Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 131Athenian tragedies, Silk never fully seems to learn from or express
penance for his “mistake.” He remains defiantly reticent to the end,
never disclosing to the outside world the long-kept secret that has
haunted him his entire adult life. Indeed, the same could be said of
Ringold and (to a lesser extent) of Levov, who also fail to learn from
their “shortcomings” at the end of their respective journeys. I argue
that such features in the narratives constitute deliberate strategies
by Roth to provoke the reader into adopting a critical cosmopolitan
vision toward culture and subjectivity. But before illustrating just
how this provocation operates as a literary procedure in the texts, it
is necessary first to finish listing the other points of departure that
The Human Stain makes from the tragic mode.
Another significant deviation from the classical model can be
seen in what could be termed the values (or ethos ) that are brought
to the fore through the tragic mechanisms of the plot. To clarify, we
must first appreciate the extent to which the Greek tragic model was
largely dominated by the Athenian playwrights, who usually wrote
so as to reinforce the values of Athenian citizenship and civic patri-
otism. As Simon Goldhill explains, the traditional mode was infused
with “this sense of being an Athenian citizen.”^14 F u r t h e r m o r e , a n d
perhaps more interestingly, the consolidation of Athenian civic values
also meant the promotion of its somewhat conservative and exclusive
social values. Such values included rigid distinctions between citi-
zens and slaves, as well as between Athenian and outsider.^15 W r i t i n g
about representations of non-Greeks and noncitizens in Athenian
tragedies, David Roselli informs us that “equality [... for subaltern
characters] with elite Greek characters was typically avoided and
class distinctions affirmed.”^16 Such sensibilities represent significant
differences with the inclusive, egalitarian spirit that underlies cos-
mopolitan thought, which, as illustrated below, is evoked through
the tragic trajectory of Silk’s life in The Human Stain.
Of course, the divergence between ancient Greek social values
and the philosophical idealism of cosmopolitanism is not a new dis-
covery, and clearly there were broader tensions within ancient Athens
that also attest to this disparity (such as the role of slavery in a sup-
posed democracy). We could recall, for instance, the argument put
forward by Mitchell Aboulafia (mentioned in the introduction) that