• English

1Glyph’s protagonist, Ralph, says: “I wondered if there was no inside and outside to the spirit of being, no body and soul, no opposite side to any orientation, but that we were moebius surfaces…”1

2“Non illegitimi carborundum,” read a folded note a colleague had passed to me on the way into a faculty meeting. Not remembering much of my university Latin, I puzzled over the note and even why my colleague, Charles Sumner Stone, Jr, had handed it to me. Chuck was one of my favorite people in the English Department at the University of Delaware in 1991. Somehow I didn’t know that Chuck was one of the pre-eminent black journalists of the time, a nationally syndicated columnist, former aide to congressman Adam Clayton Powell, a Tuskegee airman, and an ordained minister. I knew Chuck as a stately, kind, approachable figure with a great sense of humor whom students loved.

3Chuck’s note came out of nowhere. I had no idea why he had given it to me. After someone had translated it as “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” I chuckled because of course, it was a wonderfully counter-institutional epigram, a shared comment that produced a connection that might defy any of the on-coming departmental idiosyncrasies. In retrospect, even the gesture of passing the tightly folded note produced a small resistant conspiracy as well as a multi-layered commentary on the state of academe.

4The gesture and message, I would find, were typical of some of Chuck’s journalistic moves, the seemingly innocent, yet clever, parodic, enwrapped gems that appeared in his columns collected in the 1968 tome, Tell It Like It Is2. The phrase itself, “Non illegitimi carborundum,” emerged during the second world war. It is dog Latin, bastard Latin about bastards. A close reading of the mock Latin would tell us that it is full of puns. “Illegitimi” actually refers to lawlessness, torquing outlaws into bastards and vice versa. The turn from lawlessness as a moral or ethical quality to being born out of law, or illegitimacy, reduced to a cruder epithet as a figure for unprincipaled, bullying beings enacts a complex series of reversals. “Carborundum” comes from silicon carbide, a grinding substance, and the word looks like a Latin gerundive, which would make the neologism (if Latin can ever be that) actually mean something like “fit to be ground.” According to Wikipedia (and I apologize for this), if this phrase were indeed Latin, it would mean something like “It must not be ground down by the outlaws.”3

5The message aligned Chuck and I with the non-bastards, those who resist the grindings of pettiness, misguided priorities, we who stand for the real people against the insensitivities and misdirections of institutions. And, of course, ironically, the note was finally a joke on ourselves, a turning back once more to the sophisticated academic jokester as the commentator who unwittingly comments on him or herself, as somehow being both exempt from the institution and as much inescapably a part of it in every way. The entire gesture enacts a model of an encached, multi-target speech act in which a phrase or example seems to offer superficial commentary while also enacting the hidden threats of a Trojan horse.

6But what does this have to do with Percival Everett’s fiction? Or the larger rubric of “theory”? Percival’s fiction often deploys a combination of performativity and moebius reversals similar to that performed by Chuck’s note. The “theory” of this relies on a species of performative rhetoric that turns on itself to distribute the act’s hidden multidirectional critiques of pretension to several targets, including the speaker himself. We can track the act’s complexity by means of attentive close reading practices that analyze the speech act’s latent multivalence. This range of potential signifieds drives the act’s machinic moebius as it constantly redirects shifts in reference, scale, and meaning to multiple targets – offense turned to self-acknowledgement turned to commentary upon broader cultural pretensions. Stone’s and Everett’s rhetorical gestures enact a tricksterish set of reversals that link the often pretension-busting dynamic of their texts to a broad range of contexts.

7One of the most obvious cases of such a gambit (and there are several) is the enframed novel, Phuck, in Everett’s Erasure4. Erasure’s protagonist, Monk, inspired by talk show hostess, Kenya Dunston’s praise for a superficial, crudely stereotypical, ludicrously caricatured, but highly lucrative “ghetto” novel, decides to write his own parodically “authentic” ghetto tale. From the start, the venture represents multiple contradictory motivations. On the one hand, Monk wants to make money to support his aging mother. On another hand, he sets out to demonstrate how utterly fraudulent such fictional renditions are. On a third hand, the ensuing novel itself enacts a gross parody of both the genre and its execution. On a fourth hand, Monk tests the limits of his own capacity as a poseur.

8Loosed into the booksphere under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh and despite his agent’s dubiety, the novel, initially titled “My Pafology” rapidly earns wide popular and critical attention. Written from the first person perspective of the stereotype of an authentic ghetto resident, Van Go, My Pafology traces the ways Van’s combination of masculine egocentrism, imitation of hackneyed ghetto gestures (such as hanging out at a pool hall, fathering four children out of wedlock, challenging more successful males, and selfishly fucking whichever women will let him), and worldly ignorance fostered by a lack of education gradually merge to cause his inevitable downfall. Inveigled by an invitation to come on a talk show because someone has a crush on him (the talk show itself is a multi-referential gesture that critiques the talk show host whose adulation of the ghetto novel partly motivates Monk to write his own novel in which a talk show host is also an obvious parody of Oprah Winfrey and her book club), Van gets trapped by his own ego as the “admirer” turns out to be the four women with whom he has fathered children, but to whom he offers no support. Escaping from the studio mid-broadcast, Van plays the hackneyed role of a fugitive until, surrounded by police, he must surrender.

9“My Pafology” which Monk re-titles “Phuck” so as to see just how far public opinion will let the authentic denizen of the ghetto go, parodies the ways identity and social position begin to subtend the literary scene, displacing any notion of good writing, art, or sapience with mundane stereotypes that reinforce biases instead of offering insight. That the novel was so easy even for the intellectual academic, Monk, to write points to the ways facile tropes both circulate in contemporary American culture and satisfy, uncritically and ourobourically reinforcing the same racial stereotypes every step of the way. The critique made by the novel’s parody on one level targets the ways public culture reinforces stereotypes while seeming to be sympathetic to the plight of their misapprehended and misrepresented misfortune. But “My Pafology”’s gesture also turns to several other other targets: the notions of authenticity appended to identity (the idea that there is such a thing as identity premised on superficial categories), the lack of aesthetic comprehension on the part of an increasingly undereducated public, the publishing industry’s willingness to sell anything, and ultimately even the ways the aesthetic judgment of established writers has substituted estimations of identitarian authenticity for judgments of artistic merit.

10The gesture of “My Pafology” does not stop with Erasure’s ironic take on the ersatz novel’s success (including Monk’s stereotypically compliant appearance as Stagg R. Leigh and his enjoyment of the film producer’s fear of him) or ultimate announcement of a prestigious book award. The gesture also turns back on itself in a moebius track to critique the motivations of the fine academic writer protagonist who sold himself out, even as he had perhaps fooled himself into thinking that he merely wanted to make some money and show up the pretensions of silly racism. But when “Pfuck” wins the book award, the author, so far hidden by the pseudonym, not only has to decide whether to confess publicly to his deception (which act would reveal the large set of erroneous preconceptions linked to such work), but also whether to reveal his own role as a sell-out poseur, which may, in retrospect, have been part of the problem all along. But even this potential confession (we never know what he does as the novel ends before he reaches the award dais) itself turns into another critique, this time of a system in which even a talented writer can only succeed when he complies with the cultural stereotypes from which he has extracted himself. And, as we might now expect, this critique also enacts its inverse: a system which rewards affectation over art, and posing over quality, a critique the novel makes in the early encounter between Monk and the pretentious wannabes he meets at the literary conference in which he presents his play on Roland Barthes’ S/Z, “F/V,” itself addressed to the pretensions of academe, where in presenting a clever pretension to the otherwise pretentious, Monk discerns the bellicose stupidity of pretension.

11The complexly enwrapped rhetorical moves enacted by both Chuck Stone and Percival Everett are condensations: dense, cleverly-designed paradigms that in themselves enact the dynamics of certain relations or attitudes (pretension, racism, stereotyping). Unwrapping the paradigms’ condensations (which occurs even by simply reading them) spins out a multi-directional series of targets, each of which offers another manifestation of the practices it critiques. The move’s engagement with one instance of pretension, for example, leads to the critique of another until the entire formation enlarges into a consideration of the broader relations among identity, pretension, imitation, and authenticity, and finally turns back on itself.

A Stein of Bunche

12Another example might clarify this complex operation. In his column, “Big Megilla Over a White Tennis Ball,” from July 1959, Chuck Stone brings the hypocrisies of racial advocacy into question as he comments on the uproar public officials made over the West Side Tennis Club’s denial of membership to the son of the African-American diplomat and Nobel Prize winning, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche5. The perpetually generating condensed move of this essay was the rhetorical form of its statement about what actually caused the uproar around the denial of a tennis club membership by people who otherwise could have cared less about the conditions in which the black denizens of New York City lived. Instead of targeting the tennis club which was the target of general media outcry, Stone critiques the unctuousness of official culture’s reaction, which his radiating enwrapped rhetorical tactic suggests was not because of any objections to systemic racism, but because of the exceptional status of Dr. Ralph J. Bunche himself. Stone writes:

“[…] A whole host of organizations rose up like a mighty wave of oceanic thunder and sounded off on the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills. In short, everybody lost their philosophical perspective and racial sanity over the matter, including, we submit, Dr. Bunche.
Why? Because it happened to Dr. Ralph J. Bunche? Because he is a Negro?
No. Let us draw the distinction as sharply as possible.
The hassle was created because it happened to Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, who is a Negro who is Dr. Ralph J. Bunche. (My apologies to Gertrude Stein.).”6

13Like “Non illegitimi carborundum” this ourobouric recursivity rolls in while it rolls out, enacting the inextricability of form and content. Ralph is Ralph (his son who is also named Ralph) is Ralph is a Negro is Ralph whose sterlingly redundant relations between name, status, and race evoke Gertrude Stein’s famously redundant formulation which gains another meaning – (i.e., what’s in a name or a name is never the same name as the name) in rebounding to the redundancies of Ralph and Ralph-provoked outrage even though it is not that Ralph, but another Ralph who received the racist rejection. Stone’s turn through Stein, which is a gesture towards elite culture, parallels the evocation of Ralph as Ralph, his son, as Ralph, which, like the plaint about Ralph’s Ralph’s rejection, rebounds from the singularly elite to the overlooked plight of the victims of more substantial racial discrimination. Comparing this redundant naming to Stein’s phrase makes visible this associational tactic, which is simultaneously an observation about the ways names have no singular referent and the ways they do, as well as the ways assumptions about reference – about the signifier’s signified – can alter responses significantly based on nothing more than the imaginaries appended to a name.

14This is Stone’s critique: the “white tennis ball” affair was an affair not because of an outrage about New York’s pervasive racism, but because of the assumptions about the status of a name, which is, in the end not about racism at all, but about a kind of exceptionalism appended to the Negro who doesn’t seem to be like those other negroes at all, an exceptionalism that is racist in its simultaneous affirmations and evasions of race. “Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, who is a Negro who is Dr. Ralph J. Bunche.”

15Most spectacularly, we are not done with Ralph. In Percival Everett’s Glyph, infant protagonist, Ralph, a genius baby, ponders his name as a part of the inexactitude of significations. First person narrator, Ralph, has a tendency to add footnoted commentary to his autobiographical exposition, producing structures that comment on themselves in much the same way that Stone’s parenthetical gesture towards Stein operates in his commentary. Like the enwrapped note, the footnote hides at the bottom of the page, enacting a visible but oft-ignored and decentered site through which references rebound and widen. Ralph’s captor, Steimmel, a psychotic psychiatrist, ponders the suitability of the name “Ronald” for an ape, “Ronald? What kind of name is that for an ape? Bobo or Cheetah or Kong, now those are ape names. Ronald, my ass.” (76). Ralph comments on Steimmel’s panegyric in the following footnote:

“I wondered what would make a good name for a monkey. Especially since Steimmel did not even know the monkey. And so I wondered about my name and then names in general. I understood that my name was Ralph and that Ralph was my name and that there are other people out in the world, dead and alive, who answered to Ralph. Was it the case that my name Ralph was not the name of Mr. Bunch or Mr. Nader, but my own special Ralph, just as the ball of tennis was not the ball of Cinderella? Was the Ralph that all three of us shared a kind of ideal Ralph, Ralphness perhaps, a kind of denotation while my private Ralph was just a connotative manifestation of Ralph?”7

16It is almost as if the baby, Ralph, of Glyph were commenting on Stone’s analysis of the meaningfully multiple connotations of Ralph in his white tennis ball column where even the phrase “white tennis ball” takes on multiple connotations. In fact, Glyph’s enwrapped gesture repeats and enlarges the query Stone poses about Ralphic reference, about how one Ralph is never the same as another, that the name can never point to any quintessential Ralphitude, since it is precisely the difference in the signifieds that makes the difference in racial outrage, the difference between Dr. Ralph J. Bunche and baby Ralph.

17Just as Stone extends Ralphness from father to son to father to a broader cultural reputation, Glyph plays constantly with the unexamined assumptions attached to signifiers, including, in a grander performative gesture, readerly assumptions about the race of the protagonist who has been narrating himself for 54 pages. After Steimmel and Boris kidnap Ralph from his crib, spending the night in some room somewhere, the novel’s next section commences with Ralph’s observation that “only an efficient net or spray of myopia could have kept Steimmel or Boris from realizing that transporting me was going to be a conspicuous matter. Although being a baby, I had been spared the realities of racial attitudes in the culture…”8 At that moment, if not before, readers might realize their own racial assumptions, as in the rest of the paragraph, Ralph elucidates the dilemma of kidnapping a child of a different race.

18The next section begins: “Have you to this point assumed that I am white?”9 Having cued readerly suspicions, Ralph performatively exposes the possible implicit racisms of a reading audience, forcing a retroactive reconsideration of their own biases, as at least some of the reading audience, despite the race of the novel’s author, may well have been assuming that Ralph is white. This overt declaration and change of address perhaps enacts (depending on the reader) a shocking moment of pause and self-recognition, one that shifts the reader’s relation to the text from a species of referential mastery to a more humble recognition of the pervasiveness of caucaso-centrism. As Ralph explains it, “I discovered that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious ethnically identifiable idiom, live in a certain part of town, or be called a nigger by someone.”10

19Like the other examples of enknotted figurations that cast broadly in a moebius, this performative pronouncement, which seems simultaneously to be a mere statement of fact, a version of readerly mind-reading (for some readers), and/or a reminder of assumptions about race for other readers that suddenly appears one-fourth of the way through the novel casts multiple lines of entangled commentary. As a question, the sentence is simultaneously mere query and revelation that in its posing both shifts the address of the novel from an imaginary other to the actual reader, breaking through whatever tissues of fiction inhere in the narration. The sudden collapse of fiction into probability enlarges the novel’s operative realm from what seems almost the perpetuated hypothesis of a genius child to the stubborn assumptions of even an intellectually aware reading public. Ralph’s self-declaration as black also forces a retrospective reconsideration of what has already transpired, the ways he characterizes his parents, etc. It also shifts any notion of the locus of power from the reader gleaning the text’s post-structuralist meta-commentary in the empowering way enabled by arrogant familiarity (we are all intellectuals and we can keep up) to what else Ralph may not be telling us that we should already have known. The elite become the stupid; the liberals become the dogged right wing, the potentials of racism become actuality, the text breaks down all assumptions about the signified.

20In engaging openly with theory and theorists, Glyph enacts another kind of theory in its performative gestures that break into and broaden diegesis. What kind of theory is this that operates clandestinely, that breaks into the open to spin and reverse relations, to grab and commingle what might have seemed unrelated? This is finally about the power of signification, but beyond any structural binary between signifier and signified. Instead this is a three-, even four-dimensional dynamic, a Klein bottle of circulations that extend well beyond the binaries of semiosis, whirling like a vortex, spinning and casting into conscious view connotations one might not have dreamed of. These performative figures structure Erasure and Glyph, as beyond anything resembling a line, even though Ralph declares, “The geometry of this text is more than metaphorical. This is to say that the reader will understand the direct spatial implications of the work. I want the reader to trouble herself over structural analysis. I want there to be questions about orientation and location, dispositio and locus, praeceptum and datum. The shortest distance between two meanings is a straight ambiguity.”11 Or not. The questions circle and the questions arise as the lines of these enwrapped paradigms spin throughout the texts, rarely visible as such, and defining (if this is what ambiguity means) a rapidly enlarging scale of inclusions, comparisons, and paradoxes. In addition, printed page layouts and composition add intertitles, aphorisms, Erasure’s artists’ dialogues, Latin, German, and French interpolations, so that the texts within texts enwrap one another, producing kinetic paradigms casting beyond, pulling in, peering deeply, their lines gathering all, and in the end all pretension ends up in irony. At the end of Erasure Monk is, ironically, where Juanita Mae Jenkins was at the text’s beginning, no matter hard Monk tried to show up the stereotypes and hypocrisy of American culture.

21I wonder what the conversation might have been if Chuck Stone and Percival had ever met – and maybe at some point, they did.

Chuck: Writing is a two-way mirror. All is reversed and reversed again. You see
as much of yourself as of others.
Percival: Revelation obscures as much as it reveals, but obscuration casts the line
to imaginary insight.
Chuck: In the end, all is in plain view.
Percival: Even as readers search the corners for clues.
Chuck: I say it again: “non illegitimi carborundum.”
Percival: Tell it like it is, Chuck.