Erasure

“Linda had published one volume of predictably strange and stereotypically innovative short fictions (as she liked to call them). She’d fallen into a circle of innovative writers who had survived the sixties by publishing each others’ stories in their periodicals and each others’ books collectively, thus amassing publications, so achieving tenure at their various universities, and establishing a semblance of credibility in the so-called real world. Sadly, these people made up a good portion of the membership of the Nouveau Roman Society. They all hated me. For a couple of reasons: One was that I had published and had moderate success with a realistic novel some years earlier, and two, I made no secret, in print or radio interviews, what I thought of their work.”

Apart from his conflict with the publishing industry, Monk is also at odds with his fellow writers and the literary community. The passage, however, shows that Monk reacts against a postmodern tradition that white authors claim for themselves and further by forming a mutual admiration society rather than through any merit. Monk publicly contests their work, but they also consider him a disturbing presence because of success as a writer and his identity as an African American author.

“It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.”

Monk explains his perspective on the world and society, both as a person and as an artist. He does not scrutinize life in search for meaning and does not make political statements in his writing. Monk claims to simply view the world as it is and understand it through a personal viewpoint without any restrictions. As the novel progresses, though, this changes, and Monk becomes increasingly attuned to what society expects of him.

“Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is meant and I knew that for all my mother’s seeming incoherence or out-of-itness, she was trying to tell me something over tea. The way she had mentioned the smoke in the living room twice. Her calling the blue box gray. Her easy and quick capitulation to what it was she and her cronies actually did at their meetings. But since I didn’t know the rules, which were forever changing, I could only know that she was trying to say something, not what that something was.”

This quote connects to the theme of The Complex Relationship Between Language, Identity, and Art. Monk emphasizes the fluidity of language and wonders about the way it impacts human relationships. Despite sharing a language, Monk and his family struggle to connect with one another. His mother’s memory loss and fragmented thoughts reinforce his questions about the ability of language to provide meaning. Monk feels that words are sometimes independent of their meanings.

“For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, ‘You made me work, son.’ He once said to me in a museum, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, ‘You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.’ He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, though he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.”

The passage delineates Monk’s close relationship with his father. Benjamin Ellison is present throughout the novel in Monk’s memories. His father understood Monk’s singular personality and literary talent, and they shared a love of art. Monk recalls his father’s views on art that still impact him, and he also holds his father’s preference for difficult ideas responsible for his own writing style, which many characters (including his sister, Lisa) complain is hard to understand. Again, Monk repeats his views that the artistic work is independent from its creator and from reality.

“I had vague and unsettling memories of everything that had ever gone wrong when I was a child, times when I accidentally hurt my sister, times when I hurt her on purpose, when some boy had crushed her feelings, when her grades weren’t what she had wanted, Bill ignored her, I ignored her, Mother paid me more attention. I admired her, but hardly knew her and it was all my fault, had to be my fault, because she was not alive to blame. But that thinking was bullshit and I quickly dropped it, replacing it with consideration of my familial duties.”

Lisa’s tragic death impacts Monk emotionally and also changes the way he lives his life. He reconsiders his relationship with his family and takes over his mother’s care. Here, Monk wonders about his relationship with Lisa, their parents’ influence on them, and regrets that they could not be closer. He notes that after someone dies, they are no longer “alive to blame,” therefore leaving the onus of guilt on the living. This foreshadows Monk finding out about his father’s affair with Fiona; at that time, too, Monk does not blame his father since he is dead, but he does feel guilty about his half-sister, Gretchen.

“I went to what had been my father’s study, and perhaps still was his study, but now it was where I worked. I sat and stared at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on Time magazine. The pain started in my feet and coursed through my legs, up my spine and into my brain and I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?’ I put a page in my father’s old manual typewriter. I wrote this novel, a book on which I knew I could never put my name.”

A turning point in the story is Monk’s impulsive decision to write a satirical novel as a response to Jenkins’s stereotypical Black novel. Monk is enraged because he cannot relate to what society and popular culture considers “authentic” and honest African American stories. He begins to play with these stereotypes in his mind but he refuses to claim the work as his own by putting his name on it.

“My name is Van Go Jenkins and I’m nineteen years old and I don’t give a fuck about nobody, not you, not my Mama, not the man. The world don’t give a fuck about nobody, so why should I? And what I’m gone do instead of going to work over at that Jew muthafacka’s warehouse over on Central is go over to the high school and wait for Rexall’s mama. Her name be Cleona. She’s a dreamer, always talkin bout graduatin and goin to the communy college and bein a nurse or some shit. Her dreamin don’t bother me none. I hope she do make herself some real money some day. But she be actin funny a lot, like she think I ain’t good enough fo’ her ass. Fuck her. All I know is I can go over her house when her mama gone and cut me out a piece. She ain’t too good then.”

Van Go Jenkins is the protagonist of Monk’s satirical novel and he is the typical stereotype of African American masculinity. Van Go speaks and acts like a “gangsta,” lives in a dysfunctional household, and expresses rage against society for keeping him down. He is also a misogynist and a careless father, and he cares only about himself. Van Go’s situation appears to be “pathological” because he finds no cure as a person.

“I never before felt so stranded. Alone in that house with Mother and Lorraine. But with the new bit of change I would be collecting for that awful little book, I could hire someone to come in and care for both of them. Perhaps for dramatic effect, I should have had to wait longer for my windfall, given my brother’s newfound flakiness and my sister’s debt (both what she owed and what I owed her), but it didn’t happen that way. The news of the money came and I breathed an ironic and bitter sigh of relief. Maybe I felt a bit of vindication somewhere inside me. Certainly, I felt a great deal of hostility toward an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.”

With My Pafology, Monk intended to satirize popular Black narratives and reveal the Racism in the Publishing Industry and Popular Culture. However, he finds himself in crisis when the novel is accepted for publication. Monk needs the money and finds himself unable to resist the generous payment and the commodification of his art. However, he despairs about the public’s willingness to consume such superficial narratives.

“I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-à-vis my art. It was not exactly the case that I had sold out, but I was not, apparently, going to turn away the check. I considered my woodworking and why I did it. In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend. But the wood, the feel of it, the smell of it, the weight of it. It was so much more real than words.”

The passage connects to the theme of The Complex Relationship Between Language, Identity, And Art, and it illustrates the author’s interrogation of the writer’s relationship to the literary text. Monk disavows the novel, My Pafology, but he recognizes the irony in his satire and the consequences of commodifying his art. While he sought to challenge racial stereotypes by making them visible, he simultaneously reestablishes them through this attempt.

“The letter was unsigned. That was all that was in the box. I had read a voice of my father’s that I had not heard directly in life, a tender voice, an open voice. I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair.”

Monk’s preoccupation with language and writing also defines his personal relationships. His father’s letter to Monk’s half-sister reveals a part of his character that Monk never saw throughout their relationship. Benjamin’s letters contrast with his behavior and speech, and Monk discovers a new “voice” that challenges his memories of his father. The letters uncover parts of Benjamin’s personality that he could not express with his family.

“I grew up an Ellison. I had Ellison looks. I had an Ellison way of speaking, showed Ellison promise, would have Ellison success. People I met on the street when I was a child would tell me that they had been delivered by my grandfather, that I looked like my father and his brother. Father’s older brother had also been a physician until he died at fifty. When very young I enjoyed being an Ellison, liked belonging to something larger than myself. As a teenager, I resented my family name and identification.”

The passage illustrates Monk’s fragmented relationship with his family. As he grew up, Monk distanced himself from his familial identity, attempting to assert his individuality. While as a child he sought a sense of belonging, he later rejects the idea of a collective identity, a view that is reflected in his literary career. However, as the story advances, Monk’s assumptions change.

“Mother and Father never seemed terribly close to me. They formed a unified front against which we kids collided and bounced off. They were not outwardly affectionate, though the three of us were evidence of some touching. Indeed, I thought they were decidedly distant, cool to one another. An attitude that would seriously impair my attempts at relationships later. I of course would be taking a convenient turn to have that alone cut as any kind of excuse for my interpersonal failures. My mother saw her life as a wife and mother as a service, a loving service, but a service nonetheless. My father saw his station rather as one defined by duty, and discharged said duty with military efficiency.”

The passage shows how Monk’s parents’ relationship impacted his personality despite his attempts to distance himself from his family. He describes his mother and father as devoted and caring but also emotionally distant toward their children. The two were also distant toward each other. Their relationship defines Monk’s views on intimacy and impede him from forming meaningful connections with people.

“In considering my novels, not including the one frightening effort that brought in some money, I find myself sadly a stereotype of the radical, railing against something, calling it tradition perhaps, claiming to seek out new narrative territory, to knock at the boundaries of the very form that calls me and allows my artistic existence. It is the case, however, that not all radicalism is forward looking, and maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions that I have pretended to challenge.”

Monk’s consciousness as an artist changes over time. He reconsiders his relationship to literature and understands that in the past, his thinking was dominated by erroneous and impossible ideas. Monk intended to defy preconceptions and traditions and create a unique idiom through writing—one that would allow him artistic freedom. However, he concludes that narratives connect to one another and can therefore never quite be completely new. With My Pafology, he finds himself reaffirming the stereotypes he was trying to dismantle and ridicule.

“I’d try, but it never sounded comfortable, never sounded real. In fact, to my ear, it never sounded real coming from anyone, but I could tell that other people talked the talk much better than I ever could. I never knew when to slap five or high five, which handshake to use. Of course, no one cared about my awkwardness but me, I came to learn later, but at the time I was convinced that it was the defining feature of my personality. ‘You know, Thelonious Ellison, he’s the awkward one.’ Talks like he’s stuck up? Sounds white? Can’t even play basketball.”

The passage reiterates Monk’s frustration with his identity, which was always regulated by societal expectations of Blackness. Throughout his life, Monk is viewed as not being “Black enough.” Because Monk never embodied the stereotypical image of the Black man, never spoke in African American Vernacular English, or played basketball, he felt that he was failing his racial identity. However, while this awareness and embarrassment was primarily his own, Monk used to think that everyone else around him was as bothered by this as he was.

“It was Christmas break of my freshman year in college. Father was excited to have me home and telling him about my classes and my professors. Ever since I began reading serious literature, he had forced the rest of the family to endure our discussions at the table. When I was eleven, he would prod me with simple questions, get me tied up and laugh a bit at me. When I was fourteen, he would bait me, twist me up, confuse me, then laugh a bit at me. At eighteen, he honestly seemed to believe I could add something to his understanding of novels and stories. I told him that I had read Joyce in a class. Bill moaned. One would have thought that his second year in medical school would have proved a more normal common ground between physician and son. Lisa was about to graduate from Vassar and had adopted a kind of death-girl attitude in spite of her being off to medical school the next year.”

Monk’s father was the only one in the family who connected with Monk’s artistic tendencies and encouraged his literary pursuits. His siblings could not understand Monk and did not have similar interests and goals. His mother did not participate in these family discussions. As Monk grew up, family relations became fragmented. In this passage, Monk is embarrassed in hindsight by the special attention his father gave him, clearly marking him as his favorite, despite Bill and Lisa’s considerable achievements.

“After a brief pause, Marilyn said, ‘I have to tell you, though, that we slept together that night.’ Why did she have to tell me that? I didn’t need to know it and I could have done quite well without knowing it. Had I not known, I would not have cared, but now all I could do was care. I cared about what he meant to her, about what I meant to her, about whether she was on top or he, about whether she had had an orgasm, more than one?, about the size of his penis, about the size of mine, about why she had told me.”

Monk reveals himself as an insecure man who is immature about relationships. However, though Monk’s worries about the size of his penis echo Van’s similar obsession, Monk does not share Van’s hypermasculinity, violence, and anger. Rather, Monk’s worries depict him as an honest, flawed person. His insecurity about himself as a man combined with his artistic crisis make him a failure at intimate relationships.

“We are told that the subject of the statement should not be taken as synonymous with the author of the formulation – either in substance, or in function. This is, my theoretical friends have told me, a characteristic of the enunciative function. The statement with which I was concerning myself was the box containing the letters of my father. Was it something my mother was attempting to tell me about my father? Or rather, was it more ingenious, as brother Bill would have had me believe, a message from my father, his knowing that Mother would not in fact burn the box and would somehow get it to me?”

Monk continues to wonder about language’s ability to provide meaning. He reiterates his view of the independence between the written work and the author. Discovering his father’s personal letters, he wonders what they reveal as pieces of writing and tries to make meaning of his father’s intentions in leaving them to his mother. Indeed, the letters reveal new information not only about Benjamin’s character, but also about his life and the secrets he kept from his family.

“Some water is so clear that trout will swim to your fly, your silhouette all too visible to them as they gaze up and through the water and air, and will inspect your tying job, the amount of head cement you applied, observe whether you used a good stiff hackle or whether you used natural or synthetic dubbing material, nose the thing, then swim away. Occasionally, one will take the fly, not caring that a bit of thread is visible where the tail is tied down, not even caring that your tippet is corkscrewed. A trout hiding behind a rock in fast, muddy water might or might not take a nymph fished deep through the riffle. For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to.”

The passage illustrates the significance of the fishing motif in the text. Fishing is one of Monk’s pastimes, outside of writing. It is meaningful to him because Monk contrasts it to the function of language. As a writer, he can plan how to use words and sentences; however, while fishing, nature resists his intentions. He cannot manipulate a trout and make it conform to a specific structure because its rules are different from those of humans.

“Only appearances signify in visual art. At least this is what I am told, that the painter’s work is an invention in the boundless space that begins at the edges of his picture. The surface, the paper or the canvas, is not the work of art, but where the work lives, a place to keep the picture, the paint, the idea. But a chair, a chair is its space, is its own canvas, occupies space properly. The canvas occupies spaces and the picture occupies the canvas, while the chair, as a work, fills the space itself. This was what occurred to me regarding My Pafology. The novel, so-called, was more a chair than a painting, my having designed it not as a work of art, but as a functional device, its appearance a thing to behold, but more a thing to mark, a warning perhaps, a gravestone certainly.”

Through his satirical novel, Monk realizes the performative aspects of language and art. For him, the novel is not an artistic creation but a functional statement. It is carefully crafted to represent and critique limited narratives—it is not an example of expansive storytelling. Writing it has become mundane work for Monk, and he feels his identity as an author collapsing.

“The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of ‘black’ writers, I ended up on the very distant and very ‘other’ side of a line that is imaginary at best. I didn’t write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that) and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. Perhaps if I had written in the time immediately following Reconstruction, I would have written to elevate the station of my fellow oppressed. But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression.”

Monk explains his authorial intentions. Throughout his career, he sought artistic freedom and did not view himself as an advocate of his race. Monk refused to conform to the publishing industry’s racist practices and expectations of Black narratives. However, he realizes that he contributed to the marginalization of Black voices by accepting the commodification of his art. Despite his refusal to accept race as a key factor in his work, racism nevertheless impacts him.

“Once I was back home I would read, then torture myself about work. I was lonely, angrier than I had been in a long time, angrier than when I was an angry youth, but now I was rich and angry. I realized how much easier it was to be angry when one is rich. Of course, there was the accompanying guilt and the feeling stupid for feeling guilty, what I was told was one of two common intellectual’s diseases – the other being diarrhea.”

Close to the end of the novel, Monk tries to redeem himself as an artist and returns to writing a new novel that matches his conception of art. However, his rage and guilt dominate, since he has accepted the money that My Pafology brought him, and he is enjoying being rich. As a result, Monk is more frustrated about his writing intentions than ever.

“Thelonious and Monk and Stagg Leigh made the trip to New York together, on the same flight and, sadly, in the same seat. I considered that this charade might well turn out of hand and that I would slip into an actual condition of dual personalities. But as I nursed my juice through turbulent skies I managed to reduce the whole thing to mere drama. I was acting, simple and plain, and my pay was substantial and deserved. So, we were there dressed as myself, once Monksie in my mother’s eyes, once artist in my own eyes.”

This passage shows the conflation of the author with the persona he has invented for himself. Monk created Stagg R. Leigh to distance himself from My Pafology. However, he has continued to perform as Stagg R. Leigh for the public, and he gradually feels like that persona has melded itself to his own identity as Monk, to the point of assuming a dual identity. Stagg R. Leigh challenges Monk’s assumptions about his work and the ways in which an artist can control narrative. His inner crisis exacerbates: He thinks that the person who was “Monksie” is gone since his mother’s memory is failing and she no longer remembers him; similarly, he once thought of himself as an artist but is now only a sellout in his own eyes.

“Had I by annihilating my own presence actually asserted the individuality of Stagg Leigh? Or was it the book itself that had given him life? There he was for public scrutiny and the public was loving him. What would happen if I tired of holding my breath, if I had to come up for air? Would I have to kill Stagg to silence him? And what did it mean that I was even thinking of Stagg as having agency? What did it mean that I could put those questions to myself? Of course, it meant nothing and so, it meant everything.”

Monk’s inner thoughts demonstrate the story’s exploration of the role of the author. Monk wonders how his persona acquired a life of its own. He is haunted by Stagg R. Leigh—though that author is an artificial construction, he is also part of Monk. This ambivalence of authorial identity troubles Monk, who, by the end of the story, wants to reclaim his own identity as an artist.