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Erasure

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A Vehement, Anarchistic "Fuck You"

By Erik Tarloff
Posted Monday, Oct. 1, 2001, at 5:08 PM ET

Dear Debra,

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I've been enthusiastically looking forward to doing this particular book with you. But I've also felt some trepidation. The issues it raises--issues of race and class and culture--are so highly cathected, there's an unavoidable temptation to tread warily where they're concerned. But in Erasure, Percival Everett gleefully and repeatedly refuses to step warily, and so perhaps it behooves us to resist the temptation, to follow his example and frolic recklessly through the minefield his book presents.

Nevertheless, I can't deny I'm relieved to learn you and I are in basic agreement about it. We agree Everett is setting out to do something admirable and important in this novel. And it appears we also agree the book is bracingly transgressive, bravely obnoxious, and at times very, very funny. And yet, I ended up feeling thoroughly conflicted about it. Am I wrong in suspecting you feel the same way? Despite its many strengths, and despite my desire to love it whole-heartedly, I found it to be, ultimately, a disappointment.

One of the great destructive shibboleths of modern literary studies insists that the canon is the exclusive preserve, the self-perpetuating creation, of Dead White Men. Of course, this shibboleth also happens, by and large, to be true, but as a result of historical and social happenstance rather than some sort of conspiracy. Once upon a time, indeed, the restrictions went even further, permitting only Dead White Well-Born Christian Men into the literary parlor. Who would have thought a poor, spottily educated, rustic glover's apprentice from Warwickshire might have something to contribute, for example? Well, he managed it, and with a vengeance. (Although, perhaps because they find the idea so offensive, there are still plenty of cranks who flatly deny it was he.) Who would have guessed that a lower-middle-class spinster from Hampshire would become one of the greatest novelists in the English language? Who would have thought the great-grandson of a black African would become the national poet of Russia, for God's sake? Who would have imagined the great-grandson and the grandson of a Haitian slave would become two of France's most popular novelists? Who could have foreseen that the despised Irish were going to produce so many world-class poets, playwrights, and novelists? And who knew 20^th-century American letters were going to witness the noisy emergence of that rambunctious throng William Styron has styled "the Jewish mafia"?

Dead white well-born Christian men dominate the canon because, for much of written history, they dominated everything. But the glory of the tradition is precisely that anyone ambitious enough, talented enough, and clamorous enough is free to elbow the aristocrats out of the way, seize the baton, and run with it. That's part of what gives the tradition its great ongoing vitality. Western literature, since perhaps Homer himself, celebrates individual experience and individual consciousness. It exults in the particular over the generic. It thrives on messy human variety. Which is why it isn't mere bleeding-heart sentimentality to embrace a liberal, expansive vision of multiculturalism; the Western tradition--the canon--requires it. The tradition embodies such a vision.

It's clear that Mr. Everett, a professor of English at USC, feels this way, and feels it passionately. He regards himself as heir to a great intellectual tradition and refuses to let his consciousness be defined by sloppy racial categorizing. He is a black man who considers himself independent of some narrow cultural ghetto. To his credit, he recognizes that pressures to dwell in such a ghetto come from both black and white sources: from blacks who resent his refusal to write a certain kind of disaffected, politicized fiction, who regard that refusal as a form of racial betrayal, and from whites who want their sociological preconceptions reaffirmed and their bien pensant sympathies safely tweaked by a familiar set of narrative elements. And I think it's a reasonable guess, more than a reasonable guess, a veritable sure thing, that the rage in this novel--not the events or the characters, just the rage--is autobiographical. Rage at the restrictive range expected of him as a black writer, and rage--almost any fellow novelist whose last name isn't King can sympathize--at the way his fiction has been underappreciated. At some point, the rage exploded and produced this book, this vehement, anarchistic "fuck you," directed at writers, publishers, reviewers, and readers, black and white.

A vehement, anarchistic "fuck you" can be a joyous and liberating thing. But if you're going to do it for 265 pages, you'd better do it with sustained and vibrant inventiveness. Everett's performance, alas, is maddeningly inconsistent.

In tomorrow's posting, I'll try to be much more specific about what I consider the novel's strengths and weaknesses, where it hits its targets, sometimes with breathtaking accuracy, and where it misses altogether. But it's interesting that you and I both seem to have felt a need to establish a sort of dialectic before we got down to cases, a set of parameters within which we might feel comfortable assessing Mr. Everett's novel. Perhaps because it's a novel of great ambition and great resonance, and therefore elicits complex and deeply ambivalent responses. Perhaps we're stepping warily after all.

Yours,
Erik

P.S.: Yes, the author's photo is way cool, no doubt about it. Do you think it's deliberate, or just an ironic accident, that it's weirdly reminiscent of the Huey Newton poster from back in the '60s?