Ironist vs. Empiricist: The Polical Battle Royale in Percival Everett's Cutting Lisa and Erasure

Abstract

Percival Everett‘s writing poses any number of challenges. Just to take the two examples concerned here: Cutting Lisa presents a sixty-six-year-old obstetrician – John Livesey – who visits his son, daughter-in-law (Lisa), and granddaughter in Oregon and discovers that no one seems pleased about Lisa`s pregnancy. Livesey attempts to reconcile himself with the life his family appears to live and with his son, from whom he has drifted with time. The novel ends with Livesey aborting his grandchild on the family`s kitchen table. Erasure presents the story of a university English professor named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison who writes complicated postmodern novels that no one reads because they are not ostensibly “black enough.” Monk is black. To register his critique about this regime of unexamined readerly assumption, he writes a satire about “black life” in “black slang.” The satire is loosely based on Richard Wright‘s Native Son, and it‘s awful. However, it becomes the literary sensation of the year, and the narrative of Erasure subsequently requires some difficult decisions from Monk.

From here, the questions asked by Everett‘s fiction are: why do we ask different questions from black writers than from white writers? And what happens when black writers produce art that we have been trained not to expect from them? One way to approach such questions is supplied by Richard Rorty‘s notion of the ironist, the individual who recognizes and engages with the contingency of existence and with the vocabulary that he or she has assembled in order to make sense of some truth. Caitlin McConkey-Pirie‘s excellent argument invites us to engage with some of the many challenges posed by Everett‘s work and Rorty‘s philosophy.

-Dr. Anthony Stewart