deceit, betrayal, and selfishness.
In an interview, Roth has suggested that the choice of a Jewish disguise for Coleman was “strictly utilitarian”, having nothing to do with the ethical, spiritual, theological or historical aspects of Judaism” or “with wanting to belong to another ‘we’ ” (qtd. in Shostak, 2004: 154). He passes, because he is “among the very lighted of the light skinned” blacks; and he passes as a Jew, rather than another ethnicity, because he looks like a Jew and Jewish people have a much higher social status than the blacks. He has just taken the advantage of his Jewish-like appearance to achieve his success. Since he looks like Jewish, and since a Jew has a much higher social status, why not be a Jew? Why not take this advantage? His utilitarianism is also embodied in his choosing Iris as his wife. He marries her because she is a good partner who will make his secret of passing more secure. His wife’s Jewish identity makes his Jewish identity seem more believable. In addiction to her Jewish identity, Iris’s hair, which is very much like a black woman’s, is also one of the reasons that she is chosen as his wife. He has admitted to himself that “all that he had ever wanted from Iris Gittelman was the explanation her appearance could provide for the texture of their children’s hair” (Roth, 2000: 136). In addition, she is open-minded and tolerant for the unusual, thus she will be likely to be tolerant for his passing too in case she finds out the secret some day.
In order to make others believe that he is Jewish, Coleman has to lie. He lies about his race to the Navy, to his wife and children—he lies to the whole society. After all, his lying to the Navy has violated the country’s principle. In ethics a citizen has the obligation to obey the country’s laws and principles. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates refused to allow his students to help him escape from the minimum security prison where he was awaiting execution, because he considered that disobedience to the law was wrong even though he and his friends believed that his sentence was unjust. He believed that disobedience to the law could not be right in some instances and wrong in others. Law was law, and people counted on everyone obeying it (Janaro, 2004: 443). It was the respect to the obligations of a citizen that made him accept the execution (He Huaihong, 2002: 104-106). His belief that a citizen should have respect for his obligations and the country’s laws and principles is commendable. Coleman’s lying shows that he does not have respect for his obligations as a citizen. Lying between individuals is also undesirable. People should not deceive each other for the simple reason that nobody wants to be deceived by others. If you do not want others to deceive you, you should not do it to others. Coleman knows this and lives in the fear of being found out his true identity. We can find his fearfulness in his misunderstanding of the poem that Steena pens for him. In the dim light and panic, he mistakes “his neck” in the poem as “his negro”, afraid of her discovering about his race. 26
He never tells his real identity to his wife and children, inventing the same story for every one of them. It seems that all of them have believed in his answers to their questions, in fact, the children are not satisfied with the answers, especially Mark, who is never satisfied. Mark’s distrust in his father has resulted in his resentment towards his father: he drifts apart from his father and never contacts him. Coleman has been punished for his lying to the family. The bigger punishment lies in his inability to defend himself with the fact of his black identity when he is persecuted as a racist because his revelation of his real identity will expose his big lie. All he can do is to keep silent about his identity. The biggest punishment comes to end his life. One reason of his being hated by Lesley Farley is that he is a Jew, because Lesley is an anti-Semitist. Parrish is quite right in pointing out: “Where Ernestine sees Coleman as a victim of history, Faunia sees Coleman as cursed simply because of his humanity: what marks him is not his hidden blackness but the universal burden of his ‘human stain’” (Parrish, 2005: 221). The self-concern in his nature makes him lose in the end. “White as your skin might be, now it’s advantageous not to do it, just as then it was advantageous to do it” (Roth, 2000: 326). The Jewish identity has helped him success but also brings him disasters.
Coleman’s passing is also a behavior of betrayal to his race and his family. For himself, passing is a resistance to the injustice in a society in which democracy is claimed to be of great significance. But for the whole black community, his passing is a kind of betrayal. He protests racial discrimination by taking a white identity, which shows that he has accepted and given in to the rule of racial inequality. His resistance does not do any help to black people’s striving for their due civil rights and racial equality in the society. His way of resistance to racial discrimination is not to remove it, but to jump over it. From this perspective, his passing is in fact a kind of escaping. He is driven by this inequality like a slave. Just like Coleman’s mother tells him: “You’re white as snow and you think like a slave” (ibid.: 139). In the moral choice between his seeking for his personal rights of freedom and equality and the black community’s rights of freedom and equality, he takes the former. “Coleman couldn’t wait to go through civil rights to get to his human rights” (ibid.: 327). From here we can see that he is self-centered. When Coleman tells his mother that he will marry a Jewish girl and will not let the girl know about his race and family, his mother is so grieved in losing her son that she says: “But where do you think I’m going to find the strength to be that ruthless with myself?” (ibid.: 138). Coleman thinks that he is murdering his mother with the choice of breaking up with the family. He knows that he is “Murdering her on behalf of his exhilarating notion of freedom!” (ibid.), but he considers that it is something that “must be done” to change his fate through passing. In the moral choice between his seeking for his personal success and filial piety to a wonderful mother who loves him unconditionally, he chooses the former. His choice is understandable but also 27
shows his selfishness. Coleman’s elder brother Walt’s story makes a comparison to what Coleman has experienced. Unlike his brother Coleman, Walt fights against racial discrimination publicly. When he is a school boy, he would be angry for months when not asked to the birthday party of a white teammate whom he has been foolish enough to consider as a “buddy”, and he would ask a teacher to change a grade which the teacher has mistaken because he does not believe that Walt’s grades are as high as the white students. With his own effort, he has become the first colored teacher in the white Asbury Park school system, and subsequently their first Negro principal and then their first Negro superintendent of schools. Walt feels insulted by Coleman’s passing and getting rid of his race and family. In Walt’s opinion, Coleman is never fighting for anything other than himself. Walt is among the most active in the fight for integration and civil rights for the black community. And their mother is also one of the fighters. She has risen, by virtue of merit alone, to become the first colored head nurse on the surgical floor of a Newark hospital. It is the great efforts of black fighters like Walt and their mother that result in blacks’ achievements in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Roth praises them for their fighting for black people’s freedom.
3.3 Roth’s Ethical Ideas on Love, Marriage and Family
3.3.1 Roth’s Ethical Ideas on Love and Marriage
Roth shows his ethical ideas on love and marriage in his depictions of Steena’s refusal to marry the man she loves because of the social conventions, Coleman’s utilitarianism in choosing Iris as his wife, and Coleman and Faunia’s pure love.
Steena loves Coleman so much that she has ever written a poem about her love to him. Coleman has tried to be honest to Steena, not concealing anything to her when he decides to marry her. She has also decided to marry him before she knows his black identity. But after meeting his family, she moves back. “I can’t do it”, this simple sentence has expressed her thinking clearly. She knows well how a black is treated in the society, and she does not have the courage to marry a black. Not only she herself can not persuade herself to accept a black man being her lifelong partner, but also she can not endure the pressures that social conventions put on a black family. To some extent, to marry a black means that you will become a black too. Coleman himself is trying to escape the racial discrimination by passing, how could he wish a white girl to have the courage to face it? Though he is wishing their deep love can have some impact on her choice, he understands when she refuses to take a life with a black and his black family. He thinks that there is wisdom of “thinking-for-yourself common sense” (Roth, 2000: 126) in her choice. Steena’s choice is understandable, but it is also disappointing, to Coleman and to the readers. And her choice has hurt herself as well. They meet each other four years later 28
since their parting, and after the meeting, Steena writes him a letter expressing her regret for her loss: “after I saw you I felt an autumnal sadness, perhaps because the six years since we first met make it wrenchingly obvious how many days of my life are ‘over’ ” (Roth, 2000: 126).
Coleman seems to have learned from Steena, so when he decides to marry Iris, a Jewish girl, he does not want to be honest about his race to her. As mentioned above, his choosing Iris as wife is rather utilitarian. He decides to marry her because his marrying to a Jewish girl will protect his true racial identity from being discovered; because Iris is rather open-minded and would not pay much attention to his race; and because her hair which is very much like a black woman’s. Before Iris, he has had a love affair with a black girl, Ellie. Not needing to conceal anything from her, he feels completely relaxed and has an innocent fun with her. However, he chooses Iris, because “Iris gives more. She raises everything to another pitch. Iris gives him back his life on the scale he wants to live it” (ibid.: 136). With marrying Iris, he would be safer in getting rid of racial discrimination by passing as Jewish and be able to achieve greater success in his future life. And it would be also safer not to tell her the truth about his race. In order to lead a happy marriage life, husband and wife should be sincere to and trust each other. Coleman’s concealing his race from his wife shows that he is not honest to and does not trust his wife. He detects her attitude to the concealing between husband and wife in her point of view on the betrayal of the husband of a close friend of hers. The husband has kept secretly a woman for eight years by whom he has had two children. Iris thinks that the secret has eliminated the intimacy between the couple and caused the wife’s misery. This shows that the sincerity between husband and wife is very important. For fear of the punishment of his lying, all he can do is to continue lying. Coleman suppresses his impulse to reveal his secret to Iris, continuing to give her the false intimacy between them.
Roth praises the love between Coleman and Faunia. Viewing from the conventional perspective, their love is not appropriate: he is already 71 and she is only 34; he is a retired college professor and she is a cleaning woman. He is probably “sexually exploiting” her, and it seems that she attempts to gain some money from him. But the narrator tells us these conventional opinions are not true. They both enjoy themselves in their relationship, and they can both find comfort in each other. It is not easy for Coleman to achieve success in Athena College. He, as an African American who passes as Jewish to behave as himself freely, must endure the fear of his real identity being discovered, the feeling of sorrow and missing to his mother and the family. So when his success is shattered overnight by such a trivial thing as the word “spook”, he feels rather humiliated and angry. However, when he meets Faunia, he finds that he is not the one who has the worst luck. He thinks she “is a woman whose life’s been trying to grind her down almost for as long as she’s had life” (ibid.: 27). Born in an upper class family, 29
Faunia has run away from home at fourteen because of the sexual harassment from her stepfather. Having drifted from place to place, homeless and miserable, she gets married to Lesley Farley for a stable life. But the marriage comes to an end because of Lesley’s violent treatment to her for his mental illness. Her two children die in a fire and Lesley often stalks her because of his illness and his consideration that it is her ignorance that has caused the children’s death. And now she has to get three jobs to support herself. Coleman sympathizes with her. He thinks that she has “dropped so far down the social ladder from so far up” and has been “exiled from the entitlement that should have been hers” (Roth, 2000: 28). And he finds that she, like himself, has been brave enough to escape the powerful control of something vicious to get freedom but has become the unfortunate’s favorite child. He believes that not only she “excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena”, but also she is the woman “with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union”, who is “more to him like a comrade-in-arms than anyone else on earth” (ibid.: 164). And Faunia knows what she can get from Coleman is “his generosity”. He does not hurt her as Lesley does. “He listens to me. He’s loyal to me. He doesn’t reproach me for anything. He doesn’t plot against me in any way … He takes me seriously. That is sincere … Just the rise and fall of his voice, just hearing him, reassures me” (ibid.: 237). From these sentences we can find that their love is based on mutual understanding, sympathizing, respecting, and appreciating. The love is pure, without utilitarianism and extra conditions and free from the conventions too. They choose to continue their relationship despite of the great menace from Lesley, the accusation from Delphine Roux, the despising and disapproval from his children and people around them and the warning from his lawyer of Lesley’s threat. They even make their relation somewhat public by listening to the open concert rehearsal together. The narrator sees them sitting there “like a couple who had achieved their own supremely concentrated serenity, who took no notice whatsoever of the feelings and fantasies that their presence might foment anywhere in the world” (ibid.: 207). Although the love ends in a tragedy, it is rather impressive.
In depicting these characters’ different attitude to love and marriage, Roth has revealed the true meaning in them: a love or marriage based on trust, understanding, sincerity, appreciating and without extra conditions is forever attractive, charming, and desirable, and a love or marriage with utilitarian purpose or baffled by conventions is always a pity.
3.3.2 Roth’s Ethical Ideas on Family
The conflict between two generations is a main theme in Roth’s writing. In exploring this theme, his earlier works pay attention to the younger generation’s misery in trying to get rid of the control of their parents, while his latter novels are mainly about the older generation’s bitter feeling about their children’s misunderstanding or transgression. In The Human Stain, Roth 30
describes these two kinds of conflicts, paying more attention to the latter kind. This part of the thesis attempts to find out Roth’s ethical ideas on family by analyzing the conflicts and love in Coleman’s big family and small family.
Roth depicts the deep love that Coleman’s parents give him. They try their best to protect Coleman from being affected by racial discrimination, never talking too much about the insults that they get from discrimination. They forbid him to box at the Newark Boys Club for the sake of his safety. They turn down Dr. Fensterman’s offer of three thousand dollars, which is more than what Coleman’s father earns in a whole year, and of helping Coleman’s mother to become the first colored head nurse on the condition that Coleman would choose his two weakest subjects to get Bs on the final exams to make Dr. Fensterman’s son become the valedictorian student of the graduating class. They do not want to sell their son’s future for their own benefits. Their love is unselfish and unconditional. And they have shown their children the dignity of an American with black identity. They hope Coleman can work with his efforts and with the dignity to have a brighter future and live a better life.
But Coleman chooses an easier way to achieve success when his father has died and nobody can prevent him from passing as Jewish. When he tells his mother he is going to marry a Jewish girl and his mother will never know her grandchildren, he knows what misery he is bringing to his poor mother: he is “murdering her”. But he will not change his idea because he needs his freedom. He cares more about his benefits. Coleman’s brother Walt, on the contrary, has a different image. He loves his parents and family more than himself. When Coleman fatally hurts their mother with his marriage, Walt is wrathful and forbids Coleman to contact her again in order to protect her. He is always ready to defend the black people’s rights, trying his best to succeed in the dignity of a black, just like their parents. He does not hurt his parents for his own good. Comparing with his parents and Walt, Coleman is very selfish and cruel. In depicting the parents’ deep love, the mother’s great bitterness, Coleman’s cruelty, Walt’s being considerate; Roth provokes the readers to think about this question: when we are seeking for our own success and happiness, should we consider about the benefits and feelings of the other members of the family? Roth seems to have told us the answer from Coleman eagerness to learn about his mother and the family, even about Walt and his promotions, and from Coleman’s feeling that he has given up a world of love. The love of the family in fact is very important to him, but he does not realize how important it is until he has lost it, until he has achieved success and then loses it overnight. Coleman has also been in torment for his cruelty to his mother. He even thinks that the hatred to him from his son Mark is “the punishment for what he had done to his own mother” (Roth, 2000: 321).
Roth describes Coleman’s great misery in his strained relationship with his four children. 31
When he is in the tangle of “spook incident” and his wife dies during that time, his children can not understand why he would not apologize to the two students. They think their father has caused their mother’s death for his own dignity. When the children hear of his affair with a cleaning woman who is half of his age, they show their disapproval and resistance by not contacting him regularly as usual, even his favorite daughter Lisa treats him coldly on phone. He is sad that his own children can not understand him. It is more terrible that he does not realize how his children feel about his love affair until he has phoned his eldest son Jeff. They do not understand why he has a love affair with such a woman at such an old age. They even believe in the rumor that Faunia has had an abortion and tried to commit suicide, believing what other people say about it instead of phoning their father and listening to his words. Coleman is deeply hurt by his children’s distrust of him. The most misery comes from his youngest son Mark, who is always at odds with him and hates him so much that he never contacts his father. Coleman does not understand why his children treat him like that after he has given them his full love to take care of them, to instruct them, to talk with them at dinner, to answer their foolish questions seriously. However, Coleman himself has figured out why Mark hates him so much: it is his lying to them about their Silk relatives. He guesses that “he would have hated me for never telling him and because he had a right to know” (Roth, 2000: 321). Yes, lying is the root of his bad relationship with his children. How can a father expect trust from his children when he is lying to them? Besides Coleman’s lying, we have found that the children’s not understanding also does harm to a good family relationship. They do not try to talk with their father to understand him. They do not care much about their father’s feeling. They care more about the glory that he has ever brought to them as a college dean. They do not trust and respect him even when he is dead. Nathan has wrongly thought that Coleman’s two smart children would help put Lesley into the prison for the rest of his life. However, they do not want to find out the real cause of his death, because they fear that any further investigation by the police into their father’s accident and love affair would damage their father’s reputation and bring them more disgrace. So they are more keen to “turn his reputation right side out” (ibid.: 308) by giving him a “perfect” funeral: they make the black professor Herbert Keble and other members of Athena College confess at Coleman’s funeral for the injustice they have done to him.
Roth also explores the significance of tolerance in a family. When Walt freezes the contact between Coleman and their mother, he means to protect her. But he does not know he is as cruel as Coleman in preventing a mother from seeing his beloved son. If Walt would like to be a little tolerant to Coleman, their mother would not be hurt so much. And it is not until his father’s death does Mark realize that how important his father is to him. He cries at the funeral: “We’re never going to see him again!” Roth expresses his ethical idea by Zuckerman’s thinking about Mark’s 32
crying: “What difference should that make? You weren’t that keen on seeing him when he was here” (Roth, 2000: 314). Mark would not be tolerant to his lying father, he “apparently had imagined that he was going to have his father around to hate forever” (ibid.). Roth has shown his deep understanding of hatred in Ernestine’s words: “But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop. I don’t know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate” (ibid.: 328).
By depicting Coleman’s relationships with his parents and children, Roth reveals to the readers that love, trust, sincerity, respecting, understanding, and being considerate and tolerant are important to a good family relationship.
33
Chapter 4 Conclusion
In The Human Stain, Philip Roth has explored the human nature through a wide-angle lens, from academic campus to political area, from individual fate to national political correctness, from love romances to the Vietnam War, and from family conflicts to racial discrimination.
Just like Nathan Zuckerman, whose “reason for being is to find people’s secret spots and expose them” (Parrish, 2005: 222), Roth has relentlessly revealed the various ugly deeds of human being: people of different positions, different social classes, different ethnicities and different genders. He denounces the hypocrisy of political correctness, hypocritical morality, ugly political disputes, American government in the Vietnam War, the inequality of racial discrimination, the selfishness in Coleman’s searching for freedom and success, and the self-concern in Coleman and Steena’s marriage choices and Coleman’s family conflicts etc.
Roth has exposed what lies behind all these hideous deals is self-interest. The whites discriminate the blacks to gain more power and rights; Delphine Roux supports the two students in the “spook incident” to make her position of faculty dean stable; the political parties fight in the Clinton sex scandal for their political interests; people protest the love affair between Coleman and Faunia to show their “purity in morality”; Coleman passes for Jewish for his own freedom and good future in spite of his mother’s great sorrow; Dr. Fensterman attempts to “buy” the honor of “the valedictorian student” for his son’s interest; Steena refuses to marry Coleman to escape from racial discrimination; Coleman marries Iris to make his secret more confidential, etc. It seems that people usually care more about themselves in their lives. Roth calls this acting for self interests in human nature “the human stain”. Relying on Faunia, who seems to be the most unfortunate, Roth points out that the human stain is in everyone: “we leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error … without the sign it is there … it’s inescapable … like the Greeks. Like their gods. They’re petty. They quarrel. They hate. They murder” (Roth, 2000: 242). We can find the stain in Delphine Roux, Dr. Fensterman, Coleman, Steena, Lesley, Coleman’s children, the professors at the Athena College, etc. It is in everyone, from president to civilian, from whites to blacks, from male to female. Thus we can see that the abuse of Roth’s self-hatred by some critics is not appropriate. When he seems to be depicting the dark side of Jewish people, he is depicting the dark side of human beings. He is exploring the desires and obsessions of ordinary people. “One of Roth’s achievements is in revealing how flawed people experience themselves” (Cooper, 1996: xi). According to psychological egoism theory, people are basically selfish, they always act to promote their own best interests, and if they sometimes act for others, it is only because they think that it is in their own best interests to do so (MacKinnon, 2003: 36). But the fact is not always like this. We must 34
admit that people often act for the sake of their own interests, but we can not say a person is selfish when he sympathizes with another and take the other’s point of view and when a parent makes sacrifices for his children. In fact, this is the two sides of human being. People have an instinct to act for their own interests, but they can love and sympathize with each other at the same time.
And Roth also shows the bright side of human nature in The Human Stain: Coleman’s resistance to racial inequality in his passing, Walt and other blacks’ protesting against racial discriminations against them and fighting for the rights of black people, Coleman and Faunia’s searching for pure love in spite of other people’s disapproval and Lesley’s menace, Coleman and Coleman’s parents’ deep and unconditional love to their respective children, Walt’s love to his mother, Ernestine’s tolerance to Coleman’s passing, Louie Borrero and other veterans’ patient and unselfish helps to Lesley to recover from his mental disease, etc.
On the one hand, Roth accepts that self-concern exists unavoidably in the human nature; on the other hand, he condemns people’s ugly behaviors of obtaining self-interests in depriving others of their proper interests and rights, sympathizes with those people hurt by the ugly deeds, praises people’s protesting these ugly behaviors, and celebrates the love, understanding and unselfishness in people. Roth stresses to respect an individual as an American, as a human being.
A human being has the right and freedom to speak, to love, to search for success and happiness, to be treated equally and respectfully, to do anything he loves to do if his acts do not do harm to others. According to ethical egoism theory, a person ought to look out only for his own interests, and he ought to be concerned about others only to the extent that this also contributes to his own interests (MacKinnon, 2003: 38). But if each person in the society holds this belief, our life would be pretty wretched in a society full of conflicts and wars, as the dark side of society Roth shows in the novel. That is why it is better for people to have and follow moral rules. The basic duty in the bottom lines of ethics is the “golden rule”: treat others as you want to be treated (He Huaihong, 2002: 113-114). For many centuries the idea has been influential among people of various cultures. If every person is able to see beyond himself and his own interests, trying to respect others and take another’s point of view, or to be impartial, our life would be happy and beautiful, we will live in a harmonious society of freedom, equality, justice, and full of understanding and love. This is the ethical ideal Roth expresses in The Human Stain.
35
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揭示人性污点，呼唤人间真情：——论《人性的污点》中的伦理思想
作者：
学位授予单位：覃双眉广西师范大学
相似文献(8条)
1.学位论文 李杨柳 从《人性的污秽》看菲利普·罗斯的伦理思想 2009
菲利普·罗斯是最杰出的美国犹太作家之一。和他的其他作品一样，罗斯创作于2000年的小说《人性的污秽》一经出版就引起了国内外学者的极大关注。尽管许多文学批评家从身份、历史、种族等角度对其进行了分析，但这部小说从头至尾都反映了菲利普·罗斯对人与自我、人与他人和人与社会这三种伦理关系的呈现和思考。因此，本文试图运用文学伦理学的批评方法，探讨罗斯对这三种伦理关系的刻画，并寻找作家在该作品中所体现的伦理思想。<br>
全文分为五章。<br>
第一章简要介绍了菲利普·罗斯以及《人性的污秽》这部作品，介绍了该部作品的国内外研究现状以及本文的研究方法—文学伦理学批评。<br>
第二章探讨了菲利普·罗斯在《人性的污秽》中在人与自我关系上求真的伦理主张。本文认为，通过描述小说主人公认识和重塑自己的过程以及自我塑造的失败，菲利普·罗斯表达了他在人与自我关系上求真的伦理思想。这里的真指的是人应该做真实的自己，不应为自己戴上假面具。<br>
第三章主要探讨菲利普·罗斯在人与他人关系上求善的伦理主张。在《人性的污秽》中，人与人之间的关系表现为人与人之间的相互迫害和中伤，罗斯谴责了藏于社会和人性中的污秽或恶，在他看来，正是这些污秽导致了人与人之间的相互迫害和中伤，并且借谴责这些污秽或恶表达了他在人与他人关系上对真诚、平等、客观公正、无私、宽容和博爱这些不同形式的善的推崇。<br>
第四章探讨了菲利普·罗斯在人与社会关系上求和谐的伦理主张。在《人性的污秽》中，人与社会的关系表现为人与社会的矛盾冲突。小说的主人公想要实现自我发展，无奈却受缚于美国社会。通过展现小说主人公的生存悲剧，罗斯表达了他对和谐的人与社会关系的向往。社会为人的发展提供更好的条件，与此同时，人充分发挥自己的才能并为社会的进步作出自己的贡献。<br>
第五章为结论部分。该部分对全文进行总结并讨论了本文所做研究的现实意义。罗斯关于这三种伦理关系的思考对读者在现实生活中处理这些关系具有指导意义。<br>
2.学位论文 刘瑞芳 丧失与回归：《反生活》中犹太身份的文化解读 2009
菲利普·罗斯是继索尔·贝娄、艾·巴·辛格和伯纳德·马拉默德之后文学成就最令人瞩目的美国犹太作家。罗斯因其早期小说侧重对犹太传统文化的嘲弄和对主人公犹太身份背弃的描写而倍受争议。然而，到八十年代后期，这种创作趋向发生了根本性的转变。这种转变集中体现在《反生活》中，具体表现为罗斯对犹太传统文化和当代美国犹太人民族身份的重新审视。所以，《反生活》在罗斯的创作生涯中具有转折性的意义。在这部小说中，罗斯刻画了朱克曼家族亨利和内森两兄弟对其犹太身份从丧失到回归的演变过程。该小说对犹太身份这一文化问题的探讨十分契合美国犹太移民研究学者马库斯·李·汉森二十世纪三十年代提出的“第三代回归模式”理论。有鉴于此，本文以汉森的回归模式理论为支撑，对《反生活》中所描写的犹太身份问题进行文化解读。
除绪论和结论外，全文共由四章组成。第一章追溯犹太民族身份意识的文化渊源，分析当代美国犹太人的身份危机问题和罗斯文学创作中所体现出的犹太身份意识。第二章主要分析亨利犹太身份从丧失到回归的转变过程及其原因。论文指出，亨利犹太身份的丧失主要表现在背弃犹太信仰和不遵守犹太传统道德之上。回到犹太故居以色列后，亨利则通过否定原来的美国身份、恪守犹太传统和重新认识本民族身份的方式使其犹太身份得以回归。地域的转换和对本民族文化传统的反思是其犹太身份回归的主要原因。第三章集中探究内森丧失和回归犹太身份的历程及其成因。对犹太传统的漠视、对客居地美国和犹太故居以色列的不同态度和对“割礼”这一犹太传统的违背体现了内森对犹太身份的背弃，而移居英国后的内森在反犹运动的影响下逐渐意识到自己的犹太身份并开始遵守犹太传统，最终回归犹太身份。地域的转变和在英国时因犹太身份而遭受的各种歧视则是导致其身份转变的主要原因。该小说所描写的犹太身份转换这一主题具有丰富的文化内涵，这是本文第四章重点探讨的内容。论文认为，亨利和内森犹太身份的丧失是对犹太传统文化的一种背弃，而其犹太身份的最终回归则是对犹太传统文化的一种反思与恪守。
罗斯在该小说中对这一主题的刻画折射出罗斯本人对犹太民族身份的重新审视，同时也彰显了作为犹太作家的罗斯对本民族传统文化的深刻反思，以及对当代美国犹太人生活境遇的深切关怀。本文对《反生活》中犹太身份这一主题的这种文化解读有助于学界从文化批评的视角理解和赏析这部晦涩难懂但确实值得深入研究的作品。
3.期刊论文 简·斯迈利.李红侠 25年来的美国小说 -译林2006,""(6)
今年(2006年)早些时候,《纽约时报书评》的总编萨姆·塔伦豪斯给几百位著名作家、评论家、编辑和其他文学大腕寄发了一封短信,请他们评选出"25年来出版的美国最优秀小说".最终公布的结果显示,文坛精英们心目中的最优秀小说是托尼·莫里森(Toni Morrison)的《宠儿》(Beloved,1987).排名第二至第五名的分别是:唐·德里罗(Don Delillo)的《黑社会》(Underworld,1997)、科马克·麦卡锡(Cormac McCarthy)的《血色子午线》(Blood Meridian,1985)、约翰·厄普代克(John Updike)的《兔子四部曲》(RabbitAngstrom:The Four Novels,1995)以及菲利普·罗斯(Philip Roth)的《美国牧歌》(American Pastoral,1997).
4.学位论文 李梁 论菲利普·罗斯的《遗产》 2009
《遗产——一个真实的故事》是美国犹太小说家菲利普·罗斯于1991年创作的一部纪实性小说。本论文从《遗产——一个真实的故事》文本出发，通过细读研究文本的方法，详细论述《遗产》较之其它美国犹太小说的不同之处，分析《遗产》作为一部纪实性小说的三大特点：一是菲利普·罗斯对传统犹太文化母题的继承和发展，罗斯在继承“父与子”和“祭祀——救赎”两大犹太文化母题的基础之上，对其进行了延伸和发展，进一步深化“父与子”的文化内涵，又从新的视野角度阐释犹太民族的“祭祀——救赎”文化；二是罗斯以写实手法打破犹太小说的传统意象，作为一部带有自传性质的小说，《遗产》具有高度的真实感和写实性，罗斯以写实的手法赋予了美国犹太小说创作新的意义；三是罗斯将各个历史时期犹太小说人物身份的演变发展集于一体，塑造了不同历史时期具有典型意义的犹太人形象，从而使整部作品的人物形象充实丰满，人物性格鲜明突出，人物身份具有一定的集中性和完整性。以上三大特点使《遗产》在美国犹太小说中的文化意义显得尤为深远。
5.学位论文 孙延宁 《美国牧歌》中的异化主题研究 2008
菲利普·罗斯是继索尔·贝娄和伯纳德·马拉默德之后最著名的美国犹太作家之一。《美国牧歌》是罗斯晚年创作的作品，被一些学者视为其所有作品中最具有思想深度的小说。
作为生活在美国的第三代犹太作家，罗斯在《美国牧歌》中通过对犹太家庭塞莫尔一家在犹太身份、家庭关系和宗教信仰方面的异化的描写，突出表现了三代犹太移民在美国主流文化影响下的生存状态及宗教信仰危机。据萨特的存在主义哲学理论，异化是西方现代人的一种生存状态。因此，本文试图运用萨特存在主义哲学中关于“异化”的理论探析《美国牧歌》中所体现出的异化主题。
全文共分为四章。第一章简述犹太民族被异化的历史背景以及美国犹太人的异化现状，并说明这种异化现象在罗斯作品中的体现。第二章主要分析《美国牧歌》中塞莫尔一家的犹太身份是如何在美国主流文化影响下被异化的，并指出其犹太身份在美国主流文化中被异化的必然性。第三章和第四章分别探析该小说中塞莫尔一家的家庭关系和宗教信仰的异化过程，认为除受到美国主流文化的影响外，塞莫尔一家对自身犹太传统道德观念的背弃更是导致其家庭关系和宗教信仰异化的直接原因。通过对《美国牧歌》中的异化主题的探析，本文试图说明罗斯对美国犹太人之生存状况的深切关怀，并论证犹太传统文化和美国主流文化对罗斯文学创作的深刻影响。本文对《美国牧歌》之异化主题的这种文化解读将有助于国内学界对罗斯晚年作品的研究。
6.学位论文 裴水妹 解构美国个人主义的宏大叙事：对《人性的污秽》的文化解读 2008
荣获各类奖项的美国犹太裔作家菲利普·罗斯享誉中外文坛，但目前国内对他的作品的研究还不多见。为数不多的一些批评也主要是分析罗斯作品中的种族、性别和写作技巧。而我的论文主要讨论罗斯小说《人性的污秽》中对美国个人主义的解构这一不大被重视的主题。本文首先从理论上界定了美国个人主义这一概念，继而重点分析小说《人性的污秽》中众多人物所遭受的个人主义的幻灭。本文由五部分构成，前言对个人主义进行理论界定，结语部分综述全文。
前言部分指出对《人性的污秽》中个人主义幻灭这一主题研究的目的及意义。
第一章略谈位于美国文化核心的个人主义。本章追溯美国个人主义发展的历史，也选取众多提倡个人主义的学者中的三位代表：拉尔夫·瓦尔多·爱默生(Ralph WaldoEmerson)，约翰·罗尔斯(John Rawls)和乔治·凯笛(George Kateb)，阐述他们各自的理论。
第二章主要分析小说中四个主要人物的个人主义的幻灭。科尔曼·希尔克和德芬妮·鲁斯是“美国梦”式个人主义的牺牲品；莱斯·法利则是普通美国爱国者个人主义的化身；甚至连体现在福妮雅·法利身上的“自我嫌恶”式的个人主义，也逃脱不了幻灭的悲剧。
第三章首先指出小说中的小角色也遭受了个人主义幻灭的煎熬，继而介绍了该部小说的创作背景，例如前总统比尔·克林顿与莱温斯基的性丑闻；而小说故事的发生地雅典娜学院就是整个美国的缩影。
结语将个人主义置于整个美国文学中看待，从而为个人主义寻求一个文学传统，进一步证明并强调个人主义的幻灭。
7.期刊论文 刘元直.姜涛.LIU Yuan-zhi.JIANG Tao 直面荒诞与自由的生命悲歌——"边境三部曲"的存在主义初探 -黑龙江教育学院学报2010,29(2)
科马克·麦卡锡(Cormac McCarthy,1933-)是一位获普利策奖的美国小说家,文学批评家哈罗德·布鲁姆(Harold Bloom)把他和托马斯·品钦、唐·德里罗、菲利普·罗斯一起,列为当代美国最主要的四大小说家.<骏马>、<穿越>、<平原上的城市>构成了科马克·麦卡锡的"边境三部曲".在三部小说中,麦卡锡记述了两名年轻的牛仔少年在美国西南部与墨西哥边境的生活状况.为了寻求理想的天堂,他们盘旋于世界的边缘.<边境三部曲>中充满了悲痛与荒诞,是一部精妙的美国边境挽歌.＃
8.学位论文 何朝辉 身份危机和女性表征：解读菲利普·罗斯《人性的污秽》中的主要人物 2008
菲利普·罗斯(1933-)，自从于1959年发表他的成名作《再见了，哥伦布》以来，到目前为止已经发表了28部作品，获得了除诺贝尔文学奖以外的几乎所有文学奖项，并以此确立了自己在当代美国文学界的伟大作家的地位。因此，他被人称为“在世的最伟大的美国作家”，当代美国文学界最杰出的作家之一，等等。然而，罗斯也被认为是当代美国文学界最具有争议性的作家之一。他的一些作品中譬如有关“性反常(错乱)”的内容和他对犹太人生活的尖锐而讽刺性的刻画激起了评论界巨大的争议。当有评论家在称赞罗斯运用语言的
艺术，他旺盛的创作力和独创性以及他的幽默感的时候，也有评论家认为罗斯的作品具有反犹、性反常和自我放纵的倾向。
一般认为，罗斯较多地利用他的犹太裔美国人的出身来探究一些譬如追寻自我身份、传统道德价值观与当代道德价值观之间的冲突以及小说与虚构之间的关系等的问题。然而，菲利普·罗斯是“这样一种文学少有现象——随着年龄的增长，其创作更为完善的一位美国小说家”。罗斯在他的晚年开始去探索一些新的领域，使他的每一本小说都体现出试验性，挑战性，甚至出现一些不同凡响的努力尝试。这些都可以在他晚年的“主题三部曲”中得到体现。这一三部曲是由《美国田园诗》(1997)，《我嫁了一个共产党员》(1998)和《人性的污秽》(2000)组成的。它们已经得到了评论家和学术界的高度评价。三部曲中的最后一本《人性的污秽》即是本文的研究对象。
在《人性的污秽》一书中，罗斯描写了一个把自己伪装成犹太人的非裔美国人科尔曼·西尔克的一生，即从他的青少年到成年再到他的垮台以及死亡的一生。通过以及围绕着西尔克的一生，罗斯给读者呈现了当代美国社会的现实图景，讽刺了隐藏在美国前总统比尔·克林顿性丑闻背后的“迫害精神”，谴责了“政治正确性”给无辜者以毁灭的狂热激情，批判了越南战争给个人和社会造成的伤害，更为重要的是，罗斯还揭示了存在于非裔美国人以及其他白人身上的身份危机，并最后指出所有这些都是占主导地位的白人话语导致的，它们都是美国社会及人类的污秽。
本文《身份危机和女性表征：解读菲利普·罗斯＜人性的污秽＞中的主要人物》，旨在研究这位伟大但有争议的作家在英语国家以及在中国的声誉和接受情况，有关《人性的污秽》这本小说的评论，体现在这本小说中的罗斯本人的风格，小说中男性人物的身份危机，女性人物的女性表征或女性特质，以及对这本小说的其他解读。论文简单地介绍了罗斯在英语国家和在中国的接受情况，详细地论述了有关《人性的污秽》的一些评论，同时也简单介绍了罗斯在这本小说中的跨越界限的写作并分析了他独特的个人风格。论文借用主要由杰弗雷·马德尔提出的有关身份的一些理论观点和由桑德拉·M·吉尔伯特和苏珊·古芭对文学中的女性形象的分类，从身份危机和女性表征的角度来分析小说中的主要人物。其目的在于通过研究小说中的这些主要人物，以分析罗斯是如何通过身份危机来描写他的男性人物以及如何通过女性表征或通过男性人物的凝视来刻画这些女性人物形象的。本文是由引言、三章和结论组成。
“引言”部分介绍了菲利普·罗斯在英语国家的极高声誉和在中国的较低的接受情况，罗斯晚年的艺术成就，《人性的污秽》的故事情节和有关论文的总的概述。
“第一章文学思考：关于《人性的污秽》的评论”简单地论述了罗斯在这本小说中的跨越界限的写作，仔细地分析了许多关于这本小说的英文和中文的评论，并解释了罗斯自己的写作风格是如何在这本小说得到体现的。跨越界限的写作使罗斯成为一个比以前更为成功的作家，这可以在关于罗斯和这本小说的评论中看出。这些批评观点从主题、人物刻画、社会背景、文体、语言和叙事技巧等方面来研究罗斯的小说，旨在称赞大师罗斯和这本非凡的小说。这一章的后半部分认为罗斯是以“纯粹的游戏和极度的严肃”的方式写就《人性的污秽》这本小说的，并结合小说的社会背景和几个主要人物来解释它是如何在小说中得到体现的，同时旨在向读者介绍小说的社会背景和几个主要人物的相关情况。
“第二章《人性的污秽》中的身份危机”提出了关于身份问题的一些总的理论观点，解释了发生在三个主要人物科尔曼·西尔克，莱斯特·法利和纳森·祖克曼身上的身份问题，其目的在于指出身份危机对理解这些人物和罗斯的小说都至关重要。
首先，本章探讨了关于身份的一些理论观点，包括它的定义，总体上影响一个人的身份的因素以及由杰弗雷·马德尔提出来的一些影响因素，它与责任和自由的关系，最后还探讨了集体身份与个人身份之间的关系。
其次，本章还深入探讨了主人公科尔曼·西尔克的身份伪装和他的悲剧命运。通过简单介绍关于(种族)身份伪装的定义，列举美国文学中由非裔美国作家和白人作家创作的伪装叙事，给小说提供了一种历史的和文学的框架，然后再详细地解释了科尔曼为什么以及如何在他的成年时期伪装成一个白人，揭示了科尔曼在伪装成白人之后所取得的成就，分析了他与福妮雅·法利，德芬妮·鲁克斯，莱斯特·法利和纳森·祖克曼之间的戏剧性联系，并最后说明他的身份伪装如何导致了他的悲剧命运。
再次，本章也讨论了战争带来的创伤和莱斯特·法利的身份危机。战争文学中的身份问题得到了简单概述，以指出战争可以改变一个人的身份，从而引出关于莱斯特被越南战争毁坏了的身份的讨论。莱斯特的心智和身份以及他的生活是如何被战争摧毁的，又采取了什么措施去拯救他和他的生活也得到了论述。罗斯对越南战争的批判也有提及。
最后，本章也详细地论述了叙述者纳森·祖克曼以何种方式体验了发生在他的男性身份上的转变。借助于他与科尔曼的交往和他对科尔曼性生活的兴趣，纳森，一个隐居者，重新开始了与生活的纠缠，并以一种替人感受的方式(由他的生理问题导致的)体验着科尔曼在他与福妮雅的情爱纠葛中所体验到的激情。
“第三章《人性的污秽》中的女性表征”根据桑德拉·M·吉尔伯特和苏珊·古芭对文学中的女性形象的分析并归纳为天使与魔鬼两种类型来研究小说中的三个女性人物的女性表征或女性特质。首先，本章探讨了福妮雅·法利的女性表征，认为她是男性凝视下的他者，解释了她如何既是一个天使般的女性同时又是一个魔鬼型的女性，详细论述了她与科尔曼·西尔克的关系和她作为一个女性在罗斯的写作中所呈现出的复杂性，与此同时，本章也分析了她的身份危机。其次，本章通过论述德芬妮·鲁克斯与科尔曼·西尔克的关系，她在她的祖国法国的过去经历，她对母亲的反叛，并通过描写她的疯狂的心境和她对待科尔曼的无法控制的行为，解释了为什么德芬妮的女性身份和性特征会处于危机之中以及是如何表现出来的，并说明了德芬妮为何是一个带有魔鬼型特征的复杂女性人物。最后，本章通过简单地刻画西尔克夫人作为妻子、母亲和一位护士的品行，她的聪明才干，并生动地描绘了她在儿子科尔曼的身份伪装中所经受的痛苦折磨，以指出她是一个不同于福妮雅和德芬妮这两个复杂女性的一个天使般的女性，从而清楚地阐明西尔克夫人，科尔曼的母亲，一个坚强的黑人妇女的女性表征。
“结论”部分在总的评价了菲利普·罗斯在他晚年所取得的文学成就之后重申了本文的观点，并介绍了如何从文化研究、体裁研究、叙事技巧以及“影响的焦虑”等角度来解读《人性的污秽》。因此，罗斯的深刻性和可读性可见一斑，尽管在罗斯的叙事中有一个明显的不足之处，即在他的文本中有太多罗斯自己的身影出现。罗斯自己的写作意图和这本小说的主题意义也在这一部分的结尾处得到简略提及。
菲利普·罗斯是当代美国文坛一位伟大的作家。他的《人性的污秽》是一本非同寻常的小说，其内容非常丰富，其主题非常深刻，其叙事技巧的运用非常老练，非常值得研究。体现在男性人物身上的身份危机和女性人物身上女性表征，给读者留下了深刻的印象，是理解小说的关键所在，将会激发起更多的读者对菲利普·罗斯及其小说的更大的研究兴趣。
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下载时间：2010年12月8日
