The human stain (novel)

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The human stain (English: The Human Stain ) is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth , which was published in 2000 by the publisher Houghton Mifflin . It marks the end of "American Trilogy" that match 1997 American Pastoral ( American Pastoral was opened) and 1998 with my husband, a Communist ( I Married a Communist ) was continued. The German translation by Dirk van Gunsteren was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2002 . In 2003, the film adaptation of the same name by Robert Benton was made .

content

In 1998, Nathan Zuckerman was 65 years old. Five years earlier, the writer withdrew from Manhattan to the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts , where he lived largely isolated after prostate surgery , having become incontinent and impotent . Two years ago he made the acquaintance of the now 71-year-old Coleman Silk, a professor of classical literature at nearby Athena College . When the well-respected Jewish classical philologist and former dean wanted to end his academic career with lectures, he made a momentous statement in which he ironically described two regularly absent participants at the seminar as "dark figures who shy away from the seminar light". The students unknown to Silk were black and his choice of words was interpreted as racism . The following hearings and power struggles within the university led to the exasperated abandonment of his professorship and, as he believes in a causal connection, to the death of his wife Iris from a stroke . The next day, angry Silk asked Zuckerman to write down the events. Although the writer did not accept the assignment, the two men became friends.

Two years later, the year when the Lewinsky affair cast a spell over America, Silk completed the manuscript himself, but is no longer interested in its publication. Meanwhile, a completely different passion has seized him: the affair with the 34-year-old Faunia Farley, a cleaning lady at his college. The young woman fled sexual abuse by her stepfather at the age of 14 and at 23 she married the Vietnam War veteran Lester Farley, who suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, beat his wife and continues to persecute her after the divorce. Farley blames his divorced wife for the deaths of their two children, who died after an electric fire set the house on fire.

The affair of the professor emeritus with his lover, who is not even half his age, does not remain a secret. First, the literature professor Delphine Roux, Silk's young opponent at college, protested in an anonymous letter against the relationship in which the old man, instead of female students, is now suppressing an illiterate woman who has been handed over to him . Then there is a violent argument with the psychopath Farley, who fear Silk for his life and his lawyer Nelson Primus advises to break off the relationship. Finally, Silk's four children turn their backs on their father when rumors arise that Faunia attempted suicide after an abortion forced by Silk .

On the eve of Silk's 72nd birthday, there is a definitive clash with Lester Farley, who has completely lost control of himself after visiting a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and attacks Silks' car with his pickup truck and drives him off the road. Neither Silk nor his passenger Faunia survived falling into a river. Rumors spread around the city that the accident was caused by oral sex while driving, while the police simply assume that the vehicle is driving too fast. Only Zuckerman suspects that a third party must have been involved, but his demand for clarification falls on deaf ears with Silk's children. They want to rehabilitate their father posthumously by hushing up his improper last love.

Only after her death does Zuckerman reveal secrets that have been kept for a long time in both of their lives. Faunia Farley kept a diary and pretended to be illiterate only because of her social status. Coleman Silk, on the other hand, was born a particularly light-skinned black man who assumed the identity of a white Jew after enrolling in the Navy as a white man. He revealed his true origins to his first girlfriend Steena Palsson, which overwhelmed her and led to the separation. He no longer dared to be frank with his wife Iris, and after deceiving her throughout the marriage, he even believed in the end that he had married her only because of her curly hair and the camouflage it offered for the appearance of their children . In order to realize his version of the American dream of freedom and independence from his origins, Silk went so far as to deeply offend his mother and to deny his own family, with whom he had no contact with the exception of his sister.

At Silk's funeral, Zuckerman gets to know his sister Ernestine, from whom he learns the life story of the deceased, which he ultimately processes into a book. He accepts her invitation to East Orange , New Jersey , where Silk grew up in the immediate vicinity of his own hometown Newark . On the way he recognizes Lester Farley's pickup on the side of the road. Zuckerman gets out and finds the Vietnam veteran ice fishing on a frozen lake . In the conversation between the two of them it becomes clear that Zuckerman knows that Farley killed Silk, and that Farley knows this, but also knows the name and place of residence of his counterpart, as he indicates with the ice auger. The writer hastily withdraws from Silk's murderer. He has the certainty that he will no longer be able to live in the area once his book is out.

title

The eponymous “human flaw” is described in the novel as the character that a wild animal takes from dealing with people: “The touch we humans leave behind a flaw, a mark, an imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excretion, seeds - the blemish is inextricably linked with existence. ”In this sense, for Ulrich Greiner, every character in the novel has its blemish, which he keeps hidden. Both Silk and his lover Faunia deny their origins. The “flaw” stands for what is “impure, what is wrong with people. He can never be at peace with himself. It always remains an indelible stain. ” With the“ stain of original sin ”, Paul Konrad Kurz brings a theological interpretation into play.

The English term “stain” also has very direct references, for example to skin pigmentation and thus to Silk's hidden secret, but also to “all-too-human stain”, the all-too-human presidential sperm stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress . Jeremy Green regards the "stain" in general as a sign of mystery and shame, but also as a characteristic of what makes a person beyond all social norms: his urges, his sexuality, his carnal desires. In this sense, the “stain” is also an unchangeable sign of people's resistance to all attempts at social re-education, which are expressed in a language of “shared responsibility”.

translation

The German translator Dirk van Gunsteren pointed out in the preface to the novel that the play on words about Coleman Silk's supposedly racist remark was not translatable. In the English original, Roth used the term "Spooks", which can be translated as "ghosts", but was also a derogatory term for black people until the 1950s. In order to save the ambiguity of the original expression in German, van Gunsteren turned to the phrase "dark figures". In 2007 van Gunsteren received the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize for his translation of Anglo-Saxon literature, in particular the transmission of Der Menschen Makel .

background

Some reviews of The Human Blemish saw an inspiration for the character Coleman Silk in the life of the American literary critic and editor of the New York Times, Anatole Broyard , who died in 1990 and who, as the son of Creoles , had passed himself off as a white man. These included Charles Taylor on Salon.com and Michiko Kakutani and Lorrie Moore in the New York Times . This thesis was also spread again and again in later publications. Philip Roth disagreed in a 2008 interview, stating that it wasn't until months after starting the novel The Human Stain that he found out about Broyards Passing through an article .

After the statement was also found in the English Wikipedia article about the novel, Roth published a letter in the New Yorker in September 2012 , in which he made it clear that there was no connection between his fictional character Coleman Silk and Anatole Broyard. The trigger for the novel was an experience of his friend Melvin Tumin, a sociology professor at Princeton , who made the same statement in his sociology class in the fall of 1985 that he put into the mouth of Coleman Silk in the novel. Despite a long academic career, in which he had just made a name for himself as a specialist on racial issues, Tumin, like Silk, was exposed to a witch hunt and had to defend himself against accusations of " hate speech " with several declarations .

Adaptations

In 2003 the film The Human Blemish was made , directed by Robert Benton . The main roles were played by Anthony Hopkins (Coleman Silk), Nicole Kidman (Faunia Farley), Ed Harris (Lester Farley) and Gary Sinise (Nathan Zuckerman). In the same year the SWR produced a radio play adapted by Valerie Stiegele. The speakers, directed by Norbert Schaeffer , included Jürgen Hentsch (Nathan Zuckerman), Michael Mendl (Coleman Silk), Sophie Rois (Faunia Farley) and Peter Dirschauer (Lester Farley). The radio play was published on CD by Der Hörverlag .

Awards

The human flaw won the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction (USA) and the WH Smith Literary Award (Great Britain) in 2001 and the Prix ​​Médicis étranger (France) in 2002 . In Germany, the novel stayed on the SWR best list for three months and reached first place in March 2002.

expenditure

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philip Roth: The human stain . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2003, pp. 271-272.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Greiner : The tyranny of us . In: The time . February 14, 2002.
  3. ↑ Paul Konrad Kurz : The human flaw. In: Voices of the Time . Issue 7, 2004, p. 497.
  4. ↑ Jeremy Green: Late Postmodernism. American Fiction at the Millennium . Palgrave, New York 2005, ISBN 1-4039-6632-X , p. 74.
  5. ↑ Philip Roth: The human stain . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2003, p. 4.
  6. ↑ Dirk van Gunsteren receives Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize. On: boersenblatt.net , August 28, 2007.
  7. ^ Charles Taylor: Life and life only . On: Salon.com , April 24, 2000.
  8. ↑ Michiko Kakutani : Confronting the Failures Of a Professor Who Passes . In: The New York Times . May 2, 2000.
  9. ^ Lorrie Moore : The Wrath of Athena . In: The New York Times. May 7, 2000.
  10. ↑ See for example: Mark Shechner: Roth's American Trilogy. In: Timothy Parrish (Ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-68293-0 , pp. 153-155.
  11. ^ Robert Hilferty: Philip Roth Serves Up Blood and Guts in 'Indignation' (Update 1) . At Bloomberg . September 16, 2008.
  12. ↑ See The Human Stain in the English language Wikipedia
  13. ↑ See Melvin Tumin in the English language Wikipedia
  14. ^ Wolfgang Saxon: Melvin M. Tumin, 75, Specialist in Race Relations . In: The New York Times, March 5, 1994.
  15. ^ Philip Roth: An Open Letter to Wikipedia . In: The New Yorker . September 7, 2012.
  16. ↑ The Human Stain in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  17. ↑ The human stain . in the audio game database HörDat .
  18. ↑ The list of the best of 2002 at SWR (pdf; 120 kB).