The Human Stain and Passing as Metanarratives

Looking at individual letters in The Human Stain and Passing proves a fruitful exercise when examining the role of written communication within them. However, we could perhaps read both novels as letters, or at least as the musings of a specific person—Nathan Zuckerman or Irene Redfield, respectively. (Because it is told from the perspective of an unnamed omniscient narrator, we cannot analyze The House Behind the Cedars in the same way.) Philip Roth and Nella Larsen closely cultivate metanarratives where the novels act almost like letters to the reader—like a letter, these novels come from the perspective of a narrator who has not promised to tell the truth, only that “they will communicate with their reader” (Jolly and Stanley 92). Thus, we can extend our analysis of letters in the text to each novel’s structure in general, emphasizing letters’ cruciality to both texts.

Nathan is more obviously an untrustworthy narrator than Irene because he describes deeply personal exchanges, feelings, and thoughts he could never have known the details of. Much of the novel thus feels unreliable, although Nathan purports that he tells a true story. Nathan himself complains that “the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out” but “there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies” (Roth 315). He recognizes that we will never fully understand our neighbors—that everyone at least somewhat builds their lives upon secrets and lies—yet writes The Human Stain, wherein he feels he has uncovered “the essence,” the truth, about Coleman Silk’s life and death (Roth 359). Calvin Hoovestol grapples with this idea—he claims that “such metafictional intertextuality destabilizes Zuckerman’s rickety narrative authority,” making truth “elusive” (35). He also asks his readers to consider if “Zuckerman’s fiction reality [is] our best hope for comprehending life’s paradoxical conundrums about other people and their secrets” (38) and “why…we continue reading if our narrator admits total ignorance” (43). I believe we can answer this question by analyzing the test using the framework through which we might analyze a letter. Nathan Zuckerman intertwines his conscious and unconscious, relying not only on the rational but also on his irrational projections and ideas. When we read The Human Stain from this perspective, the layers of paradoxical secrecy and lying inherent in identity—embodied in Coleman’s racial passing—become deeper. Instead of knowing Coleman’s closest secrets, we only know Nathan’s assumptions of what Coleman’s secrets might be based on his conversations with Coleman’s sister, Ernestine. Similarly, we do not know if Nathan ever gained access to Faunia’s diary (though we can presume he did not, since her stepmother, claiming it “is best for you” (Roth 298) refuses to give it to Faunia’s father or Nathan). Using that diary, Nathan may have learned more intimate details about her life—but regardless, he could not have known the level of detail he presents in The Human Stain. This confusion emphasizes Roth’s message that we will never really have “you or your neighbor figured out” (Roth 315). In The Human Stain, we can only figure it out by decoding Nathan’s unconscious, just as we decode the unconscious/conscious paradigm intertwined in the letters in the novel.

Although not quite so immediately unreliable, Passing must also be read from the perspective we take when decoding the symbolic and textual meaning of letters. Throughout the novel, we only understand Clare from Irene’s perspective, “allowing Clare only secondary characterization” (Henderson 24). Unlike Nathan, Irene does not claim that she understands Clare’s inner-thoughts; rather, she omits them completely, leaving most details about Clare and her feelings hidden from the reader. Mae Henderson argues that, in the context of receiving Clare’s first letter, “Clare becomes the text that Irene must learn to decipher, so Irene, in turn, becomes the text to be deciphered by the reader” (23). Because Irene tells the story (presumably after the novel’s events have occurred), we read something akin to a letter Irene has sent to us, which in turn describes her decoding Clare through another letter. As in The Human Stain, these layers add confusion and textual ambivalence when we attempt to determine the “truth” about the novel. We must look between the lines to fill in these narrative gaps fully. When she examines these questions, Gabrielle McIntire argues the following:"Passing still takes us to the largely inarticulable limits of both race and desire—how they mean, and how they function together—by performatively embedding confusions about the legibilities of race and desire within a commensurately riddled narration where none of its plot-lines or dominant preoccupations (with the ethics and allures of passing, with anxieties about an extramarital affair, or with the lesbian-erotic subtext) submit to a definitive reading (778)."Thus, Larsen leaves these gaps—enhanced by Irene’s unreliable, limited perspective—to tie the structure of the novel to her commentary about race and sexuality. The letters within Passing function in a similar way. This connection between letters and the overall narration of the book indicates that both play a vital, interrelated role in Larsen’s commentary about the paradoxes inherent in race and passing.

These metanarratives, in their resemblance to letters and thus to passing, heighten their authors’ messages and invite new, alternative readings of the text. They call into question which “truths” we can trust and if any truths about their characters exist at all. Just as racial passing makes the construction of race more open-ended, these metanarratives make our readings and understandings of the novels more open-ended, too.

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