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 intellectual articulations of a singular, un-group-identified man to the culturally approved Black English of the ghetto biography, true or not, genuine or not, Monk Ellison literally speaks in tongues.
My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. . .. Call me Monk.
So, too, does the Monk Ellison of Cord Jefferson’s film adaptation of Everett’s novel, American Fiction, but in more limited fashion. This would appear a concession – fully conceptually realized – to the more popular appeal, and diminished attention-span of even the more art-film leaning cinema audience. In both novel and film, professor and novelist Ellison feels compelled by his lack of commercial success and appeal – and with characteristic contempt for his own act – to succumb to white readers’ expectations of what is both Black English and Black life. Under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh, Ellison produces My Pafology, which he later retitles, in further provocation, Fuck, a fake replication of the currently favored, brutally expressed ghetto autofiction biography.
My name is Van Go Jenkins and I’m nineteen years old and I don’t give a fuck about nobody, not you, not my Mama, not the man.
It becomes a sensation, wins “the Book Award, and Leigh-Ellison is offered three million dollars for the film rights. Differences between the novel and film in these and other respects are instructive, even coded.
For an Amazon Studios MGM production, Monk’s brief romance in the novel, occurring well past the midpoint, moves more to the fore and is implicated in the ending, while it is not in the novel. The novel’s Black female author whose ghetto biography early on provokes Monk, in the film serves with him on the awards committee, where the two privately debate – she wishing to award Leight’s novel, he adamantly not – the Black exploitation of white expectations and her and Leigh’s stereotyping of African American identity. In the novel, all the judges besides Monk are white.
Most significant is the disparity in the endings. In the film, Ellison is on a studio set with the director who will shoot not Leigh’s novel, but rather Ellison’s story, surrounding the writing of Leigh’s novel, including its ending – the awards ceremony. Having decided between them among several alternative untrue endings, Monk exits onto the studio lot in a kind of triumphal reunion with his brother, from whom he has been alienated, having taken the money to drive away. The poignant family drama that has been told at the center of a crackling social satire receives some satisfying resolution.
None of this is in the novel. The novel ends at the awards ceremony, before which Monk’s brother has failed to return multiple phone calls and never appears again. Rather than multiple possible versions of what transpires when judge Ellison rises from his table and approaches the stage to accept author Leigh’s award, we get a quicksand merger of apparent reality and Monk’s hallucinatory, psychic disruption of identity as he feels himself absorbed into Leigh.
The film, and Monk in the novel, respond to the terrain of publication in African American literature around the time of Erasure’s own publication, when Saphire’s Push – prototype for the books in Erasure –had appeared some time earlier. However, author Everett had still greater and historically deeper interests than current trends, encoded into his title.
My Pafology (Fuck) recalls Richard Wrights Native Son.
Erasure recalls Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
To the novel’s very last words, Everett gives no popular quarter: “Hypotheses non fingo.”
Definition of “code”
3
a
: a system of signals or symbols for communication
b
: a system of symbols (such as letters or numbers) used to represent assigned and often secret meanings
c
: coded language: a word or phrase chosen in place of another word or phrase in order to communicate an attitude or meaning without stating it explicitly
Code, then, is another word for language. All languages are codes. All codes are languages. People born after a certain year, below a certain age, hearing the word “code,” will almost certainly think of computer code, the language of computer programming. We see in definitions 3. a. and b., however, that codes are also used to obscure meaning, even hide it in secrecy.
In these two comic bits of Key and Peele, we see the secrecy involved in codes and their switching but then an additional feature.
In this first, probably better-known example, we see Jordan Peele as Luthor to Keegan-Michael Key’s President Obama, Luther functioning as Obama’s “anger translator.” The joke is Obama’s hiding behind his placid adoption of white vernacular English his inner Black man’s outrage and anger and literal in-your-faceness.
In this second video, we see an Obama “meet and greet,” after delivering a speech. White and Black men and women are lined up for Obama’s approach, the first in line a few white men. They all receive polite handshakes and a brief, smiling greeting. With the first Black man, and then with Black men and women both, the immediate transformation in Obama is total, in physically embracing and effusive expressions of intimacy and bondedness. There are suggestions of private connection and shared knowledge: “fam” Obama calls the first Black man and that man’s pointed finger with Obamas smiling, “you know.”
But when the switch is made, according to how people lined up, back to white people, and each time after, it isn’t just the inclusiveness of the Black-coded greetings we recognize but now, too, the exclusion that occurs when Obama switches back to what so obviously presents, in contrast, the chilly white European convention. And when a white woman tries to get in on the intimacy, she is coldly shown the metaphorical door in response to that. Oh, no. We need to use two codes because of you. You don’t get to ingratiate yourself by encroaching on our code. Some delicious added humor occurs when the light skinned Peele, as one of the waiting greeters, has to make the case for his actually being Black before he gets Obama’s “secret handshake.”
In this added dimension, the code functions like a shibboleth – historically, a verbal representation, through proper pronunciation of a word or phrase, or even the very knowledge of it, that one belongs to the in-group, a means, too, of catching out and excluding those who don’t belong. A shibboleth is an early, ancient version of a secret entry phrase or answer word, of a passcode.
At the time that Push and, later, Erasure, were published, I was teaching at a historically Black college in South Central Los Angles, a college, in fact, born out of the Watts Riots of 1965, though in the code of that local and broader African American community, the events are more commonly named a “rebellion” or “uprising.” One year durng that time, Push was selected to serve as the college-wide book read. For a number of, I think, good reasons, I chose not to participate in that program, though it is so that, with exceptions, I generally did not participate in such programs, choosing to follow my own instructional path.
One day around the same general time, I had to leave the classroom for a few minutes, probably to use the bathroom, and when I returned, I could see that a lively conversation had been in progress. As I reached my desk, a male student raised his hand.
‘Professor Adler,” he said, “can we ask you a question?”
I believe that’s why I’m here.
“Are you Black?”
That took me by surprise. I was curious and privately amused. My features wouldn’t suggest I was African American. Relatively speaking, I was notably pale. But the students knew as well as I did that I wouldn’t have been, theoretically, the first white looking Black person, some of whom had even chosen to pass as white. There wasn’t any reason to address that point.
What, I wondered aloud, had led them to think I might be?
Several students spoke up. The consensus seemed to be that it was something in the way I carried myself. How I presented. A certain attitude.
I pondered in silence a few moments. Then it came to me.
I know, I said.
Expectant eyes throughout the room.
“I’m from New York,” I said.
“I told you!”
“What’d I say?!”
“I knew it!”
Right code, wrong referent. But I felt embraced.
Around the same time, for a period of 8-10 years, into my early 50s, I was often mistaken for actor John Malkovich. If not mistaken, I was told I looked like him, by students and others. But I was mistaken for him a lot. Curiously, this confusion lasted only that discrete period of time and never again since. But for a while, I got some sense of what it was like being John Malkovich.
During the same period, in 2000, Julia and I attended a special Amnesty International screening of Julian Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls. (I was then the leader of a local Santa Monica AIUSA group.) Schnabel, star Javier Bardem, and others were present for a Q & A after the showing. By the time of the Q & A, Julia was feeling antsy and needed to leave the theater (probably for a cigarette, too – we both still smoked in those days.)
At some point near the end, feeling I’d left Julia out on the sidewalk too long already, I raced up the aisle and out of the theater onto Wilshire Boulevard to look for her, my eyes quickly scanning the sidewalk. I was surprised to find it very crowded and with a horde of paparazzi. I was peering hard for Julia when I heard a voice call out.
“Mr. Malkovich!”
Oh, I thought with pleasure, John Malkovich is here. I turned to look.
And the flashes burst in my face.
I had fun imagining photo editors at a host of newspapers around the country later that evening crying out, “You idiot – that’s not John Malkovich.”
I was mistaken for Malkovich in the South of France during the years he lived there. I would hear a stream of French spoken too quickly for me to pick out many words, but in the midst of which would sound, very noticeably, “John Malkovich.”
A few years later, in a Marais restaurant in Paris with friends, a couple approached me and began to speak with great excitement. This exchange also well beyond my conversational French, I turned to an American friend then living in Paris. She inquired. Lots of nodding heads back and forth before Susan turned to me.
“They wanted to know if they could have their picture taken with M. Malkovich. I explained to them that you are not M. Malkovich. They were quite taken by surprise. But after a little back and forth between them there, they want to know if you would take a picture with them anyway.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I think they want to pass you off.”
Wrong code. Right referent.
It would be our secret.
And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?
And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
Luke 8:9-10, King James Version
In his 1979 The Genesis of Secrecy: on the interpretation of narrative, the late Frank Kermode, starting from the tradition of Biblical hermeneutics, examines the potentialities of interpretation applied to narrative more generally. He identifies several characteristics of narrative interpretive expectancy – what close readers anticipate of texts they deem available to interpretation. Among them, ironically, to begin, is opacity. Without it, interpretation would not be needed. Then there is latency, the quality of what is present but dormant and unseen in the opaque text, which the reader seeks to draw out. The reader, the interpreter, then anticipates coherence, that what is divined from the text may be assembled in a unified connectivity of meaning.
This is dependent, in part, on a belief, in the Biblical text – Kermode focuses especially on the gospel of Mark – that it possesses occult figurations, which in other narratives is the projection that they contain artful figurations, with later elements prefigured earlier in the text: “The book, then, is a permanent image of occult design and coherence.” And the interpretive effort presumes, contra opacity, that the text may be brought to transparency. Kermode comments regarding the full hermeneutic tradition:
The belief that a text might be an open proclamation, available to all, coexisted comfortably with the belief that it was a repository of secrets.
So texts have been for me, in my life, with one text looming greater and above all others.
“For the world is our beloved codex,” writes Kermode.
And in the divination that is the art of interpretation, I will add, the one great divining rod for the beloved codex is death. I am among those – others, I know, do not – who think of death a good deal. I have all my life. It is not a morbidity but rather the frame of existence without which I cannot observe the shape of my life. It is the latency of meaning within the opacity of our mortal being. Like the lingering background radiation of the Big Bang creation of the universe, it provides the “intermittent radiances” Kermode says we draw from the act of interpretation.
I sit and bend to tie my shoelace. I blink, and the fact that I am going to die rises up before me in my mind.
I have thought about death with an applied intensity ever since I was a child. I have carried the memory of that thinking about death as a child vividly with me all my life. It took place in the bedroom I shared with Jeff, my older brother by five years, for the first ten years of my life. For most of that time, our twin beds were separated by the large window that looked out on the walkways and grassy lawns of our very expansive, coop garden apartment complex. But my memories of thinking about death – at night, in bed, before sleep – come from a later time in that decade, when our beds had changed their arrangement, so that mine sat in the far corner, opposite the corner door to the room, while Jeff’s now sat on the other side of opposing window.
And I would try to imagine – my powers of concentrated imagination, to evoke in my mind the presence of what is not there, are strong – what it means not to exist anymore. Forever. I tried to imagine nothingness. I tried to imagine eternity. I would do this until the vivid sensation of what, of course, will be the absence of sensation filled me so powerfully that I would shudder, chilled with the terror of oblivion. (You can recognize that I had not been led through religious inculcation into embracing any conception of a God.) At that I would quickly retreat into the comforts of my pillow, breathe in the sweet smell of home and family and my own perspiration, consoled by the reminder to myself that I was so young – 5? 6? 7? 8? – and my natural death so far in the distance of time as to constitute, almost, a virtual eternity in itself.
It long ago ceased to feel to me anything like an eternity. I also long ago determined that I will be cremated after death. My instructions have long been that my ashes be scattered in New York Harbor, to recognize my attachment to the hometown I love so much. Then, I will sometimes say, with my mordant humor, I can end up sludge on a Harlem River pylon and truly be ineradicable.
In recent years I have been pulled by a contrary and just as constant impulse, not to go home again but to maintain my movement westward toward the new, ever toward the horizon and transformation. Scatter my ashes into the Pacific.
Then, about six months ago, a funny twist of thought inserted itself into this end-of-life thinking.
The garden apartment complex where we lived during my first decade was called – is called – Bell Park Manor Terrace. In the Queens Village neighborhood of suburban looking northeastern Queens, in New York City, it extends over several city blocks on both sides of Hillside Avenue. So well maintained, it looks today exactly as it did then, with its many green, well-manicured lawns among intersecting walkways, its cleanly tended flower beds, its cropped hedges. With our small but inexpensive three-bedroom apartment, it was the best place my family ever lived, before or after my birth, a postwar, Eisenhower-era refuge of sunshine and safety for young veteran families. And just before my tenth birthday, our parents, at our mother’s ever restless behest, moved us away.
Ever after in our family, with wistful longing, that community existed in our collective imagination as the Garden from which we had all been cast. “Bell Park,” when spoken among us, was code for paradise lost. For me especially, the youngest of three children, who had no reference before Bell Park, the tenor of life there, its light, its sounds, the press of uncountable firsts upon my senses and spirit imprinted themselves on me beyond erasure, like the shadow of a mother hawk upon its hatchlings.
At my organization, we all five returned to Bell Park for a first and only visit twenty years after leaving it. Only I ever returned again, several times on my own.
It was a stunning happenchance, then, when moseying around the web one day last year, I saw that a few apartments at Bell Park were for sale, and that one of them, out of the hundreds possible – could I believe my eyes? – was our very apartment, sixty years later. Not only was it for sale, but there were photos of every room, rooms whose interiors I had not seen since I was ten years old. I scanned every pixel.
The modern décor, the finishings of no particular style were far apart from the Danish Modern of my childhood but what mattered were the dimensions, the layout, the shapes, the corners and nooks revived from dim memory. I never thought I’d see those rooms again.
I downloaded them and shared them with my sister, Sharyn, the only other of us left. “Incredible,” she wrote.
I focused on my bedroom, with Jeff. Saw now where every shadow of recalled existence had lived full-blooded. I saw the corner where I lay in bed imagining death.
There were nights I recall in that room when I lay in that corner, Jeff asleep nearby, amid the thunder and lightning of the most terrifying storms. The slender branches of the young tree just outside the window shook and wavered in shadow on the lighting-lit wall, reflection of the wild world from which my home, my bedroom were haven. The bedroom door cracked open, leeching the warm glow of hallway light behind my parents’ backlit heads looking in. I pretended to be asleep.
“Paradise lost” we remembered it, but I was such a sad, dreamy, frightened child, and Jeff, anxious and compulsive, among his behaviors, gnawing with pressed knuckle and teeth at the inside of his cheeks until they bled. Sharyn, the oldest, implicated in our parents’ unhappy marriage (“There’s nothing we can do,” our mother said to her. “He doesn’t love us.”) argued and stormed with our father to cause mirrors to crash to the floor and make a bad marriage at nineteen just to escape from home.
Paradise, before the reality, or is it just the knowledge, of death.
In time it occurred to me, after many weeks, that what I so long recalled as multiple times lying in my bed imagining death, might really have been only one time, the first time – the first time that I had grasped the meaning of death.
For at the base of the tree that shook in those storms just beyond the window was buried a shoebox containing Pretty Boy, Sharyn’s parakeet I never much liked because he bit. But that bird’s death would have been the first I ever experienced, and maybe it was that occurrence – I seem to recall now (do I?) that box being buried in the earth beside the tree trunk – maybe it was that occurrence and for a first time seeking and understanding, that provoked my first time night time imaginings.
A wild thought sprang to mind, a fantasy: I am old (older) dying, and someone on my behalf approaches the new owners of the apartment (for it soon left the market). There is a man, my spokesperson tells them – he was raised in your home from infancy. He has little time left. He would like to die in the home where he came to life – could you find it in your hearts. It’s preposterous, but they agree, and I’m lying in a bed in that corner in that room. I know that I’m dying, in that space, in sight of that window, that wall, in the same interior of that mind I have lived in all these years since first I knew of death. People have done it, how many times in this world, on this earth, died in the rooms where they were born? What would I feel as the light began to die in me?
“World and book, it may be,” writes Kermode, “are hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing; we stand alone before them, aware of their arbitrariness and impenetrability, knowing that they may be narratives only by our impudent intervention, and susceptible of interpretation only by our hermitic tricks.”
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.1
Would the fading light I had tried to imagine extinguishing itself a child’s lifetime earlier resemble the glow that rose from my father’s eyes up to the space above him as his children stroked his hands and sang in soothing tones their love?
Would it stare, rather, empty back at me, like the cold, dead eye of my brother directly into my own?
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
Would it feel, my life, in a flash of revelation, a mere matchstick struck into flaring firelight and a burning down in seconds along the slender shaft of wood to its end, light’s end, hardly lit before it was out. Hurry – quick! Strike another! Strike a match!
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-treeNot known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
And would I know the code?
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
Closing poetic passages from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Little Gidding.”
Jay,
So much to think about from this essay. I was drawn particularly to this passage:
"Among them, ironically, to begin, is opacity. Without it, interpretation would not be needed. Then there is latency, the quality of what is present but dormant and unseen in the opaque text, which the reader seeks to draw out."
There is a zone of the ideal in any work of art where the reader is challenged to bring their intellectual chops to a text in order to derive a deep and personal connection to it, without the text making the reader feel like Alan Turing breaking the Enigma Machine code. And sometimes it's the reader who imposes that sort of "over-coding" on the text.
A book that makes fun of "over-coding" is Nabokov's Pale Fire. Although in doing so, Nabokov makes reading it at times a chore, but mostly it's very funny.
Remarkable essay, Jay. As David says, there's "[s]o much to think about."
Reading your piece brought to mind a course I took in college on Noam Chomsky's theory of human language and its "deep structures." It was not an especially easy class but it did fascinate me.
I have to admit, the bit about you being Makovich cracked me up, though I do see the resemblance. The only time I've been mistaken for someone else is when I've been abroad, in a country I haven't visited before, and someone stops me to ask for directions. I guess there's an art to not looking like a tourist.
Also, finding your family apartment for sale is proof that nothing ever becomes nonexistent; it just goes on the Internet, even when we die, if we haven't made arrangements in advance to have ourselves wiped from social media and every other place we've been to leave something of ourselves behind.