Page 64 →Chapter 3 Five Exemplary Menippean Satires

Weinbrot has characterized Menippean satire via two clusters of common traits, the first of which is formal, the second thematic: “We see copiousness, various mixtures of genres, languages, plots, periods, and places whether super-or subterrestrial. We also see finite and recurring topics: concern with dangerous, harmful, spreading views whether personal or public, whether by the individual human being who needs to learn not to fantasize about harmful heroism or beauty, the governor who needs to learn not to tyrannize, or the nation that needs to learn not to destroy its benevolent heritage” (5–6). Glyph, Erasure, and A History of the African-American People all feature shards of text from numerous literary and nonliterary genres embedded into their overarching novelistic narratives. In the case of A History of the African-American People, this narrative substrate must be inferred, as the book consists entirely of what appear on the surface to be letters, interoffice memos, publishing contracts, notes from business meetings, transcripts of conversations, and handwritten personal notes without any sort of conventional fictional framework binding them together.

Margaret Russett’s contention that “the integrity of Everett’s project consists in maintaining an unrelenting assault on constricting fictions of identity—be they racial, generic, authorial, or … even corporeal—while insisting on their real and unevenly distributed effects” (366) helps explain the presence of Weinbrot’s “recurring [Menippean] topics” in these three books as well as in God’s Country and Grand Canyon, Inc. All five novels feature characters whose fantasies of “harmful heroism or beauty” are grounded in “constricting fictions of identity.” For example, Curt Marder of God’s Country believes in his own righteousness throughout the book, even though his sole response to bandits burning down his house, abducting his wife, and killing his dog on the novel’s opening page is to ride his horse to the top of a nearby hill and watch. Marder’s feeble insistence that “[it’s] not like I didn’t do anything. I did pull my gun out of its holster and stand my ground” (3) undercuts not only his later claims of moral superiority to Bubba, the black tracker he rather grudgingly hires to recover his wife, but also the “code of the frontier” (27) by which he repeatedly professes to live. Similarly, Rhino Tanner intends to lay “claim to a testament to the American Spirit” in Grand Canyon, Inc. by transforming one of the nation’s most iconic natural locales into an amusement park called “Tanner’s Grand Canyon.” However, the book’s narrative constantly emphasizes the underlying ignorance—“in the famous words of Jesus, ‘Live like there is no tomorrow’”—and/or outright fraudulence in Tanner’s claims to represent “the real American Dream” (113) as well as the notion that such an authentic American identity exists in the first place. Aspects of Tanner’s characterization Page 68 →are remarkably prescient of Donald Trump’s self-presentation—particularly his nonstop invocation of the “Make America Great Again” slogan during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. It is not entirely impossible that Everett may have had the Trump of the late 1990s in mind when he wrote the novel, but it seems far more likely that Everett recognizes that the various grotesque rhetorics that Tanner employs are readily available and intimately familiar to a distinctly American brand of oligarchic demagogue that has recurred throughout the nation’s history.

Dustin Griffin added the element of playfulness to Weinbrot’s formal and thematic classification, contending that Menippean satire engages in a form of rhetorical experimentation “in which the point is not to arrive at a conclusion but to let ideas of high principle and worldly accommodation, community good and individual good, liberty and equality jostle against each other in an open and free-wheeling contest” (87). Everett has frequently articulated his ludic outlook on life and on writing: “Well I like to play. And I find the world and the work amusing” (Champion 168). Menippean satire offers a “serious” outlet for such play, making it especially alluring for a writer who, like Everett, is interested in arousing thinking in his audience rather than in pleasantly distracting them. Monk Ellison’s attempts at satirical subversion in Erasure ultimately fail largely because his efforts lack such a seriously playful element (as is explained in greater detail below). Similarly, Everett implies the value of play in Glyph via the apparent preference for Ralph’s inherently childish—inasmuch as it comes from a child, albeit a child with an otherworldly intellect—thought process over those of the novel’s adult characters. Feith discussed a physical manifestation of this contrast as stemming from the relative freedom of Ralph’s play, compared to the morally constrained attitude of his father: “Due to his very young age, Ralph is not described as a fully sexualized being. Yet he plays with his ‘willy’ with delight, to his prudish father’s dismay…. If not amoral, his vision of the body is mostly positive, untainted by guilt or social morality” (“Hire-a-Glyph” 306). Everett seems to suggest that Ralph’s play with himself—whether physical or intellectual—is ultimately more useful than his philandering, and thus hypocritically “prudish,” father’s mental masturbation in the form of poststructuralist literary theory.

Weinbrot expanded his initial classification by adding that Menippean satire “may use or combine any of four cognate devices,” each of which is determined by the manner through which the satirical mode enters and/or deforms the text:

[1] Menippean satire by addition enlarges a main text with new generally smaller texts that further characterize a dangerous world. [2] Menippean satire Page 69 →by genre sets a work against its own approximate genre … and either comments on it or uses it as a backdrop to suggest its own subject’s danger to the world. [3] Menippean satire by annotation uses the sub-or side-text further to darken the already dark text. [4] Menippean satire by incursion is a brief guerilla attack that emphasizes the danger in the text and then departs. These devices may work together at various times, though one is more likely to be pronounced than the others.” (6–7)

Initially giving the reader what looks like a conventional “yellow-back” Western in God’s Country, Everett gradually “cultivates doubts about the glorious epic of the West” (Bonnemère 157) by using both the second and fourth of Weinbrot’s devices to reveal “how deceptive appearances are. First in the literal sense, when Jake, the young boy who accompanies Curt and Bubba in their quest turns out to be a girl, then with Colonel Custer’s unexpected cross-dressing. But it is also to be experienced in the figurative sense: one can not say to what genre Everett’s books belong” (Déon 5). As Leland Krauth noted, Everett does not wait long to begin his degenerative satirical process: “The first sentence of the novel evokes the traditional Western; the second subverts it.” Marder’s self-conception as “the very heart of the Western, the dauntless hero of courage and skill, dwindles in a flash to a stick figure of fear and feckless resolve” (315). Krauth marveled at “how many formulaic elements of the traditional Western Everett packs into” the novel, especially since “each episode exaggerates, inverts, or twists its prototype” (316) to produce a Menippean commentary on Marder’s ignorant and yet wholly conventional—in both the literary and sociopolitical senses—views on “what this country’s all about” (Everett, God’s 23).

Grand Canyon, Inc. combines devices 3 and 4 in the form of the explanatory observations made by Simpson “BB” Trane, Tanner’s “lifelong sidekick and aide” (12), as well as the (initially third-person, later first-person) narrator of the book. BB’s nickname comes from being intentionally shot in the forehead—“at ten feet [and] after hundreds of BB’s” (16)—by Tanner when both were still boys, and he has spent much of his life willingly “playing a fat Tonto to Tanner’s maniacal Lone Ranger” (12). BB ultimately has little ability to mitigate Tanner’s destructive plans; in revealing himself as the book’s narrator after twelve chapters, he echoes Dionysos’s “mortal bookmark” Vlepo in Frenzy: “What I did get to do while Rhino Tanner killed everything in sight was read, read and watch, read and watch and wonder” (84). However, BB’s incursions into the narrative serve indirectly as Menippean “annotations” that demythologize Tanner’s bombastic proclamations about how things are and how they should be. BB performs this function long before the reader knows who he is or that he is the teller of the tale being read. For example, the Page 70 →opening paragraph of the book lists all of Tanner’s exalted and hyperpatriotic claims of having been a “Navy Seal, a former Army Ranger, a member of the Delta Force, an on-call DEA agent, a special agent for the President of the United States, and the best rifle shot on the planet.” Immediately thereafter the narrator’s voice coolly debunks these frauds: “Of all the things he claimed, only the part about being a good rifle shot was true at all” (3). As Sylvie Bauer has noted, this gesture establishes BB as the satirical counterpoint to Tanner, the voice who will present the “unheroic version” of Tanner’s fabricated self-conception even as the rest of American culture venerates him: “A process of deflation is at work … as if to insist on the gap between saying and being: the more Tanner says, the less it corresponds to reality” (“Percival Everett’s Grand Canyon Inc.” 262).

On the surface Glyph is heavily dependent on Weinbrot’s third device; the entire book is a series of “all-invading digressions” away from the central story line of Ralph’s “successive abductions by an array of mad scientists, Army secret service officers, childless Mexican immigrants, and paedophiliac priests” (Feith, “Hire-a-Glyph” 302). Michel Feith observed that this core plot “reads like a pastiche of popular literature and TV series,” whereas the digressions from it “amount … to an ambiguous deconstruction of the poststructuralist vulgate, mostly represented here by Barthes and the ‘Great Unreadables,’ Lacan and Derrida.” The other three devices from Weinbrot’s list are suggested by Feith’s claim about the seemingly “hermetic”—that is, reminiscent of the occult texts attributed to the quasi-divine figure of Hermes Trismegistus in ancient Greece and Rome—nature of Glyph: “the novel comprises an accessible, ‘exoteric’ face—the story—and an ‘esoteric’ one, in which postmodern Academese has replaced mystical allegory. The text can therefore be defined in part as a parodic philosophical novel, revolving around the themes of language and fiction” (Feith, “Hire-a-Glyph” 302). Judith Roof likewise has seen the novel in terms of coexisting—though possibly paradoxical—pairs of textual impulses: “The anatomical poetry, the critical terms of art serving as subtitles, the puns …, the linguistic diagrams, the mathematical equations, and the commentary snatched from the broad terrain of Ralphie’s reading simultaneously cohere as narrative and as disparate commentary on the possibilities of signification, exploding outward to show the assumptions underlying any investment in coherence, narrative, or meaning” (“Everett’s Hypernarrator” 210). Whether viewed as a parody of pseudomystical academic prose (device 2) or as a patchwork (device 1) metanarrative (device 4) intended to “destabilize any possibility of linearity, continuity, predictable cause/effect relationships, and correlations of signification” (Roof, “Everett’s Hypernarrator” 203), Glyph corresponds to the contention that “the Menippean satirist from Rabelais to Page 71 →Burton to Swift and Sterne does not simply collect shining bits of obscure learning; he mock-pompously shows them off. Scholarship becomes spectacle” (D. Griffin 74).

Erasure incorporates each of Weinbrot’s four devices in a similarly “spectac[ular]” fashion in order to “deconstruct … the form of the novel…. Everett’s presentation of his book as a multi-genre piece of literature illustrates the limitations of current genres to express his narrative” (Eaton 223). Glyph remains somewhat ambiguous about whether Ralph’s hyperintelligent discussions of critical theory mark him as one of the targets of Everett’s satire or as the vehicle thereof. In Erasure, though, there is a clear contrast between Everett’s awareness of satire’s limitations and Monk’s lack thereof in attempting to use My Pafology to chastise ignorant readers of various kinds. As a result, the text’s pomposity is attributable only to—and therefore mockable only in—the latter, not the former. Gillian Johns has written that Erasure “as a whole encloses a plurality of discourses that imply metacommentary on its embedded stories, satire and parody, and (mis)readings” (89). For example, the essay “F/V: Placing the Experimental Novel” functions as Weinbrot’s second device, “satire by genre,” in its initial publication under Everett’s name in Callaloo; however, this display of mock-erudition takes on the functions of the first and third devices—“satire by addition” and “satire by annotation”—when embedded within Erasure, a book whose opening page suggests that it is Monk’s “journal,” a therefore supposedly “private affair” (1).

It is perhaps significant that Monk immediately follows this claim with an expression of anxiety concerning the fact that his journal will likely be read only after his demise: “As I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages.” He tries to demur, claiming that “since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when,” but his attempts at playing it cool are unconvincing, since his next three sentences make it abundantly clear how much he is unlike Everett in believing that the author has an integral part to play in controlling the reaction to his work: “My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer” (Everett, Erasure 1). Having written several such stories, Everett is obviously not “put off” in the same way, but a more salient point is that it would not matter to him if he were, at least not in terms of the reaction it would instill in those who “found and read” the manuscript. Unlike Everett, Monk is intensely aware of having an audience and finds the thought of being a “dead” author loathsome, whether that death is literal or Page 72 →figurative. Monk’s manic desire to manipulate the public reaction to his writing is what starts him down the path to the trouble in which he finds himself at the book’s end. Like Barthes, Everett sees “serious consideration of self-termination” as a desirable and possibly even necessary condition for an author, so Monk’s inconsistency in this opening paragraph is a Chekhovian “pistol” that will go off repeatedly as the book unfolds.

The novel’s structure forces the reader to interpret the same set of words simultaneously as the products of different people, leading to a greater multiplicity of overlapping realities in Everett’s text than in his protagonist/narrator’s version: “If Erasure’s approach to satiric critique is complex and layered, My Pafology is a prime example of Juvenalian satire” (Fett 180). Johns extended this distinction in claiming that “Everett’s satire reaches for more than a critique of such stories on their own terms; it bitingly extends to readers (and, moreover, writers like Monk) who would compartmentalize them and believe themselves above suspicion regarding their invention, display, and consumption” (91). My Pafology is, of course, an inextricable part of the “complex and layered” (read: Menippean) satire that Everett wrote in Erasure, but Monk does not share his creator’s satirical subtlety, leading Johns to remind readers “that it is Monk’s (not Everett’s) work that wins the prize [within the novel], and Monk’s novella comprises only 70 pages of the otherwise 265-page, first-person autotext that Monk presents—and that we read—as his diary” (89). Danielle Fuentes Morgan added that My Pafology’s multiple meanings arise from the differing relationships between its authors and audiences: “The absurdity apparent to the audience of Erasure is not enough, because it does not resonate with the relatively unsophisticated [fictional] readers of My Pafology. Although My Pafology written by Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison could be coded as satire, the same text written by Stagg R. Leigh is at best unclear” (Morgan 170). She noted that this lack of clarity—and the willingness to capitalize on its ostensibly unintended consequences—is ultimately what makes Monk a part of Everett’s satirical scope: “Although readers are guilty for so eagerly devouring Stagg’s tale, Monk is even more culpable for writing a supposed satire containing no satirical markers” (167).

Johns’s and Morgan’s readings contradict (rightly, in my view) the impression with which Houston Baker and numerous other readers have been left, which is that Everett intends Monk to be perceived as possessing “redoubtable talents as a satirist” that make him “a lampooner of the first order” (Baker 136). He is certainly the latter, as My Pafology is a nearly letter-perfect parody of the various real (Native Son) and fictional (We’s Lives in Da Ghetto) intertexts that both Everett and Monk intend to mock. Only Everett, though, is successful in conveying his satire to his audience, a point that Baker missed Page 73 →entirely when he insisted that Monk “is intended to be a sympathetic character” (136) or claimed that “Percival Everett and his engaging protagonist” act in lockstep as “they drive us back through a genealogy and critical history of influence and reception” (145). Baker ultimately found Erasure “deeply problematic” (145) and spent the bulk of his essay on Everett in I Don’t Hate the South (2007) taking the novel to task for what he saw as its shortcomings as a work of African American fiction. Perhaps in direct response to this uncharitable assessment, Everett included a thinly veiled version of Baker in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. In that novel a “hack academic” named “Housetown Pastrychef or Dallas Roaster, something like that” is mocked in passing for his theory that “race was not only a valid category but a necessary one,” a position with which Everett assuredly does not agree. When the academic, now called “Austin Cooker,” and the narrator’s friend “nearly [come] to blows,” the latter dismisses him with stinging irony: “This nigger believes in race as a valid category.” The narrator claims—perhaps facetiously—not to comprehend this insult fully, but he adds a subversively Menippean aphorism that punctuates Everett’s satire: “language’s function is not to inform but to provoke” (34).

The multiple layers of textual reality that develop throughout Erasure confuse all notions of identity and concurrent authority to the extent that even its narrator seems in danger of losing the ability to tell them apart: “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” (237–38). Despite Monk’s reassurance that he is only “acting, simple and plain” (238), the novel’s conclusion—in which Monk unconsciously reenacts the closing scene of My Pafology while quoting its final line nearly verbatim—conflates Monk once again with Stagg Leigh. It also further blurs the lines separating those two personalities from each other and from Monk’s protagonist, Van Go Jenkins, himself a grotesque parody of Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Morgan noted that this confusion is attributable to Monk’s acquiescence to and assimilation by the forces he intended to deride in writing My Pafology: “Everett is satirizing both mainstream American culture and the African American literary communities that allow these negative performances to stand in for blackness” (165). Lacking Everett’s understanding that “anger is for suckers” (Bauer, “Percival Everett” 8), Monk allows his “very personal anger [to] overwhelm … his text, and consequently he lacks the critical stance necessary for a full evaluation of race in American society” (Morgan 165). In the absence of a multifaceted and self-critical Menippean thought process, Monk is doomed to fail: “His novella becomes impotent as he furthers the Stagg R. Leigh charade…. Monk is far too cavalier Page 74 →about any ramifications of his portrayal. If his racialized frustrations stem from mainstream willingness to accept the basest stereotypes of blackness, Monk is only embracing them rather than agitating against them” (165).

The authorial doppelgängers quickly multiply out of Monk’s control in Erasure, but Everett adds even more layers of textual and extratextual confusion in A History of the African-American People. In this novel he has created a character who not only resembles him abstractly but also shares his job, his colleagues, and his name. The intentional bewilderment of the reader begins with the full title of A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid, which is as notable for its verbosity as for the bizarre and unlikely intellectual product it describes. Add in the oddity of two literature professors, one of whom is African American, serving as the infamous senator’s amanuenses and the fact that the words “a novel” appear in brackets on the book’s front cover (albeit in a smaller font than any of the other words), and the reader may be readily forgiven for lacking clear expectations upon opening the book.

Before arriving at the novel’s first page, though, the already puzzled reader still has to contend with a farcical list of blurbs supposedly written by Abraham Lincoln (“I knew Strom and I didn’t think he had this in him”), William Howard Taft, Clarence Thomas (“Finally, a voice that speaks the true black experience!”), William Bennett, and John Ashcroft. Even then the satirical metatext that frames the novel is not yet complete. The reader next encounters a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer on the copyright page (a device Everett revisits in several other books) emphasizing that even though “there are many references to actual people, all of our interactions with those people (and the fictitious ones as well) are, in fact, fictitious.” Although the impossibility of the real-life Everett and Kincaid having any interactions with fictitious characters should be fairly self-evident, the disclaimer reminds the reader that the versions of Everett and Kincaid—that is, the authors of the ostensible work of nonfiction that appears within this work of fiction—are fictitious and should not be mistaken for the Everett and Kincaid who are the authors of the novel the reader is holding. The disclaimer concludes with an intentionally insincere apology: “If any of the matter of this novel should be found offensive by anyone, we understand (if not completely) and suggest you find another book to read. We wish we could say that we mean no disrespect.” The book’s Menippean degeneration has already begun before the start of what appears to be its actual text; the incongruities of the title hint at each of the first three devices from Weinbrot’s list, and the disclaimer functions explicitly as a preemptive satire by incursion, directed at anyone foolish enough to have taken the title at face value—as My Pafology’s uncritically worshipful audience might do.

Page 75 →Having finally arrived at the novel’s first page, the reader sees what appears to be a chatty personal memorandum to Thurmond from Barton Wilkes—identified indistinctly as “Assistant to Aide” (7)—in which Wilkes obliquely suggests that the senator take advantage of his “peculiar place in history” and consider the “production of a possible mode of transport” along “the route we have traveled to arrive” at “the new diversity” of contemporary America (7). Wilkes’s circumlocutions never specify that this is the history book presaged in the title, but the reader is certainly inclined to cling to that conclusion in the wake of all the mis-and disinformation presented thus far. Dated two days after the initial memo, a three-line, handwritten note from “Strom” follows, and it indicates that his mind is failing him: “Come to think of it, I did play Mother May I. That’s been a while. Who are you? What?” (8). Without any intervening or corroborating correspondence, the next letter is on Thurmond’s official letterhead and consists of a blunt, half-page proposal by Wilkes—now identified as “Junior Advisor, Public Relations”—to the Simon & Schuster publishing house for a book called “A History of the African-American People by Strom Thurmond” (9). Wilkes faux-modestly denies that he “[has] been entirely uninstrumental in persuading [Thurmond] to undertake the project in its present form” (9) and insists that the senator wishes to have “no honorific titles” appended to his name in the title. The preceding two pieces of correspondence indicate not only the distortions inherent in Wilkes’s self-effacing language but also that the project has no “present form” at all, except as a notion in Wilkes’s mind.

The remainder of the book plays out an elaborate and increasingly absurd web of communication—public and private—primarily among Wilkes; Martin Snell, an editor at Simon & Schuster; R. Juniper McCloud, Snell’s assistant; Juniper’s sister Reba; and the professorial/authorial duo of Everett and Kincaid, who are approached by Wilkes to ghostwrite the manuscript that Thurmond is obviously incapable of producing himself, at least in a form that would be acceptable to the publishers. In fact, until halfway through the book, Thurmond seems only nebulously aware of the project attributed to him by Wilkes—or of Wilkes, for that matter. Thurmond’s signature on the book contract—“For Cindy, With Love, Strom” (47)—suggests that Wilkes either forged his signature by copying it from an autograph or duped Thurmond into signing the contract. Thurmond’s first unmistakably direct involvement with the project occurs eight pages before the novel’s end, when he handwrites a note to Everett and Kincaid indicating that “it strikes my old pate that we should be getting this book done” and invites his two ghostwriters to join him for a working lunch (303). Thurmond’s voice is thus comparatively absent from the book whose cover suggests that he is the (proposed) author. Kincaid noted in an interview about the novel that Thurmond “withered away to almost nothing[,] … more or less” Page 76 →as the book moved away from mocking him and “turned to issues of writing, authenticity, biography, character, and horsing around” (“Collaborating” 370). The project eventually falls apart—partly because Thurmond apparently dies while doing a headstand during his lunch meeting with Everett and Kincaid—leaving the reader to sort out the confusion arising from the fact that the real-life Percival Everett and James Kincaid finished and published a novel whose name is similar to the work of ostensible nonfiction that their fictitious counterparts within that novel ultimately abandon and leave unpublished.

Schmidt claimed that the novel represents “the perfect example [of] what Weisenburger means by degenerative satire [because] it … produces its own dissolution and dismantlement” (159). The novel A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid satirically frames the unfinished concept of “A History of the African-American People by Strom Thurmond”—which Thurmond retitles “A History of the Colored People by Senator Strom Thurmond, America’s Oldest Living Lawmaker” (306) late in the book. Unlike My Pafology, which exists as a text-within-a-text inside Erasure, Thurmond’s would-be history book does not appear within the novel except as a few fragments of dubious research provided by Wilkes and a five-page introduction, grudgingly produced by the fictional versions of Everett and Kincaid and rejected via a brief form letter from Simon & Schuster on the final page of the novel. A History of the African-American People basically tells the story of why “A History of the African-American People by Strom Thurmond” does not exist. Schmidt suggested that the novel’s satire is entirely reflexive: “all along [it] has been a satirical subversion of questions of authorial identity, the defining qualities of a ‘black’ text, and whether only African Americans have the authority to write a history of their people. The satire of Everett’s epistolary novel thus targets neither Strom Thurmond nor any other real extra-textual entity” (159).

Schmidt furthermore observed that the novel is quintessentially Menippean in posing, but not answering, the question of whether Thurmond is able (and/or suitable) to author a work of African American history, given both his race and his personal history: “Barton Wilkes asks the tandem of ghostwriters to show that Thurmond ‘is, properly understood, a black writer.’ … And while this is an outrageous thing to say about the notoriously bigoted Thurmond, it raises an important question about this degenerative satire: namely, what is a black writer, and what makes—by extension—a black text? … By complicating the levels of narration and narrative transmission, this satire dissimulates blackness and the question of black authorship in a text that consists of nothing but masquerades” (Schmidt 159–60). Thurmond asserts his notion of the value of black authorship in stating that Everett being “colored” is “a good Page 77 →thing, for my book anyway” (306); unsurprisingly, his perspective expresses the kind of “constricting fiction of identity” that Monk resents in Erasure. Nevertheless, given that Everett disavows Monk’s obligation to write in a particular manner that others ascribe to blackness, he would not disqualify Thurmond from writing a history of the African American people simply for being white. Both the fictional Everett and his real-life analogue are unambiguous in their belief that Thurmond is essentially “nuts” (309), but A History of the African-American People questions whether Thurmond’s proposed book would be rejected or accepted by publishers and audiences based on its reprehensible and demonstrably flawed ideas or on the “properly understood”—that is, manipulated and fictitious—racial presumptions concerning its ostensible author and/or any of the others involved in the “masquerades” to which Schmidt referred.

Many critics have noted that Menippean satire is distinct for its multiplicity. Most often this multiplicity has been described in formal terms, as in Frye’s observation that Menippean “exuberance” is expressed “by piling up an enormous mass of erudition” to the point of creating an “encyclopedic farrago” (11). Weinbrot similarly noted the “various mixtures of genres, languages, plots, periods, and places” (5) inherent to the mode. Eugene P. Kirk echoed this, calling it “a medley—usually a medley of alternating prose and verse, sometimes a jumble of flagrantly digressive narrative, or again a potpourri of tales, songs, dialogues, orations, letters, lists, and other brief forms, mixed together” (xi). Joel Relihan elaborated on Menippean multiplicity’s disruptive purpose, arguing that its “indecorous mixture of disparate elements, of forms, styles, and themes that exist uneasily side by side” preclude the reader’s “coherent intellectual, moral, or aesthetic appreciation” (34).

Although Bakhtin too mentioned formal diversity, he revealed a more rhetorical brand of Menippean multiplicity: “the entire world and everything sacred in it is offered to us without any distance at all” through “unfettered and fantastic plots and situations [that] all serve one goal—to put to the test and to expose ideas and ideologues. These are experimental and provocative plots … full of parodies and travesties, multi-styled[, that] can expand into a huge picture” (26). For Bakhtin, this “huge picture” is directly due to Menippean satire’s exploitation of what he termed the heteroglossic nature of language: “it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth” (291). Satire foregrounds this heteroglossia through the related technique of polyphony: “[Polyphony] serves two speakers at the same time Page 78 →and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings, and two expressions” (324). Polyphony is not necessarily satirical. For example, a scene in which a character repeats a phrase spoken by another character earlier could indicate homage, rather than mockery, even though the reader is meant to hear and to feel the “echo” of the previous utterance—that is, the phrase’s implications in its original context—when the second character speaks the same line. When used satirically, however, the implicit authorial “voice” is intended not just to augment but also to undermine the voice on the surface of the text.

Each of the novels discussed so far in this chapter is polyphonic. In the case of God’s Country and Grand Canyon, Inc., Everett largely limits himself to only two levels of simultaneous “voicing” in dismantling a pair of toxic American cultural narratives: the “frontier myth” and the “self-made man” (see chapter 5 for additional discussion). Bubba is revealed to be the “one moral hero … endowed with a sense of justice and honor” (Déon 5) in God’s Country partly because “Curt [Marder]’s naivety and stupidity are pitted against Bubba’s common sense and human qualities” (Bonnemère 156). Marder’s first-person narration unwittingly reveals how much of his “naivety and stupidity” result from internalizing and then uncritically repeating the dominant—and corrupt—cultural “voices” of his time. These include the “dime novels about the frontier” that Marder insists “give a fair account” (Everett, God’s 10) of the world, as well as other traditional sources of morality: “I’d learned my frontier Christian lessons well—lie, steal, cheat, and, when all that failed, pray” (92). Marder’s folly is satirized, but so is the racist cultural discourse that allows him to valorize himself even as his words and actions betray a much baser character. As Krauth noted, Marder’s “attitudes are also those of all the whites in the novel … [and] Everett creates the unsettling interior experience of race hatred” by putting “his readers in the skin of a white racist, forcing them to hear and feel the self-vaunting pride and belittling prejudice of a white supremacist” (319). Krauth also argued that the novel “does something more than laugh at a seemingly exhausted genre” in emphasizing “the gulf between Marder and the other races around him: between his fear and their bravery, between his incompetence and their skill, and between his depravity and their goodness” (319). Krauth claimed that Everett also “recovers” to some extent the genre of the Western by undoing two of its most glaring historical omissions; in the book he depicts Native American and African American characters whose unmistakable virtues—even heroism, in Bubba’s case—contradict the exclusion of those groups from the frontier’s mythology except in hostile or subservient roles. In the end, “Everett’s parody of the Western cheerfully demolishes its most cherished features” (321).

Page 79 →In Grand Canyon, Inc., BB Trane embodies the authorial-satirical “voice” that remains implicit in God’s Country. Bauer noted that Rhino Tanner’s worldview—and hence the language through which he expresses it—is inherently not polyphonic but rather a self-centered, circular monologism: “His language implies a total coincidence between what he says and reality. His sense of reality is founded on an equation between language and facts that thus confers a performative power to language. It seems as though telling stories makes them true…. He invents stories throughout and invents a reality that suits him, indifferent to the world around him” (“Percival Everett’s Grand Canyon Inc.” 260–61). In chapter 13, as BB first reveals himself as “your narrator … and not some disembodied entity” (83), he suggests that the ball bearing that Rhino lodged in his forehead years ago has given him a kind of polyphonic ability: “I mention the BB only because it is my defining and certainly my most special feature. The hole in my head works as a kind of third eye…. Imagine that I am pushing the needle into my hole, extracting it, and wiping it on the paper” (85). This oracular perspective invalidates the notion that BB’s narrative stands in simple contradiction to Rhino’s version of the truth. The “vision” provided by a “third eye” in Buddhism, after all, is mystical, not personal, and so when BB suggests that “sometimes … the BB in my head rolls into a truth,” it gives greater weight to his assertion that “what happens at the end of this story is more than poetic justice; it is real justice” (85–86). Even at the moment when a massive wave—the Colorado River, freed from the dam that has constrained it—is rushing down the canyon to kill him, Tanner tries to suggest that his own desires are entirely consistent with God’s: “He shouted something unintelligible at the water, then attributed the words to Jesus” (126). BB’s narration is presented as less nominally divine but considerably more transcendent: “As a seer and a story-teller, [BB] is the character with the fullest apprehension of reality because he stands as a mere observer, a watcher, as he says at one point, thus refusing to translate the real into something else. He just absorbs it, in this way stressing the stillness of his position as opposed to the circulation of the world around and inside him” (Bauer, “Percival Everett’s Grand Canyon Inc.” 266).

Both God’s Country and Grand Canyon, Inc. present the reader with two “voices” and suggest a preference for the one that sides, respectively, with Bubba and BB—the similarity of their nicknames may not be entirely coincidental—over the hypocritical and self-aggrandizing voices of Curt Marder and Rhino Tanner. Importantly, though, neither Bubba nor BB offers a prescriptive truth of his own to replace the ones they deride, least of all a simple negation via diametrical opposition; they instead demonstrate the interrelated value of open-mindedness and careful observation as means to gaining understanding. The Menippean dimension of these texts arises less from their relatively mild Page 80 →structural polyphony than from both texts’ satirical depiction of protagonists who are essentially mouthpieces for broader cultural voices: the “frontier myth” that provides Marder with his violently ignorant notion of “what this country’s all about” (23) in God’s Country; and Rhino’s sense of “the real American Dream” (113) in Grand Canyon, Inc. As such, these two books are more akin to classical Menippean satires in discrediting a particular philosopher—regardless of how poorly that title fits either Marder or Tanner—as well as his philosophy. As Yves Bonnemère wrote, Everett “provokes laughter mixed with scorn for the would-be hero and the West he is made to represent” (157).

Glyph, Erasure, and A History of the African-American People all playfully experiment with form and narrative to a much greater degree, bringing many more “voices” into their polyphonic mix and thereby inhabiting even more fully capacious dimensions of contemporary Menippean satire. David Musgrave’s catalog of the different manifestations of Menippean satire’s “radically heterogeneous form” (22) diagnostically supports the assertion that these three novels are Everett’s most representative Menippean satires. Musgrave has listed seven structural and/or rhetorical “features[, not all of which] will be present at all times in every Menippean satire” but which are distinctive enough to lead him to the conclusion that “if it looks like a Menippean satire, then it probably is” (23). The first feature is “structural heterogeneity,” essentially the same jumble of genre conventions that Frye, Kirk, Weinbrot, and Relihan have observed: “Traditionally, this was seen as the admixture of prose and poetry, but essentially it can mean the insertion or mixture of different literary genres, such as letters, diary entries, scholarly apparatus such as footnotes, or a profusion of prolegomena, prefaces, and other textual apparatus or the use of different typographical forms” (22). Having discussed this feature at length earlier in this chapter, there is no need to rehash it here.

Whereas the first feature in Musgrave’s schema emphasizes the formal variety of Menippean texts, three other features work together to encapsulate its linguistic and philosophical variety; these will be discussed not in the order in which he presents them but in terms of how they correlate to one another. His second feature is called “stylistic heterogeneity,” which involves both the “frequent use of different languages” and the “frequent use of portmanteau words, neologisms, jargon, slang, and obscurantism” within those languages (22). The sixth feature is “encyclopedism,” a totalizing worldview marked by the use of “lists, anatomies, parodies of entire world views or ideologies of belief-systems.” Musgrave has stated that, in general, “the possibility of the successful encyclopedic view is ridiculed or parodied,” usually by suggesting Page 81 →the “impossibility of systematic understanding or explanation of the world, through any of several major discourses, such as the political ([Salman Rushdie’s] Midnight’s Children), religious ([Jonathan Swift’s] A Tale of a Tub), philosophical or sentimental (Tristram Shandy), or ideological ([Thomas Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow)” (23). Musgrave’s seventh feature suggests the recurrent rhetorical practices of Menippean satire: “digression, lists, catachresis (or the deliberate misuse of metaphor) and enthymeme [a form of reasoning that, often problematically, omits one or more of its essential premises]” (23) These techniques all contribute to the sense of performative “spectacle” in Glyph, Erasure, and A History of the African-American People. As unconventional uses of language that call attention to themselves, they present the reader with additional interpretive difficulties beyond those of the conventional novel.

Glyph is clearly the most stylistically diverse of the three, as a quick survey of its opening chapter demonstrates. The page just prior to the chapter presents the reader with the first of many diagrams that appear in the book. This one visually implies a reciprocal relationship between a pair of concepts—“signifier” over “semantic clock” and “liar” over “time”—whose meaning is fairly opaque, even to the reader familiar with literary theory. Moreover, the diagram is attributed to the as-yet-unknown Ralph, leaving both its import and its origin unclear (Glyph 3). Immediately thereafter Ralph introduces himself via a simultaneously grandiose and humble statement: “I will begin with infinity. It was and is the closest thing to me. I am a child and all I see is infinitely beyond my grasp, my understanding, my consciousness” (5). If this last statement is true for the preposterously intelligent narrator, there is little hope for the poor reader being inundated with subheadings in French—“différance,” “ennuyeux,” and “donne lieu”; German—“bedeuten,” “Vexierbild,” and “umstände”; Latin—“peccatum originale,” “ens realissimum,” “causa sui,” “vita nova,” and “mundus intelligibilis”; Greek—“pharmakon,” “seme,” “ephexis,” and “ootheca”; and formal logic—“(x)(Cx→~Vx)⊢(x)[(Cx&Px) →~Vx]”; as well as English that is scarcely more familiar or comprehensible—“unties [sic] of simulacrum,” “libidinal economy,” “anfractous,” and “tubes 1 … 6” (Glyph 5–37). In addition, the actual text of Ralph’s narrative is so motley in tone, subject, genre, and even typography that the reader is likely to feel relieved by the blank page that separates the first chapter from the second.

Yet for all its difficulties, Glyph is no more inherently incomprehensible than such celebrated “encyclopedic” novels as Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), each of which exhibits similar extremes of stylistic heterogeneity, although not necessarily for similar purposes. Stylistic and linguistic diversity serves Everett’s Menippean satirical Page 82 →ends by accentuating the difference between Ralph’s difficult and erudite, but ultimately open-ended, play with the forms of language and what he terms the “gum-bumping” of his father, Douglas (7). Douglas believes he possesses a “systematic understanding or explanation of the world” (Musgrave 23), and as the mocking nickname, Inflato, that Ralph bestows on him suggests, his son intends to “deflate” (compare Kaplan, above) this belief. Ralph insists that Inflato’s “yak[king] about the ongoing critique of reason” (Glyph 10) causes him to fall “repeatedly into the same trap, the thought that he could not only talk about meaning, but that he could make it” (7). Despite Ralph’s astonishing intellect—which his father fails to recognize, believing instead that his son is “mildly retarded” (7)—Ralph remains insistent that “language was the prison and the escape and therefore no prison at all, any more than freedom is confinement simply because it precludes one from being confined. Indeed, my much regarded and remarkable relationship and facility with language had caused my incarceration, but it had also freed me” (145). Ralph’s meaning in the final sentence of this passage is both literal and figurative, given that it is the written evidence of his unusual intelligence that stimulates the series of kidnappings that make up the novel’s plot. The figurative intention comes through as the second “voice” in this utterance, though, reinforcing Everett’s aforementioned comments about language’s inherent contradiction—“It refutes itself. But in so doing, reaffirms itself”—and its indispensability to human existence.

Ralph’s way of telling his story fits Linda Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction, which uses a parodic accumulation of “any signifying practices it can find operative in a society” in order to “challenge those discourses and yet to use them, even to milk them for all they are worth” (133). Whereas Ralph’s father would insist on imposing meaning on language, Ralph’s own purely written form of language—he refuses to speak even though he can—frustrates any such effort. In essence, he forces the reader to find pleasure/satisfaction in the intellectual exercise that the text requires rather than in the hope of a definitive answer as to what it means (compare the discussion in chapter 5 about the final lines of Assumption). In doing so, Ralph liberates himself in his creator’s preferred manner: “Everett seeks personal independence from the constricting boundaries of fixed systems, his art asserting personal identity in freely chosen, if unpredictable acts of self-creation” (Ramsey 131).

Erasure too uses stylistic heterogeneity satirically. Most of Monk’s narration is in the “proper” English that one expects from a literature professor with an upper-middle-class upbringing, but Monk notes that this usage conflicts with other expectations when he recalls the puzzled reactions of opponents “on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads” (2). Languages that differ drastically from this awkwardly formal English are inserted into the Page 83 →text in several places. Most obviously, the two “nested” texts—F/V: Placing the Experimental Novel and My Pafology—introduce extreme parodies of “Academese” and African American dialect, respectively, into Monk’s narrative. Monk clearly intends F/V as a hand-delivered mockery of the Nouveau Roman society’s preferred scholarly argot, a point made clear by its barbed closing: “A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious” (17). The inclusion of Monk’s curriculum vitae—a document whose deeper implications are indecipherable, and likely irrelevant, to nonacademic readers—injects another aspect of Monk’s professional language into the story.

In regard to African American vernacular, Lesley Larkin noted that “[Monk] is careful to create in [Van Go Jenkins] a character who is bereft of the linguistic birthright passed down by writers like Hurston and Ellison…. Monk deliberately distances [My Pafology] from literary works, like Their Eyes Were Watching God, that (in his view) authentically represent and celebrate black linguistic ingenuity” (156). Monk’s incredulous reaction to Juanita Mae Jenkins’s runaway best seller We’s Lives in Da Ghetto illustrates his awareness of her characters’ debased language and its significance to his own satirical intentions: “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” (62). His immediate response is to “put a page in his father’s old manual typewriter” and to write My Pafology, which is transcribed in full beginning on the next page of the novel. Monk begins his parody of African American “linguistic ingenuity” with the first chapter heading, which is spelled “Won” rather than “One,” establishing a pattern of faux ignorance that persists throughout My Pafology.

There is yet another major nested text in Erasure, though, and it serves a crucial function in distinguishing Everett’s methods from Monk’s. Immediately after an emotional and noncomical episode in which Monk swims to the middle of a pond to retrieve his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother from a boat, the tone of the book shifts dramatically. What follows is a nine-page section with the untranslated French heading “Àppropos de bottes,” an archaic phrase that literally means “on the subject of boots” and figuratively signals a sudden and/or pointed change of subject. This is a reworked and reframed version of a short story entitled “Meiosis,” which was previously published in Callaloo in 1997 by Everett under his own name. Everett embeds it within Monk’s text and in doing so transforms it into a polyvocal commentary on Monk’s satirical project. To emphasize further the seeming discontinuity from the main narrative, Everett/Monk Page 84 →prints this section in a noticeably different typeface, an approach he likewise uses for all of the other “digressive” texts previously noted. The story, presumably authored by Monk, though its origins are never revealed, turns out to be not a digression but rather a parable that serves both as a mirror—from Monk’s authorial perspective—and as a counterpoint—from Everett’s authorial perspective—to what is happening in Monk’s life. “Àppropos de bottes” fancifully and idealistically echoes Monk’s experience of gaining fame and fortune while masquerading as Stagg R. Leigh. It tells the story of a character named Tom who fabricates aspects of his identity in order to become a contestant on a rigged game show named Virtute et Armis. This phrase, meaning “by valor and arms” in Latin, is also the state motto of Mississippi, although the text does not reveal this fact. When Tom is later introduced by the show’s emcee, he is announced as being “from Mississippi,” an epithet that is repeated at the end of the story. These two details imply that the story resembles “The Appropriation of Cultures” (which, like “Meiosis,” was originally published in 1997) in depicting a character creatively finding a means of entry into a culture that hitherto excluded him. If the story is read only as an inserted episode within Monk’s journal, ignoring the inseparably double ontological frame of Everett’s novel, such a figurative reading is plausible; after all, Tom’s exertions on the game show resonate symbolically with Monk’s ambition for literary appreciation. Within Erasure, though, Tom’s story contributes to a Menippean commentary on particular aspects of the enveloping text.

As Tom fills out the application to become a contestant, he almost immediately feels an impulse to falsify: “The first question asked for his name and already he was stumped. He wanted to laugh out loud. Under the line, in parentheses, the form asked for last and first names. He wrote Tom in the appropriate place and then tried to come up with a last name” (169). If Tom actually has no last name, he resembles Harriet Beecher Stowe’s long-suffering slave protagonist Uncle Tom, whose name has become a shorthand accusation of selling out one’s black identity in exchange for white favor. This Tom, however, is not betraying his blackness; rather he is obfuscating what it suggests to others while trying to earn a spot on the game show: “He thought to use Himes, but was afraid that he would somehow get into trouble, more trouble. Finally he wrote, Wahzetepe…. If asked, he would say it was an African name, but he knew that it was a Sioux Indian word, though he didn’t know its meaning. He didn’t know how he knew the word, but he was sure of it as his name” (169–70). Although he rejects the last name of the provocative African American writer Chester Himes, he chooses a name from a Native American tribe famed for its (admittedly tragic) resistance to white domination, even though the name’s significance is not consciously apparent to him. Tom’s thoughts suggest that he is confident Page 85 →the show’s white producers will neither know nor particularly care about the distinction between a Native American name and an African one anyway. At the outset of his deception, Tom is more sanguine than Monk about how to use his audience’s ignorance to his benefit, though he also seems to lack Monk’s desire to protest, to reveal, or to undo that ignorance. Tom completes his imposture by lying not only about his last name and social security number but also “about his address, about his place of birth, about his education, claiming that he had studied at the College of William and Mary, about his hobbies, in which he included making dulcimers and box kites out of garbage bags” (170).

Ironically, all of this absurd misinformation almost immediately proves inconsequential. He is flatly told by the show’s producer, Damien Blanc—that is, “white devil”—that no one “really gives a fuck where you studied or what you studied or if you studied.” Blanc informs Tom that he has been chosen for immediate inclusion on the show because of a last-minute cancellation and that the reason for his selection was his stellar performance on the brief exam that was part of his questionnaire. Tom thoroughly and correctly answers a series of questions pertaining to insect classification, nineteenth-century French ballet, the Mean Value Theorem from calculus, as well as a “boring” question about “the single-point continuous fuel injection system that the Chrysler Motor Company devised in 1977” (170). Blanc seems to validate Tom’s intellect as he repeatedly tells him that he “can’t believe how well you did on that exam” (172). Monk/Everett begins introducing doubt about Blanc’s motives, though, when the producer also tells Tom that he should treat being on Virtute et Armis as a “golden opportunity” that might even land him “a recording contract or a sitcom offer” (172). In essence, he is telling Tom that it is his appearance on television, not his expansive knowledge, that matters to the world. He promises Tom the chance to strike it rich in one of the two realms of culture, popular music and low comedy, that have been comparatively open to African Americans since the dawn of minstrelsy. As Blanc and Tom walk to the studio, they pass “a black man who was mopping the floor,” and Tom recognizes him as “a former contestant on the show” (172–73). This comment casts Tom’s earlier recollection of “the ugly ends met by his predecessors” and his desire to “succeed where the others had failed” (172) in a new light. Whereas this comment initially seems to be an effort to boost his confidence in the face of a difficult game, the narrator’s explicit mention of the race of the contestant-turned-janitor strongly hints that Tom is being set up for a fall because of the color of his skin.

This sense is amplified as Tom is prepared for the show by the makeup artist: “‘You ain’t dark enough darlin’,’ she said. She began to rub the compound into the skin of Tom’s face…. He watched in the mirror as his oak brown skin became chocolate brown. ‘There now,’ the redhead said, ‘that’s so much Page 86 →better’” (173). The racial violence hitherto implicit in Tom’s predicament becomes more explicit as he is made to wear a shirt with a collar that is too tight and a tie that is described as “squeezing his throat with the stiff collar [of the shirt]” (174). Tom realizes that he is being prepared for a televised lynching, and he nervously tells himself that “he had to win this game. He just had to win” (174), as though his life is literally at stake. The point that he is not expected to win, or likely to be allowed to do so, is driven home by the show’s smarmy host, Jack Spades, who welcomes Tom to the set by saying, “I want to wish you luck. Just relax. I’m sure you’ll do fine and be a credit to your race” (175).

To this point the story superficially parallels Monk’s efforts to parody the “constricting fiction of blackness” represented by We’s Lives in Da Ghetto in order to find a means to be judged on his own literary/intellectual merits. Tom’s experience in the makeup room directly parallels an episode in My Pafology in which Van Go is told that “this will make you shine like a proper TV nigger” (112) while he is being prepared for his own television appearance. The “constriction” inherent in Tom’s blackness is furthermore literalized by the nooselike collar of the shirt he is forced to wear. Monk’s situation differs significantly from Tom’s, though, inasmuch as the barriers to acceptance that he faces are not solely the work of whites. Just prior to “Àppropos de bottes,” Monk recounts his failure to “talk the talk” in order to “fit in” among African Americans. Monk recalls a series of phrases such as “What it is? You better step back. That’s some shit. Say What?” and claims that they “never sounded real” either in his usage or “coming from anyone [else]” (167). Monk’s lament that he never knew “when to slap five or high five, [or] which handshake to use” (167) links him to such “post-soul” characters as Benji Cooper, the narrator of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009). During the school year Benji lives in Manhattan, where he attends a mostly white prep school; this fact leaves him somewhat mystified about gestural nuances during the summers he spends among an almost exclusively African American group of friends in the Long Island beach community of Sag Harbor: “The new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? I was all thumbs when it came to shakes. Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment” (Whitehead 43). Richard Schur has explained the possible consequences of these two characters’ inability to master the use of these gestures: “Handshakes, like the use of language, are performative—conferring legitimacy and authenticity on some while revealing the supposed failings of others” (“The Crisis” 247).

Page 87 →Neither Monk nor Everett has much use for discourses of “legitimacy and authenticity” where race is concerned, regardless of whether they govern language or behavior. Tom’s experience of being made up and costumed makes visible the show’s conception of a “legitimate” black person, a fact that Blanc demonstrates through his exclamation upon seeing Tom: “Nice job, girls. Real nice. He looks just right. I almost didn’t recognize you.” The significance of Tom’s sardonic reply, “Me, either” (174), is lost on Blanc, but it reminds the reader that Tom abandons his self-fictionalizing impulse as soon as he is told that no one cares. Monk also claims to have realized that “no one cared about my awkwardness but me” (167), but his ongoing performance as Stagg suggests otherwise.

Tom’s situation on the game show also echoes another episode from Monk’s teenage years. Despite “enjoy[ing] the exercise and the game” of basketball, Monk confesses that he did not enjoy “playing the game,” in part because he “wasn’t very good at it” (133). One day when he is seventeen, his mind begins to drift while playing basketball and he winds up “considering the racist comments of Hegel concerning Oriental peoples and their attitude toward the freedom of the self” (133–34). His distracted musings do not prevent a teammate from passing him the ball, and after Monk awkwardly throws up “a wild and desperate shot which had no prayer of going in,” that teammate demands to know what he was thinking. His simple and truthful response—“Hegel … I was thinking about his theory of history”—precipitates a flurry of dismissive responses that threaten violence: “Get him”; offer scorn: “Philosophy boy”; or express incredulity: “Where the hell did you come from?” None marvels or otherwise positively comments on Monk’s thoughts, which are clearly unusual in both subject and depth for a seventeen-year-old (134).

Thus, when Tom steps onto the set of Virtute et Armis to compete against the thoroughly unexceptional (and white) Hal Dullard, Monk’s intended framing of My Pafology by “Àppropos de bottes” is complete. Like Everett, he is decrying the general devaluation of intellect—and specifically black intellect—by American popular culture, a process Monk knows firsthand, as demonstrated by his rueful inclusion of an editor’s written rejection of one of his earlier manuscripts: “Why did you bother sending it to me? It shows a brilliant intellect, certainly. It’s challenging and masterfully written and constructed, but who wants to read this shit? It’s too difficult for the market” (42). Monk is desperate for an outlet in which his intellectual skills will be rewarded on their own terms, and Tom’s flawless victory on the game show is a literary projection of this desire’s fulfillment. Monk wants to win like Tom but does not recognize the importance of Tom’s willingness to play the game “free of Page 88 →illusions” (264) until the end of Erasure, though even then his realization seems incomplete and/or inadequate.

Everett’s juxtaposition of “Àppropos de bottes” and My Pafology reveals the polyvocal satire that he directs not just at Monk’s intended targets but also at Monk himself: “[Everett] frames the longest text-within-the-text in such a way that readers are alert to its parodic register while also remaining sensitive to the possibility of meanings that exceed or contradict Monk’s intended critique” (Larkin 162). Monk’s attempt to resist the expectations imposed on blackness is unsuccessful not only because of the unsophisticated interpretations of his audiences but also because, as Morgan asserted, “despite his arguments otherwise, Monk is not truly attempting to write a satire” (166). Although Tom distorts his identity in order to get on the show, he reveals his lie to Blanc before he is even accepted as a contestant: “Actually that’s not true. I just wanted to put down something” (Everett, Erasure 171). He then proceeds to win the game not by further violating its corrupt rules but rather by legitimately demonstrating superior knowledge. Admittedly, having knowledge inferior to Dullard’s would be difficult, as Dullard not only incorrectly identifies the nation’s first president as Thomas Jefferson but also “did not know that a gorilla was a primate. He did not know the abbreviation for Avenue. He did not know what a male chicken was called” (177). As was the case with those he was asked on the preliminary exam, Tom’s questions are esoteric and obscure, involving biological cell division, tenth-century Arabic poetry, septic-system installation methods, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Self-Reliance” (175–77).

Despite the obvious unfairness of the game, Tom wins, a fact that causes the all-white studio audience to fall first silent and then dead, presumably from shock. Monk seems to expect a similar reaction from the various audiences he exposes to the literary imposture of My Pafology, whether by appearing as Stagg R. Leigh as a guest of Kenya Dunston—a fairly obvious parody of Oprah Winfrey, who Everett bluntly says “should stay the fuck out of literature and stop pretending she knows anything about it” (Shavers, “Percival” 49)—on her daytime talk show, or playing the same part in a business meeting with a Hollywood producer while negotiating the seven-figure film rights for the book. As the slavering readers/consumers of My Pafology remain unaware of having their ignorant expectations overthrown and, correspondingly, fail to be shocked—to death or otherwise—by his performance, Monk concocts increasingly elaborate, and untenable, rationalizations that make him “able to look at my face in the mirror and to accept” (209) the fame and fortune that his supposed act of protest is bringing him.

Some critics have insisted that Monk’s refusal “to explain to his readers how to interpret his work” is an assertion of authorial integrity and that he Page 89 →therefore “never compromises his art” (McConkey-Pirie 31). This might be a defensible interpretation if Everett and Monk were as substantively similar as their superficial resemblances imply. Everett certainly denies the desire to influence his readers in this way, but Monk has been expressing his anxiety about his potential readers’ reactions since the book’s opening page. Moreover, he flatly asserts that My Pafology is “a failed conception, an unformed fetus, seed cast into the sand, a hand without fingers, a word with no vowels[,] … offensive, poorly written, racist, and mindless” (261) to his fellow judges on the selection committee for what is called “simply and pretentiously The Book Award” (223). In fact, he does so less than half a page after a flat declaration of his self-interested intentions: “Call it expediently located irony, or convenient rationalization, but I was keeping the money” (260). The hypocrisy on display in these passages buttresses Lavelle Porter’s claim that Monk’s success requires him to accept covertly the same oppressive discourse of authenticity that he lambastes overtly throughout the book: “Monk is able to sell My Pafology by concealing his actual identity as a learned man, and an author of more intellectually rigorous fiction…. Monk was able to convince them of his authenticity by concealing his identity and assuring them that his writing was the product of the streets and not the library. This reality points to the fact that the sale and marketing of authentic art as a commodity is contingent upon the ‘organic’ quality of the author herself. Too much formal education (real or perceived) corrupts that authenticity” (155). Monk is doubtlessly constrained by the expectations of a “normative society, both black and white, [that] refuses to let him speak, to let Monk successfully involve himself in representation” (Hogue 121), but he also keeps the money once it becomes clear how well conformity pays. Consciously choosing to “sell out” is the exact opposite of Tom’s victorious exhibition of actual knowledge or the Swiftian satirical protest staged by the protagonist of Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout (2015), who attempts to reinstitute segregation and slavery in his California hometown as a barbed commentary on how little has actually changed.

Morgan added that Monk’s impersonation of Stagg becomes an example of the “grotesque, caricatured blackness” he claims to be resisting, and the more he allows the suggestion of Stagg’s reality to go unchallenged, the more it reinforces the fact that “My Pafology has all the signifiers of a work to be taken seriously, at least when presented to an audience already largely inured to a complex signification regarding black masculinity.” Everett’s polyvocal and satirical framing—whether of My Pafology by “Àppropos de bottes” or of Monk’s journal by Erasure itself—assures that “Monk’s text is unable to function as a fully articulated satire because Monk is unable to establish any distance between himself and his narration; satire presumes authorial Page 90 →understanding of the situation being satirized, while providing space for simultaneous audience awareness of authorial distance from the actual plot as it occurs” (Morgan 166).

Musgrave’s three features of linguistic and philosophical multiplicity play major roles in A History of the African-American People as well. The interplay of voices speaking and writing publicly to one another in the formulaic jargons of politics, publishing, and academia readily conveys the self-conscious linguistic variety of stylistic heterogeneity. The novel adds another layer, though, in the form of private communications transacted in more intimate and less regimented forms of language, the idiosyncrasies of which tend to reveal the very traits that the book’s more public forms of discourse attempt to disguise. Although the book has no overarching narrator, there is an implied editorial presence that curates the novel’s fragments in a manner that is essentially omniscient. This invisible quasi-narrator uses that omniscience to juxtapose public and private communications satirically, exposing the concealed contradictions, nonsensicalities, perversities, and other sources of linguistic instability. This technique ensures that the text’s lack of formal concord mirrors its rhetorical incoherence. In essence, the book becomes a series of ultimately self-negating digressions.

The hand of this hidden omniscient compositor/narrator is already apparent in Barton Wilkes’s first set of interactions with the two members of Simon & Schuster’s editorial staff who are responsible for handling his ludicrous book proposal. Wilkes writes his unsolicited proposal in a matter-of-fact style that could be taken straight from an online template. Although his letter meets the most minimal formal requirements of such a document, Wilkes displays his lack of understanding of the publication process by providing nothing more than the name of the book and an extremely premature request to respond to him with “such things as: 1. publicity plans 2. advances 3. royalties” (9). After a month with no response, Wilkes sends a follow-up letter that not only exposes his lack of sophistication regarding the process of manuscript review in the publishing industry—a somewhat esoteric topic, after all—but also begins unleashing the disjointed language and excessive familiarity that will soon become absolute hallmarks of all his correspondence:

Dear Sir/Madam:

In ref. to mine of the 13th inst.

Ha, ha. I’m just joking, of course. There’s no need for such formality.

However, there is need for some dispatch, as the Senator always says, when telling the story about how there was only one outhouse at the school pie-eating contest when some prankster—the Senator swears, with Page 91 →a twinkle in his eye, it was not he—put castor oil in the blackberries that filled the pies (blackberry pie, the Senator’s favorite to this day): “There is some need for dispatch, Sammy!” shouts one of the boys in line. I wish you could hear the Senator tell that one.

Of course it will not be appropriate to the project we are discussing. (10)

This pairing of documents shows that Wilkes is basically capable of mimicking the form of a business letter, but that he barely comprehends the context in which that form is relevant.

His correspondents at Simon & Schuster have their own communicative issues, though, emphasizing the point that the satirical impulses of this book are not simply focused on Thurmond and those affiliated with him. The first response to Wilkes from the publisher is an unsigned form rejection that is dated nearly a month after Wilkes’s second letter and misaddressed to “Blanton” Wilkes. Wilkes responds within three days, incredulous at what he believes must be a “joke” and condescendingly proposing to “get down to business, shall we?” (12). The next document is an internal memo from “Snell to McCloud,” two names without any referent at this point in the book. This memo, dated two weeks after Wilkes’s last letter, is a hodgepodge of chatty interoffice niceties and business: “Ask the guy for a proposal, but tell him the usual about how we aren’t interested. Make that emphatic. Don’t leave any room for doubt. Do you keep a cat? I find a well-groomed cat a great comfort. My ex-wife hated cats” (13). The next document, a formal business letter addressed from McCloud on behalf of Snell, follows the instructions laid out in the memo and, in doing so, clarifies who Snell (an editor) and McCloud (Snell’s assistant) are. Wilkes’s response is predictably off-kilter, filled with overly presumptive statements, such as “Surely not coincidental that we are both Assistants to important people”; quotations from Poe; lectures about excessive formality, for example, “Now it’s easy to see why you’re being standoffish”; even-more-presumptuous denials of being presumptuous, such as “Neither of us is quite his own person”; a restatement of the fact that the title of the book “can stand as description and what you call proposal”; and an invocation of southern aristocratic camaraderie: “Puissant name, ‘R. Juniper.’ Are you from the Charleston McClouds? My own name is a matter of pride to me, as yours is to you. Someone at your place called me ‘Blanton.’ Oh my” (15). The (d)evolution of Wilkes’s language can be measured by comparing the relatively informal valediction of this letter—“Yours for now”—with that of his first—“Most sincerely”; within a few more exchanges, this morphs further into a catalog of bizarrely intimate sign-offs and pet names—for example, “Love, Bark” (26); “Devotedly, Button” (36); “Here ya go, bud! Bar-bar” (47); “Yours fondly, Barthes” (52); and Page 92 →“Puss-puss, Big Blan” (128)—that mark a corresponding change in the tone and content of the letters themselves.

The initial memo from Snell to McCloud hints at the fact that the book’s oddities will not be confined to Wilkes, and the next set of memos and letters establishes that there is a plague on the house of Simon & Schuster as well. Snell is every bit as unprofessional and intrusive as Wilkes in his communications with McCloud. Snell’s initial awkwardness is magnified in his second memo to McCloud: “We have reason to believe this guy [Wilkes] is connected to Thurmond, but he doesn’t seem to have many tines in his fork, does he? … Do you wear boxers or briefs? Also, you haven’t answered my question about kitty” (16). Not long thereafter Snell sends a memo filled with double entendres that seems both to admonish McCloud and flirt with him:

I am not going to get ahead at this place if I ride projects like this one and blister nothing but my own ass! Don’t forget that there is a paradox here: I am the smartest fuck here and also the youngest. I expect you are already toting up dates and saying, “Well soul-kiss your sister, he isn’t the youngest at all.” But you know what I mean, Juney. Don’t be an idiotic literalist. I am the newest and most vulnerable. Don’t take advantage of that vulnerability, please. Others have, but I thought you were different. And if I’m fired, I’m taking you and that cute ass with me. Cats? (24)

This bifurcated tenor pervades Snell’s subsequent messages to McCloud, and he begins making explicit advances toward his assistant even as he projects his attraction onto Wilkes: “I don’t see anything kinky or out of line in his letter. Probably you are just timid, McCloud, sexually repressed. I’m not saying you should offer yourself to him or he to you. Nor should either of you find a third party, male or female” (92).

McCloud initially seems as though he might be a voice of reason or at least a naïf caught between two lunatics; he describes himself in an early letter to Wilkes as something of a babe in the woods: “Here I am just out of NYU, an English major lucky to get a job, or so I thought” (25). The rapid dissolution of his coherence and propriety is typified, however, by a letter he sends to Wilkes that spends four lines describing an editorial disagreement about the project and nearly another page and a half wildly oversharing personal details: “My sister was caught masturbating. I mean really caught. And really masturbating. My sister is two years older than me, you see, and really gorgeous, if I do say so myself. I mean, she is also pretty much a raving bitch, if you ask me, but she hides that very well around anyone except me” (62). Every character who becomes involved in the expansive correspondence surrounding the Thurmond book—including the fictional versions of Everett and Kincaid—demonstrates Page 93 →this sort of digressive spiraling descent into madness, strongly suggesting that one would have to be crazy to take such a project seriously in the first place.

Even the contract that Wilkes wrangles out of Snell for the book demonstrates this linguistic insanity; tucked away amid the tortured grammar of legalese and “small print” that is conventional for such a document is a quintessentially Menippean detail that purports to describe the unwritten book for which the contract is being issued: “This publishing Agreement … concern[s] a work presently titled A History of the African American People and not described as yet to be either a factual accounting, social commentary or fictional reenactment of some era, portion of time or reflection of attitudes about or concerning people of African descent on the continent of North America” (39). This nondescription not only negates practically all of the relevant meanings of the significant words in the book’s title but also reinforces the sense that this book will never become more than an idea; it is only a not-something, not a something. The real-life Everett and Kincaid, however, deliver the only such book that is possible under these circumstances, a metafictional novel that ironically explains how and why it could never be written/published as a serious history. What they accomplish is reminiscent of the way in which Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David used fictional versions of themselves to claim jokingly that their long-running hit show Seinfeld was a “show about nothing” (“The Pitch”), or the way in which director Terry Gilliam made a documentary film entitled Lost in La Mancha (2002) about his failure to complete a feature-film adaptation of Don Quixote. In each case the metafictional work forces the reader/viewer to confront the irony of beholding something that seemingly should not exist, leading to possibly unanswerable questions about the nature of what does exist in light of the “nothing”-ness.