Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 135thought. By “passing” as white with such apparent ease, Silk both
reveals the porous and socially determined nature of “ethnicity”—
an act that dovetails with cosmopolitan priorities of seeking to do
away with rigid systems of human classification, especially the vague
and spurious taxonomy of what was then termed “race.” This cri-
tique of the underlying logic of essential ethnic difference is illu-
minated in typically irreverent Rothian style in a scene in which
Silk visits a white brothel while on leave from the navy. In spite of
usually being able to “pass” as white due to his pale complexion, Silk
is exposed by one of the prostitutes as being “a black nigger” and
forcefully thrown out by two “goons” (p. 114). The ironic tone used
to describe the woman who exposes him, who is “maybe herself two
thirty-fifths something other than white,” satirizes the category of
race by stretching to breaking point the untenable system of quanti-
fication it requires (p. 114). Indeed, the pseudoscientific terms used
for categorizing the various shades and combinations of “white” and
“black” were used well into the twentieth century, with “mulattoes,”
“quadroons,” and even “quintroons” being the designations applied
to represent the racial compositions of one half, a quarter, and one-
fifth black, respectively.
Picturing Silk’s “eggnog” hue and ethnically vague features in the
mind’s eye subsequently becomes a problematic task for the reader,
one that tests their own conceptions of “racial” difference and its
received endemic, essential properties (p. 122). Just how black or
how white must he look, we find ourselves asking, to successfully
deceive all the teachers, friends, and colleagues that enter his life and
yet simultaneously raise suspicions among others (like the antago-
nistic sex worker) whom he has only just met? The area of doubt
Roth creates here is broadened by the knowledge that Silk is not the
only one engaged in this form of ethnic deception, but that there
“are ten, if not more” African Americans passing as “white” in the
small district of Greenwich Village alone (p. 135).
Such a subversive depiction of “race” is by no means new in
American literature. William Faulkner, a writer perhaps not best
known for championing progressive racial ideas, presents a sim-
ilarly heterodox image in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Written at a
time in which racial essentialism and eugenics ideology shaped the