Philip Roth: "The Stain of Human Nature"
Kikuko.
In recent years, the name of American novelist Philip Roth will appear frequently before the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded. The most vocal this year is said to be the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk; Ross is still on the list, and experts speculate that his probability of winning is 11 to 1. I just read Ross's series of novels featuring David Kepesh a while ago. After watching the movie "The Human Stain" (The Human Stain), I went back to read the novel "The Human Stain". According to experience, many rich details are missed when a movie is condensed. After watching a good movie, you will not be disappointed when you go to the original work.
(1) Public Trial: The Great Exposure of Personal Privacy
Philip Roth's (1933-)
novel is set in 1998, the year Clinton was impeached. Looking back today, eight years later, when the entire United States and even the world stared at the president's pants and Monica's skirt, how innocent, how prosperous, how carefree that year seemed... The Soviet Union fell and the world was at peace , the economy is prosperous, the technology is developed, the stock market remains high, the stock is soaring and not falling... Only in a peaceful and prosperous world, people talk about food and drink.
Ross said, in fact, the little bit of shit between Clinton and Monica, to put it bluntly, was just a little joke between middle school students, but it inspired the most traditional American public entertainment: adulterers and prostitutes. A public trial is conducted, and the moral authority of the judge comes from the "trial spirit" described by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Ross quotes Hawthorne in many places. The writer in the novel lives in seclusion in western Massachusetts, only a few miles from the place where Hawthorne once lived for a short time, suggesting that American society is still imposing religious and moral judgments on people.
It is against this backdrop that The Stain of Humanity begins its story. Before the story is told, the author reminds readers to be lenient, and the protagonist Coleman Silk must have something to be forgiven. Because, under the microscope and spotlight of public opinion and moral judgment, what can only be displayed is the "stain of human nature".
The description of the novel is multi-angle, sometimes directly stated by the protagonist, but the main narrator throughout the book is the author Nathan Zuckerman, a friend of the protagonist Coleman Silk. The reason for the whole story is because Coleman used an ambiguous word: Spooks. Because of saying this, all of Coleman's colleagues and superiors, including those young black professors who he personally supported, refused to give him even the slightest moral support. Overnight, he became a loner, having to face various committees and keep writing "ideological reports". For this ambiguous statement, he lost his job, lost his wife, lost what he had worked hard for all his life, lost his human dignity, and became a stain on humanity.
Coleman was in disrepute, and his inner conflict, depression and guilt had nowhere to go. Two years later, Coleman met Fonia, a thirty-four-year-old cleaner. He was seventy-one himself, more than twice her age. He knew why he needed her: his relationship with her seemed to be the only connection he had with the world, and because of her, he no longer hated the injustices of the world, nor wrote his own stories madly. She is also a loser, failing too much and asking for nothing. When they are desperate, their only happiness is the most primitive happiness of human beings.
Like some other male writers, Ross lets women use sex to comfort a desperate man. Thomas in Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" was politically purged and his career was hopeless, so he had to have fun in the gentle village, and had sex with more than 200 women in six years. Ross's own Kapehi series, on the other hand, is about a literature professor's sexual experience from youth to old age, and sums up a whole set of methods to seduce young women in literature. However, his description of the old man is the most shocking: when he is dying, the old man yearns for the pleasure of the young woman's body, and the sexuality of the young woman from the needs of the senses and emotions has now risen to a spiritual and religious height, because Death is looming at any moment.
King David in the Bible was old, so he let a group of young and beautiful maidens warm him with their bodies. He still felt cold. With Viagra, at least he can take some action, although the result of the action is still cold, because death is still waiting not far away.
In the novel, the author repeatedly emphasizes that Coleman was a sports star when he was young, and now, even in his seventies, he looks forty from behind. In the movie, the image of Anthony Hopkins is too old. There's only Gregory Peck and Paul Newman to play an old man who is still sexually attractive: they still have lines in their faces, and their muscles don't pull down even as they get older. Not Hopkins. Especially in the scene in the movie, when he sits on the bed watching Nicole Kidman dance naked, he looks extremely tired, tired, and instinctively produces a kind of physical disgust.
(2) Race: Are they ghosts?
Coleman has been a dedicated professor of classics for more than 20 years. Later, a new headmaster came to the school, named him the provost, and supported him in making a drastic reform of the school: forcing all teachers to report their scientific research results - many teachers I have only published the "Notes" recovered from my doctoral dissertation in my school's journals. I use lecture notes from many years ago. Some special people don't come to school for a week, and I don't participate in any academic or school affairs. Meeting. Coleman forced some hopelessly lazy old gangsters to retire early, and recruited some young, energetic assistant professors from prestigious schools with the desire and ability to compete. In this way, the school's atmosphere was really cleaned up.
The newly arrived principal is favored by a prestigious school and chooses Gao Zhi, leaving Coleman to the wolves. The term "Spooks" provided the best excuse for those who hated his reforms to surround him.
After Coleman's reforms were "successful", he was complacent and decided to step down from his administrative position as provost to continue teaching full-time. He taught a class for five weeks, and at each roll call, two students were absent. In the sixth class, he called again as usual, but they were still not there. So he joked, where are they, are these two really there, Arethey spooks?
Here, the meaning of the word Spook he said is obviously the more commonly used meaning of "ghost" and "ghost". Unfortunately, at a certain point in the 1960s, Spook used to be a derogatory term for black people, and the two absent students happened to be black. Although they never showed up in class and the professors had no idea they were black, they formally protested to the school. The school also knew that the professor's original intention had nothing to do with the student's race, but it still seriously started a formal investigation.
Racial discrimination, like adultery, is the name of a public trial.
At the time of the school's investigation, Coleman's official racial identity was Jewish. Once upon a time, Jews themselves were objects of discrimination. In 1948, Jews were dissatisfied with the restrictions on the proportion of Jews in universities, especially famous universities, and established their own university in the suburbs of Boston, named after Jewish Justice Brandeis. In the novel, one of Coleman's sons attended Brandeis University. Over the past few decades, the status of Jews in American society, especially in cultural institutions, intellectuals and universities, has risen day by day, and they have become people who can discriminate against others.
Ironically, Coleman was not Jewish, but just a black man. He has been living this lie since he was in his twenties. Soon at the beginning of the novel, Ross quietly confesses Coleman's black identity.
Through Coleman's memory, Ross described the racial conditions of American society in the late and early postwar period. Coleman's father, a well-mannered gentleman with a passion for Shakespeare, lost his eye doctor's practice in the Great Depression and had to work as a train attendant. Because he is black, he suffers daily humiliation that is difficult to tell his family.
Coleman is brilliant, smart, healthy and ambitious. However, when he went to the brothel as a sailor, the prostitute glared at him and said, "You're a nigger, aren't you?" and two burly men threw him out. His Icelandic/Norwegian girlfriend, who lived with him for two years without knowing his ethnicity, found out the truth, cried and said, "I can't do it", and has since disappeared. Coleman hopes to get rid of the various specific restrictions and invisible humiliation brought to him by being a black person, and begins to conceal his black identity by taking advantage of his paler skin. After the Spook incident, the author allows us to enter his heart and let him cowardly defend his actions while ruthlessly self-blame and repent.
There is an important segment in the novel, which is preserved in the film without any abridgement. Coleman told his mother that he was getting married and that the woman was white (Jewish). He had told the woman that his parents had passed away. The mother said calmly: Well, I know, I will never see my daughter-in-law, never see my grandson. You'll tell me where I'll be passing the kids on some day, what time or what time you'll be waiting at the train station, peeking at them, and, you know, I'll be there waiting.
Since then, Coleman has never seen his mother again. He evaded the human rights movement for black emancipation under the pretext of becoming an independent individual from his race, severing ties to the past. He was "whiter than white", married a white wife, and studied the most white subject - Greco-Roman literature. However, it wasn't enough to hide his black identity, everyone had to have a racial background, so he made up a lie that his grandfather was Jewish from Russia.
The reason Clinton was impeached was because of sex, the formal legal basis for impeachment was not sex, but because he lied. Likewise, in The Stain of Human Nature, it looks like Coleman is being tried for racist remarks when, in fact, the real reason he is being tried is also lying.
His wife did not know his true identity until death; and his younger son, who seemed to know his lies instinctively, had a hatred for him from birth. The mother, the wife and the son, plus his own remorse, became the supreme judge of his crimes.
(C) aryl Virginia: All focal point for social issues
Antony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, Nicole Kidman as Faunia Farley in "The Human Stain", Directed by Robert Benton, 2003
"The Scarlet Letter" in the heist, the subject After the humiliation and judgment of the church and the public, spiritual and moral redemption was finally achieved. And Rose's heroine, Fonia, is a character who has experienced failure.
Ross assigns many of the social problems of American society to Fania. When Fonia was a child, her parents divorced, her stepfather sexually molested her, and when she was fourteen, he attempted to rape her, so she ran away from home and wandered around. Later, she married her husband, hoping to have children and live in peace and contentment, but their dairy farm business was not good and ended in bankruptcy. After their divorce, Fonia and her boyfriend were on a tryst when the shack she and her children rented caught fire, killing both of them.
As if these weren't heavy enough, Ross wrote Fonia's husband again as a Vietnam veteran. Rice went to Vietnam twice to fight. After returning home, he was out of tune with his home country and his family, and never recovered from the trauma of the war. The Vietnam War was the biggest defeat in modern American history and the biggest psychological trauma to the American public, and Rice specifically symbolized this huge psychological scar. The broken family and the death of the child pushed him to an angry madness and despair. He regularly blocked and harassed Fonia, blaming her for killing his children.
Ed Harris plays Rice in the movie. He didn't take many shots, but he left an unforgettable impression.
Ross goes to great lengths to burden Fonia with social problems in order to emphasize her impoverished and cornered status, making the social differences between her and Coleman, combined with the age difference, an obstacle to their public interaction. He wanted to prove that it was because of these differences that they were "sinners" like Hester and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, condemned and tried by public opinion and by the institutions of society: The dean of his department wrote him anonymous letters accusing him of sexually exploiting a poor, illiterate woman half his age; his children ignored him, and her husband kept watch and track them.
However, my feeling is that no matter how tragic the author writes about Fonia's life, the age and social differences between her and Coleman are not enough for them to experience as much social pressure as the author describes : After all, they started dating after Coleman's wife died. In 1998, a sexual relationship between a widower and a divorced woman, despite differences in age and social status, was condemned, compared with the religious and moral trials that Hawthorne's characters faced a century and a half earlier. , it's really a little dwarfed.
In addition, Nicole Kidman came to play Fonia, and despite her good acting skills, she was still too beautiful, too sexy, and too charismatic in the eyes of audiences who knew her well. In fact, in Rose's novel, she is a tired and broken woman, and her tiredness and brokenness are the necessary conditions for this novel: tired and broken, she accepts the cornered Coleman, and the two are sympathetic to each other. , resulting in a feeling of "death and then life", she is beautiful, but it reduces the tragic atmosphere.
(4)
Towards the end of the sympathetic novel, Ross said through the mouths of the characters: The novel he wrote was about people and people's problems, not an unsolved case story about "who is the murderer".
That's how I feel when I read it. Ross explained Coleman's life secrets to readers early on, but the characters in the novel don't know it yet, and they need to slowly find out these secrets as the story develops. For the author, the most important thing is not the plot reasoning, but the detailed description, describing the American society at the end of the twentieth century, and the many social problems faced by people in American society. Some chapters read like sociology rather than fiction. Years later, when people read this book, they can still understand what kind of problems are plaguing people living at this moment.
However, it is also a literary work after all, and the way of expressing these issues is not abstract discussion, but more importantly, it reflects these social issues by depicting vivid characters and their behaviors and psychological conflicts. Each character, imprinted with the environment in which they live, represents a social issue: Coleman: racial and ethical issues; Fonia: family, marriage, and child education; Rice: Vietnam War; Director: The difficult situation of intellectual women in academia at a high altitude.
After reading the novel, I have to admit that the film adaptation was very successful. Ross often let the characters in the novels talk at length, and he doesn't mind using the characters' mouths to express his philosophical thinking, moral commentary and political commentary. Even the supposedly illiterate Fonia and the vulgar Rice can be like a university professor. They talked like that. Movies can't do that. The adapted film rarely has overly tedious discussions and dialogues, and the cuts of characters are also very appropriate. Except for Nico? Kidman's image is too beautiful, and the film successfully reflects the heaviness and helplessness that runs through the novel.
What exactly is "The Stain of Human Nature", the author used Fonia's mouth to say, that is, after people leave nature, human nature has been destroyed and polluted. A crow, living in a bird cage for a long time, has long lost its natural instinct and cannot return to live in the natural environment. Human society has polluted the beautiful nature. At the end of the novel, the writer Zuckerman is on a frozen lake and meets Rice, who is ice fishing alone there. Rice, who was usually manic and angry, seemed rational, calm and gentle at this moment. He said that this place is isolated from the world, there is no harassment from others, and it is still a clean paradise. If he has a son (if his son is not burned to death), he will bring him here and teach him to fish.
Here, I read some Emersonian New England Transcendentalism. Human society and people are imperfect. Only by returning to nature can we remove the stains of human nature and restore our pure nature. But the author's attitude toward this incompleteness is not a condemnation: all these characters in the novel, whether it is Coleman who tells the big lie, or the aggressive female department chair, or even the ruthless and crazy Vietnam veteran, once the author describes them carefully and meticulously hearts, you cannot fail to develop heartfelt sympathy and compassion for them. Sometimes the author tentatively looks at the characters with a microscope while describing them. However, he just faltered and stopped tracking, because he wasn't really trying to unmask them to embarrass them, but to remind us that we, the imperfect people, don't stand up to the cold scrutiny of a microscope. And Judgment: Our freedom and dignity have an important premise - privacy.
Instead, the author repeatedly denounces social intolerance. Occasionally, the author describes a character in the book in a very unbearable manner through the mouths of others. When he took us to approach them, he realized that he was not a beast of a flood or a wolf, but an ordinary person with flesh and blood who struggled hard. The flaws of these people are innate to human beings, and they are also the imprint of the era they lived in. The author tells us their stories, so that we can observe here, how they bear various heavy burdens, Struggling to survive.
At the end of the novel, it can be seen that there is also some intentional imitation of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter". The author has never definitively concluded whether Coleman himself led his lovers to death in confession, or whether a jealous ex-husband conspired to murder them. In Hawthorne's novel, Hester's lover dies when he is shown in public, but Hester is redeemed. It seems that modern man has not yet found a way to salvation.
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