The Code: A Fantasia

A Reader’s Review: A Closer Look

I wrote a month ago, in “Lost in Translation,” and again this past Thursday, in the first ever A Reader’s Review, about Percival Everett’s novel Erasure and Cord Jefferson’s film adaptation of the novel, American Fiction. Together, they raised the subject of codes and their switching. I was inspired, as this second half of A Reader’s Review intends, to give that subject a closer look. This first time around, the regularly paid feature is free to all.

The Code: A Fantasia

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

~ Linus Torvalds

“Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.”

~ John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, the protagonist of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, knows codes. He knows many codes. From the signs and symbols of French literary theory and abstruse or – exceedingly abstruse – incomprehensible scholarly conference papers to the academic CV and wide-ranging intellectual jokes, from the emotionally distant and ironic interior monologues and exterior intellec…