Some stories account for their existence. The framing device is the means of doing so - the fictional explanation of how a narrative has been discovered or recorded. The first great novelist to use elaborate framing devices was Sir Walter Scott. His novels invariably begin with lengthy mock-antiquarian explanations of how the story that follows has been transcribed by some pedantic historian from a manuscript left by an observer of the events described. The new novel masquerades as an old tale. The technique has been particularly apt, and aptly unsettling, in stories of the uncanny. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, for instance, disturb us partly through being introduced by listeners or witnesses who have themselves been disturbed.
Philip Roth likes to use a framing narrative in order to approach with investigative curiosity a tale of passion. It is the means of making the scrutiny of an individual's fate part of the novel. The Human Stain concerns a New England classics professor, Coleman Silk, who is hounded out of his job for alleged racism. His story is told by Nathan Zuckerman, who has, literally speaking, been employed as narrator. Silk has asked him to write the true account of the witchhunt that has ruined his career. He has also told Nathan about the sequel: his secretive affair with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age who cleans at the college.
Silk's story comes within Nathan's account of how he came to find it out. Nathan recalls sitting on Silk's porch and listening to him pour out the strange facts of his new life. We have not just the picture of Silk's experiences, but also the frame that Nathan puts around them. The narrator who tells us of 71-year-old Coleman's all-possessing, Viagra-enhanced sexual passion is himself impotent after prostate cancer. The sexual delirium, heady and destructive, is seen from the outside.
Nathan is a character whom Roth often uses for such a purpose and who has aged with the author. The Human Stain explicitly recollects his first appearance in a Roth novel. Silk teaches at the same university which, we are told, once employed EI Lonoff, the great Jewish author whom Nathan visits in The Ghost Writer (1979). Ever since, Nathan has been encountering characters on Roth's behalf. Roth's persistent use of the framing device suggests that he is but discovering stories that are already out there.
By thus framing his narrative Roth also unsettles our sympathies. Nathan recollects "that April day two years back when Iris Silk died and the insanity took hold of Coleman". He is drawn into the story when Coleman, furious and persecuted, bangs on his door one afternoon. "All restraint had collapsed within him." His exorbitant feelings seem mad. "Estranged from life", he is a person to be explained, a man whose fate is a fable of American prejudices.
The framing device is insisted on in The Human Stain, whose concluding chapter returns us to Nathan, writing his book and measuring the reverberations of Coleman's life and death. Yet it requires peculiar suspensions of disbelief. Within the frame of Nathan's record, the reader is allowed to know more than he could ever know. We are taken into Coleman's unspoken thoughts and into his secret past: his childhood, his sexual awakening, his making of a new identity for himself.
We might think these the narrator's imaginative prerogative (Nathan does say "As I reconstruct it..." before one description of an episode that he never witnessed). But then the novel includes the solitary actions and private reflections of other characters too. We listen to Coleman's lawyer talking to his wife about Coleman's case. Delphine Roux, Coleman's feminist nemesis in his faculty, daydreams in the library about the handsome man reading post-structuralist theory opposite her. In a slab of virtuoso interior monologue, we are even taken inside the maddened resentment of Les Farley, Faunia's psychopathic ex-husband.
So the frame that Roth has made for himself is sometimes a convenience to be forgotten. This is why it is important that Nathan is so clearly Roth's representative. The very flouting of the framing convention catches the author's own passionate, lucid exercise of his imagination.
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