134 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
utterance, “Yes, suh” (pp. 81–90). This poignant image of a dis-
empowered father who is eager not to see his son deprived and
maligned by virtue of his ethnicity and background is a familiar
motif in Roth’s oeuvre.
From Portnoy’s Complaint to Indignation (2008), a number of
Roth’s fathers have exhibited similar feelings of anxiety and paranoia
that their sons should overcome the same class and ethnic obsta-
cles that they attribute to their own lack of success. Jack Portnoy is
laughed at and ridiculed when he makes his rounds “in the slums”
of Newark and is unable to achieve promotion in the company he
works for, we are told, because “there had not been a Jewish man-
ager in the entire history of Boston & Northeastern.”^25 S i m i l a r l y ,
in Indignation , Messner’s father is a frustrated and disillusioned
butcher who never finished elementary school.^26 Like Portnoy, the
protagonist feels acutely aware of his father’s often excessive expec-
tation for him to succeed and to somehow regain the latter’s sense
of lost pride.^27
However, in The Human Stain, not only does ethnicity play a
more dominant role in shaping the contours of the plot, but it also
appears as a category that is more intimately tied to peculiar socio-
historical circumstances. The derogatory idea of “blackness” that
sabotages the success of Silk’s father in the 1950s is clearly different
from the one that empowers Silk’s students (somewhat opportunisti-
cally) to sue for ethnic discrimination in the 1990s. It is this han-
dling of ethnicity (revealing a conceptual discrepancy contingent
upon historical context) that first marks the novel’s subversive cos-
mopolitan leanings.
Nonetheless, this representation of ethnicity as a historical cate-
gory is never conspicuously stated in the narrative. Like many of the
feelings and thoughts that lie behind Silk and his life-changing deci-
sion, it is only brought to the reader’s attention by way of provoca-
tively subtle suggestions. The recondite nature of these revelations
presents interesting parallels with Macherey’s project of “recovering”
from texts that which is “momentarily hidden, but eloquent by its
very absence.”^28 Another, perhaps more visible way in which the novel
subverts ethnicity can be found in Silk’s act of identity construc-
tion, which speaks to some of the central priorities of cosmopolitan