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CRITIQUE:

Idea for a Book Review

As I read this book, each word, then each line, each sentence, each paragraph, each page, each chapter, and finally the protagonist and the author, one after the other, started to unravel, and then to disappear from sight. By the time I'd finished reading the book, I had erased it. Or somebody or something had erased it. Or it had been erased. All that was left was an erasure. Nothing of what the author had intended to write remained. His book was all nothingness. It had become nothingness. Perhaps that was his intention. Perhaps he had used me, the reader, as his factotum or amanuensis. He mightn't have had the courage or the desire to erase his own book (or to let it be erased). Such is the hubris of the author, well, any author.

Black Faces, White Masks

On the front cover of my copy of this novel is a photograph of a young black boy holding a pistol to his right temple.

It's arguable that this photo says more about the nature of racism than the mass shooting at the Dollar General store in Jacksonville, which took place on the day I finished reading the novel.

By this, I mean that such crimes aren't so much the result of a "personal ideology", as a product of systemic linguistic and cultural racism.

Language and culture contain and purvey disdain for people of a different colour, gender, sexuality, ideology and faith.

The boy on the cover doesn't need to be attacked by a "racist". He can be killed by pulling the trigger of his pistol himself (or "hisself" as the fictional author Stagg R. Leigh might say).

The hegemony of language and culture will kill the boy, any boy, by putting the pistol in his hand, pointing it at his temple, and pulling the trigger. The boy becomes the vehicle through which the culture kills one of its own.

Black people cannot escape from the impact and consequences of racism, because they form part of the shared language and culture. It is dictated that they will remain black, even if they (or their masks) look white, or look less black than other Black Americans (or Australians).

Publishing and Television

It's possibly for this reason that Percival Everett's argument as a novelist is less with individual racists than with the ultimate cause of racism: language and culture.

Everett, through his narrator, the academic and writer, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, attacks the publishing and television industries.

Monk writes postmodern novels that publishers and agents describe, like the works of John Barth, as "retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists". One reviewer writes of his most recently published novel:

"The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what his reworking of Aeschylus' 'The Persians' has to do with the African American experience."

Two normative biases can be inferred from this comment: firstly, as a black writer, he shouldn't be entitled to write about non-black (or universal) subject matter, or subject matter that relates equally to two or more categories of human; secondly, as a black writer, he should "settle down to write the true, gritty real stories of black life." He should be confined to stories of the ghetto.

To which last statement, I would respond on Monk's behalf (using the words of another Monk): "well you needn't."

Still, Monk's idiosyncratic interests make him question whether he is "black enough".

Thus, he is alienated from both culture at large and his own sub-culture.


Geoffrey Wright in the film "American Fiction", which is based on "Erasure"

Erasing the Black/ Postmodern Self

When his latest novel is rejected for the seventeenth time, Monk's agent urges him to write something like the bestseller ("We's Lives in Da Ghetto") written by Juanita Mae Jenkins that was welcomed and promoted by the Oprah-tic talk show host, Kenya Dunston.

Despite his misgivings, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, Monk writes just such a novel, which is called "My Pafology" and then "Fuck", the protagonist and narrator of which is Van Go Jenkins. The novel is short enough to be incorporated into "Erasure".

It turns out to be a massive commercial and critical success, though at the expense of Monk's identity, authenticity and integrity.

Ironically, "Erasure" itself is a combination of realistic writing and postmodern structure. It purports to be Monk's personal journal, in which he writes down his CV, diary entries, ideas for novels, scripts for television appearances, the novel within the novel, and the novel which contains the novel within the novel.

Ultimately, what appears at first to be fragmentary coheres into a highly intelligent, humorous and self-aware work of fiction.


SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)[
Percival Everett on the Myth of Race



"...if I don't have my character comb his afro by page 10, he's white..."

"American Fiction" (Trailer)



Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane - "Well You Needn't" (from the album "Monk/Trane")



Rising Sons - ".44 Blues"



Ry Cooder - "Feelin' Bad Blues"



Ry Cooder - "Dark Was the Night"



Blind Willie Johnson - "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"



Doc Watson - "Brown's Ferry Blues"



Love - "Bummer in the Summer"



Arthur Lee & Love - "Bummer In The Summer" (Live at Glastonbury)



Love - "Andmoreagain"



Lloyd Price - "Stagger Lee"



Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Stagger Lee"




(hide spoiler)]