Doubly hidden, doubly exposed: master-narratives, counter-narratives, and the ethics of “passing” in The Human Stain
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Howard Sklar
Abstract
Philip Roth’s 2000 novel The Human Stain wades directly into the ethical and emotional complexities of “passing,” the attempt by light-skinned African Americans, particularly during the Jim Crow era of American history, to hide their identities in order to assimilate within mainstream White society. The novel presents the case of Professor Coleman Silk, a Black man passing as White, a hidden identity that is compounded by the particular “White” identity that Silk has adopted: Jewish. Roth has reduced the distance between his own (Jewish) experience and that of a passing African American by providing Silk with an adopted Jewish identity. Thus, Roth engages – in possibly irreconcilable ways – with two master-narratives. On the one hand, he counters a master-narrative of White supremacy by revealing the debilitating experience of hiddenness – both Black and, by implication, Jewish – as represented in one man. However, the novel also reinforces – without any implication of counter-narration – another master-narrative that presents “identity politics” primarily as a narrowminded attempt to police social discourse. These contradictory impulses ultimately muddle the rhetorical persuasiveness of a novel that both challenges one form of discriminatory discourse, while reinforcing another. While the fictional mode itself enables Roth to attempt to inhabit Coleman’s complex experience, the novel ultimately misses an opportunity to effectively challenge, through counter-narration, the ethical dimensions of that story.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Interview
- “Every war is a war of words and images”: an interview about Gaza with W.J.T. Mitchell
- Special Issue: Counter-narratives: A concept for narratology and the study of fiction?; Guest Editors: Per Krogh Hansen, Matti Hyvärinen and Sylvie Patron
- Introduction: counter-narratives: a concept for narratology and the study of fiction?
- Vicarious voices and positioning in marking counter-narratives in fiction
- Roadmaps for saving the world? Construction and use of master and counter-narratives in programmatic climate fiction
- Analyzing master and counter-narratives in the multilayered narrative communication of literary fiction
- Novel/nation: counter-narrative fiction, Israel-Palestine, and the politics of form
- Doubly hidden, doubly exposed: master-narratives, counter-narratives, and the ethics of “passing” in The Human Stain
- Generation storytelling: (Counter-)narrative identity in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
- Narratives of excision: master- and counter-narrative in Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence
- The counternarratives of Ulysses
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Interview
- “Every war is a war of words and images”: an interview about Gaza with W.J.T. Mitchell
- Special Issue: Counter-narratives: A concept for narratology and the study of fiction?; Guest Editors: Per Krogh Hansen, Matti Hyvärinen and Sylvie Patron
- Introduction: counter-narratives: a concept for narratology and the study of fiction?
- Vicarious voices and positioning in marking counter-narratives in fiction
- Roadmaps for saving the world? Construction and use of master and counter-narratives in programmatic climate fiction
- Analyzing master and counter-narratives in the multilayered narrative communication of literary fiction
- Novel/nation: counter-narrative fiction, Israel-Palestine, and the politics of form
- Doubly hidden, doubly exposed: master-narratives, counter-narratives, and the ethics of “passing” in The Human Stain
- Generation storytelling: (Counter-)narrative identity in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
- Narratives of excision: master- and counter-narrative in Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence
- The counternarratives of Ulysses
