Different "Languages" in The Human Stain

Writing plays a crucial role in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Throughout the text, protagonist Coleman Silk encounters short snippets of text (letters or e-mails) that influence how he and the audience view their authors. Characters like his former coworker Delphine Roux have trouble hiding their true selves within the context of the written word; in a way, Delphine acts as Coleman’s mirror. They differ in that Coleman, who has been obscuring his racial identity for decades, does not engage in personal letter-writing (his only connection to his past is through infrequent phone calls to his sister). Perhaps if he had, his secret would not have died with him. In The Human Stain, letters (and the act of reading them) connect the unconscious with the conscious, which grants them the possibility of exposing deep-seated secrets. Because of their proximity to one’s inner thoughts and the potential for public exposure, this position gives letters a distinct role as a separate language in the novel.

How does writing distinguish itself from speaking? I argue Roth constructs it as a language distinct from spoken English—a genre of language, so to speak. In his analysis of Roth’s treatment of language in The Human Stain, Holroyd analyzes Roth’s novel in conjunction with Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious and language formation. He summarizes the following Lacanian framework:"Lacan’s conception of the unconscious is that it comprises only signifiers (word sounds) and not the signified (the concepts to which they refer); thus the unconscious is not identical with language as formulated within the conscious mind. This suggests the case for immersive linguistic play, after the fashion of Lacan’s therapeutic model whereby one follows a string of signifiers to the site of a repression, such that one may become an active, shaping agent in this material of which the unconscious is composed. A multilingual model of human communication and expression emerges from this linguistic play, a model where—since signifiers comprise the substance and mechanism of repression—engagement in other languages can be therapeutic, in both escapist and more deeply psychoanalytical senses (54)."Operating under this conceptualization about the unconscious vs. the conscious (where someone might have some agency over their unconscious, but it remains separate), we can look at the linguistic properties present in The Human Stain more fluidly. Holroyd incorporates Lacan into his analysis by arguing that Roth creates languages out of expressions of physicality, the most prominent being boxing and sex. These languages serve as avenues for Coleman to “discover the possibility of emotional release through physical action, allowing him to see through a more objective, dispassionate lens” (Holroyd 64). I propose we analyze written language through a similar framework, where writing can allow characters to explore/escape from their identities, analytically reconciling their conscious and unconscious. Delphine embodies this idea with the anonymous letter she sends to Coleman that reads: “Everyone knows you’re sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age” (Roth 38). Coleman can ascertain her identity straightaway—he notes that “she hadn’t made any effort…to put him off the trail by falsifying her hand” (38). We later see Delphine’s process as she writes that letter (or at least what Nathan presumes is her process). She at first uses “big block letters that no one would recognize as hers” (Roth 196). Yet, “three nights later…[she] went to her desk to crumple up and discard and forget forever the piece of paper…and instead, leaning over the desk, without even seating herself…wrote in a rush ten more words that would suffice to let him know that exposure was imminent” (Roth 196-7). The words pour out of Delphine without any careful planning, giving us a glimpse into her unconscious. She laments, “Of course that wasn’t her rhetoric. It couldn’t be. That’s why she’d used it,” when, of course, while she was writing, she did not think of her rhetoric at all (Roth 197). Later, when she accidentally sends the e-mail describing a man resembling Coleman for a dating advertisement, she says, “She was embarrassed to send it and didn’t want to send it and she didn’t send it—yet it went,” again demonstrating the power of her unconscious while she writes (Roth 279). That snippet of writing and that push of the send button more clearly reveal Delphine’s feelings than any of her conscious musings or claims. Writing operates as a different genre of language than speaking precisely because it can give us this glimpse into the unconscious.

Focusing on writing as that language provides a new wrinkle that Holroyd does not deal with, however. Writing and speaking are more infelicitous than the physical language genres he analyzes. They leave more room for deceit and exposure, especially because of the interaction between conscious and unconscious associated with writing. Sinead Moynihan claims that Roth portrays “the act of writing as profoundly ambivalent: as radical and complicit, as revelatory and obfuscatory, as creative and degenerative” (135). Roth presents writing as unstable, emphasized by the letters present in the novel wherein people cannot hide their true selves. For instance, Coleman frequently sees Delphine’s true self exposed in her writing. Not only does he guess her identity as the author of the “everyone knows” note, but also, during her interview at Athena College, finds that her observations about “the internal contradictions about the work of art” resemble her rambling in the “autobiographical essay” she sent as part of her application (189-190, emphasis mine). José Carlos del Ama goes so far as to argue that “Coleman Silk embodies everything Roux has not been able to become and everything she longs for” (105). She longs to go through life able to cultivate a constructed identity that her colleagues, friends, and family cannot see through or penetrate. To accomplish this feat, Delphine often uses her writing to hide her identity and true thoughts. However, her writing cannot conceal that hidden truth from Coleman. Instead, it interrupts that fictionalized construction of her identity. Reading written communication can also lead to similar mistakes and revelations of unconscious thoughts and desires. When he first begins passing, Coleman finds a poem his white girlfriend, Steena, wrote, and at first misreads the word “neck,” thinking she wrote “n---o” instead (Roth 112). His misreading of the note demonstrates the untrustworthiness of our readings of written texts. Our unconscious projections might reveal our deepest, most hidden fears. When Steena does find out Coleman is Black, she leaves him, but years later writes him a letter, wherein “Coleman can read the trajectory of a life he did not live, a counternarrative in which he would have had to conceal nothing” (Wilson 144). Instead of projecting his unconscious fears onto this note, Coleman projects his deepest desires, even if his interpretation was not Steena’s original intention. Thus, through writing (and reading), we connect our unconscious feelings to our conscious ones, but that leaves opportunities for mistakes—which could be fatal for Coleman, a man with such an extensive secret. (Writing will not always occupy this position. See this analysis of coded language and discussion of white academia to consider why Coleman’s academic writing would not expose him in the same way as more personal letter writing.)

During his time passing, Coleman never engages in such risky letter writing. He does not offer the inner workings of his unconscious to anyone. (Perhaps he only releases that while partaking in the physical languages Holroyd explores.) He is too careful about concealing his greatest secret. His only connection to his past comes with phone conversations with his sister, which leave much less room for potential exposure since they are less permanent than a written letter. When applying these ideas to the other novels of focus, I believe the letters present in The House Behind the Cedars and Passing contribute to both Rena Walden and Clare Kendry’s inabilities to pass. Although Charles W. Chesnutt and Nella Larsen do not portray languages so ambiguously as Roth (Holroyd claims such an investigation is characteristic of Roth’s novels, because he frequently explores a “conflict between a desire to champion the individual over societal codes and convention” which “often manifests itself” in “an ambivalence about language itself”), the letters they depict still give a greater opportunity for their protagonists’ exposures (Holroyd 53). Thus, the possibility for writing as a separate “language” might be, in this case, unique to Roth, but its implications can apply to The House Behind the Cedars and Passing.

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