One of the ways of reading Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” is to read it as a critique of those who firmly believe they are morally superior and therefore have a right to indict others for their political incorrectness.

These self-righteous people do not hesitate to ruin other people’s lives and careers without remorse. “The Human Stain” is a story of a man who is wrongfully accused of racism and sexual misdemeanors by those who believe they are politically correct and morally impeccable. Coleman Silk, a professor of classics at Athena College, is summoned to a hearing after he is accused of uttering racial slurs in his class.

The thing is that he had referred to two students who have never come to class from the first day of school as “spooks.” While calling the roll, Silk says, “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”
“Spook,” though it primarily means a specter, is also derogatory slang referring to African-Americans, Silk is immediately criticized and condemned as a racist. Silk protests, “I was referring to their possibly ectoplasmic character. Isn’t that obvious? These two students did not attend a single class.

“That’s all I knew about them. I was using the word in its customary and primary meaning: ‘spook’ as a specter or a ghost. I had no idea what color these two students might be.”

Unfortunately, however, nobody listens to him and he resigns from his job. Shocked by the news, Silk’s wife passes away from heart failure. Silk’s life and career are completely ruined.

The irony is that Silk is known to be a Jew, another race that used to be subject to racial prejudice in American society until the 1950s. Furthermore, the novel gradually reveals that Silk is a white skinned African-American who had pretended he is a Jew. Therefore, the accusation loses its validity and becomes sheer nonsense.

Yet, Silk is hopelessly victimized by those who think they represent justice. In extreme loneliness and frustration, Silk seeks comfort from a woman named Fauna Farley. As Silk is 71 and Fauna is 34, his former colleagues, including a radical feminist female professor, accuse him of being morally corrupt. These events happen in the summer of 1998 when American society was boiling over due to the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal.

In the beginning of “The Human Stain,” Roth writes, “Ninety-Eight in America was a summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism -- which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security -- was succeeded by” the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal that “revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony.”

Roth points out that many Americans who had been sexually promiscuous joined the nationwide accusation of Bill Clinton and Lewinsky as if they themselves were morally immaculate and flawless. Roth writes, “In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat and band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne identified in the incipient country of long ago as ‘the persecuting spirit.’”

Of course, Roth does not want to defend Bill Clinton. In fact, he poignantly criticizes Clinton’s inappropriate sexual behavior. Nevertheless, Roth also depicts how those who think they are politically correct can ruin a person’s life callously. It never occurs to self-righteous people that they may be wrong. That is why they do not suffer from a guilty conscience no matter what they do. These sanctimonious people demand the rite of purification. In the epigraph of “The Human Stain,” Oedipus asks, “What is the rite of purification? How shall it be done?” Creon answers, “By banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood.”

Reading “The Human Stain,” we come to realize the danger of self- righteousness and the notion, “Only we represent justice.”

Using the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Roth sharply criticizes and parodies “political correctness,” pervading the American society in 1998. He calls it “national frenzy.” In an one sentence-paragraph, Roth aptly depicts the social atmosphere at that time, “It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn’t stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn’t stop, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered, ‘Why are we so crazy?’” Then Roth concludes, “It was the summer when -- for the billionth time -- the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one’s ideology and that one’s morality.”

Indeed, Roth’s “The Human Stain” is a constant reminder of how devastating it would be if blind self-righteousness and stubborn moral superiority are pervasive in any society. The same thing goes for the Korean society as well. Perhaps Trump’s victory, too, was the inevitable outcome of such obstinate political correctness when you push it to the extreme. 

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He can be reached at sukim@snu.ac.kr. -- Ed.