Erasure

I'm in the middle of reading Erasure, a required book for the Lit class in the LC.

Wow! It's kind of hard to explain this, but I am really enjoying this book. I don't think the book is meant to be enjoyed in the regular sense of the word. It's not fun. It's not entertaining. It's not "laugh out loud" funny. But for me it is enjoyable because it is getting me to think about the issues it raises and to stretch my brain for the links to the other literature it refers to.

In some ways it has already reminded me of The Invisible Man, Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Pale Fire. I don't want to talk about Erasure too much because I'd hate to spoil anything for the people who will read it, but that doesn't mean I can't talk about the other books!

I'm going to start with Pale Fire by Nabokov. Most people know Nabokov because he wrote Lolita. I have to admit: I have tried several times to read Lolita but have never gotten through it. The protagonist was way too twisted and unlikeable for me to get into it. Which leads to to Pale Fire. This is perhaps the strangest book I have ever read. It starts with an Introduction of sorts and then there is a long poem. After that is the notes section of the book. At first glance, it looks like this book will be about the poem. In reality, the book is the intro and the notes, which are not what you would expect at all. Nabokov creates a poet who writes the poem. Then he creates another character who writes the intro and the notes. If memory serves, his name was Kinbote, and he is an oddball. He worships the poet. He also believes in the existence of this other world that doesn't really exist (or does it?) and he makes the poem notes refer to this other world in their entirety. So there will be a line of the poem, something like "gray shoots through the fog of the car" (completely made up for example purpose here) and the number that indicates the note will direct you to a page about a hundred pages back, where you'll find pages upon pages of a note that have to do with this other place and only begin with some reference to the fog or the car.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Erasure? I'm not entirely sure myself. I'm just reminded of Pale Fire because of the book within the book and the idea of making characters who have their own little worlds out there in order for them to be fully realized characters. For someone to seem real, there has to be an immense backstory or the possibility of a backstory. Then it gets you thinking about what is real and how much of it is our perception of what's real compared to what is actually real.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my favorite books. This is a slight digression here, but it's also one of Oprah's favorite books. Her reason is it's the "best love story ever" or something to that effect. I feel like that's really reducing the book to something frivolous, like a fluffy romance novel. The book is wonderful for its language. The beginnings and endings of the chapters are beautiful for their wording, images and meaning. Yet, they are also simple enough that the reader can almost miss the depth that is there. The parts in Erasure that are about fishing and woodworking are lesser versions of what I experience as a reader of Zora Neale Hurston's work.

Native Son and Invisible Man are clearly referenced in Erasure. At some point, I started writing, "Reminds me of Native Son" in the margins of my book. A little later, I wrote, "It is Native Son!" It's been years since I've read the book, but I think the structure of My Pafothology follows NS in a fairly straightforward way, diverting in order just on the point of the girlfriend (or baby momma in this case). At some point after My Pafology, Monk actually starts saying of himself, "I am invisible." As a lit scholar with the last name of Ellison, I would expect him to be very familiar with this book, so that one is a no-brainer. One big difference: I associate both books with winter and darkness, so it's kind of weird for me to have E set in California's sunshine.

This brings me to what is making the book fun for me and also making my head hurt and making me want to reread The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Erasure is obviously referring to venerable works of literature that also happen to be written by African-Americans. (Like the narrator, I hate that all books written by African-Americans get placed into a category of their own, and that's probably a discussion for another blog) Anyhow... This referencing of another work is generally labeled allusion when encountered in most canonical literature. Signifying is something similar but different...which is pretty near the best definition I can come up with of it in a short amount of space. Signifying involves alluding to or using the original but expanding on it and/or commenting on it by reusing it in a different or more involved way. It's like jazz that improvises from an already established piece of music. Yes, it is similar, yes it borrows from, but is it the same? no, not really. Do you have some of the same feelings and reflections you had with the other work? Yes, but more because you have those and the new.

I am not doing Gates' work justice at all here, but these are some of the things I'm thinking about while reading this book.