• English

“I emphatically do not identify possible worlds in any way with respectable linguistic entities; I take them to be respectable entities in their own right. When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally. Possible worlds are what they are, and not some other thing. If asked what sort of thing they are, I cannot give the kind of reply my questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to something else.
“I can only ask him to admit that he knows what sort of thing our actual world is, and then explain that other worlds are more things of that sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them.”
David Lewis, Counterfactuals (1973)1

1This paper will concern two of Percival Everett’s novel experiments: Erasure (2001) and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013). These stories are about what they are as stories – not stories as a general concept, structure, or even modality, but each story as the story that it is, whose modality is an effect of its text – not its textuality but this text of the fiction that it is and contains, in reality. I read them as two stories also about what the “fictional modal realism” of my title might mean.

I. Hypotheses Fingo

2According to the truth: Aristotle’s laws gave us logic, Euclid’s axioms founded geometry, Isaac Newton’s rules define the scientific method, Gottlob Frege’s formal system delivered predicate calculus, and thank heavens for all that!

II. To Bean or not to Bean

3In Percival Everett’s 2001 novel, Erasure, protagonist and narrator Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is, among other things, a contemporary American writer of experimental, as opposed to experiential, novels. Ellison is the kind of writer who is told by “a tall, thin, rather ugly book agent” at a party that he “could sell many books” if only he would “forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists and settle down to write the true, gritty real stories of black life.”2 As an author, Ellison is too aloof, too literary, too highbrow and not black enough, not literal enough, and not authentic enough to evince market appeal in the libidinal economy of New York literati’s high-society. There’s a hint of masochism to Ellison’s half-hearted but serious membership in another certain Society where that spectrum of values would be all but inverted, and yet an atmosphere of mutual disdain puts a finer point on his sense of appearing out of place there. In the academic Nouveau Roman Society, Ellison is not “stereotypically innovative” enough, has suspiciously and successfully dabbled in realism, and is hated because the French hold his work in high critical regard while he makes no secret about being highly critical of theirs (the Society members’).3 How could such a wry, self-aware masochist resist the delicious convergence he plans to take place in Washington, D.C.?: the annual meeting of a professional Society where his being out of place fits him like a glove, and the return home, to his family, where there is a place for Monksie, but he is uncertain how to fill it.

4In D.C., Ellison delivers a paper at the Society meeting in which he performs a Barthesian reading on Barthes’s own seminal work on Barthesian reading, S/Z. Under the title “F/V: Placing the experimental novel,” the text of Ellison’s “F/V: a novel excerpt” is reproduced in the novel itself, placing the experimental novel right here, in this novel, Erasure.4 Ellison faithfully applies Barthes’s typological method for deriving the five codes to the title and first few phrases of S/Z, namely, the following:

I. Evaluation:
There are said to be certain buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean. Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see the whole world’s stories (And there have been ever so many) in a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a great narrative structure, which we shall reapply (for verification) to any one narrative…5

5Barthes announces the failure of these analysts, who thought they would find a universal quantifier over all stories, but in doing so rendered their beans, that is their books, blank. To restore the book to semiology, Barthes places the first analysts’ bean-bungling, their ascetic high-mindedness, under erasure to get back to the beans, themselves. Ellison emphasizes, “Finally, it is not the buddhist we should find interesting, but the bean.”6 At this point, the tale of certain buddhists and their beans is also looking like a parable of certain Barthesians and their bean-busting pretensions – of course, the real bean-gazing buddhists were not analysts at all. Ellison reminds his colleagues that a bean, like a novel, implies the seed which it both is and contains, it is its own beginning, middle, and end “and so, is complete as a picture of itself, a landscape.”7 If buddhist practice achieves this ascetically, by seeing through the veil of illusion, then novelistic practice achieves this aesthetically, by writing it on the surface of illusion, the novel showing a landscape by bringing it in-ludo, entering into the text as a place of coded writing framed in a pretense of play, which is not to say innocence.

6Ellison rhapsodizes, “And so we come to dismantling of the endeavor as the endeavor of the text at hand, Sarrasine, not being chosen as a model at all, but accepted as one treated in a way which in turn is a model for the treatment of other texts, as is this text.”8 How to dismantle the dismantling of beans in search of their universal essence? What Barthes did to Sarrasine was treat it as a model in order to demonstrate his method for propagating texts by rereading and rewriting them as models of themselves. And this, we are told, is what Ellison is doing to S/Z. We need not look beneath the bean, or beyond all beans, but go back to breeding the beans themselves. For these beans are all surface and yet we’ve barely scratched it! Barthes offers Sarrasine as one such bean and seminates another. Ellison’s F/V offers S/Z and seeds another. Erasure offers F/V and sows another.

7In the extended text of “F/V: Placing the Experimental Novel” (1999) published under his own name in the journal Callaloo (the “novel excerpt” of which will double as the text Ellison presents at the Nouveau Roman society in Erasure), Everett avers,

The “novel” F/V is not a parody of S/Z, but a story about the relationship of the author of S/Z to what he claims to be his subject text, a story about the relationship between that author of S/Z and his own pretense toward critical analysis of any literary work at all, a story about the nature of parody and the conventional story itself, a story about the relationship of the author of F/V to the conventional story, the critical endeavor of his subject text, to his place and the place of the novel within the culture.9

8Whereas Barthes’s initiative to analyze the subject text of Balzac’s realist novel diverts back to a fascination with the analysis itself as text, Everett plots the experimental “novel” F/V (but also and again in Erasure) on an ironic return to the conventional, because most mimetic, sort of story – a story of “the relationship between the creator and the created, which in turn becomes the love story, the betrayal story, the monster story.”10 In Everett, such novel experiments respond to existential emptiness and commodifying culture’s endeavors in exploitation by seeking and seeding a fictional modal realism in the fecundity of this highest mimesis, natura naturans.

9The dismantling of the endeavor to dismantle seeds the endeavor of the text at hand, as Erasure. This story, then, is also another such text. As is Ellison’s fabricated story, his counterfeit novel My Pafology, for which the dismantling of the author will be the endeavor of authoring the text at hand, so that the writer will put the author under erasure, by assuming his proper place in the text as precisely that erasure. Just to give the middle finger, he’ll even retitle it Fuck. With all the sanctimony of a fake buddhist, Ellison closes his remarks: “A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.”11 Fingered by a Society colleague as a “mimetic Phillistine,” Ellison joins the company of Everett and “Barthes, et al, [who] are looking for something to do and he wants somebody to see him doing it.”12 Finally, at “The Ceremony,” the Book Award will bestow its eponymous honor on Stagg R. Leigh; the pseudonymous placeholder that Ellison made for himself has come to call him to account. Among the society of important guests and colleagues, Ellison confides or perhaps feigns, once again: “I feel generally out of place.”13 The truth is, he knows and we know, he’s really stepped in it. Ellison had long since come to regard My Pafology-cum-Fuck by Stagg R. Leigh not as the surface of illusion, a landscape in a bean, but something he “designed as a functional device, its appearance a thing to behold, but more a thing to mark, a warning perhaps, a gravestone certainly.”14 It had occurred to him that, “the novel, so-called, was more a chair than a painting,” and he intends to sit on it.15 In this way, too, Fuck is furniture as much as fiction... balderdash disguised as bookshelf decor for those who are looking to look hip.

10This is how the Fuck affair will work: the writer will have to replace-in-order-to-erase the author-taken-as the authentic speaker of My Pafology in the final ceremony, where the writer will stand in place of the author, as the author, standing in for a supplemental transference that re-marks the indelible stain of erasure by re-sign-ing the pathological object. Fuck is a hoax – the book is not a real bean, but part of a bigger picture, a piece of the whole story, in Erasure – and hoaxes always require a complementary supplement to be decoded – always, in fact, more than one. In this ceremonial dreamscape, the emperor, wearing no clothes, finally takes his seat atop his throne, a crowned counterfeit, a “mimetic hack.”16 The point of the hoax will have always been of a piece with such an endeavor of exposure.

11What can one do with the place one has made for oneself, there being no one else? He takes it... taking his proper place, the Book Award’s pride of place, denuded but for his laurels atop his throne. Ellison owns it by owning up to it, gives himself up by exposing himself in erasure. That erasure in this Erasure is also the bean.

III. Nota Beane

12As at least double, Erasure: A Novel names and renames at once the “thing” (erasure as a novel) and the novel narrative of the story, and even the narrative act (the narration) of the narrative of the story of a novel – this novel title chosen by an author to name an experimental novel about erasure; authorial erasure, for one. If Erasure is a novel, does that mean A Novel is erasure? Does it follow that Erasure is the object of A Novel because a novel is the object of erasure? The thing, the bean, the object of the novel Erasure: A Novel defined as erasure, is not, precisely, a thing like any other in the strictly determined sense of the thing, but is like the thing that marks and is the mark of a thing which it would have been only insofar as it could have been what it is now, its erasure. Even so, erasure is not a mark like Spencer-Brown’s clear and distinct mark (the cybernetic correlate to Descartes’s clear and distinct idea), but a smear and a stain, the indistinction and indefinition of a mark. It is, then, “something” like a sign, and even a false sign, or maybe a true sign with a false value, a sign whose signified seems (but that is the whole story) finally not to correspond or be equivalent to anything, a fictive sign without secure signification. Rather, erasure is insecure insignification, a dissimulation of insignification, the double of a sign or a signifier as its insignificance, a true counterfeit defictionalized: the author under erasure in a novel signed to simulate the significance of authorial authenticity and its erasure. In this Erasure, we have a fictional author counterfeiting a fictional pseudo-author to put him under erasure, to take his place in and as that erasure. Which is only to say that: in the fictive narrative as the true narrative by the fictive writer (the story, you will recall, opens by way of a first-person-private entry in Ellison’s journal, taking us into its confidence)... Or, in a fictive narrative as the true narrative by the fictive writer (Ellison) of a counterfeit narrative by a counterfactual writer (Stagg Leigh)… we really get something like a so-called “true, gritty, real story” of black life doubly-fictionalized, at least twice counterfeited, certainly double-conscioused, always already remarked by erasure.17

13This erasure in Erasure obliges us to wonder if such a novel is also about the true, gritty, real story of a fetish (commodity or narrative) that binds a certain desire for stories of black life to the desire for certain stories of black life. It obliges us to wonder if this is what such a true story might sound like – that is, what the whole fantasy for what Stagg Leigh sounds like, might really sound like: the sound of a story about a problem of identity dissimulated in a certain characterological desire for fabricated authenticity. Following W.E.B. DuBois, is the question of wanting true, gritty, real stories of black life really a question of wanting stories about what it feels like to be a problem?18

14Here, something like a desire for fiction is pathologically tendered into a desire to have on hand something about which one could say, not just authoritatively or universally, but credibly: “it’s a black thang.” Credibility is exchanged, given and taken on credit. The publishing industry’s commercialization of blackness runs on a credit backed by racial debts, a fiduciary obligation to be a credit to a nation’s race, to credit race with one’s stories and one’s life, taking race on credit to lend credibility to a counterfeit economy of “black thangs.”19 With this system of debt in erasure, in a final analysis, we see that this idea of “real stories of black life” has nothing to do with the fact of the author’s skin color because Stagg Leigh’s skin is exactly as black as Monk Ellison’s, his skin is his skin, his story of black life is in his story of black life. Whether commercially or ceremonially, this desire for “black” is not really a search or desire for any black things, racial equality, class consciousness, or intersectionality, but for a counterfeit authenticity that, in truth, countenances back one’s own darkest delusions. Fuck, over-exposed and under Erasure, denudes the very base of that delusion: identity, then, isn’t even skin deep, but racialized in the eye of the beholder. Dissimulating dissimulation, erasure signifies designification and resignification – the erasure of the counterfeit story of race and the counterfeit counterfiction of its erasure. Ellison/Leigh’s feint and counterfeint: not my pathology but your fantasy.

15This text, Erasure, then is also the counterfactual hoax, a novel experiment in counterfeit fiction, in which fake stories are functional devices, that is, machines for provoking events, starting with its being there, taking place in the space it takes, like a bean but also like a chair. Or, as Derrida puts it concerning Baudelaire’s story “Counterfeit Money,” having remarked its similarity to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” on the basis of certain affinities for (dis-)simulation and (self-)exposure that strike us again in Erasure:

This text, then, is also the piece, perhaps a piece of counterfeit money, that is, a machine for provoking events: First of all, the event of the text that is there, like a narrative offering itself or holding itself open to reading (this event has taken place and continues to take place, it gives time and takes its time, it apparently gives itself time), but also and consequently, from there, in the order of the opened possibility and of the aleatory, an event pregnant with other events that have in common, however, a certain propitiousness for this staging of a trap or a deception [leurre].
And the trap is the affair of nothing less than reason, of the reason one has or the reason one gives. [...] An affair of reason, the trap or deception is also an affair of gift, excuse, forgiveness, or non-forgiveness for a non-gift or rather for an always improbable gift.20

16This perhaps experiment with counterfeit fiction, the fictive hoaxer’s journal and his novel hoax, too, has a certain propitiousness for this staging of a trap or a deception, the propensity to false pretense marking an endeavor of exposure. The counterfeit story dissimulates a machine for provoking events, but rational mechanics merely disguise “the fact that the text performs because of its meaning, regardless of where that meaning resides or how that meaning is constructed (and by whom).”21

17What reasons do we give or take for experimental fiction? Its place, or placing, of an experiment and its fictional nature? If this novel of contrivances – in which literary frames and feints are functional devices for counterfictional kairos – frames an experiment, to what end does it conclude, appended in Latin no less (a dead language): “Hypotheses non fingo” – I frame [feign/contrive] no hypotheses?22 Well, hypotheses non fingo is also famous line in Isaac Newton’s essay “General Scholium,” first appended to the second edition of his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1713). There, Newton takes the opportunity to speak up about his reasons for insisting on the existence of the laws of gravity without being able to give any clear reason or true cause [vera causa] for the existence of gravity, itself. Answering the critics of the first edition of his Principia who suspected he was introducing “occult forces” into science, the author expounds:

[…] I have not as yet been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was that impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation, were discovered. And to us it is enough, that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.23

18In this context, the phrase hypotheses non fingo contrives to distinguish Descartes’s and Leibniz’s scientific method of deduction – that is, deriving conclusions by ratiocinating a priori definitions – and Newton’s inductive method of scientific inquiry that dictates phenomena should be observed before general rules are framed to explain them. For Newton, his observation-based inference that gravity appears to exist and inductive knowledge of how it exists supersedes both ignorance and doubt about the unaccounted whys and wherefores. For Newton, it is enough to see gravity in a bean, so long as it didn’t appear to matter which bean because he saw gravity in every bean he could have seen.

19Here we needn’t quibble over, but merely remark, the little trap Newton laid for himself, because he indeed framed many hypotheses in the first edition of the Principia (1687), particularly in the opening section of Book III, titled “Hypotheses.” Along with the addition of his “General Scholium” to the subsequent editions, all but one of those hypotheses were renamed or refashioned as “Phaenomena” or “Regulae philosophandi,” reframing “Hypotheses” by calling them “Rules.” Still, the reception of hypotheses non fingo as a rousing proclamation in the name of studying “the things themselves” helped make Newton Hume’s hero. His would-be hypotheses, reframed as rules, are credited with doing for the scientific method what Euclid’s axioms did for geometry and Aristotle’s laws (e.g., non-contradiction) did for logic... No need to spill the beans behind the excluded middle where feigned hypotheses come to count for real rules.

IV. Back to Bean Counting

20Erasure frames F/V frames My Pafology frames Erasure feigns no hypotheses but a string of beans: three beans in a bean or beans by beans. What does the “erasure” in Erasure name, in fact, but a story of the possible beans it could have been? In another possible story, Everett considers the fact of fiction qua the being of these beans, the fact of fiction as an existential modality: “[...] given the existence of the story, the story is a fact and the elements of the story are in fact not fiction at all, not only within the context of the story but in the totality of reality. If the facts change, then the story is different and is not the same story.”24 The identity of the bean with its being is yet another story, puzzled over in yet another triplicate bean, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett (2013), that compels the question of to what beings such a novel title supposably refers?

21Before the beginning one titles two names that are already three even if they identify the same thing. The novel rewrites a classic word puzzle framed by logician Gottlob Frege to stage the project of formal mathematics over a hundred years ago. In “Sense and Reference” (1892), Frege’s puzzle splits the atom of identity (the necessary unit of truth-propositions, “a=a”) into 2+n dimensions by realigning reflexivity, or the relation between an entity and itself, in the bifid articulation of geometria (“=”) and grammateia (“is”).25 Observed in this higher dimensionality, the discrete phenomenal identity of an object-referent unfolds a syzygy constellated in the firmament of signs: “the morning star,” “the evening star,” and the planet “Venus.” All three are “proper names,” equally identifying the same referent, yet each sign’s reflexive relation to its sense prevents seamless interchange. When predicated on, substitutions generate successive series of significations changing sentences’ meaning and even veracity.

22Against such baroque errancies, Frege surmises that proper names only really acquire their distinctive meanings together with predication: sentences are more complete units of meaning than individual words or phrases.26 For the logico-mathematical sign system to work deductively across its proper domain within n-dimensions of significant meaning, thought, and knowledge, Frege had to axiomatically refine and syntactically restrict the combined semantic functions of every possible sentence to the range of the bivalent set: True or False.27 If we are to credit statements in formal mathematical logic with nontrivial truth in reality, Frege insists, it can only be granted on the induction of complementary accounts of mathematical domains’ empirical applicability outside of mathematics. Convinced that mathematics could overcome its own ludic triviality, “Frege’s Constraint” settles the matter modally in his Basic Laws [Grundgesetze] of Arithmetic (1983/1903): “Now, it is applicability alone which elevates arithmetic above a game to the rank of a science. Applicability thus necessarily belongs to it.”28 Logicism might take mathematics from disguised nonsense to patent nonsense, but it’s only by metaleptic transumption that it has any non-trivial sense at all.

23Just as Frege finished putting the final touches on his formal system of writing, Bertrand Russell revealed a trick in the system that made it testify against itself, confiding the persistent intractability of pure mathematics’ ludic foundations in its own idiom. The Russell Set contrived a complementary supplement that decoded the disguised erasure on which Frege’s formal logicism relies. The poor devil had been duped by his own referential hoax. Despite their pretensions to perfectability, the salutary “failure” of Frege’s and post-Fregean systems – incompleteness, halting problems, ineradicable ambiguities – hasn’t diminished successive hoax-solutions’ seductive power. Tracing his genealogical legacy through Russell and Alfred Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and so forth, credits logical positivism and the Anglo-American project of analytic philosophy among the notable spinoffs claiming Fregean patrimony.

24For what it’s worth, Everett confides that Frege’s preeminent riddle provided the novel’s inception: “These are all the same thing, but are different things. That was Frege’s puzzle – how is it that we have these referents for different things that are the same thing? It’s one way of approaching a problem of identity, and that’s often what drives me and a lot of my work – the notion of logic and identity.”29 Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell rewrites a fictionalized Frege’s puzzle in reverse, for which Everett replaced its working title Frege’s Puzzle with the titular puzzle Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. If this is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell – how does Percival Everett come by it? – this being by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett. By what predecessor relation does identity skip a generation?30 Does Percival Everett have Percival Everett by Virgil Russell like Abraham has Isaac by Sarah?

V. A Hill or a Head Full of Beans or None: Half-Baked Beans

25Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett, isn’t it? But does Percival Everett by Virgil Russell = Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett? Do both sets of names refer to the same thing and by the same set of relations?

26On an Ellisonian-Barthesian reading, the title’s authorial catachresis functions sequentially where each term succeeds from the next, which it is “by,” confounding the read work with the work of writing. This nominative series enfolds an enigma of names that may frame sets and sets of sets, formalizing a summative series that converges on the novel as a set of the sets that do not contain themselves – a Russell set.31 The preposition proposes a novel modalism by which objects can range over the concepts they fall under – a quasi-reversibility of name and predication, product and production, form and performance. Hypothetical reversibility frames the author function as a textual effect, the byproduct of writing. Thus, semiotic synthesis and summative sense will appear in the province of metalepsis, and transumptively moves us frame by name, line byline. The titular lexia both constitutes an enigma, a hermeneutic code, a question of the author function and the response of writing, in writing, by writing. Connoting a signifier par excellence – identity – Percival Everett by Virgil Russell prepositions the province of metalepsis on the symbolic level into which the opening of the novel will have introduced us.

27While Frege’s puzzle presents multiple names for ostensibly the same object but “meaning it” in significantly different ways, Everett’s novel makes a fictional puzzle of ostensibly different persons, father and son, author and character, identified with the same name. The text proposes: “Well, here’s a game for Ludwig, Pin the Tail on the Narrator.”32 That it’s only a game is true enough for us when we see that, in reality, the bean really does exist; the fact of illusion is a credit to the difficult truth that reality is anything but real.33 If literature as an institution feigned no more hypotheses of authentic essence and invests confidence in the obscure and indeterminate surface of fiction, might ideation itself begin to appear as a textual effect, in the ordinary sense of text?34

28Hypotheses non fingo. Re vera, sum seria.