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THE HUMAN STAIN p 328-332

 INTRO :
Nathan has just encountered Coleman’s sister Ernestine in the cemetary at Coleman’s funeral. He invited her at home to a meal and they have been talking for hours. Ernestine tells Nathan the life and relationships of Coleman and his family, especially his brother.
Nathan is just going to tell Ernestine about the spooks’ incident


 I)Difficulty to know people in deep – question of identity and truth

The first sentence of this passage is significant and captures the essence of the novel, that is the quest of identity: “ did you know before yesterday why it was….” this question actually means :do you the motives your brother had? do you know the thoughts, the feelings he had in order to explain what he did? Do you really know your brother”

The repetition 3 times of the verb “sound” p 328 “sounds from what you’ve told me…Sounds like…Sounds like…” points out the fact that what we learn and think to know about a person comes from a third person, this is rumour and you can never know what is true and what is not. Language is essential as it is a way to know the truth, to get to know people (Ernestine learns her brother’s past from Zuckerman) as well as it is a way to deceive you( Coleman was forced to resign because of the deliberate misinterpretation of the word “spooks”)

Then if you can’t trust language, how can know people are?
Ernestine identifies herself referring to her father “I am my father’s daughter M Zuckerman”: your family determines a part of what you are. Even if you reject your family as Coleman did, you are part of it, it influences you, whether you abide by it or you reject it. For example, We may think of Coleman’s interest in words, especially Classics that he inherited from his father. The people you love and look like partly defines you and tell you who you are “I saw now that if you’d put them (Ernestine and Coleman)side by side, it wouldn’t have been at all difficult to tell what Coleman was.
Of course, your family doesn’t determine completely who you are and this passage shows how it is difficult or even impossible to know the truth about other people: Ernestine herself doesn’t know her own brother. Even your family, the people you are the most close to don’t know you. Let us just think of Coleman’s concealing his actual skin colour to his wife and kids to prove it. But this is more complex than just not knowing who the other people are, the problem is also that you can’t even know yourself. That is the the eternal question human beings will ask themselves: who are you and actually who am I? a sentence in this passage expresses it brightly: ”one’s truth is known to no one, and frequently(…) to oneself least at all”p330









 II)This passage is important as it makes the reader know the character of Ernestine better.

What I found particularly striking is that Ernestine doesn’t react as a sister but as an American citizen, as a teacher. She doesn’t react with passionate familial feelings but with rationality , she doesn’t adopt a biased but an objective point of view, she makes a sensible analysis of the situation. We could entitle this passage “Ernestine’s lecture”
To me, Ernestine’s reaction is quite improbable. I find the way she talks and reacts unfit to Zuckerman’s revelation. She doesn’t really appears concerned about the injustice made to her brother specifically; at once, she extends it to the injustice made to Black and white people, to American people.
It is as if Philip Roth wanted to make a philosophical or economical criticism of some aspects of American s° through Ernestine, this extract doesn’t seemto belong to the novel

But let’s focus on “Ernestine’s lecture”

-1)As an American citizen: she seems indignant at (indignée par) the faculty’s injustice but reacts as a well-educated woman saying a lecture, a plea against (un plaidoyer contre) the university
She replaces the injustice made to her brother in its historical, social, cultural context

“here in America…” “What ever happened to the first Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America?” she dramatises the event by referring to the law of the whole country. This is quite specific to the American society, which the individual important more than in any other country. when you wrong one person, you are guilty in front of the whole society.

-2)As a teacher: she expresses herself fluently and she speaks to Coleman as she was lecturing him: “Shame on you(…)I’ll tell you in a minute(…)she said, gently enough, but to shame me nonetheless”
“Ernestine, in her element now, all professional correctitude and instruction”


TRANS:

It reveals much of Ernestine’s nature: she has dignity in her self-control and the ability she has to distance herself from what happened to her brother, to evaluate the situation rationally.
She tries to understand the evolution and the characteristics of the members of her family as the s° she lives in, that is, with objective thought
Indeed, she considers the spooks incident just as an element of the whole change affecting the American s°:”before everything changed, including Coleman Silk”








 III)“ The enormous failure”, “I often wrestle with this question of what everything used to be “deterioration”

-1)She refers to a time past she feels nostalgic for her parents’ day and well into hers, “it used to be the person who fell short now it’s the discipline” she has witnessed the degradation of her surroundings . what express the nostalgia of Ernestine in the text are:
-recurrent use of the verbal form “used to”: “what education used to be” “what East Orange used to be”
-repetition 8 times of the word “before” in 10 lines
-2)criticises the American s° as a whole( its institutions, its leaders, and as a csq its citizens), for her there is a degradation of life in general, of the quality in life and she takes her neighbourhood as an example to illustrate and reinforce her plea: “all of life was there in East Orange…All of life was there in East Orange” she laments how it changed people’s everyday life. she is quite pessimistic about how the American s° has evolved, what it has become from her childhood to the day of her brother’s funeral

-She seems to accuse Big Business of being responsible for those changes:
She explicitly accuses “the city fathers”, “the state” with harsh words: they “scared to death (…) they” eliminated
She distance the people who are responsible of it with disgust with the use of the pronoun “they”.

-quantity has replaced quality and money has replaced values. She expressed the loss of values in those words: “you can’t compare quality. It’s not the same”
-She refers to housing speculation ”the urban renewal” from which the Black community suffered “what that did to that community!”
-she reproaches American s° for not being colourblind. “everything there is black this and black that”
Either Blacks were discriminated against in the past or have now advantages but the pb is still there: there is no real justice so long as there is race-discrimination.
she claims justice and equality for every American, she shows her desire to be neutral, a quality asked for teachers. She doesn’t consider a man as Black man or a White man but simply as a human being “what difference, I would ask them, if it’s a black author or if it’s a white author?” her attitude is original in the fact that, as a Black, she accuses both White and Black people of their racism

-she also complains about how education has debased as well: ”today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege” “all these colleges starting their remedial programs to teach kids what they should have learned in the ninth grade”
She makes a plea for education and its important role, for her, education now lacks rigour

-As a csq, she is attending the decline of the individual: people become estrange one from the other and are less educated


Previously I criticised Ernestine’s way of speaking but the narrator also distances himself from what she says:
We can feel the irony which lies in the last sentence of this passage, when the narrator himself seems to speak and not on Ernestine’s behalf anymore: “and she lamented, it will never be the same again, not in East Orange or anywhere else in America” is he giving there a criticism of old age, as old people are said to be pessimistic about the future and nostalgic?



 To conclude, I may say that this passage is quite interesting for 3 main reasons:
- it enables the reader to know Ernestine better
-We can strongly feel how this novel has some historical contents as it is impregnated with the actual bitterness of some people in front of the evolution of Modern s° , with its racial, economical and ethical problems.
-But beyond all those practical questions(many debates could be raised about the advantages and shortcomings of the American s° and other developed countries ‘s°), what remains essential and is sensible throughout the whole novel is a more philosophical matter that is, the quest of identity: how can you better know yourself and others ????

héhé

ben non moi jm'en fous pas et je dis même THANKS Audrey !