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