Would it matter if I published this essay under a pseudonym, which hid all the markers of my identity, including my race? Does that identity always matter to what I say, drawing on the authority of the experience I bring to the task? Or might it matter more to how it is read by you, the reader, who carries a cargo of expectations about what that experience really is or what, in the current jargon, my “positionality” should be? Would a pseudonym successfully short-circuit posing these questions, or would it merely imitate the stratagem chosen by the flawed hero of the movie about which I’m writing, who hides behind a nom de plume in order to sell a pseudo-autobiographical potboiler about allegedly authentic Black life? Is it, however, possible to reveal an “authentic” self or do we always present an artificial persona, perhaps many, to the world? And conversely, can you, the reader, ever hear an argument without filtering it through the prior expectations you carry about the person—or more likely, the type of person–making it? Can you listen without the buzzing noise of cultural mediations, the echoes of past experiences, the distortions of media, in short, the years of those sedimented internalizations called prejudices?

From its opening scene, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and adapted by him from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001), poses these very questions, grabs us by the throat, and never lets go. The movie’s hero, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an ambitious, but frustrated novelist played brilliantly by Jeffrey Wright, is conducting a writing class at a prestigious university. He casually leaves the toxic word “n-word” on the blackboard, where he has written the title of Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger. When a student, not incidentally White, objects that it makes her uncomfortable, he responds by condescendingly telling her “I got over it, I’m pretty sure you can too.” She storms out, and he is soon called on the carpet by the university administration for being insensitive to student feelings. When he demurs, he is asked to take an extended leave of absence. The audience is left with ambivalent reactions that will continue throughout the movie: is Monk being under-sensitive in his desire to transcend race and retreat into the safer territory protected by a race-neutral aesthetic frame? Is the student being over-sensitive in her reluctance to tolerate the nasty word in that frame and playing the “woke snowflake” with the effrontery to tell a Black teacher she is more offended than he is by the n-word? Should we discount their respective racial identities, ages and statuses in our judging their responses to what is normally an unacceptable insult? Or, as Claudine Gay might put it, does context matter, and if so, how?

What makes American Fiction a fascinating movie is the way it struggles with all of these questions, while being honest enough to perform its inability to answer them. It is, in fact, a movie that embraces its contradictions. Most obviously, it juxtaposes broad, often satirically cutting comedy with subtle and moving drama. My favorite example of the former comes when three Whites on a panel judging a literary contest smugly defend their honoring the trashy potboiler written surreptitiously by Monk, one of the two Black panelists who vehemently reject it, by saying “it’s time to listen to underrepresented voices.” The latter focuses on Monk’s tortured relations with his prosperous, accomplished, but deeply unhappy family, unable to overcome their unhealed wounds and lifetimes of resentments. Not only is Monk’s father absent, but the reason, we learn, is his suicide at some unspecified moment in the past. His mother, played by Leslie Uggams, is in serious mental decline, and his two siblings, played by Trace Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown, are loath to take on the responsibility of caring for her. Monk’s decision to write his trashy novel is motivated in part by his need to fund his mother’s expensive care. His sister’s sudden death shortly after Monk returns to Boston and his brother’s drug use and defiant determination to indulge homosexual pleasures denied for so long make Monk’s home-coming even more fraught. A superb, self-sufficient drama could have easily come from developing in greater detail these intricate family dynamics, especially as Uggams, Ross and Brown are every bit as compelling on the screen as Wright.

The agenda of American Fiction, however, is much more ambitious. It wants to explore the conundrums of American race relations as well as the ways in which fictionality grapples with them. The underlying attitude of the film towards the former approaches what certain academics, following Frank B. Wilderson III, call Afropessimism, in which Blackness is essentially a death sentence with no reprieve. Dreams of successful integration are shattered, as relations with Whites, even the most well-intended, are unremittingly bleak. The Whites in the film—academic colleagues, other writers, publishers, book publicists, and movie directors—are satirically portrayed, albeit more often comically than bitterly, as unintentional racists who wallow in guilt and are merely virtue signalling when they defend diversity and equality. Intimate personal relations with them are also invariably failures. Marriages and love affairs by the siblings with White partners have ended calamitously, and Monk’s philandering dead father is remembered unforgivingly for having been spied kissing a White woman. When Monk presents his new girlfriend to his mother, she sighs with relief and says “I’m glad you’re not White,” to which the woman replies “so am I.” The film gives this exchange its implicit approval, however much it would have been a scandal had the races been reversed. There is, moreover, no way out for Whites, whose professions of guilt and attempts to repair the damage are revealed as feckless and easily manipulated for commercial purposes. The book’s publicist cynically urges publication on Juneteenth, because White bad conscience will be at its height then. But there seems to be no antidote to this dynamic, as the audience, or at least the Whites in it, are only left with the added meta-guilt they now feel about the impotence of their prior self-incrimination. There is no off-ramp, the movie glumly tells us, leading to genuine empathy or intersubjective respect between the races. The humanist dream of a fully color-blind society, as Afropessimists have always insisted, is a chimera.

The film’s pessimism is not confined to the prospects for integration alone. Monk is presented with a stark and unpalatable choice. He can continue to pursue his vain fantasy of becoming an acclaimed writer of quality above racial pigeon-holing, which produces neither fame nor success, or pander to a White audience that craves only stories of depraved, oppressed, if sentimentally heroic Blacks who embody stereotypes of thugs in the hood. He wants his work to be placed in racially indifferent sections of the bookstore and respected as literature tout court, but it is shoved back into the Afro-American culture ghetto instead. There is apparently no chance of writing decent work for a predominantly Black audience, which seems not to exist in the film’s imaginary. To his initial surprise and dismay, his invented authorial persona, a fugitive murderer hiding behind the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh,” becomes a sensation, and his purported confessional novel, first called My Pafology and then even more procatively retitled Fuck, climbs the best-seller list and attracts the attention of Hollywood. There is only one way, the movie implies, that this Ellison can cease being an “invisible man,” and that’s to lose his integrity and abandon his lofty ideals. Despite his initial qualms about selling out, the final scene in the film, where we see Monk drive away from a movie lot laughing with his brother, suggests he has made his peace with it.

If the alternatives presented to a Black artist are grim, so too is the image projected of Black family life. For all their haute bourgeois prosperity and laudable individual accomplishments, the Ellisons are as dysfunctional and “broken” a family as any depicted in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous 1965 report on The Negro Family. Monk is even denied the consolation of an incipient family of his own, when the rom-com potential of his promising relationship with the neighbor next to their summer beach home—that attractive Black woman of whom his mother approves—is torpedoed by his outrage at her innocent enthusiasm for Stagg R. Leigh’s trashy novel.

The only really successful love relationship in the movie is between the Ellison family’s long faithful housekeeper Lorraine and her timidly sweet security guard beau, whom she assures everyone is “a fine man.” But here too the positive impact of their happiness is undercut because she embodies the stereotypical role of the selfless, nurturant “mammy,” who insists on calling the younger Monk “Mr. Monk,” as if vaguely recalling an earlier time when she served someone else named “Miss Scarlet.” In addition, the decorated military uniform her husband wears at their wedding suggests that he too has an implicit backstory, that he may have been drafted to kill for his country in that war where Muhammed Ali famously said “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong” who never “called me nigger.” It is as if some measure of personal happiness for Blacks is only granted to those who know their place in the larger society and serve in whatever capacity as “credits to their race.” They are the very opposite of the legendary Stagger Lee, whom Julius Lester memorably called “the baddest nigger that ever lived….so bad that the flies wouldn’t even fly around his head in the summertime, and snow wouldn’t fall on his house in the winter.”

American Fiction does, however, provide some relief from the Afropessimist nightmare, but it is on the meta-level of the telling of its story, which ironically returns Monk to the racially neutral ground of aesthetics in general. The movie’s title refers not only to the corrupt nature of the book market in this country, but also implies that fictionality is so pervasive in America that any aspiration to authenticity is virtually impossible to realize. Monk does not, after all, write a best-seller based on his own experience as an accomplished member of the Black bourgeoisie, nor does he do any ethnographic work to depict the lives of Blacks lower on the cultural or economic ladder. Instead, he relies on tropic conventions or what we might call images of the “figural Negro” (with apologies to Sarah Hammerschlag’s The Figural Jew), which are not merely held by Whites, but also by Blacks themselves. American Fiction demonstrates the power of figurality by the way in which Lorraine appears as a latterday “mammy” from Gone with the Wind. It may have been the case that Hattie McDaniel’s original characterization slyly played off the racist archetypes portrayed in minstrel shows, which were understood as such by discerning Black audiences. But by the time we get to American Fiction, the distinction between authentic life and fabricated art has been worn away. It seems as if it is figurae all the way down, a mise en abyme of external and internalized racial profiling, which no one can easily escape.

But if the movie’s frequent allusions to the figural constitution of ostensibly authentic behavior seems to rob its characters of any idiosyncratic individuality, its final meta-level conclusion leaves a very different impression. For when we are led to believe we are about to witness a confessional moment at the literary awards ceremony, when Monk will reveal the true identity of Stagg R. Leigh, the action suddenly stops. The film audience is astounded to discover that there are alternative endings to a movie that is itself a realization of a script “written” by Monk himself. The concluding scene that is selected is not his confession revealing his authentic self, nor one in which he reconciles with his girlfriend, but rather an over-the-top alternative in which the police storm the room looking for a fugitive murderer, mistake the award Monk has been given for a weapon, and riddle his body with their bullets. It is the perfect ending to a blaxploitation narrative about the imagined Stagg R. Leighs of the world and their flesh and blood avatars, or at least so the craven White director who makes the movie persuades Monk to believe.

Presenting a menu of alternative endings and delegating their choice to a character in the story is, of course, a distancing aesthetic device that alerts us to the contrived nature of the narrative and creates uncertainty about who is doing the narrating. A further hint about the power of aesthetic conventions over the alleged “authenticity” of what is depicted comes from a passing reference to the fact that one of Monk’s previous novels is a reworking of Aristophanes’ play The Frogs. Celebrated for combining satire, fantasy, comedy and a moment of parabasis, in which the aesthetic frame is broken and the audience directly addressed, it anticipated what were later called Menippean satires, which even more wildly mixed genres. The generic instability of American Fiction shows that it belongs in this tradition, which is evident as well in the experimentally bold novel from which it was drawn. Erasure’s conventional narrative arc is interrupted by everything from random quotations in Latin, imagined dialogues between real historical characters, the lengthy cv of its main character, a fantasized game show in which a Black outsider has extraordinary powers, and, most disruptive of all, the entire seventy-page text of My Pafology itself.

Disentangling the web spun by a movie about a movie about a book written under a pseudonym by a character who is originally the ambivalent hero of an earlier book, which experiments with its narrative voice and mixes genres, is no eask task, and, you’ll be relieved to know, will not be attempted here. Instead, I want to conclude with a more general point. Although American Fiction presents a bleak picture of the dilemmas faced by Black artists who cannot escape the traps laid for them in a racist society, a picture etched in Afropessimist acid, it is performatively something more. Drawing on a sophisticated arsenal of aesthetic devices that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, it provides a lesson in the ways form and content in a work of art can be productively in tension. It shows that artists, whatever their backgrounds, are never entirely determined by them. Or better put, that they can resist being trapped by the identities thrust on them, often by hostile observers, by finding ways through their art to rise above them. For even if they work within received aesthetic traditions, they can bend them for their own purposes. At once particular and universal, emerging from a specific context and yet able to transcend it, the art they create at their best, like American Fiction, unsettles the givens of the world they portray and rattles the assumptions of the audiences they reach, whatever their subject positions may be. While not denying that race surely matters, it does not give the r-word the final say.

Alternate Ending

Ok, how can an analysis of a movie with several possible endings stop with just one? Is there a danger in assigning a universalizing aesthetic gambit the role of successfully erasing the racial specificity of American life, whose malign effects are anything but fictional? Everett’s novel is, after all, called Erasure for a reason. It is most directly referenced in an imagined dialogue between the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning concerning the former’s literal erasure of a pencil, ink, and grease pencil drawing by the latter, one of the most famous episodes in the conceptual art of the 1950’s. It appears as well in many other less explicit ways in the novel. The worsening dementia of Monk’s mother, much more elaborately detailed there than in American Fiction, progressively erases her personality and ability to function in the world. Monk’s father, we learn, erased a girl he had conceived out of wedlock from the family history, at least until after his death, when her existence is revealed in letters he left behind, leading Monk to seek her out and rectify her disinheritance. And most disturbing of all, the persona Monk invented of a ghetto thug threatens to erase the reality of his scornful creator. Or as he confesses when he arrives for the ceremony honoring Fuck: “there was the nagging fear that upon waking from a three-year coma, I would find the identification bracelet on my wrist reading Stagg R. Lee.”

The adaptation of Everett’s novel by Cord Jefferson, who won an Academy Award for his efforts, can be seen in some respects as continuing the process of erasure. In the original story, the death of Monk’s sister is not due to a heart attack, as it is in the film, but to an assassination by an anti-abortion zealot. The sorry episode of Monk’s discovered half-sister, who turns out to have grown up in poverty and begrudges his attempt to make things whole, does not find its way into American Fiction. The White producer simply called “Wiley” in the movie is called “Wiley Morgenstein” in the book and is accompanied by a nubile, enhanced-breasted “assistant” whose presence inevitably triggers associations with Harvey Weinstein. Rather than reconciling with Monk, as he does at the end of the movie, his gay brother terminates their fraught relationship with brutal directness: “Upstairs in the study you will find a note which explains everything. I went up to the study and found an envelope on the desk. Inside was a note which read: FUCK YOU! Bill.”

Screen adaptations, of course, inevitably involve cutting and reshaping, and Jefferson’s additions, such as the opening scene with the offended White snowflake, are often inspired. And so it would be mistaken to fault him for making hard choices about what to exclude or simplify from a very complex and challenging original text. There is, however, a larger point to be made about erasure in general, which draws on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, and reenacts in the visual medium of written language Rauschenberg’s audacious erasure of De Kooning’s drawing. The philosophers often drew a slanted line over a word, which while being crossed out nonetheless survived its obliteration. In the page headings of Everett’s novel the word “erasure” is in fact systematically marked in precisely this way. Writing “under erasure” (sous rature), as Derrida called the gesture that signaled a word or phrase that was “inadequate yet necessary,” performatively indicated both the power and the limits of language in general. Or to put it in somewhat different terms, it signals that words can neither fully mean what they are intended to say nor successfully obliterate their intended meanings, latent as well as manifest.

Transferred into the register we adopted in our first ending, this insight would suggest that the particular racial identity or point of view that a universalizing aesthetics seeks to overcome still remains potent even after its apparent erasure. In Everett’s novel, as Monk decides to take the money offered by Hollywood to turn his reviled novel into a movie, he comes to experience the fear “that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of ‘Black’ writers, I ended up on the very distant and ‘other’ side of a line that is imaginary at best….the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression.” As he goes up at the end of the novel to the podium to confess his having been the real author of the novel, Monk fantasizes that a small boy, perhaps himself as a child, holds up a mirror. What he sees is the face of Stagg R. Leigh, who says “Now you are free of illusion….How does it feel to be free of one’s illusions?” In short, Monk seems to discover that the real erasure is not of his authentic aesthetically sophisticated self by his thuggish alter ego, created to live up to White fantasies about Blacks, but rather that his supposedly authentic self was in fact an erasure of the inner Black “thug” who had been covered over by his veneer of condescending gentility. Or at least that no matter what he does, he cannot escape the fate prescribed by the color of his skin. So it turns out the r-word, after all, does have ultimate power to trump pretensions of being above the fray via universalizing aesthetic fiat.

Final Ending

The logic of sous rature is not, however, a simple binary opposition of appearance and essence, surface and depth, phony and authentic. Monk, it turns out, is a thinly disguised autobiographical character, mirroring much in his creator’s own life. Everett also came from a prosperous family of medical professionals, and, like Monk in the novel, loves to fish. He is as notoriously recalcitrant an interviewee as Monk (almost matching the exquisitely honed passive aggression of a John Coetzee). One of his early novels, Frenzy (1997), was an intertexual rewriting of a Greek myth (in this case, that of Dionysus), which defied channelling “the Black experience,” and was largely ignored as a result. Another called For Her Dark Skin (2002) reimagined Euripides’s Medea. Like Monk, Everett teaches creative writing at a university in Los Angeles (in his case USC) as well as writing fiction. He is well travelled in the labyrinthine furrows ploughed by literary critics analyzing multiple narrators. Among his own works are novels titled A History of African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurman, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004) and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013).

Ironically, then, American Fiction, with its aesthetically indeterminate transcendence of the allegedly authentic Black experience, may seem more in sympathy with Everett’s own oscillating point of view than with the apparently definitive conclusion that illusions of transcending racial identity can be overcome reached at the end of Erasure. If, however, we attend to the latter’s very last words, the Latin phrase hypotheses non fingo which come only a paragraph after the mirror fantasy, the two perspectives line up again. For the phrase is taken from the second edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia—thank you, Wikipedia—and means “I frame no hypotheses.” There is, in other words, an undecidability between an immanent and transcendent point of view in Erasure, despite Stagg’s face in Monk’s mirror, which is then skillfully reimagined in the multiple endings of American Fiction.

It may, therefore, be possible to derive a more complicated lesson from the movie than the either/or of our own first two endings, a lesson that takes on board the existential implications of living sous rature. Seeing the atypical lives of the Monks of the world as legitimate expressions of an expanded notion of “Black experience,” no less (or more) “authentic” than the more familiar ones that have come from a shared history of oppression and the jaundiced perception of outsiders, lets us avoid a simple choice between particular or universal identities. Against the grain of Afropessimist despair, it appreciates the possibility of aesthetic experimentation not as an abstract opposition to the stereotypical roles assigned to figural Negroes, but as as a legitimate possibility open to real Blacks who are far more than self-loathing deniers of their rootedness in the real world. It is to realize that the “double consciousness” that can tear the souls of Black folks asunder may be better appreciated as expanded selves that already contain multitudes and are able to fashion new ones that will surely continue to enrich and astound the world.