• English

1Narrative theorists have a strong tendency to afford outsized attention to beginnings and endings, due in large part to the seemingly irresistible impulse to analogize narrative and life. From Claude Lévi-Strauss to Paul Ricœur, references to “beginning-as-birth” and “end-as-death” abound¹. Even in attempts to theorize something as apparently non-plot-related as pleasure in narrative, one can find descriptions of the text as a body with erogenous zones, pulsing with life². Not only does Percival Everett’s work disrupt the idealized, linear notion of narrative, inviting us to question our commitment to the arcane structuralism of beginning, middle, and end; it also urges a reevaluation of the impulse to read narratives as if they were lives. Everett troubles the narrative middle at every turn; Erasure’s3 middle contains within it another complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell4 rejects wholesale a linear, cause-effect structure. Their criticism of such structures instead advances an aesthetically-focused understanding of style as a narrative technique.

2In their difference, in their deviation from what Andrew Scheiber calls “Aristotelian notions of unity and forward dramatic movement,” Erasure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell reveal the perversity which comprises the narrative middle – and, I argue, provide a new formulation of pleasure in narrative5. Where they make formal (and, therefore, aesthetic) innovations, Everett’s novels demand a new critique of the relevance of cause-effect mastery, the relevance of the narrative middle, and perhaps most urgently, a temporal (or corporeal) analogy between life and narrative. I read these novels through what I call the lens of the perverse, drawing special attention to difference and deviance as sites of re-narrativization and pleasure. Emerging critical race narratologies, such as Scheiber’s blues narratology, provide the aesthetic scaffolding for a reading of the perverse which privileges tension over release.

3The common notions which describe the cause-effect organization of events in narratives tend towards universalism, an effect of narratology’s Russian Formalist roots. According to formalists such as Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky, all narratives have a “fabula,” or a chronological sequence of events, which may then be presented in or out of “order.” The Formalist term for the ordered narrative construction is “syuzhet,” and the opposition of fabula to syuzhet is the driving force behind the progression of narrative⁶. Thus, for example, it is possible for Gérard Genette to devote a chapter in Narrative Discourse to the “connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative,” contrasting a notion of the “true” chronology of events with the aesthetic, narratively-constructed version7. Skepticism about the accuracy of this division is widespread, but only recently has it emerged from the perspective of critical race narratology.

4Catherine Romagnolo defines critical race narratology as “the study of the ways sociohistorical context and racialized subjectivities impinge upon the formal and structural features of narrative,” and traces the development of its study from the Frederic Aldama-edited collection Analyzing World Fiction in 2011 to the more recent collection Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States in 20178. Forms of narrative theory which attend to racialization critique other, flatter modes, from their failure to include works by authors of color to their very theory of what constitutes a narrative. I am informed by what Greta Olson and Sarah Copland have begun in their collection The Politics of Form9: that is, a recognition that all forms have social and political dimensions and that emergent cultural forms signal not only new shifts in perspective but also the failure of universal theories of narrative to meaningfully engage with all texts. However, it is not my intention to say that Everett speaks from a marginalized positionality – that of a Black man – and that that is what makes his novels unique. To do so would be to fall into the trap set by Erasure. Erasure argues that to tokenize “minority voices” is precisely to elide what is interesting about narrative form in the first place, putting the text and its author in a one-to-one relationship of identity. This is yet another mode of analogizing narrative and human life. Novels such as Erasure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell are not merely refutation by counterexample; they are theory by way of exception, forwarding new “rules” in the mode of systematically breaking the old ones. Critical race narratology warns against reductive readings of life and narrative while also emphasizing the ability of emergent or experimental forms to critique and innovate upon the old ones.

5The tangled nexus of pleasure, narrative, and life animates Peter Brooks’ crucial essay “Freud’s Masterplot,” in which he grants psychoanalytic scaffolding to the notion that lives and narratives are analogous10. Brooks reads Sigmund Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in order to posit a theory of narrative based around desire and meaning in narrative beyond “pure information”11. For Freud, an organism experiences pleasure when it satisfies a need – i.e. a hungry organism experiences pleasure in eating. Undergirding this basic, day-to-day fulfillment of needs is the death drive: pleasure in avoiding the wrong, preventable kind of death (starvation, for example) and an inescapable momentum towards the “correct” death. For Brooks, a narrative follows the same pattern of corrections and return to “homeostasis:” narrative events proceed in a cause-effect pattern from beginning to end, with the ultimate goal being resolution, closure, and satisfaction. In his analysis, the end of a narrative is its most essential meaning-giver; the middle is “determine[d], shape[d], necessitate[d]” by the end12. The narrative middle exists only “as a state of tension, as a prolonged deviance from the quiescence of the ‘normal’ […] until it reaches the terminal quiescence of the end.”13 Here one can already see the workings of deviance, which (to link this vitality to the embodied pleasure it evokes) I call the perverse; Brooks sees the role of plot as being to correct those instances of deviation, and those corrections are generative of forward narrative movement and pleasure.

6Everett’s novels invite a renewed skepticism not only of the opposition of fabula and syuzhet, but also of the motive power of narrative and the modes by which it generates tension and pleasure. Contrasting Brooks’ notion of the return to quiescence, Everett’s prose posits the deviation itself as the source of pleasure. Perversity works on every scale, from the organization of narrative events to the level of the sentence. In this way, Everett’s peculiar style generates a strong critique of cause-effect linearity and the corporealization of narrative, while centering the narrative middle as the site of play for the perverse. I choose “perversity” instead of “deviance” (Brooks’ word) because of its strong association with the body. From Brooks to Barthes, attempts to read for pleasure in text tend towards the erotic and the bodily; “perverse” names the strangeness – and perhaps the un-intuitiveness – of such designations, cautioning readers to be wary of the tokenization (and thus the fetishization) which informs certain acts of reading – i.e. the identification of narrative with life. The word also names the ways texts like Everett’s stand “against what is reasonable, logical, expected, or required”14. The Latin deviare and perversus both have translations having to do with turning away or being contrary, but only “perverse” carries with it the simultaneous sexual and nonsexual gloss from Old English of “return.” Returnings, repetitions, and departures make up the web of pleasure which coheres the narrative middle; what returns is not narrative calm but strangeness, contrariness, and anomaly, both in plot elements and style.

7In Erasure, the perverse arrives in the form of Fuck, a novel written by character Monk Ellison. Ellison, a Black author, finds himself “screaming inside” after reading a “ghetto novel” by rising star Juanita Mae Jenkins, and writes his own satirical novel in response15. The entire text of Fuck is contained in Erasure, standing apart from the rest of the text not just by virtue of its difference in content but also in its literary style and even the font of its title page (“MY PAFOLOGY by Stagg R. Leigh”)16. In Fuck, main character Van Go Jenkins perfectly embodies many Black stereotypes before an on-camera humiliation and beating by the police. The novel quickly rises to fame, earning the prestigious and aptly-titled Book Award. Revealing the fetishization at the heart of Fuck’s popularity, a critic writes,

This novel is so honest, so raw, so down-and-dirty-gritty, so real that talk of objectivity is out of place. To address the book on that level would be the same as comparing the medicine beliefs of Amazon Indians to our advanced biomedical science. […] Our young protagonist has no father, is ghetto tough and resists education and reason like the plague. It is natural, right for him to do so. He is hard, cruel, lost and we are afraid of him; that much is clear. But he is so real that we must offer him pity. […] Fuck is a must read for every sensitive person who has ever seen these people on the street and asked, “What’s up with him?”17

8The repeated “we,” set to contrast “these people,” puts Fuck at odds with the normal, “sensitive” reader, who will be “afraid” of the “naturally” hard and cruel Van Go. This fetishizing contrast permeates more than characterization: the critic also observes that “one often forgets that Fuck is a novel. It is more like the evening news. […] The writing is dazzling, the dialogue as true as dialogue gets and it is simply honest”18. Fuck expresses a style which fits this critic’s expectation for what Black writing – and thus Black life – ought to look like. Style itself is a category defined by deviance, and especially so with Fuck, with its prose dialogue-heavy and profanity-laced and its paragraphs short. As Barthes observes, “Style is seen here as an exception (though coded) to a rule; it is the aberration […] Literature is the domain of the verbal anomaly in the sense that society fixes it, recognizes it, and assumes it in the act of honoring authors […] just as an abscess marks the boundary of a disease”19. A piece of writing can be said to have “style” only insofar as it is deviant from some assumed unstyled, neutral, “normal” writing. Fuck is pleasurable as a fetish object for its audience in its “glimpse of hood existence,” but it also operates as an interruption of and deviation from the text of Erasure itself.

9If style is an aberration, it must be measured against a norm. Barthes identifies the “norm” against which writing is measured to be “spoken (‘current’ or ‘normal’) language”20. The term “normal” is loaded here, especially when one considers Fuck as a fetish object, titillating to its readers in its deviation from the novelistic “norm” and also from norms of white colloquialism. Fuck, with its exaggerated grammatical constructions and spellings, veers so far towards the verbal that it loops back around towards the particularly textual. The chapter titles – “Won,” “Too,” “Free,” “Fo,” etc. – mark textual difference (style) as a signal of Van Go’s spelling and pronunciation (themselves metonymies for his level of education and his difference from the “sensitive” reader). This is what makes it possible for the critic to write that “The writing is dazzling” and “the dialogue is true” in the same sentence, naming the paradox at the heart of Fuck: as a purely constructed work of fiction – satirical fiction! – it accesses a “reality” of which its readership is grateful to catch a glimpse. “One often forgets that Fuck is a novel” exactly because the perversity of its style – its difference from “normal language” – elides its status as text.

10Pleasure – that is, fetishistic pleasure in the perverse – here springs from textual difference, echoing Barthes’ provocative comment in The Pleasure of the Text that “for some perverts the sentence is a body”21. Famously, Barthes writes of textual pleasure as corporeal, sexual pleasure: “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no ‘erogenous zones’ […] it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic”22. The narrative middle appears here as the gape itself, the space “between two edges”23. Style can only be described with comparative metaphors (“gritty,” “earthy,” and “gutsy” being frequently employed style metaphors in Erasure) but “it does not describe itself. Like a god (and as empty), it can only say: I am what I am”24. Contentless, style can only exist referentially and cannot assert itself by itself:

[W]hat would have to control the stylistic work is the search for models, of pattern: sentence structures, syntagmatic clichés, divisions and clausulae of sentences; and what would inspire such work is the conviction that style is essentially a citational process, a body of formulae, a memory […] a cultural and not an expressive inheritance.25

11Such an understanding of style as being empty in itself and existing only citationally has two major implications. Firstly, the pleasurable perversity of Fuck comes as a reference to Juanita Mae Jenkins’ We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, which itself is a reference to “the evening news” and the vision of “those people” that a white readership has already constructed. The layers of textuality inform the presence of Fuck at the center of Erasure both textually and narratologically. Secondly, it means that style is the product of the workings of the middle of a narrative – it is a trend, a pattern, that can either continue in repetition or surprise with newness. Style is best observed as a movement or gesture which develops throughout a narrative, generating pleasure where it deviates and changes – thus, style is not just a valid object of narratological analysis but an essential one, providing an understanding of pleasure which scales up to underscore the importance of the narrative middle.

12To provide a more robust narratology of the middle, however, is to widen the scope of analysis. Barthes’ theory of style and perversity is a response to Brooks’ argument about the return to quiescence (the “normal”) in that it supposes that there is no “normal,” but it still relies on a metaphorical corporealization of text and of narrative. Andrew Scheiber’s notion of blues narratology is a useful alternative to these visions of text as body or life, squarely situating narrative in the tradition of the aesthetic – meaning that instead of sharing structural similarities with life, they share aesthetic techniques with other artistic modes. Scheiber argues that some narratives share an aesthetic with blues music, in that they are informed by modes of repetition, chance and descent. Blues narratology provides a counter-reading to the more universalizing theories which understand the narrative world “in Enlightenment terms, in which actions beget equal and opposite reactions, and the course of events evolves as an aggregate effect of such actions and reactions”26. By contrast, blues narratology sees time as being composed of cycles of repetition. Like blues music, such narratives understand experience not through a forward-looking, progress-driven narrative of development, but instead through the “accretion of incidents that, through repetition, provide the opportunity for self-understanding and mastery of the basic terms and techniques of existence and resistance”27. In order to understand narrative elements in terms of patterns and trends, they must be approached from the perspective of the middle; only then does the perverse emerge as improvisation or innovation, which then operate as strategies for handling and responding to waves of repetition.

13Percival Everett by Virgil Russell is an explicit challenge to the supposedly-self-evident meaningfulness of cause-effect narrative chains; a blues-narratological reading illuminates its formal and stylistic qualities as sources of pleasure and the perverse. For theorists like Brooks, the end of a narrative is the final meaning-granter to its middle because it can be seen as the ultimate destiny towards which the narrative is propelled (by a force akin to the death drive), avoiding the hazard of the “improper end” along the way28. To build a narrative about a living person, then, is to imagine a “proper” destiny for them which will retroactively explain what happened during the middle of their life (i.e. to say “this person never would have become a lawyer if they hadn’t joined the mock trial team as a teenager”). Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, however, argues that there is an alternate aesthetic by which the middle is the vehicle of its own meaning – an aesthetic which does not appeal to life. This is a novel about the end of a man’s life, told without narrative recourse to its beginning or middle; instead, a son and his dying father share unfinished vignettes. A painter meets his daughter for the first time, a doctor cares for a man in exchange for a camera, a nursing home resident steals keys, etc. Each vignette has a beginning and a middle, but they never reach a sense of resolution or conclusion (thereby thwarting Brooks’ notion of pleasure in satisfaction). The text stretches the middle on, reluctant to see the end or the fulfillment of a purpose; faced with human death, it refuses to even hint at the idea of a metonymy between the end of a life and the end of a narrative.

14A sense of infinite middle-hood structures the text, as does storytelling and narrativization as a mode of communication. Billy, a nursing home character, observes that many things are “and just so on,” reciting almost the entire English alphabet: “It’s like this, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I , J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and so on”29. When the narrator presses him to explain why he did not say the letter Z, he says he “didn’t feel like finishing”30. Playfully, another narrator references the Freudian conception of death from which Brooks draws his analysis: “I was dead the day I was born or at least headed toward death and I must say that I stayed the course with rather impressive and also rather common tenacity”31. As the text closes, the father goes on narrating his life after his death, indicating that death itself ought not to be thought as a hard limit on narrative. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell ends not with a sense of fulfillment or closure but instead an exchange of knowledge, of being in on something which can be communicated after the end:

Fuck with them any way you can. I’m dead, but they don’t know it. […]
I write this for you.
If I wrote, this would be it.
If you wrote.
Yes.
I will always be here.
And I.
I’m dead, son.
I know that, Dad. But I didn’t know you knew it.32

15This closing passage, with its tenderness and intimacy, highlights both communication and a strategy of repetition. Knowledge of death can be communicated through writing – through textual style – “if” the character wrote. While the evidence of writing is there on the page, who is doing the writing is ambiguous and indicates that writing and death are not the same, but are in a hypothetical relation (signaled by the “if”). If a character wrote, they would be able to write this text which is on the page now. So, does the character write? The novel refuses an answer, uprooting a cause-effect, if-then relationship between narrative and death. “I will always be here” can be true even when a character is dead; “always” means that presence is not dependent on time or cause-effect event organization. Finally, the repetition of words and phrases between the two speaking narrators is not just a style but a narrative technique of sidestepping the end in favor of an infinite middle. Where Brooks supposes that a narrative must “present itself as a repetition of events that have already happened,” the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell argues that that repetition, knowledge-sharing, writing, and communication can occur after the end – that they will “always” happen33. Furthermore, instead of a fabula or “events,” narration itself – the act of storytelling – structures the novel. Rather than having a fabula – or even an artistically disordered syuzhet – give form to the telling of the father’s death, that death is formed through short, unfinished vignettes, communicated through repeating the act of sharing writing. This perverse return signals the primacy of text as an aesthetic medium.

16Scheiber has already identified this particular narrative technique of repetition as being indicative of blues narratology. Blues music is characterized by harmonic repetition – the repetition of the same chords and phrases over and over. Conventionally, musical tension is created and released by the establishment of a tonic, or final resolution tone, and then progression towards and away from that resolution. In the blues, repetition is a “refusal to create conventional musical tension in the first place – a refusal that creates a new kind of tension”34. I read that tension as being a kind of pleasure, especially in its perversity as an unconventional structural organization. In turning towards repetition, blues narratives create pleasure not through a logic of development, progress, unity, or building on the past, but instead through “the accretion of incidents that, through repetition, provide the opportunity for self-understanding and mastery of the basic terms and techniques of existence and resistance”35. For Scheiber, that self-understanding and mastery happens on the part of the individual, who through repetition can change her relationship to the repeated event in the form of improvisation, recognition, or other minute changes. Thus, a blues narrative makes difference and deviation – the perversion of the expected – into a source of narrative movement.

17However, Everett’s work leans further into the realm of the aesthetic, unseating the individual from the throne of mastery and autonomy in favor of textual style. While, in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, two characters may share knowledge and intimacy via the technique of repetition, the borders of their identities are hazy and marked only textually. Paragraph breaks, chapter changes, and the flitting back and forth of “I” and “you” pronouns flag slippage between self and other, narrator and narrated. By repeating larger narrative structures (the beginnings of vignettes) and words and phrases (“If I wrote” / “If you wrote”), Everett underlines textual style as a narrative technique. Over the course of his novels, his characters rarely develop new senses of autonomy or control. Instead, they resist the notion of pleasure in mastery. Scheiber’s critique of traditional notions of narratology includes a criticism of the “Enlightenment-based narrative economy that posits the individual as the primary architect of his or her fate”36. A shallow reading of blues narratology would see a character as purely reactionary, responding to the conditions of repetition and chance which structure her life through acts of improvisation, growing, learning, and becoming wiser along the way. Everett’s texts acknowledge that this would simply be another kind of Enlightenment progress narrative. Just as Scheiber’s analysis is strongest where it makes arguments about narrative aesthetic techniques and modes, Everett’s theory of narrative is clearest when his characters are read as textual artefacts – fictive constructions – instead of people with mimetic relationships to “real life.” Scheiber pulls back from thinking of characters weathering repetitive events when he writes that the “dramatic intensity of the blues narrative depends less on structured arcs of building, complicating, and releasing tension than on the finessing of the moment, on the deployment of wildcard cleverness”37. Scheiber leaves room for a reading of the text itself as the actor: a narrative can deploy “wildcard cleverness,” as can a sentence. This finesse emerges as style and as the surprising perversity of the unconventional or unexpected (in the face of an already-set-up repetition, or even as that repetition itself). Thus the aesthetic techniques of the blues can resonate through narrative literature, avoiding the life-narrative analogy which prevents Brooks’ analysis from reaching novelists like Everett.

18Everett sets out a new aesthetic of narrative organization which centers pleasure in the perverse. His novels invite a reading which alleviates the under-theorization from which the narrative middle suffers, but they also turn a critical lens onto the cause-effect dynamics of tension and release which are commonly said to structure narratives. Surrendering a sense of autonomy and mastery to narrative style, Everett forwards textuality in tension that is pleasurable in its tenseness. A middle that stretches beyond the conventionally meaning-granting ending to generate its own momentum is the stage for textuality, repetition, and style. Perhaps most importantly, though, this reading resists an aesthetically untenable mimetic relationship between narratives and lives. Erasure itself is a strong warning against reading a text as if it were a life, or even as a body. Such a reading risks its corporealization into a system of exchange which would not only commodify it but see it as a stand-in for its author, making them both fungible and available for fetishization. Perversity, the narrative dynamic that makes Everett’s prose such a successful formal counterpoint to dominant narratological theories, also alerts one to the dangers of eroticizing text on too literal a level. To do so would elide the promise of an emerging critical race narratology to develop its own aesthetic methodology, exchanging text and characters for authors and naming tokens instead of techniques. That too-easy satisfaction thwarts Everett’s project, which would much rather leave things unresolved to unfold on their own.