Mirroring and Alterity

Note: Pick one of the following three prompts to answer (Mirroring and Alterity, Badiou and Identity, or Everybody Knows).  As always, 200-400 words, due by 10pm Monday 3/14.

We discussed the concept of "Mirroring" and "Alterity" in lecture yesterday, specifically w/r/t the scene in which Nelson Primus berates Coleman ("Faunia is not from your world" p. 80).

What other examples of mirroring do you see throughout the novel?  What role do these mirrors play?  What might Roth be saying about self-awareness through the dramatic irony of so many mirror characters/scenes?  Further, we discussed how Primus's attitude toward Faunia mirrors Coleman Silk's attitude towards Tracy Cummings, but does Primus's condemnation of Coleman's association with Faunia mirror something else, as well?

Prompt Two "Badiou and Identity"

Analyze/react to the following argument:

As pointed out in Badiou’s Metapolitics, “All resistance is a rupture with what is.  And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself” (7).  It can certainly be argued that Coleman’s fight with the department over the “spooks” incident—the other event which changed the course of his life—began with his fight against himself, his resistance against, or avoidance of the problems in early to mid-twentieth century America with respect to the race he was born into.  This rupture wasn’t just over fighting against being born black, it was fighting to be free of such labels of race at all.  That he chose to live the lie of a white (Jewish) man was due to the outside world’s insistence on such labels.  He had to have one, so he picked the one that allowed him to live more freely than had his previous label; the label that alleviated some of the oppression he felt by being a member of a small group by no choice of his own.

                In effect, by the end of his life, Coleman Silk’s identity is hardly able to be broken down to one simple, direct answer.  Rather, much like in Badiou’s “ontology of pure multiplicity,” he is not a one, Coleman Silk is instead a multiple “radically without oneness, in that [he himself] comprises multiples alone.  What there is exposes itself to the thinkable in terms of multiples of multiples… in other words, there are only multiples of multiples” (Theoretical Writings 47-48).  He remains a Classics professor to some, a Jewish man to others, an ex-lightweight boxer undefeated in the gyms of Newark to those who knew him in high school, a racist to two perhaps misguided students, a black man who turned his back on both his family and race, a father who was making a fool of himself with a younger woman, a man who could never get over the grave injustice done to him by the university, and so on and so on. 

Can there be one singular, consistent identity for such a man?  Or, as it seems, should the critic trying to make sense of it all relent and give up on trying to establish a singular identity?  In the ontology of pure multiplicity, Badiou states, “We will not concede the necessity of reintroducing the one.  We will say it is a multiple of nothing.  And just as with every other multiple, this nothing will remain entirely devoid of consistency” (48).  Coleman Silk’s identity, then, becomes that of a chimera—a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-experiential being conflated into a multiple of nothing.  Or, in other words, a human being.

Prompt Three "Everybody Knows"

"Three rows down from me, Coleman, his head tipped slightly toward hers, was talking to Faunia quietly, seriously, but about what, of course, I did not know.

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows... How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliche that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an uncliched way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing."

-The Human Stain, 208-9

Analyze this quote in terms of the novel at large.  Things to focus on might be: 1) The role of speculative narration and mirroring (w/r/t Nathan Zuckerman).  2) How this quote shapes the narrative.  3) How the role of the speculative narrator complicates/adds to the reader's conception of Coleman Silk.  4) The knowing/not knowing paradox.