Issue #316: American Contradiction
Tommy Orange’s new book, Wandering Stars, is out tomorrow.
You better believe I will be up late reading this one.
Also, pen report (handwriting by Erin):
The Sky Blue Mattehop Pentel might be the one.
“All I do is invent little people in my head, then make them have imaginary conversations with each other”: Representation in American Fiction
There are a lot of differences between Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001) and Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (2023), but only a few I really care about. Jefferson relocates the story from DC to Boston. He changes the tone of the story, reshaping the brutal sledgehammer of Erasure into something more nuanced. And he revises the character of Juanita Mae Jenkins into Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a foil to Jeffrey Wright’s Thelonious "Monk" Ellison who speaks back to the critique Monk makes of her work.
Changes (Adaptation)
Despite the wide range of changes, many in addition to the ones I mention at the outset, I think American Fiction is a work of adaptation that takes seriously its status as separate from Erasure. Both works fundamentally deal with the same problem, one that is perennial: Black writers occupy a certain position within a literary marketplace. This economic demand results in the proliferation of texts that are meant to satisfy the tastes of, as Monk says, “white publishers” who hunger for an image of Black life that is exaggerated fantasy. The appetite is also for realism, verisimilitude, so this distorted image is passed off as “sociologically revealing” (Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 134).
This is hardly a new problem, but it does seem to be an enduring one. Erasure and American Fiction’s release dates are more than two decades apart, but they are hardly the first texts to address the issue. John A. Williams writes about precisely this in The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) pointing to the publishing industry’s tendency to valorize one Black author at the expense of all others (Williams 182), the market’s appetite for a distorted and sensationalized version of Black life (Williams 47), and the incentives for white publishers to find and promote Black art only under certain political conditions that mean it will sell (Williams 244). He writes:
When he wrote, Max wanted to soar, to sing golden arias. But Zutkin’s editor friends wanted emotion: anger, unreasonable black fury; screeching, humiliation, pain … Do not Sing, Max, the editors seemed to be saying. Instead, tell us, in your own words, in ten thousand words or less, just how much we’ve hurt you! We will pay handsomely for that revelation. (Williams 47)
Monk, for his part, struggles like Max Reddick while Sintara Golden’s book, We's Lives In Da Ghetto, is a smashing commercial success. There is only one passage from We's Lives In Da Ghetto produced by Everett or Jefferson, the same passage that appears in both the novel and film, about unexpected pregnancy and absent fathers. Monk rejects the novel as “trauma porn,” saying as much to Golden herself.
Earlier in the film, in a fight with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander), Monk is more explicit:
My problem is that books like this aren’t real. They flatten our lives. … My life is a disaster, but not in the way you’d think reading this shit.
The conversation between Coraline and Monk states one of the primary areas of interest for American Fiction, the content of popular novels about Black people, but also serves to distinguish it from what it adapts. Though American Fiction is not without its tragic moments, Erasure is certainly pornographic in the middle class trauma it depicts. Monk’s relationship with his brother, Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is at the core of the film. Though strained, they end the film literally driving off into the sunset. Though the biographic details of the character, in Erasure his name is Bill and the last exchange the two have is one-sided, a note left from Bill: “Fuck you.” After Monk reads the note, the two never speak again. This is the only time Bill is mentioned again in the novel:
I called Bill, but Bill was not home. Bill was never home, never at his office, never anywhere. He never called back, never left a message, never wrote. I wondered if Bill was dead. I wondered if it mattered.
Trauma porn, indeed. Reading Erasure, I had the sense that it was every bit the miserable torture chamber for its characters that Everett tries to critique. Monk is a pathetic, pitiable character just like Van Go Jenkins, the protagonist of My Pafology/Fuck. The novel does a great deal more to align Monk and Van Go. Jason England writes, “[My Pafology/Fuck] ****runs parallel to the main narrative of Erasure: a fractured relationship with a father and a society that holds black identity in contempt lead to an ultimate schism in the protagonist. Van Go and Monk are warped doubles.” By relating the characters and tones across the actual novel and the fictional one, Erasure’s critique of the supposedly offensive essence of these salacious works is seriously dulled.
This is not to say Jefferson doesn’t do his own work to leave American Fiction a less sharp condemnation than it might otherwise be. Clearly, he writes back to Everett, adding an addendum to the novel’s ending with Monk adapting the very story we have just seen into a screenplay. He suggests the ending, as Everett wrote it, to the white movie producer Wiley (Adam Brody). Wiley tells Monk, “There’s no resolution here. What’s he gonna say? … Novels aren’t movies, okay? Nuance doesn’t put asses in theater seats.” This self-reflexive gesture is worthy of Erasure. But not ever change is for the better.
Seemingly to enhance the “nuance” of the text, Jefferson’s transformed Juanita Mae Jenkins repudiates Monk’s critique of her book. I can’t outline the issues here better than Jason England, so I will quote him:
Then there’s the strangest and most cynical updating of the book: Juanita Mae Jenkins, author of We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, is humanized. She is given a new name, flesh, a voice, and a seat at the table—none of which is the case in Erasure. It’s a counterintuitive change to the source material, and serves no real dramatic purpose, but it does serve a diabolical one. Sintara Golden is presented not as a vile blaxploitation author, but rather as a thoughtful foil to Monk, every bit his peer on a literary prize jury. They even find common ground in their shared critiques of Monk’s parodical novel. During the film’s denouement, when Monk asks questions of Golden that should be central to the film, Jefferson backs away from any real interrogation of integrity, exploitation, role playing, and grift. Golden, played by Issa Rae (an intriguing bit of meta casting?), has rejoinders at the ready; her half-baked rationalizations, moral relativism, and false equivalencies (the one about Bret Easton Ellis is particularly sophistic) seem to confound Monk, who, we are left to infer, might simply be sexist and envious of her success.
Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call this change “diabolical,” it does result in at least making possible the reading England is describing (he did, after all, read the film this way). I don’t see Golden as getting off so clean. She appeals to the market in a transparent admission that her work is undertaken in an effort to enrich herself and one strains to find the consistency in her litany of defenses to Monk’s precise but exhaustive critique. “The market” is hardly some faceless entity, after all, but the assemblage of interests, biases, and demands of people.
Even as someone who prefers American Fiction to Erasure as a work, I cringe hearing Issa Rae delivering the line “I did a lot of research for my book,” changed from Mae Jenkins’s description of her process in Erasure, “When I was twelve I went to visit some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days and that’s what the novel comes from.” What amount of research could have possibly resulted in the passage Golden reads at the film’s outset?! Jefferson may have envisioned a film that embraces the ambiguity Monk prizes as a screenwriter, Monk seemingly gleaning some insight from Golden’s counterattacks dilutes the film’s message.
If Monk is meant to appear elitist or — frankly, more absurd in context — sexist in the face of Golden’s defense, it seems to me Everett’s approach to this characterization is more in line with the shared interests of American Fiction and Erasure.
The Banality of Evil
Jason England, a critic for Defector who I quoted earlier, has a widely different overall impression of the film than I do. In the course of his takedown, he raises an important point about American Fiction’s white characters. He writes, “the problems are costumed as white dolts and doofuses—publishers, editors, writers, and filmmakers who are such caricatures that the white audience can laugh at them without feeling indicted.” Indeed, the true villains of American Fiction, the cartoonish buffoons who publish and promote My Pafology/Fuck could never be mistaken for sociologically accurate portrayals of white people. This is a widespread problem for any socially malignant (in a word, evil) behavior represented in film. These acts are committed by human beings under a given set of cultural conditions, not exceptionally horrific individuals. From murder to promoting a book rife with stereotypes, there are factors outside of one subject’s agency that drive such acts.
Far from exculpating these individuals from responsibility, films are often challenged when it comes to implicating the audience along with the wrongdoers, insofar as the wrongdoing is something of a greater social problem. Sensationalizing wrongdoing with buffoonery as American Fiction does, mustache twirling villains, or mysterious strangers allows the audience to see themselves as separate from the exceptional, inherent characteristics of someone who commits harm when, in fact, given the right circumstances, everyone can harm someone else. Walter Johnson writes about this ideology in the context of chattel slavery in the U.S., “[w]e are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings: we are separating ourselves from our own histories of perpetration.”
Jefferson may have an escape hatch from this critique, however, in an appeal to genre. American Fiction is a work of satire, and the extreme caricatures who facilitate the dissemination of texts that are, in essence, objectionable by virtue of their appeal to white racist fantasies fit the formal mold of satirical characters. One may question if these characters are the right ones to satirize in a work that also treats some characters with dramatic weight and psychological realism, particularly when one considers who will view this film and how they will see themselves in relation to Monk and his publishers. Ultimately, while the formal imperative of the publishers and Adam Brody’s Wiley is clear, this is an element of the film that may work against itself.
Sad and Angry Professors
Erasure and American Fiction share the distinction of working through a very difficult problem for Black authors that is simultaneously existential, economic, and aesthetic. The fact that the white appetite for Black work of a very specific kind is so enduring causes a host of wide ranging problems, not least of which is the internal tension in both works. American Fiction must also modernize itself, giving the impression of of a more contemporary critique than Erasure. One attempt by Jefferson to accomplish this is a commentary on classroom culture, though it is only a brief gloss in the film’s opening scene.
There must be something in the air (there is), as the ideas here have also been taken up by Dream Scenario (2023) and, to a lesser extent, The Holdovers (2023). In fact, it seems impossible to make a film with a high school teacher or college professor that does not in some way comment on modern students’ “sensitivity” and lack of academic acumen. American Fiction can’t work out this issue to its synthesis. Nonetheless, it is a gratifying quick hit for professors who have recently struggled with problematic students.
Re-Presenting
I don’t really buy into the colloquially expressed idea of “the work is not for you,” usually a reflexive gesture meant to defend a work from criticism. When a work is put out into the world, it’s for everybody. Meaning, anyone can read, watch it, engage with it, whatever the case may be. What is implicit in a claim about who a work is for is an intersection between two ideas.
One is the idea of “target demographic” in the economic sense. This is an idea that imagines a buying audience for a work of art cum commodity. The group that is imagined as being the primary buying audience for the commodified work of art is necessarily being exploited. There will be all manner of methods cooked up, not by artists, but by advertisers, to part a group from their hard earned money. This is a calculus American Fiction depicts with extreme clarity.
The other idea, less implicit and more explicit in the statement of something being not for someone, is the idea of who the author imagines their audience to be. Who they say they “wrote it for.” Like any declaration by an author about their own text, this should be taken with a grain of salt. An author has no control over how and by who a work is received. Though it may be meant to gratify the sensibilities of some, often a work is taken up by people other than the audience imagined. Surprisingly, who Monk is writing for seems to rarely be at issue. In fact, more than anyone, he writes for himself.
When a work is defended in this way, it usually takes the former (target demographic) for the latter (author’s intended audience) assuming some access to hidden repositories of knowledge within the text. And it may well be true, some people understand texts better than others, sometimes that has to do with a shared experience the text relies on to get something across. But it seems more important to me to ask who is in a work rather than who a work is for. That is the question that drives much of the analysis of American Fiction: who is it, exactly, that is represented here?
It’s easy to try to answer that question by pointing to Cord Jefferson or Jeffrey Wright or Percival Everett, whatever confessions any of these men have made about their personal life, whatever way one might align the events of American Fiction to any of their biographies. But there isn’t just one person that Monk embodies. As Monk presents at the Massachusetts Festival of Books in a half-filled broom closet, the scene felt almost too familiar.
I have been in this room… presenting about any combination of detective novels, Black American literature, and Lacanian psychoanalysis that you like. What makes American Fiction a great film is not that it is heartwarming or makes an exhaustive critique of the many social issues it takes up. It is the vicissitudes of the life of Thelonious Ellison that make it great. And they are slings and arrows one faces in a vocation that will be less and less common as time goes on.
American Fiction immortalizes something recognizable for those who write what no one wants to read.
Weekly Reading List
https://crimethinc.com/2024/02/26/this-is-what-our-ruling-class-has-decided-will-be-normal-on-aaron-bushnells-action-in-solidarity-with-gaza — Yesterday (Feb 25, 2024), Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in a demonstration of opposition to the genocide in Gaza. He is far from the first to take such a political action and is, in fact, not even the first to do so for this specific cause. Just as the history of Palestine and Israel did not begin on October 7th, the history of self-immolation did not begin yesterday. And yet, today, you hear concerns about “glorifying suicide” expressed by people who have never considered either self-immolation as a political act or suicide as a social problem before today. My suggestion to those people would be to consider what you can do to address the material conditions that produce the incentives to commit suicide. That would, however, have nothing to do with Aaron Bushnell, though it would address the issue of suicide that suddenly concerns so many.
Crimethinc, a long running anarchist collective, published a thoughtful piece about Bushnell, Gaza, and the history of this kind of political activity.
Until next time.