Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 141he hears no response: “Do they exist or are they spooks?” (p. 6). On
receiving word of the joke, the students, who are black, interpret the
term as a derogatory slur and, assisted by a spiteful and calculating
young colleague, Delphine Roux, accuse Silk of racism. Of course,
having lived his entire life conditioned by an acute sense of racial
consciousness and anxiety, this accusation bears a particularly unpal-
atable irony. Furthermore, the legal action the two students bring
(which forces him into early retirement and, he believes, leads to the
death of his wife, Iris), would have been unthinkable at the time of
his own student career. So there is a double irony here in that the
very social apparatus that would have assisted his own ambitions in
the academic world in his youth, had it been enforced and followed
(political correctness), becomes the source of his ultimate downfall
and ostracism in later life. As in Coetzee’s Disgrace , we can detect a
distinct criticism of the possible drawbacks of liberal political cor-
rectness here; but, whereas David Lurie is persecuted for refusing to
modify his ideas of sex and gender differences so as to be in line with
the regulated ideal, Silk is attacked for racial insensitivity.
Taking up the case of one of the offended students, Delphine
rebukes Silk for failing to “nurture” her and to understand “where
Tracy is coming from” (p. 18). For Silk, however, as someone who
knows all too well about the realities of racial discrimination, such
a suggestion is infuriatingly absurd. For him, the “spooks” affair
signals a victory for ignorance over critical thought, whereby pol-
icy guidelines and managerial protocol have replaced common sense
and individual responsibility. Roth therefore appears to suggest that
the form of vulgar reactionary suppression that Silk falls victim to
is not the preserve of mainstream culture but can also be success-
fully brought into the reputedly refined and nuanced theatre of
academia.
Another parallel between Silk and Lurie is that they are both
university professors specializing in language and are therefore intel-
lectually preoccupied with interrogating words and their (possible)
meanings. But with the “spooks” incident, all avenues of significa-
tory possibility and ambiguity are forestalled, and his own words
become coopted to fit within a new, unyielding, schema of semantic
classification. This process of intellectual and linguistic suppression