A Lacanian Approach To The Human Stain

Roth's “American Trilogy” has intensively explored the interaction between the individual and the society;besides,it highlights the degradation of the self under the impact of the cultural discipline.The Human Stain probes a variety of motifs,including identity,existence,historical and ethical problems and so forth.Against the background of president Clinton's sexual scandal,Coleman and Faunia,as the representatives of civilized people,violate the cultural taboos,which further disclose the hypocrisy of humanity that is long veiled by the law of culture.Thus the rebellious behaviour of the self could be regarded as an overt negation of reason.Roth profoundly rejects the collective identity being constructed by the society;instead he pursues the voice of the self and claims that the self should overmatch the social codes and conventions.According to Lacan's interpretation of the Symbolic Order,we are the subjects who think and depend on the field of the big Other.Not only are the individual code of conduct confined,the self also has to conform to a series of societal and cultural values that have represented the interest of the community.Therefore,the civilized community,to some extent,will impose some oppression and misdoing on the freedom of the individual,who then will confront with the alienation.Resorting to this repression,Roth has criticized the traditional cultural values and a social phenomenon that advocates universalism.Instead,he proposes the idea of returning to nature and the salvation of the constraint of the humanity.Only by confronting with the Other can the individual's experience from subjection to rebellion be meaningful.Through the defiance against the Other,Coleman and Faunia liberate themselves from the confinement of the tyranny of the propriety and to pursue freedom.The two protagonists Coleman and Faunia primarily are subjected to the Other,which represents the Law of Culture.They actually suffer from their racial inferiority and the persecution of the patriarchy respectively.Coleman has yielded both to the discrimination from the white community and to the authority of his father who is a submissive black,whereas Faunia has undergone the trauma from her stepfather and ex-husband.Gradually,Coleman and Faunia transform into two rebellious force against the Other.Coleman breaks through the conventional social morality in two ways: his quest for male intimacy with Zuckerman and his sexual affair with Faunia.Faunia challenges the rationality of the civilized community through her alienated affair with Coleman and her own pursuit of the raw “I”.With their resistance to the Other,they both free themselves and become the author of the self,like Coleman's successfully forms his own identity as a Jew,and Faunia deliberately pretends to be illiterate.Their eventual death,to some extent,is a desperate as well as a thorough way to liberate themselves from the Symbolic Order and to go beyond the social existence.