FAKE IT by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813946283
Publisher: BookComp, Inc.
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Verse: Monk’s Dream

I would not think of them,

one way or the other,

did not they so grotesquely

block the view

between me and my brother.

—James Baldwin, “Staggerlee Wonders”

Feeling “as near suicide as [he] ha[s] ever felt” (253), Monk dreams that Nazi soldiers are pursuing him. He watches them burn a house from which a woman manages to save a painting—Starry Night. When the soldiers snatch the painting and lance it, the dreamed Monk senses a sharp pain in his stomach. They chase him; he fires at them. A wounded soldier crawls toward him, singing “The Stars Fell on Alabama,” and asks, “Wie heissen Sie?” [What’s your name?] He does not know the answer (255–56). The dream expresses Monk’s anxiety about his hideous progeny, for the painting is, of course, by Van Go(gh)—a metonym for Fuck—and the stabbing represents the pain both of childbirth and of penetration. Monk has delivered a monster. Is the monster himself? If the painting represents his alter ego, then Monk is also the one being stabbed—fucked, in Go’s idiom. Exacerbating these traumas is the converse wound, castration. “I had managed,” Monk thinks, to “reconfigure myself, then disintegrate myself, leaving two bodies of work, two bodies, no boundaries yet walls everywhere. . . . Somehow I had whacked off my own willy” (257). Go’s dream of the bump has come true.

Another turn of the screw follows when Monk learns that the other judges have “fallen in love with Stagg Leigh’s Fuck” (254), deeming it a “true, raw, gritty work,” one so “vivid, so life-like” in displaying the “energy and savagery of the common black” (254). These are the same terms in which We’s Lives in da Ghetto is lionized: demeaning stereotypes are read as realistic. Not one reader grasps that it is a parody. When Fuck makes the final five, Monk’s off-putting title comes back to bite him: having fucked them, Stagg is now fucking him. The situation mirrors the one Everett laments in his 1991 essay, where he pictures African American authors “standing in the dark, signing to the blind” (11). Like Thelonious Monk’s version of “’Round Midnight,” Monk Ellison’s real books have been buried by the fake book. He resolves to “defeat myself to save my self, my own identity. I had to toss a spear through the mouth of my own creation, silence him forever, kill him, press him down a dark hole and have the world admit that he never existed” (259). This mission is made more challenging in the wake of laudatory reviews like the one in the New York Times, in which Wayne Waxen moons over Fuck, using words like “true” and “real” (260). Monk desperately tries to convince his fellow judges that Fuck is not merely a bastard but “a failed conception. . . . offensive, poorly written, racist and mindless. . . . It’s not art.” “I would think,” snaps the judge who failed to recognize him in the elevator, “you’d be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this” (261).

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