E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
Everett Erasure
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ISBN: 978-0-571-37463-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
now a major motion picture 'American Fiction'
E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-37463-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Percival Everett is the author of fourteen novels, including Glyph, Watershed and Frenzy. Erasure won the inaugural Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. Everett teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
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In the first year of my graduate program in creative writing, I asked a professor how I could render blackness on the page in a way that wasn’t boring to me. I had been accused in workshop of trying to obscure my characters’ race. ‘Why do we only find out on page seven that this character is black?’ was a question put to my work with irritating frequency, as though I were trying to trick my reader like a parent sneaking vegetables into their children’s meals. I turned to the only black instructor in the program to ask how they did it. They leaned back in their chair and said something like, ‘That’s a good question. Yeah, I don’t know.’
It seems to me now that the question of a character’s race in fiction, when put to black writers in particular, boils down not to a failure of craft or lack of clarity on the author’s part, but to a great uneasiness in the reader. They want to know if a character is black, but they want that information to flow along the usual lines of communication. That is, they want the information to conform to their expectations of race and its workings. They want the descriptions comparing the character’s skin to various nuts and shades of coffee. They want the hair described as various textiles, animal and plant in origin. They want the swagger and the clothing and they want a voice that is somewhere between Gone with the Wind and Dolemite. Blackness as idiom embedded within a larger (whiter) social context. What they want, I sometimes feel, is art that traffics not in the eternal matter of black people’s souls but a superficial accounting of objects that when taken together represent some sort of abstracted notion branded black by the overcultural gaze and imagination.
Percival Everett’s sublime, satirical novel of ideas, Erasure, is animated by the question of whether or not it’s possible for a black artist to create art that is itself ambivalent to the constructedness of blackness. It isn’t so much interested in humanizing the black experience, as has often been said of certain novels in the tradition, as it is in drawing attention to the absurdities that attend the inherent doubleness of black literature. A doubleness that comes, in part, from knowing that one must perform for an external white gaze. Take, for example, the opening pages, in which we are introduced to our lead character, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, by way of an almost Bellovian riff:
My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last, callous-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.
As far as openings go, it has shades of Augie March and Moses Herzog: a voice turning over itself, prickling with shame and self-recrimination even as it thrusts itself forward with bravado and winking humor. But then, as if acknowledging the pact every black writer makes with his audience, a second introduction thunders down:
I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race.
This second introduction tells us at once less and more about this character. It is less specific to the matter of his soul and his life’s specific circumstances. The tone is one of amused resentment. The register is similar but distinct from our first encounter with Monk. ‘Pasty white policemen’ stands out because it has a loose, conversational flow. It arrives with a vernacular context. It tells us, because of the racial grammar at play, that the voice speaking is a black voice with access to the idiom. Not just that, but a voice with a certain attitude about the origin of race, that is socially inscribed not only by one’s skin, hair, and nose shape, not only by the status of one’s ancestors, but also by the interactions with police. All of this feeds through society’s algorithm and churns out a black person. It’s funny as hell.
Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison is a writer of dense, obscure fiction. His latest effort has been rejected by publishers for having little to do with the ‘black experience.’ After a series of personal and professional tragedies, Monk sets out to write a novel loosely inspired by Richard Wright’s Native Son and certain commercial novels of black misery. Monk has his agent send the manuscript, titled My Pafology (later changed to Fuck), around to editors under a pseudonym. Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), his pastiche-cum-parody (reproduced within the text) is a runaway commercial and critical success. My Pafology is broken up into numbered chapters, the titles of which are spelled phonetically, and traces, in parallel to Erasure, the life of a young black man living in America. However, it deals more explicitly with the violence and turbulence of life in the ghetto, rendered in highly stylized vernacular and dialect.
And I stab Mama. I put the knife in her stomach and pull it out red and she look at me like to say why you stab me? And I stab Mama again. Blood be all on the floor and on the table, drip drip drippin down her legs and my baby sister starts screamin and I says, ‘Why you be screamin, Baby Girl?’ And she look at me and she say it because I be stabbin on Mama.
So begins an eighty-page stretch of violence, grief, chaos, love-making, and all manner of other antics that comes to resemble, in a way, Don Quixote. There’s a moment in which the narrator of My Pafology ends up on a Jerry Springer/Ricki Lake-like program at which he is confronted by all of the women he has impregnated. There are also, interspersed throughout Erasure, other texts and riffs as Monk follows his own playful creative impulses, writing comedic sketches and notes for novels of historical and political abstraction.
The texture of Erasure is incredibly elastic, at times turning back and commenting upon itself – there’s this great moment where Everett seems to be poking fun at fragmentary forms, playing with the white space between words and sentences even as those sentences discuss the effects of white space and fragment on narrative. Also reproduced within the text is a talk Monk gives at a conference about the insular opacity and failings of the postmodernism practiced by certain of his peers who have sought refuge in academia.
In his great art novel The Masterpiece, Zola depicts an artist at war with himself and his own ideas of art. In Erasure, we see Monk grapple with his ideas of art and history and thought and literature. He tangles with what the artistic impulse means and what it costs us. Erasure is a kind of intellectual sketchbook that reproduces the experiential, yes, in the way that we expect novels to, but it also captures some of the fizzing, electric energy of a writer’s mind. It reproduces the act of thought and creative enterprise. It’s a sensitive depiction of living in a capitalist society whose very purpose seems to be to aggregate and appraise art on the basis of values that have nothing to do with the artist’s own value system. Erasure does capture the black experience. Not so much in events but in the experience of a black consciousness moving through the world, through thought.
There is a temptation to read Erasure as straight up-and-down satire – as a hyperbolic extension of current aesthetics and ideas about how race operates in publishing, media, and society. The seeming extremity of Monk’s parody makes us laugh and shake our heads as we glimpse the quotidian absurdity illuminated by exaggerated stylistic gestures and flourishes. But, there were moments in Erasure when I stopped and nodded and said out loud to myself, ‘They really do be writing like that.’
Everett is sly in his parody, creating a satire within a satire. It seems that for Everett, by way of Monk, reproducing the black idiom for comedic effect isn’t really about taking it to some impossible extreme to illuminate the absurd. My Pafology isn’t extreme at all. It is shockingly believable, and so the comedic effect of the parody lies in its ability to mime or reproduce without exaggeration. It’s similar to the parodies of Key and Peele in this way. The black anecdote rooted firmly not in extremity but in accuracy of its recreation.
Everett is illuminating something, all right, but what Erasure sends up is the silliness of going about your business as a black person, only for the world to rush in and try to remind you that you are Black, and that it means something. But that you aren’t allowed to dictate what that something is. The world demands that...
