Ellison and Barthes: Occultation and De-occulation of the "Ethnic Canon" in Percival Everett's Erasure
Feith, Michel
Ellison and Barthes: Occultation and De-occulation of the "Ethnic Canon" in Percival Everett's Erasure - 2007.
9
Erasure is a work so replete with various forms of parody and pastiche that these strategies of rewriting constitute its thematic and formal core. The protagonist, Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, is himself an African American parodist, but one of his endeavors backfires, forcing him to play the neo-minstrel part of a stereotypical 'black writer.' The novel develops a poetics of allusion that implies a complex relationship with several 'canons,' among which the poststructuralist doxa, represented by a parody of Barthes's S/Z; ghetto novels predicated on the 'black experience'; and, last but not least, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The various treatments range from downright burlesque and ridicule, to critical parody and pastiche-as-tribute. The relation of text to hypotext can take on an interventionist quality, indirectly performing the canonical operation of literary evaluation. The novel seems to be rather a negative ars poetica, a deconstruction of ethnic and national canons, than a refoundational enterprise: no 'blueprints for Negro writing' are proposed. Yet, Ralph Ellison's refusal to be limited to a 'racial' province, and his advocacy of the literariness of the novel over its sociological significance, seem most congenial to Everett, and make him the real 'ancestor' of the younger writer's creative and comic wisdom.
Ellison and Barthes: Occultation and De-occulation of the "Ethnic Canon" in Percival Everett's Erasure - 2007.
9
Erasure is a work so replete with various forms of parody and pastiche that these strategies of rewriting constitute its thematic and formal core. The protagonist, Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, is himself an African American parodist, but one of his endeavors backfires, forcing him to play the neo-minstrel part of a stereotypical 'black writer.' The novel develops a poetics of allusion that implies a complex relationship with several 'canons,' among which the poststructuralist doxa, represented by a parody of Barthes's S/Z; ghetto novels predicated on the 'black experience'; and, last but not least, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The various treatments range from downright burlesque and ridicule, to critical parody and pastiche-as-tribute. The relation of text to hypotext can take on an interventionist quality, indirectly performing the canonical operation of literary evaluation. The novel seems to be rather a negative ars poetica, a deconstruction of ethnic and national canons, than a refoundational enterprise: no 'blueprints for Negro writing' are proposed. Yet, Ralph Ellison's refusal to be limited to a 'racial' province, and his advocacy of the literariness of the novel over its sociological significance, seem most congenial to Everett, and make him the real 'ancestor' of the younger writer's creative and comic wisdom.
Réseaux sociaux