Secrecy and Self-Invention: Philip Roth's Postmodern Identity in The Human Stain

Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), a fitting final part of the novelist's recent trilogy comprising American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), dramatizes powerfully the interplay of secrecy and self-transformation that determines human identity. Identity in its varied performative guises had always been a central problematic in Roth's fiction. For a novelist whose works register forcefully the solidity and specificity of the identifiable material world, a characteristic Roth shares with most nineteenth-century realist writers, the deconstructive turn of the narrative in this novel, which calls into question the essentialist notions of self, class, and racial identity, inaugurates a radical shift in direction. This decentering principle, not a wholly unfamiliar strategy in Roth's works, is notably at work in his earlier novels such as The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Counterlife (1986), Deception (1990), and Operation Shylock (1993). Telling a poignant tale of men and women driven by despair and angst in contemporary multicultural America, The Human Stain focuses on the constitution of identity and difference by negotiating the definition of self and the distortions it is subject to in the perception of the other. (2) Interestingly, the Rothian narrator's self-appointed role in reclaiming the complex identities of his protagonists by ascribing motives to their actions seems hardly objective because ultimately the images he carves of them are constructs of his own imagination. This constructedness of identity in Roth's fiction, if a typical postmodern discursive practice, not only disengages from the genre's characteristic reveling in dissipation and disputation of the self, but contrary to all expectations invests the self with the open-endedness of reinvention. The Human Stain effectively explores the transgressively audacious quest for freedom of its central characters that is shot through with the comedy of self-inventions and misreadings. If Roth's notion of identity is both fluid and protean, then the reader's conjecture of the novel as dissipating in a plethora of signifiers is paradoxically belied. On the contrary, provisional understandings of human action and character are reached that only serve to underscore the belief that human beings in the last analysis are unknowable. Curiously enough, the same secrecy and self-invention that continually recreate human identity not only aid in gaining tentative understandings but also radically complicate the given identity, empowering it to resist easy readings. In The Human Stain, Roth foregrounds the claim to an identity that refuses to be socially constructed and instead seeks privileging of its own narrative. Much as the novelist's sympathies are with such a claim, he is all too aware of the fact that suppressing the unconscious is not the same thing as breaking away from history. This essay seeks to examine how The Human Stain illuminates in particular such questions raised by the debates on identity in postmodern discourse. Before we analyze how the notions of secrecy and self-invention animate the performative identity in The Human Stain, it would be profitable to compare the notions of subjectivity that obtain in Roth with that of his fellow American writers, particularly Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, John Barth, John Updike, and Saul Bellow, as a means of contextualizing the author's canon. Riddled with conspiratorial contingencies, Pynchon's fictional universe is hardly the place for locating an identity imbued with personal or individual character. In DeLillean fiction, human identity is overridden with hyperreal presences of technology on the one hand and terror on the other. Often mediated through myth, Barth's delineation of identity is chimerical and inscribed with unending archetypal experiences. In Updike, identity is continually negotiated through the persona's sexual and religious experiences. Bellow portrays a fragmented identity that can be recouped only under susceptibility to the benign intimations of life. …

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