American Infliction

One happy consequence of film adaptations is the resurfacing, however briefly, of their sources. In the case of American Fiction, bobbing up in its wake is Percival Everett's Erasure, a dark satire on which director Cord Jefferson based American Fiction’s Oscar-winning screenplay. Erasure follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a proudly-Harvard-educated professor of English whose stubbornly highbrow novels sell sparsely. When told he would sell more books if he made them “Blacker,” Monk indignantly demurs. He refuses to pander to racism. He will not compromise his art for money.

In Erasure, Monk visits a chain bookstore and is irate to find his novels mis-shelved in an area labelled “African American Studies.” Nearby, a poster promotes a book-signing by Juanita Mae Jenkins, whose best-selling debut novel, We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, shamelessly indulges racist tropes. Later, after watching Jenkins promote her book on an Oprah-like talk show—during which the host chortles, “Girl, you gone be rich”—Monk angrily pounds out a parody—titled My Pafology—that he populates with shiftless, violent characters as debased as he can make them. Both grimly hilarious and heart-breaking—its chapter headings are written out as Won, Too, Free, Fo, Fibe, Sex, Sebem, Ate, Nine, Tin—My Pafology opens with its protagonist, Van Go Jenkins (“They calls me Go”), dreaming of stabbing his mother repeatedly. Then, shortly after waking, Go decides,

Still later, after assaulting Rexall’s mother’s boyfriend:

Go then fantasizes about impregnating an alphabetical list (lacking only X) of babies to add to the four—Aspireene, Tylenola, Dexatrina, and Rexall—he’s already fathered but doesn’t support:

Monk sends the short manuscript to his agent, insisting it be forwarded to publishers, not, as his agent urges, as a parody, but straight, although under the pen-name “Stagg R. Leigh.” Instead of the expected rejection, the manuscript receives a publisher’s enthusiastic acceptance and an offer of a large advance. Badly needing money to provide nursing care for his ailing mother, Monk instantly drops his principles and accepts the offer. No Hamlet he.

Irony ensues: Amid preparations for the novella’s release, Monk arbitrarily demands that its title be changed to Fuck!. The publisher resists initially, then folds. Fuck! becomes a cultural phenomenon. Passing as Stagg R. Leigh—and thus erasing himself—Monk angrily navigates the demands and snags of a fame he can’t, as himself, acknowledge. When Fuck! is nominated for a prestigious book award. Monk, who had agreed to be a judge before the book was nominated and who can’t admit to being Stagg R. Leigh, must listen resignedly to the other judges gushing over it:

Erasure posits a (mostly White) mass audience of callow, intellectually lazy readers who will buy, and buy into, only what affirms their minstrelly preconceptions of Black life

Erasure posits a (mostly White) mass audience of callow, intellectually lazy readers who will buy, and buy into, only what affirms their minstrelly preconceptions of Black life: caricatures of inarticulate nincompoops whose poor spelling and garbled grammar expose their functional illiteracy; prurient stories about unmarried, irresponsible, multiple-baby-burdened welfare queens who indulge voracious sexual appetites while being carelessly re-impregnated by sexually predatory, equally irresponsible, baby-daddies; and lurid portrayals of emotionally- and morally-stunted racial familiars to whom these readers feel superior and with whom they feel comfortable. (How these readers differ from White Floridians is never clarified.)

Everett’s novel is a deep dive into the myriad ways Blackness and Black culture are simultaneously created and negated, including alienation within Black communities, families, and selves. Even Monk’s name, Thelonious Ellison, sardonically alludes to Black negation, both the social eradication of Ralph Ellison’s nameless Invisible Man, and the scant regard White critics paid to the pioneering jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. [Future project: Interrogate the murky reasons White critics sidelined the boundary-expanding and influential Monk, whom they diminishingly branded as “difficult,” while apotheosizing Miles Davis, a far-crankier figure who was openly contemptuous of White critics and White audiences.]

Erasure is both autofictional—author Everett is a novel-writing professor of English—and epistolary, its chapters comprising seemingly random, journal-like entries: musings, observations, story ideas and fragments, multi-lingual aphorisms, a complete literary-conference paper replete with recondite lit-theory jargon, and the full text of My Pafology/Fuck!. Throughout, the entries are separated by trios of Xs in lieu of dates, effectively making Monk’s story timeless.

Everett’s examination of Black negation and abnegation begins in the beginning. Monk’s first entry announces that the reader is invading his privacy, which he then shrugs off:

Erasure goes on to detail Monk’s monkish life, his discomfort in and alienation from his world, and his physical and (mostly self-imposed) emotional isolation from his family. The constant, quasi-ghostly presence of Monk’s larger-than-life, domineering father (another glance at Hamlet) blots out the family’s sun. Monk has always felt estranged from his community, whose members expend copious energy establishing, reinforcing, and patrolling external and internal boundaries. Early on, Monk’s sister, an abortion provider, is violently erased even as advancing dementia erases Monk’s adored mother. His brother Bill, a closeted gay man, has erased himself.

Though his American Fiction screenplay is a loose adaptation, Cord Jefferson, who is also one of the film’s producers, continues Erasure’s dissection of Black (ab)negation. Toward the end, Jefferson adds a moving scene of sibling reconciliation: Monk (Jeffrey Wright) sits on the porch ruefully looking across the street at the home of Coraline (Erika Alexander) (named Marilyn in Erasure), whom he likes but, perhaps because he likes her, has angrily alienated, i.e., erased from his life, because she has bought, read, and liked We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. Bill (Sterling K. Brown), the brother with whom Monk has had a prickly relationship, joins him on the porch and asks about Coraline. When Monk admits there’s no longer a there there, Bill says,

While Monk is eclipsing his true self with Stagg R. Leigh, Bill is struggling out of the shadow of his own self-eclipsing. Jefferson’s emphasizing of this contrast—Monk seeks shadow while Bill seeks light, seeks, in effect, to unerase himself—is American Fiction’s emotional heart, and is among the major ways Jefferson’s screenplay differs from Everett’s book. Of all the film’s fine cast members, Sterling K. Brown’s thrumming intensity transcends his supporting role. His performance as Bill, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, communicates a complex interiority that is by turns decent, angry, frustrated, joyous, funny, and tormented. The humanity he generates disturbs the balance that satire requires between distance and empathy, mellowing American Fiction’s satirical bite but strengthening its heart.

Race separates and distances; this is its purpose. By fostering, justifying, and amplifying artificial separation and isolation, that distancing clears a fertile field for satire, sarcasm, and parody. But to succeed, the satirist/parodist must maintain authorial distance and detachment, must precariously balance sardony with empathy over the long haul. Satire and parody must provide readers—who must be familiar with the referenced subtexts, or they won’t “get” the satire—with extreme-yet-plausible situations while sustaining sketchy characters who often behave absurdly (if not contemptibly) yet with whom readers connect, if only superficially.

This balance is difficult enough to maintain in one-liners (ask any professional comedian) or short stories; managing distance and sardonic tone over extended stretches—novels or films—requires not only taxing discipline, but also long-term and enervating detachment from subjects about which writers may care deeply. (Monk is certainly channeling Everett’s frustration when, after agreeing to a publishing contract, he insists that My Pafology‘s title be changed to Fuck!.) Yet as difficult as it is to maintain distance and tone over Erasure’s full length, Everett’s task as a satirist/parodist is doubled; not only must he maintain satiric distance from and toward Monk, Monk’s cohort, and Monk’s world, he must also sustain Monk-the-author’s parodic distance from and within My Pafology/Fuck!, including Monk-the-author’s distance from and toward Go, Go’s cohort, and Go’s devolved, demented, and soul-obliterating world.

Both Erasure and American Fiction are powered by race’s endlessly destructive fusion engine, a perpetual-destruction machine fueled by false signifiers, by the delusion that external physical traits convey internal emotional and intellectual content and character. In Erasure’s initial journal entry, Monk, reacting to the advice to make his novels Blacker, says,

All writers, fiction or non-fiction, occasionally encounter a character who won’t cooperate with their narrative plans (echoes of Genesis and Eve’s disobedience). This happens in both Erasure and American Fiction. In Erasure, Everett’s empathy for Monk, his community, and his world, and in turn Monk’s empathy for My Pafology/Fuck!‘s characters and their situations—their grief, rage, and confusion as they awkwardly steer through their actively hostile world—overwhelms both Everett’s, and by extension Monk’s, distance. This disrupts both works’ critical balance between sardony and empathy, softening the satirical/parodic edge. Though both Everett and Monk distort their fictional worlds, Erasure/My Pafology/Fuck!’s characters are inspirited by the humanity with which their respective writers imbue them. To Erasure readers who see past the contorted stereotypes, both Everett’s and Monk’s characters behave as any of us might if sentenced to life in those worlds. This imbued humanity permeates all of Erasure, evoking tragedy, a bleak sense of wasted potential, of besmirched grace. Yet this is a good thing; as its satire/parody loses bite, Erasure’s impact strengthens, and its significance and emotional resonance broaden and deepen.

Much of both Erasure and American Fiction takes place in the beach community in which Monk and his siblings were partially raised, thus placing them firmly in the Black upper-middle class. This draws comparison with, on one side, the “Blacker” Black world inhabited by Go Jenkins, and on the other side, the privileged world inhabited by the White upper-middle class. (Colson Whitehead mines a similar vein—the velvet ghetto of a Black, beach-community—in 2009’s Sag Harbor, which follows an analogous, nerdy Black youth’s fraught interactions with a racism-distorted world.) That Everett intends a comparison between Go’s life, options, and choices, and Monk’s—both poisoned by the racist world’s permeating toxins—is evidenced by the similarity between Go’s last lines in MyPafology/Fuck! (“Hey, Baby Girl. Look at me. I on TV”) and Monk’s last line in Erasure (“Egads, I’m on television”).

Even when an adaptation hugs its source, comparing “the book” to “the movie” is a mug’s game, always a false equivalence, always apples and oranges. Jefferson’s adaptation embraces its source stiffly, his script softening Erasure’s satire to begin with, but in his film, empathy further swamps sardony as Jefferson the director has saddled himself with a cohort of consistently fine actors who powerfully and poignantly project their characters’ anguished, racism-pummeled interiors.

Even the White gatekeepers of the publishing-industrial complex, written as buffoonish caricatures falling over themselves for fear of offending, are harder to laugh at than they might be in other hands; in American Fiction we feel them trying not to hurt people’s feelings. In reality, most in that industry are well-read lovers of books who swim in the same ethically compromised, morally polluted capitalist seas as the rest of us.

Some of American Fiction’s satiric softness may be due to director Jefferson’s being too kind to be cruel to actors who, for the film’s satire to cut most sharply, should—but don’t—play their characters shallower and callower. It scarcely matters. Though American Fiction’s satire is not as sharp-edged as Jefferson might have liked, his film works wonderfully well due to its fine cast and his respect for his characters’ complexity and humanity. In fact, the same is true for Erasure: Everett’s characters take on lives of their own, sometimes refusing to submit to their author's designs. In the end, these two strong American fictions resonate like tuning forks.