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.