Dreams of Identity in Everett’s "Erasure"

Dreams of Identity in Everett’s "Erasure"

Of the various literary devices made use of in Percival Everett’s "Erasure," perhaps the most revealing is that of dream narratives, whereby Monk Ellison, and Van Go Jenkins, the narrator of Monk’s fictional novel My Pafology, dream events which, though not ascribed as “real” events in the narrative, nonetheless carry a significatory weight that can elucidate other aspects of the text. At the beginning of the novel, Monk says, “the society in which I live tells me I am black” (1). He believes that race, and personal identities in general, are purely a social construct of language. But throughout the novel we see that this language of race and identity, as displayed in the cultural acceptance of the ghetto dialect in which Monk writes My Pafology, is the only language his society knows, leading to a conflict where Monk begins to identify with his stereotypical nom de plume, Stagg R. Leigh. Monk’s dreams portray this encroaching conflict of identity, in which his personal interests, education, family dramas, psychological difficulties, and creative intentions are pitted against societal expectations that would violently erase personal identity.

In the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, dreams can tell us something about the identity of the dreamer; either repressed, childhood concerns, or dynamic, self-affirming principles. Regardless of the methodology or theory used, such dream interpretation often relies on knowledge of the individual dreamer’s life, as well as on symbolic archetypes that may or may not exist in all human expression. Though not intentionally created by the dreamer, a dream could thus be taken as a signification of that person’s life, and the individual as the dream’s “author.” We might assume that though the author of a text writes the dream narrative, it is similarly supposed to function as an unconscious or symbolic measure of the dreaming character’s life. Roland Barthes, in his essay, “Death of the Author,” suggests that the history and personality of a novel’s author may not serve as an accurate guide for interpreting their text. Barthes instead posits a scriptor, the narrative voice born in the act of writing itself, which allows interpretation to proceed as a disentanglement of narrative elements within the text. While dream narratives may not signify anything about the actual author, they may serve as textual clues for the interpretation of the scriptors or characters in a book, which are merely aspects of the text. This being the case, it is possible to look at dream narratives, such as those in Erasure, as a narrative layer that can further help disentangle the threads of the character’s identities.

Early in the novel, Monk dreams that his father is telling him stories about certain African-American authors, and then finds himself to be younger, watching a school of fish from a pier. Shortly, Monk discovers, “Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush.” She asks, “‘Did you see him?’ I stopped her and asked, ‘See whom?’ But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject” (41-2). Childhood memories, fishing, and the lives of artists fill a considerable part of Monk’s attention throughout Erasure, and they may be part of his way of expressing his unique identity versus his concerns that, “some people in the society in which I live… tell me I am not black enough” (2). But it is Monk’s relationship to his family that is more significantly explicated in this passage. Though his father is dead, Monk occasionally remembers his father’s pride in the young Monk’s decision to become a writer. Furthermore, this paternal encouragement often separates him from his siblings, who are both doctors, and take offense at Monk’s precocious use of the English language. Monk’s “whom” may reflect his solid education and supportive upbringing, but this personal use of language puts him at odds with reviewers, like the one who is at a loss to understand what his experimental writing, “has to do with the African American experience” (2).

Prior to this dream, Monk eats lunch with his sister, Lisa, in a Capitol Grill restaurant in D.C., and during a conversation about Monk’s writing career and inability to talk to other people Lisa says he is different. “Different from whom?” is Monk’s reply (26), perhaps not only to Lisa, but also to an unknown man who Monk catches staring at his sister, though she claims not to know him, or to the picketers shouting “Murderer!” in front of the abortion clinic where Lisa works (29). The next day, Monk learns that his sister has been killed, presumably by the pro-life protestors, and due to the linguistic similarities between Monk’s dream and the scene in the Capitol Grill, it might be tempting to read Lisa’s dream-question “did you see him?” as referring to the unknown man in the restaurant as her potential murderer. This use of a prophetic dream as narrative foreshadowing may however be a manipulative device of the text in order to conceal what is actually going on in the novel.
After eating with his sister, and before learning she is dead, Monk reads a review of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ bestselling novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a distortion of African-American life, and is asked by his editor that he imitate this form in order to be “black enough” (43) for his audience. In light of Monk’s revulsion when he first hears of Jenkins’ book, it is possible that Lisa’s question in the dream instead refers to Monk, and his concern about being an educated, black author whose, “work was not commercial enough to make any real money” (42). If the dream acts as narrative foreshadowing, it is a premonition not of his sister’s murder, but of the eventual birth of Stagg R. Leigh, Monk’s imaginary nom de plume. This stereotypically black, incommunicative ex-con has no identity of his own and is compared by Monk to being as mercurial and immaterial as the character Rinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Though Monk does not see him now, this dream passage raises the suggestion that there is someone else to be seen, a version of Monk Ellison that would not reply, “See whom,” and who is capable of writing in the ghetto dialect that makes My Pafology a publishable novel.

Out of his disgust with the success of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ book, and his alienation after his sister’s death that forces him to move to D.C. and take care of their ailing mother, Monk writes My Pafology, his own take on black stereotypes that is intended to mock We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Everett includes the entirety of this novel within Erasure, and fittingly begins it with another dream. In this passage, the main character of Monk’s My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, stabs his mother to death, claiming that he does this because, “…I love her. Cause I hate her. Cause I ain’t got no daddy” (66). It is this dream that sets the tone for Go’s actions throughout the rest of the novel-in-a-novel, including a fight with his knife-wielding mother and his shooting of Willy, a man who claims to be Go’s father. Go’s excuse for this latter action is that Willy brought him into this world where he “ain’t shit” (124). By describing such violent actions in an extreme racial dialect, Monk attempts to offer a parody of ghetto life.

This parody of black identity and actions is further conveyed in another dream sequence where Go wants to have children with a parade of beautiful women. After imagining what he might name these kids, Go has a startling revelation, “I looks down and I see that my dick ain’t nuffin but a bump” (82), prompting jeers from the women until one of them tells Go that she doesn’t care if he doesn’t have a penis, except that she turns into his mother and Go stabs her over and over again. These two dreams suggest that Monk decided to portray the real problem with such stereotypical “ghetto life” not in terms of socio-economic deprivation, but as a case of Freudian psychological repressions. The “ho” that becomes Go’s mother, his desire to stab her because he doesn’t have a father, bespeak more of castration anxieties and an Oedipus complex rather than a lack of education as the cause of Go’s desires to criminally dehumanize women. Monk casts “ghetto life” as a sense of inferiority bred from a lack of clear family identities and values. With the lack of a strong male role model, does Go’s mother become the mythical black “Matriarch,” who he must stab in order to affirm his self-worth, and in the process stab out at the rest of society?

It is possible that in writing this parody on African-American life in the same style as We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk is assuming the identity of Juanita Mae Jenkins and using her own language against her. However, textual references suggest that Monk may be also referring to his own life in My Pafology. In Go’s second dream sequence, two of the names that he imagines for the children he would have with the dream “hos” are Fantasy and Mystery, names which refer to an earlier conversation Monk has with his sister, where he says, “I come up with shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that” (26). The reality of African-American life that would lead someone to use these two names is too absurd for Monk’s educated sensibilities. Similarly, the castration theme of this dream, where Go’s penis “ain’t nuffin but a bump,” is referenced later in a somewhat disembodied interlude during Monk’s struggle to maintain his own identity despite Stagg R. Leigh’s literary success, where Monk says, “Somehow I managed to take myself, the writer, reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work… I had caught myself standing naked in front of the mirror and discovered that I had nothing to hide and that lack was exactly what forced me to turn away” (257). Monk then says that he cut off his own penis, using a variety of slang words for this member, suggesting that the body which we think of as the most real and personal part of our identity may also be nothing but a construct of language. As Monk struggles to deal with his own mother’s mental decline, his own inability to take care of her, and the absence of a father in his own life, it is possible that the somewhat psychologically repressed dreams of Monk’s character Van Go Jenkins may really be referring to Monk’s own psychological difficulties. The creation of Stagg R. Leigh as the fictional author of My Pafology may not only serve to further the book’s insistence on being a parody, but may also serve to protect Monk from the startling fact that though he and Go have different identities, they are somehow the same: caught in familial difficulties and socially constructed roles that do not allow them to express themselves or their race as they really are.

While events and characters in My Pafology may or may not refer to Monk’s actual life, he certainly insists that he intended the book to be a parody of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and its black stereotypes. By explicitly framing his intentions, Monk may be trying to call into question Barthes’ assertion that a text is not representational of an author’s life and intentions. However, Monk may have fallen for this intentional fallacy himself, as his publisher, reviewers, and audience all end up taking the book as a true statement about African-American life. The text becomes indexical not of Monk’s life and intentions, but of its fictional author, Stagg R. Leigh, an identity that Monk assumes in order get the book published and to promote it on the Kenya Dunston show. This may be an example of Barthes’ suggestion that an author’s identity does not precede their text, but is created from the process of writing, leading to Monk’s final inability to disentangle himself from the fiction that he created.
Between Monk’s appearance as Stagg R. Leigh on the Kenya Dunston show, and the acceptance of Stagg’s book for the National Book Award, Monk has one last dream sequence that suggests the depths of his crisis of identity before loosing touch with reality altogether in Erasure’s climax. In this passage, Monk dreams that he cannot wake up from being pursued by Nazi soldiers. He sees the Germans burn down a house and bayonet a painting of Starry Night, describing that concurrently, “I felt a sharp pain in my middle, grabbed my stomach and when I looked down at my hand I found it was covered with blood” (255). The soldiers burn Monk through the painting before he finally mows them down with a machine gun, but one wounded Nazi bleeds all the way into his foxhole and speaks, “The wounded man looked at me, at my own blood on my shirt, and said, ‘Wie heißen Sie?’ And I didn’t know” (256).

Two of Monk’s earlier imagined conversations take place between Hitler and Meister Eckhart, who discuss their writings that attack Jews and secure the German race. These fictional dialogues, and Hitler’s rise to power in general, may serve as examples of the danger spread from racial stereotypes and the defining of identity on one’s racial group alone. Within the last dream sequence, Monk’s thoughts on race and identity, as spelled out in the text of these conversations, have re-created him as someone intimately involved in Hitler’s Germany, as someone on the opposite side of the Nazi dialectic of racial affirmation and destruction. However, the imagined conversations between other artists whose work is being burned also lead Monk to identify himself with a work of art, to the point of being wounded along with it, in much the same way that he has so viscerally identified himself with the fictional Stagg R. Leigh. In particular, the painting is Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, whose name is referenced in Van Go Jenkins, identifying Monk with his fictional character. By shooting back at the German soldiers, Monk is further identified with Go Jenkins, who dreams of stabbing his mother and goes on a violent rampage at the end of My Pafology, but also perhaps with the unknown murderer of his sister and all those who might perpetuate violence in the name of belief or racial identity.

Monk’s inability to tell just who he is culminates in the dream when the wounded soldier asks, “Wie heißen Sie,” which in English translates as, ‘what is your name?’ Monk no longer knows how to answer this seemingly simple query, and in the novel’s final scene this conflict comes to a head. When his book is given the National Book award and the author is asked to stand up, Monk rises and experiences a sharp break with reality. He is shown a mirror in which he sees the face of Stagg R. Leigh, and finally remarks into a TV camera that he is on television, just as his character Go does at the end of My Pafology. The narrator is no longer clearly Monk Ellison, for he has now also become both the stereotyped author and character whose identities stemmed from Monk’s desire to parody those stereotypes in the first place. However, it is also possible that when the dream-soldier asks for his name, Monk says he doesn’t know not just because he no longer knows his own name, but also because he is unable to understand identity when it is couched in terms of racial dialects or dialectics. Society wants Monk to say that he is a black author addressing black themes, or that if he is black he ought to act out of the same kinds of violent and thuggish stereotypes he is trying to protest, but this is unintelligible and even inimical to Monk’s other identities, as a child, a sibling, a fisher and woodworker, an educated and experimental novelist, and finally perhaps a human being struggling with the same kinds of psychological concerns that plague any other individual.

Confronted with the religious zealotry that may have killed his sister, the education and authorial intentions that distinguish him from other authors, the stereotypes of “ghetto life” that make best-selling novels, and the uncertainty of the role of art to the most real aspects of life and personal identity, when Monk is finally asked to define himself on society’s terms, both in the soldier’s question and in claiming authorship of My Pafology, he cannot answer. Unable, or unwilling, to turn to the violent responses of Go, his sister’s murderer, or of the soldiers in his dream, that are necessitated by the dialectics of race and belief, Monk’s identity itself becomes a dream, and he states in Latin as the book’s last line, “hypothesis non fingo” (265), ‘I do not form a hypothesis.’ By the end of Erasure, the text seems to suggest that Monk’s personal identification is irrelevant to how he is perceived, and that if social constructs, stereotypes, and language itself were to become erased, then identity could not exist.