SOURCE: Raynaud, Claudine. “‘Mask to Mask. The ‘Real’ Joke’: Surfiction/Autofiction, or the Tale of the Purloined Watermelon.” Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 695-712.

I think it was Geral I first heard call a watermelon a letter from home. After all these years I understand a little better what she meant. She was saying the melon is a letter addressed to us. A story for us from down home. Down home being everywhere we have never been, the rural South, the old days, slavery, Africa. That juicy striped message with red meat and seeds, which always looked like roaches to me was blackness as cross and celebration, a history we could taste and chew. And it was meant for us. Addressed to us. We were meant to slit it open and take care of business.

—John Edgar Wideman, Damballah (my emphasis)

There is no absolute meaning; it is exactly the other way round: meaning is the meaning of an impossible.

—Serge Leclaire, Démasquer le réel (117)

“Surfiction” is one of the “stories” included in John Edgar Wideman's anthology of short stories Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories] published in 1989.¹ The title of this story recalls Raymond Federman's essay entitled “Surfiction: Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction” (1975) in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1981).² Federman defines surfiction as the fictionalization, the transfiguration, of lived experience through writing which both allows and facilitates access to a certain truth. He comments on his own autofictional work as follows:

The truth of imagination is more real than truth without imagination, and besides reality never seemed very interesting to me. And, strange as it may seem, this fictionalization of my life provided me access to the truth of my own existence.³

The problematics of writing and creative imagination in relation to reality are from the outset placed within the frame of truth and fiction, an interrelation familiar to John Edgar Wideman, who has entitled one of his collections All Stories Are True (1992).⁴ To say that fiction is truer and more real than fact is a “chestnut,”⁵ and Wideman, who knows it, goes back to Chesnutt's tale “A Deep Sleeper” in order to offer his own tongue-in-cheek twist to this hackneyed question.⁶

The “story” entitled “Surfiction” introduces an “I” narrator who strangely resembles “John Edgar Wideman,” Professor of English literature: “Among my notes on the first section of Charles Chesnutt's Deep Sleeper there are these remarks”; “Rereading, I realize my remarks are a pastiche of …” (“Surfiction” 59-60, my emphasis). Since the story tells readers that this professor is writing a story about a professor, the reader assumes that there is a relation of “identity” between the “I” in the text and the name on the cover page. But they have been told that these are all stories, a proposition the plot summary makes plain: “A professor of literature at a university in Wyoming (the only university in Wyoming) by coincidence is teaching two courses in which are enrolled two students (one in each of the professor's seminars) who are husband and wife” (“Surfiction” 66-67). Readers thus find themselves confronted with “autofiction.” Autofiction, or self-fiction, is a specific category of fictional writing related to autobiography. Its genesis as a critical category goes back to Philippe Lejeune's theoretical work. Trying to map the relationship between autobiography and the novel on the basis of an equation of identity between the author, the “I” character, and the narrator, Lejeune envisaged certain contradictory combinations or vacant structures.⁷ One of them consisted in a fictional story whose hero would bear the author's name and yet would be boldly labeled untrue. Serge Doubrovsky's Fils (1977), written as the critic was elaborating his theoretical categories, filled in the empty slot—“blackened the square”—in Lejeune's critical grid and Doubrovsky, himself a literary critic, gave his work the name of autofiction as the dust cover makes clear.⁸:

Is this an autobiography? No, this privilege is reserved to the important people of this world on the eve of their lives. Fictions of strictly real events and facts; autofiction, if you want, because one has entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, beyond wisdom and beyond the syntax of the traditional novel or the nouveau roman. Encounters, threaded and begotten words, alliterations, assonances, dissonances, writing before or after literature, concrete writing, as one speaks of concrete music, or may be, autofriction, patiently onanistic, hopeful to share its pleasure.⁹

Federman nonetheless insists on the tragic ambivalence of writing. Writing—writing to remember and against effacement (dis-remembering)—can displace the original event until its suppression, its ultimate erasure. Only fictional writing can attempt to tell the unspeakable, erase erasure, transcend “history.” As a child, Federman escaped the Holocaust by being hidden by his mother in a closet, an experience he relates in two languages in his ambidextrous autobiographical text: The Voice in the Closet-La Voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979), the English penned with the right hand, the French with the left.¹⁰ His subsequent work revolves around the impossible writing of that event. While acknowledging that truth reached through creative imagination is “truer” than truth constructed mimetically in reference to facts (representation), Federman stresses that a truly fictional discourse can only be self-reflexive. Genuine fiction constructs itself through self-destruction, constant suspicion of its fictitiousness: “An endless questioning of what discourse does as it is doing it, an endless denunciation of its own fraud, of what it truly is: an illusion, a vision, just as life is an illusion, a fiction.”¹¹ This movement towards truth via a dis-placement of fiction runs parallel to Wideman's own statement on the role of the storyteller in relation to survival:

The novelist and the writer is a storyteller, and the process for me that is going to knit up the culture, knit up the fabric of the family, the collective family—all of us—one crucial part of that process is that we tell our own stories. That we learn to tell them and we tell them in our own words and that they embrace our values and that we keep on saying them, in spite of the madness, the chaos around us, and in spite of the pressure not to tell it. And so that story telling is crucial to survival, individual survival, community survival.¹²

Two propositions emerge from both Federman and Wideman's writings: to tell stories means to tell the truth; and narration ensures survival. The truth of narration as fiction entertains a visceral link to individual and collective life, to the life instinct in its struggle with the death drive.

I. PURLOINING INTERPRETATION, OR POE WITH CHESNUTT

In “Surfiction,” John Edgar Wideman explores the relationship between fiction and autobiography as well as between critical commentary, interpretation, and fiction writing. The question which is central to his literary career, the voice of the black intellectual in relation to white literature and to the black community, also rests at the core of this text. This “story” is first composed of remarks taken from Wideman's notes on Charles Chesnutt's short story “A Deep Sleeper.”¹³

“A Deep Sleeper” is framed by the realistic depiction of the setting: a hot, sultry summer in the South.¹⁴ A white proprietor, his wife, and young sister-in-law are talking about inviting neighbors to eat a big watermelon or rather “the” big watermelon, the monarch of the patch. They ask Julius, their black servant, to tote it on a wheelbarrow since it is too big to be carried by hand. After pointing out that risks are always taken either way—if you pull the fruit too early, it might not be ripe enough and if you don't, other people might steal it (he is thinking of poor white trash)—Julius tells them that his rheumatism prevents him from performing the task and offers to call on Tom, the nigger boy, to take his place. But Tom cannot be found. He is a deep sleeper, says Julius, like his grandfather or, rather, unlike him since, unlike him, he can be easily woken up. The grandfather, for his part, is known to have slept for a month in a row. Intrigued, the young sister-in-law wants to hear the whole story for she liked “drawing out” the colored people in the neighborhood, making them talk, and she loved stories. Julius complies and tells the tale. Tom's grandfather Skundus, who was known as a big sleeper, fell in love with Cindy. The master promised them they would marry, yet she was hired out to another plantation. When she left, Tom started sleeping at work and eventually disappeared. The master thought that he had run away. Because of the unusually good crop at her owner's plantation, Cindy was called back to help, and when she came back, she said she had had a dream.¹⁵ Tom would be back the next day and—lo and behold!—the next day, Tom appeared with a hoe on his shoulder. He said he had slept in a barn and had woken up that very morning. The remedy to this incapacitating sleepiness was a speedy marriage to Cindy prescribed by the doctor who examined him. At this point Julius's story ends, and Tom appears to go and collect the watermelon. But, when they arrive at the patch, the watermelon has disappeared. What remains is “a shallow concavity where it had rested, but the melon itself was gone” (“A Deep Sleeper” 122).

The embedded text is a slave tale variation on the theme of “Sleeping Beauty”: the male slave escapes and tricks the master through a pretend deep sleep.¹⁶ Sleep means subtracting oneself from the reality of slavery, i.e. not working, but also symbolically being in a different world, the realm of desire. “A Deep Sleeper” is a modulation on the theme of the dreamer who transgresses the law in his dreams, taken literally. It also shows the reversibility of dream and the reality which is inscribed in the embedded story. Wideman later rewrites this equation as the relationship between “shadow” and “act,” terms which are more appropriate to the black literary tradition.¹⁷ Cindy's prediction plays on the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams when dreams are read as complex texts which must be interpreted through the twin processes of condensation and displacement. Or, more plainly, she uses her knowledge of folklore and belief in omens: dreams foretell, anticipate the event. She says she dreamt that Skundus would be back, and her dream proves true. By sleeping deeply, the slave plays dead or, rather in the discourse of slavery, he has run away.¹⁸ For any contemporary critic, Wideman's text gestures toward Poe's mystery short story “The Purloined Letter,” translated by Baudelaire as “La Lettre volée,” and to the subsequent debate between Lacan and Derrida.¹⁹

Tom's grandfather's trick—pretending to have been sleeping—can be equated to Lacan's reading of “The Purloined Letter” in which he creates a portmanteau word “la politique de l'autruiche” (from the French autrui [other], autruche [ostrich], and Autriche [Austria]) to explain the ambivalence between exposure and hiding.²⁰ In Poe's tale, the Minister plays this stupid game/ostrich policy, refusing to see that he is unmasked. And he is plucked by the clever Dupin. In the embedded story of Chesnutt's tale, the Master should have read the clue in the withdrawal into sleep of the slave. Instead he is the ostrich plucked by the canny slave. The same scene of dumbness is repeated in the frame.²¹ Julius also tells how Skundus' master vainly tries to catch his slave back by posting reward notices on trees.²² Reward is not where he thinks it might come from. As a matter of fact, the expected reward will escape him since the slave will be “rewarded” by marrying his beloved.²³ By a master stroke—Chesnutt can be read “chess-nut”²⁴—the slave delivers a blow to his master's mastery.

Julius's telling of the tale—enacted in real time—means that during the time of the story someone steals the object of desire, the prize watermelon.²⁵ In his comments, “Wideman” insists on the complicity/compliance of the reader with what Barthes justly terms “the readerly”:

We know [that a pay off is forthcoming] because we are put into the passive posture of readers or listeners (consumers) by the narrative unraveling of a reality which, because it is unfolding in time, slowly begins to take up our time and is thus obliged to give us something in return; the story enacts in real time. Its moments will pass and our moments will pass simultaneously, hand in glove if you will. The literary storytelling convention exacts this kind of relaxation or compliance or collaboration (conspiracy).

(“Surfiction” 63)

Once the story had been told, what remains is the hollow, or rather its positive sign, the concavity, the presence of the absence of the object of desire.²⁶

The telling of the tale is another version of Scheherazade's predicament: her storytelling enacted against her impending death ambiguously ends up with the fulfillment of the master's desire.²⁷ In A Thousand and One Nights falling in love with storytelling, the master falls in love with the teller, cannot ultimately make out the teller from the tale, and realizes that the death of the teller will mark the end of storytelling. By telling stories and thereby pleasing her master, Scheherazade defers the moment of her death as she defers the ending of the stories.²⁸ The deflowering of the young virgin, orgasm, la petite mort, anticipate Death, a death which they foretell. It acts as a substitute, a deferer. Chesnutt's tale redistributes the positions and creates an effect of burlesque were it not for the seriousness of the master-slave relationship which casts the story within a system where the master exercises a power of life and death. Scheherazade becomes a male slave and the listener is the sister-in-law of the white landowner. The slave defers and finally prohibits the master's eating of the watermelon; he dispossesses the master and exhibits a mastery of discourse which reverses the roles.

“A Deep Sleeper” exposes master-slave relationships in relation to the symbolic. The object of desire is rightly pointed out as being the “big” watermelon, but to a master's consciousness, this object can only fall within an economy of demand on the part of the slave or, rather, the slave is only seen as instrumental in the fulfillment of the master's desire. This economy of the white race is rightly pointed out in the slave's speech who himself tells the master that poor white trash might steal the watermelon if he or, rather, they get there too late. Unable to imagine the black man's desire, the white man will be intent on subtracting the melon from poor white men. What the master fails to see is that the watermelon is a metaphor in the slave's discourse, and does not refer to a “real” object. Wideman's sentence used in the epigraph underlines this knowledge: “a watermelon is a letter” (from home). The metaphoric process at work within the narration elevates the watermelon to the status of signifier and, if we read it against the seriousness of Poe's tale, effects a critique of the power structure at play in “The Purloined Letter.” American slavery versus European monarchy. The slave also knows that the landowner cannot deprive his sister-in-law of her pleasure, prisoner as he is of Southern social conventions.²⁹

The other frame which makes for time and delays the collection is thus a desire on the part of the sister-in-law. She is curious; she wants to know about niggers. The story she is then told is one of cunning and desire within a plantation household. Were she to deconstruct the story in the same way as Lacan reads the positioning of the Queen, the Minister, and Dupin in “The Purloined Letter,” she would see what is as plain as the nose on her face—“ce qui crève les yeux”—that by telling of his desire and the fulfillment of his desire against the master's wish, the slave escapes the economy of slavery. Escaping the economy of slavery in his tale, he is also escaping it in the story that embeds the text. Time and room are made outside the framed story for the theft of the watermelon. For Chesnutt, the vanishing of the melon symbolically corresponds in the framed story to the flight of the slave in a curious equation which recalls the denigration of black people as “watermelon eaters” or “watermelons.” As in “The Purloined Letter,” theft and flight (included in French in the same word: “vol”) converge. In Chesnutt's tale, by deferring the moment of the collection, the servant provides time (makes time) for the theft of the watermelon; he procrastinates by ironically saying, for instance, “to make a long story short.” He thus gives the young sister-in-law another object of desire, the tale itself, which tells of the slave's desire.

“A Deep Sleeper” is framed by the realistic rendering of the white landowner's boredom. The watermelon was going to be brought to relieve “the deadly dullness of the afternoon” (“A Deep Sleeper” 115) and apparently ends on its frustration. Yet “the deadly dullness of the afternoon” (my emphasis) has been relieved by the tale, if not by the watermelon. The framer is framed. In a stereotypical structure of embedded frames, the tale tells the story of subtracting oneself to the master's wish, contradicting it, and finally coming to one's ends through an array of masks (sleep, ghosts, etc). The tale of embezzlement provides for another embezzlement and gives to its listeners clues for the interpretative gesture without ever enclosing the text as it is using up interpretative grids.

The crux of the text in Chesnutt's tale is both the consummation of marriage, i.e. coition, ironically prescribed as a remedy to a feigned disease and the shallow concavity where the melon had been. Rereading Lacan (and Derrida's critique), one notices that this “truth” of the text, the actual place of the letter between the jambs of the fireplace, i.e. the very place which stands in for the female sex, the sex of the Queen, is reproduced in Chesnutt's tale. The Minister had thought it an “obvious” and hence an impossible place to hide the letter.³⁰ The femaleness of the curvacious melon and the empty “hollow” are too self-evident to be missed and the realization of the slave couple's union also directly points at castration. Something has been taken away. It also leads to the same possible interpretation Lacan effected of Poe's tale: femaleness as truth, Truth as Woman. Truth is the impossible since, being told, it veils, being unveiled, it hides. For instance, as noted above, Skundus' feigned sleepiness should also alert the listeners to Julius's incapacitating rheumatism inscribed in the text as a clue for the listener/reader.

As such, “A Deep Sleeper” functions like “The Purloined Letter” which bears in its narration its own deciphering and more.³¹ The doubling-up, the structures of repetition, produce the Uncanny (Das Unheimliche), and the cunning.³² The signifying chain continues generating meaning while there is no end to the circulation of desire. The tale begs the question: who stole the watermelon? Yet this question is answered by the text which makes it obvious that the disrobing of the master rather than the name of the thief is the intrigue of the story. This enigma echoes the rhetorical question at the center of the framed tale: did Skundus actually sleep for a month, or did he escape to the other plantation where Cindy had been sent to appear as a haint, haunting the swamp and incidentally getting rid of Cindy's suitors? The real fights the fictitious, shadow and act exchange places. As the saying goes, “truth is stranger than fiction.”³³ There is no resolution, no solution, no truth.³⁴ Yet these questions are decoys, for both stories affirm the reversibility of the power relationship and assert the fulfillment of the slave's desire.

The watermelon also bears an obvious difference with the purloined letter: the object of desire/demand/need can be eaten; it is food, survival and/or pleasure. Whereas in “The Purloined Letter” the actual content of the letter remains untold, what remains undefined in this case is the “identity” of the thief. Yet, as in Poe's tale, this untold identity can be surmised, and it is the process of stealing, stealth, theft, and flight which the text exhibits. The question of the time of the story as a delaying tactic is also one of the main differences with Poe's tale. The analogous gesture to this strategy of deferment in Poe's tale is the substitution of a false letter for the “true compromising letter,” a letter which the reader knows via the narrator will become the possession of detective Dupin. The slave substitutes the metaphor for the object and thus can make the object his own. He proves his mastery of language and his manipulation of the signifying process, whereas the master is fooled by his wishful thinking: that the slave does not master the metaphoric process. The topos of “The Stolen Letter” must be taken literally. The slave steals the letter via Chesnutt's work, literacy, but he also steals what stands in for the letter, the watermelon, the “truth” which shows itself as a shallow hollow, which exhibits itself as “missing.” The melon had “rested” there, Chesnutt writes, inscribing another pun on resting as remainder and resting as repose, not working, a pause for which the slave's sleep stands in.³⁵

The other major difference between Poe's tale and Chesnutt's story is that the storyteller and the listener are in the paradigmatic slave-master relationship. Hence, whereas questions of power, propriety, and sexuality were paramount in Poe's “Purloined Letter,” Chesnutt's tale falls within the trope of the trickster-slave of the slave narratives. The master is the dupe, and a parallel is established with Poe's Minister; the question remains of the equation between the slave and the Queen. The situation of utter dependence—ownership—might feminize the slave, and the object of the tale might be to inscribe the slave as the subject of desire, whereas the fact that the Queen is the object of desire, but also the guarantee of male power, is established from the start in Poe's tale. The compromising letter does that.³⁶ Yet Lacan dis-places her feminine status towards the Truth as female.³⁷ This shift makes her vulnerable, unstable in the establishment of a subject position which ultimately seems absorbed into a subject effect (“effet de sujet”).³⁸

II. FUN AND “MINE,” OR “WIDEMAN” WITH CHESNUTT AND “B” AUTHORS

A brief description of the text of Wideman's story might help emphasize how its very construction reads like notes and, as such, mimics the journal kept by a professor-writer who both prepares his classes and might think of the plot for a novel, or might have to write a paper on “Surfiction” for an academic conference. The first part consists of notes taken by “Wideman” on Chesnutt's tale and realism; these “notes” are reproduced verbatim (“Surfiction” 60-61). The “I” character rereads his notes and comments on his comment, thus breaking the boundaries between the journal entry and the text of the story, a confusion which contributes to what could be termed a pastiche effect (“effet de pastiche”). The reproduction contaminates the reader's belief in the seriousness of the quotation. The second part consists of notes taken in the margin of a xeroxed copy of the text with the professor's marginal comments presented as two separate columns (“Surfiction” 61). Remarks on the difference between footnotes follow, as well as remarks interrupted by a long digression between brackets on the critical deconstructionist chestnut of appearance/disappearance. The story then “escapes the brackets”—like the slave, it runs away from stricture—and proceeds with a substantial portion of the text which takes up Chesnutt's introduction again (“Surfiction” 62-63). The comments bear on the construction of a smooth reality until the voice from the watermelon patch seizes the word (“Surfiction” 64).

The following section consists of two columns broken up into two separate voices which read like a conversation overheard by the reader. The dialogue is between two people, one of whom has read the other's diary and broken the pact of secrecy which this writing practice entails. The last sentence reads itself endlessly like a cracked record. The subsequent paragraph referring to the possibility of replaying the tape sends the reader back to that sentence. It makes evident the necessity to find a before and after in order to break with repetition and mirror effects, in short, the necessity for a frame of reference. The last part consists of the plot of the professor's novel in embryo with digressions on his conference on surfiction and a disconcertingly burlesque definition of surfiction (“Surfiction” 67-68). The skeleton of the novel is then given twice in telegraphic style where characters and texts exchange places. The final paragraph explains that “the plot breaks down” and ends with a series of famous apocalyptic final quotations. “Surfiction”'s last words are: “And so it goes” (“Surfiction” 69). The gravity of the issues (slavery) and the constant impression of pastiche place the reader on the edge of the interpretative dilemma between divertissement or death-blow.

As early as the first page of “Surfiction,” the critic gets lost in the mirroring interpretation of Poe's tale and “A Deep Sleeper,” a ploy which is the very goal of Wideman's “Surfiction.”³⁹ The story both directs the critic-reader to Chesnutt's tale and provides no stable frame of reference for its own reading, except the fact that interpretative gestures always leave something out, a remainder brought to the fore by their repetition. A double of the critic, the professor of literature, writes his notes on Chesnutt's tale. This critic-professor later can easily identify with a character in the narrator-professor's projected story about a professor who assigns to his students the reading of “A Deep Sleeper” in his literature class: “The other redhead, there are only two redheads in the two classes, is taking the professor's seminar in Afro-American literature, one of whose stars is Charlie W. Chesnutt” (“Surfiction” 67). A little further on in the text the “I” narrator summarizes the plot and precisely emphasizes what has been discussed in the first part of the paper, the multilayeredness of “A Deep Sleeper” which Wideman's own piece reverberates: “Boy keeps diary. Girl meets diary. Girl falls out of love with diary (his), retreats to hers. The suspense builds. Chesnutt is read. A conference with Prof in which she begins analyzing the multilayered short story “Deep Sleeper” but ends in tears reading from a diary (his?) (hers?)” (“Surfiction” 68).

Indeed “Surfiction” distracts the professor-critic into a re-reading of Chesnutt to bring him/her back to the skeleton of an academic autofiction in which he/she finds a mirror-image, a reflection or rather a shadow of himself/herself. The opposition between the text as “realized” and the text as “a shadow of its act” is clarified by the reference to the tale of “A Deep Sleeper.” But as becomes evident, such a reference is also part of the bait. The precariousness of any interpretative approach rests in the fact that at all moments the “seriousness” of the statements can be doubted, which in turn can turn the exercise that I as a critic am presenting here into a farce, the critic having been engulfed in the metafictional spiral and caught in his/her desire to understand, to clear up the opacity of the text, coming up against the joke, the opacity of the other text. He/she could find herself the butt of the joke, his/her position of critical “mastery” undermined. In other words, if nothing else, the joke is real.

At the beginning “Wideman” looks at his notes in terms of the choice between writing a story or an essay. They are taken from a journal which he keeps and which he tells the reader in a footnote is in “progress,” “unpaginated,” “many hands.”⁴⁰ These remarks are a critical commentary on realistic writing and its conventions. If the notes from the journal are a story and not a critical essay, Borges and Barthelme immediately come to mind, and the title “Surfiction” suggests this alternative. What is developed is a reflection on how “surfiction” feeds on critical discourse, incorporates it, and finally blurs the frontiers between the remarks and the text commented upon, the notes and the text. The negation of the possibility of a metalanguage also comes to the fore.

In a second move “Wideman” takes down rather soberly the notes he has written in the margin of his xeroxed copy of “A Deep Sleeper” and reproduces the discussion between his marginalia and the corresponding text in Chesnutt. His remarks dismantle the rhetoric at play in the tale when the young sister-in-law of the “I” narrator, the white “boss,” asks the black servant to tell a story. The young woman marvels at the strangeness of the names of the slaves, “Skundus,” “Tushus,” “Cottus,” “Squinchus.” These names follow the order of birth/appearance of the slaves on the plantation, but the slaves, by mispronouncing the Latin words, re-appropriated what was opaque, even forbidden to them.⁴¹ “Wideman” comments on the fact that the end-result of this re-appropriation and transgression is that the names are now opaque to the dominant culture; they have become the idiom of the slaves. The supposed “ignorance” of the slaves-servants is mirrored by the ignorance of the master-boss. They both wear the mask, proceed by obfuscation. One opacity is turned into another opacity in a struggle for survival. This “mask to mask”—as opposed to “face to face”—in its relationship to the expression and fulfillment of desire is precisely what lies at the core of the construction of Wideman's complex, purposely multilayered, cunning, canny piece.

That the master would proceed uncovered in a relationship to truth, sincerity, and authenticity which his “mastery” could allow is countered by the fact that access to language means access to signifiers. The slave, by a deft appropriation of language, plays with the signifiers, redirects desire from strict orality (taste and the pleasures of the flesh: the watermelon) to aurality (listening and the delights of the imagination: the tale), and consequently he both tells the truth about the stealing, which is what has been understood from the story he tells, and has a Doppelgänger perform it. Similarly, “Wideman” has this critic take up his comments and vainly attempt to outdo him by giving to his reading a further interpretative twist.

For the main part and more markedly from page 62, “Surfiction” ironically describes the genesis of a surfictional story called “Mine” and could be subtitled “How I Wrote Mine,” or “The Story is Mine,” which in turn recalls the way in which the character May in “Watermelon Story” explains how she might end her story: “bread is bread wine is wine and the story is mine.” Closure is a gesture effected both by rhyme and by meaning since the storyteller seems to want to equate things “out there” and the possession of his/her story.⁴² The title could also mean “How I wrote my surfictional story, my autofiction …” with the inevitable “attendant” question: how can the voice from the watermelon patch be “incorporated” into the metafictional text of a black writer? It is a spoof, a satire, and more. The title surfiction (“surf”-ing on fiction?) bears traces of “surfeit,” an over-indulgence which might end up spinning on some hollow, were it not for the various framings of the story.⁴³

The “surfictional” story is constructed around Charles Chesnutt's tale and the critical commentaries made on the tale. The embedded text—like the exchanged letter in Poe's tale, “The Purloined Letter”—is Chesnutt's tale. The double construction of the “story” as metadiscourse and primary text is evident as early as the digression in brackets which plays on the appearance/disappearance of the journal entry cited at the beginning. It points at repetition and temporality, the Freudian repetition automatism, and the “real” of time. Wideman effects the de-constructive gesture on absence and presence (“shadow play”) which leads to the articulation of the “text as realized” and the “text as the shadow of its act.” The story Wideman writes “escapes the brackets.” It is a reproduction of Chesnutt's “realistic” style as he opens the story with a traditional readerly setting. Wideman had referred to realistic conventions earlier, “l'effet de réel.”⁴⁴ The realistic convention applies to the white frame. The voice from the briar patch tells the story in dialect while the white narrator created by Chesnutt insists on the posture, the difficulties the old man has moving because of his rheumatism, and hence draws our attention to the possibility of his lying.⁴⁵ Wideman's comments on Chesnutt's writing read: “An immanent experience is prepared for, is being framed. The experience will be real because the narrator reproduces his narration from the same set of conventions by which we commonly detect reality—dates, buildings, relatives, the noises of nature” (“Surfiction” 64). At the same time the ficticity of the scene comes from its facticity, what is “real” is the time of the story. The young woman is “drawing out niggers,” i.e. drawing out stories from them, but the term could be read literally and enter into the gambling/game metaphor of metafiction. She is drawing out niggers but might as well be drawing out numbers since their names are numbers. The story is also drawing on or being drawn upon, purloined. Hence the realistic convention, complete with buzzing bumblebees, frames the marvelous—the fairy tale—which is also a slave's tale. The “real” of the framing story is “fossilized” while the multilayeredness of the tale means motion, allusions, gaps, traps, the story as hook and bait.⁴⁶

The text that follows is a supposedly overheard conversation. It could be said to be over-read, since two voices are laid out in discreet paragraphs split into two alternating columns. They discuss the invasion of privacy which results from looking at someone's diary without their knowing.⁴⁷ One of the two voices compares this breaking of the secret, this “deflowering,” to a sequence in a Bergman film where a woman reads a man's diary unbeknownst to him. Once again the truth of the text (representation) is played up against the truth of experience within the minimal distance established by the most private of all autobiographical gestures. And the dialogue becomes a spoof which reproduces the opposition between the watermelon story and the embedded tale of the “Deep Sleeper,” the fight of the real with the fictitious. To read someone else's diary is to break the specific autobiographical pact which normally delimits the genre. Diaries are usually written in secrecy, become a double of the self, and should not be addressed to anybody else. The “I” narrator of the diarist often addresses the diary itself: “Dear Diary.” The last entry of this split dialogue is a sentence that endlessly reads itself in the circular fashion of Finnegans Wake or, more lightly, in the nonsensical refrain of children's sayings: “A melodrama a god damned Swedish subtitled melodrama you're going to turn it around aren't you make it into” (“Surfiction” 66). The circle points to the loss of origin, the lack of origin, the spinning of the tale, rather than the authorial voice as the source of the statement; the reader, like the speaker, is within language, within a series of signifiers, a chain which closes upon itself in an endless repetition. The compulsion for repetition (Wiederholungszwang) which Lacan analyzed at the center of the embedded structure of “The Purloined Letter” surfaces: one cannot refrain from repeating.

The last part of Wideman's “story” provides the blueprint of the plot for a novel, a series of projects which read as a satire of the complexities of metafiction with its array of self-reflexive gestures, its reflections, its spirals, its “coups sur le discours,” its disintegrating characters.⁴⁸ The professor matter-of-factly defines surfiction as follows: “Thin books with no concern for ecology. Trees are felled for books which use a lot of blank spaces as he has just done previously in the dialogue between the two voices. The authors' names all start with a B, Barthes, Barth, Borges, Barthelme, Beckett, Burroughs, Brautigan.” Wideman points to the real as the book is reduced to the space it occupies on a shelf and to matter, paper paste, paper pulp, to its value as a product minus its value as a support for producing meaning. The reverberation in this part of the story of the frames of Chesnutt's “Deep Sleeper,” this reductio ad absurdum is obviously a reference to the opposition between the watermelon reduced to nourishment versus the fulfillment of desire through marriage in Skundus' tale. The authors are themselves reduced to the alphabet. This arbitrary choice plays upon the obsession with letters which is prevalent in metafiction and with arbitrariness as one of the key notions of Saussurean linguistics. Here, however, one reaches the absurd as the arbitrariness of the list coincides with proper names.

Proper names are the “deep subject of autobiography,” Lejeune claims, and Derrida's reflection on proper names and signatures also signals the specific status of the signifier.⁴⁹ The reference to the sequence of the alphabet somehow plays back on the numbering of the slaves by the master to tell them apart which is echoed in Chesnutt's tale by the mistress' statement that a nigger is just like any other nigger, and she does not see why Cindy should marry Skundus. This blind spot is revealing of the denial of desire to the slaves. Being interchangeable and reduced to the status of objects, of goods, they cannot have specific objects of desire, or they cannot desire; they only mate. Wideman subverts the arbitrariness of the naming of the slaves by applying it to canonical authors of metafiction. The same phenomenon as the circulation of the letter, with no origin, hides in the symbolic economy where the slaves duplicate each other and cannot be told the one from the other. The letters exchanged by the Minister and Dupin are fac-similes, copies which conform to the original, yet this original cannot be pinned down. The numbering/naming of the slaves effects a similar dissemination which the slave uses to his advantage to con the master.

“Surfiction” ends in a hodge-podge of references to Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, among others. They all refer to death, to a godless world, the absurd, the end, the horror. They also play on the explosion at the center of the polysemous “Mine”: characters explode, references are so dense and compact that critics would be at a loss to decipher them all. The textual terrain is a veritable minefield where they are bound to lose some, if not all, of their bearings. In the case of Conrad, the sentence reproduces the actual words uttered by the manager's boy to announce Kurtz's death.

‘I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene in that particular smile of his sealing the unimpressed depths of his meanness […] Suddenly the manager's boy put his head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt—Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’

The “dialect”—the voice from the briar patch—tells the death of the white man. Or rather, the narrator says that the dialect—“a tone of scathing contempt”—tells the death of the white man. The black man is made to report to his master the death of the white man—what he most desired in the economy of master-slave relations.⁵⁰ He survives him, frames his story. “Dat's all folks” signals the end of the storytelling. It is followed by sadness. “And so it goes”—a quotation from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five?—like the earlier “forever” tells of the difficulty of escaping these frames. It indicates the compulsion of telling. It also refers to time as what goes on and to death as constitutive of time. “And so it goes” means that “it” vanishes, disappears. The moral of the tale is that the tale belongs to the last teller, to the one who survives to tell, and hence tells of (his/her) survival. Death is at the center of these narratives, embedded in them just like the time that it takes to tell them; the teller makes time as he/she passes time.⁵¹

The questions raised by Wideman's short story are: can Black literature play with metafiction? Has not the African-American literary canon already done so as Ishmael Reed's and Clarence Major's works, among others, attest? Does not Chesnutt's tale point to the fact that the black voice by re-appropriating language masters the tropes and the tricks of metafiction, from the origin? More jokingly, since the short story plays on pastiche, the deciphering game and the reality test are eventually reduced to the fact that by sleeping with the redhead student the professor discovers the “true” color of her pubic hair (fiery red) and verifies for himself whether the fiction is actually fictitious or real.⁵² Picaresque, farce, takes over and plays with the intrusion of the voice from the watermelon patch whose accent will distort and “signify” upon the deadly seriousness of the search for truth.⁵³ In the process of writing this essay, the critic has been fascinated by her reflection and has tested the limits of a heuristic pursuit—the “mastery” of the signifier. She has almost fallen prey to becoming the writer of a metafictional story herself. But she eventually hears a voice which signifies (to her) that it is the end: “Dat's all, folks!”

Notes

1. John Edgar Wideman's “Surfiction” first appeared in The Southern Review, volume 21.3 (Summer 1985). The edition that I am using is taken from Fever: Twelve Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1990), 59-71. Hereafter cited in the text as “Surfiction.”

2. “Surfiction” is a term also used by Ronald Sukenick, author of The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969). Wideman's play with fiction and autobiography can be contrasted with Philip Roth's The Counterlife (1985) which alludes to Huxley's Point Counterpoint, itself inspired from Gide's The Counterfeiters. In The Counterlife, the autobiographical pact is broken with every new chapter.

3. Raymond Federman, “Surfiction: Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction,” in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), 21.

4. New York: Vintage, 1992. This title is an Igbo saying.

5. The OED entry reads: slang (American): A story that has been told before. A “venerable” joke.

6. During the question time which followed this paper in Tours (Nov. 30, 1996), John Wideman pointed out the pun on chestnut/Chesnutt. The interest in the story “Surfiction” has in a way been used up. This fatigue echoes the lesson of “The Watermelon Story” in Damballah (London: Flamingo, 1984) where May says that the listeners have used up the faith that made miracles happen, such as the biblical story she told about the birth of Isaac to Rebecca. The final line of the story is: “He just got to figure out how to use what's left” (107, my emphasis).

7. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). For an English translation of Lejeune's work, see On Autobiography, John Paul Eakin, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

8. See Lejeune, “Autofictions & Cie: Pièce en cinq actes,” in Autofictions & Cie, Doubrovsky, Lecarme, and Lejeune, eds., RITM, volume 6 (Université de Paris X: 1993), 5-10.

9. Serge Doubrovsky, Fils (Paris: Galilée, 1977), quoted by Régine Robin, “Autofiction. Le sujet toujours en défaut,” in Doubrovsky et al. eds., Autofictions & Cie, 74. The pun cannot be translated since the word “fils” in French means both threads and sons. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations from the French are mine. Lejeune later acknowledged his blind spot, and Jacques Lecarme listed the writers whose work could have filled the empty slot for a contribution on autofiction to the Encyclopaedia Universalis (1984): Céline, Malraux, Modiano, Barthes, Gary, Sollers; Lejeune, Autofictions & Cie, 7.

10. Federman, The Voice in the Closet—la Voix dans le cabinet de débarras (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1979). For a summary of Federman's position on writing, autobiography, and history and a select bibliography of his work, see Catherine Viollet, “Raymond Federman: La voix plurielle,” in Autofictions & Cie, 193-204.

11. Federman, Surfiction (21).

12. Coleman, Blackness and Modernism (156).

13. Charles W. Chesnutt, “A Deep Sleeper.” See S. L. Render, The Short Fiction of C. W. Chesnutt, (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981), 115-22. All further references will be to that edition cited as “A Deep Sleeper.” During the comment session in Tours, John Wideman pointed out that one of the purposes of his short story was to make his readers go back to Chesnutt's work and read him. The question is then: Why read Poe's tales rather than Chesnutt's? Why not read both? The comparison begs the question as to whether the stakes of Chesnutt's story are as complex as or, more humbly, similar to and different from those excruciatingly examined by Lacan and Derrida. The whole debate of black literature and the canon lies in this choice of one text at the exclusion of another. The “story” of “Surfiction” could thus be seen as a playful and tricky “intrusion” of the black voice (the trickster's?) into a canonical debate which redirects the literary critic towards the black text.

14. A Biblical variation of this story is inserted into Wideman's “The Watermelon Story,” in Damballah, 99-107: “Well old Isaac had a master grow watermelons on his farm. And old Isaac he have the best knuckles for miles around for thumping them melons and telling you when they just perfect for the table. He thump and Melon, Mr. Melon, he talk back. Tell his whole life story to that crusty knuckle, Uncle Isaac knock at the door. Yoo-hoo, How do you do? Melon say, You a day early, man. Ain't ready yet, Isaac. Got twenty-four hours to go. You traipse on down the patch and find somebody else today. Come back tomorrow I be just right, Brother Isaac” (104-5). The story goes on and Old Isaac finds a baby boy inside the watermelon and runs back to tell his wife Rebecca. That a male child in this version of the story emerges from the watermelon would corroborate a reading of the watermelon as ultimately standing in for the Phallus. “The Watermelon Story” is a concatenation of dreams and a mise en abyme of storytelling.

15. The hiring out and the recalling of the female slave Cindy depends on the harvest, a symbol which works to point to the watermelon as proof of that link between appearance/disappearance and the fruitfulness or barrenness of Nature. It echoes Wideman's own remarks on reality as dates, figures versus the real of Nature: “In this culture—American, Western, 20th-century—an awareness that is eye centered, disjunctive as opposed to organic, that responds to clock time, calendar time more than to biological cycles and seasons, that assumes nature is external, acting on us rather than through us, that tames space by manmade structures and with the I as center defines other people and other things by the nature of their relationship to the I rather than by the independent integrity of the order they may represent” (“Surfiction” 63-64). It should be noted that the female slave's comings and goings can also be read within the economy of the system of slavery. She is displaced to where she can earn more money for the master.

16. The act of poisoning the evil magician to make him sleep and thus steal from him the precious object, as in some versions of Alladin and the Magic Lantern is another variation on the structure of the tale. Seen in this light, “A Deep Sleeper” is actually metaphorically putting the master to sleep so that he or his alter ego can steal the watermelon.

17. The allusion is obviously to Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act (1964).

18. Like the letter and the truth which must both be found, Skundus (a figure of the double, the Second) cannot be found and must be found. Alan Bass' translation of Derrida's “Le Facteur de la vérité” constantly stresses how “to be found” and “finds itself” are in French both contained within the reflexive verb “se trouver.” See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 413-96. Alan Bass refuses to translate the title since “facteur” means both factor and postman. The article bears on the delivery of truth in psychoanalysis.

19. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, “Séminaire sur ‘La Lettre volée’” (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 11-71. Jacques Derrida, “Le Facteur de la vérité” (Poétique, volume 21 (1975)), La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au delà (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1980), 441-524. Translated as “The Purveyor of Truth” and published in Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 31-114. In Chesnutt's tale, it is first more a question of collection which hides that of the delivery (of the blow, if not of truth) to remain within the isotopy of the postal system.

20. Lacan explains the dumbness of the belief in its own invisibility which the ostrich exhibits as follows: “Pour faire saisir dans son unité le complexe intersubjectif ainsi décrit, nous lui cherchions volontiers patronage dans la technique légendaire attribuée à l'autruche pour se mettre à l'abri des dangers; car celle-ci mériterait enfin d'être qualifiée de politique à se répartir entre les trois partenaires, dont le second se croirait revêtu d'invisibilité du fait que le premier a sa tête enfoncée dans le sable, cependant qu'il laisserait un troisième lui plumer tranquillement le derrière; il suffirait qu'enrichissant d'une lettre sa dénomination proverbiale, nous en fassions la politique de l'autruiche pour qu'en elle-même enfin elle trouve un sens nouveau pour toujours” (Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, 15).

21. The domino effect (or the pecking order?) in Poe's tale, the Queen/the Minister/Dupin, is structured in a duplication which involves the frame: the slave Skundus/Skundus' Master/Julius the storyteller/Tom the sleeper/the sister-in-law and the white landowner. A Derridean reading would call our critical attention to the excluded fourth, the frame of narration.

22. The irony of posting notices on trees must be stressed in relation to Derrida's reading of the postal system here transcribed within the economy of slavery where the slave—like the letter in the tale—is missing and could be found thanks to posters. This game of hide-and-seek played against the background of bondage and freedom recalls Harriet Jacobs' aka Linda Brent's narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in which she writes false letters to make her master think that she has escaped when she literally hides under his nose.

23. Here again a double interpretation in Marxist terms (the return of Cindy and her marriage to Skundus translated as plus-value, “pay off”) and psychoanalytic term (the jouissance of the slave) beckons the critic. The Hegelian dialectics of master and slave, to which Lacan often refers, also enter into this array of interpretative frames.

24. Derrida's reading of the different positions of the King and the Queen does refer to pawns on a chessboard. The positionings and the calculations calls forth the metaphor of chess which is named in the narrator's preface of Poe's tale; see his note, (486). The narrator prefers the game of draughts to the “elaborate frivolity of chess.” “To calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess player for instance does the one without effort at the other” (486, note 64).

25. Actually the watermelon can be used in the three Lacanian regimes of desire, demand, and need, for at one level survival through nourishment is alluded to and the watermelon could be symbolic of the interlacing of desire and need since the slave must survive: eat in order to produce the labor force demanded by the economy of slavery, and, secondarily, for himself.

26. Derrida's “Le Facteur” states the following to differentiate his analysis from Lacan's: “The difference which interests me here is that—a formula to be understood as one will—the lack does not have its place in dissemination. By determining the place of the lack, the topos of that which is lacking from its place, and in constituting it as a fixed center, Lacan is proposing at the same time as a truth-discourse, a discourse on the truth of the purloined letter as the truth of “The Purloined Letter.” In question is a hermeneutic deciphering, despite any appearances or denegation. The link of Femininity and Truth is the ultimate signified of this deciphering” (442). Later Derrida's comments would echo this concavity left by the watermelon: “Until now, our questions have led us to suspect that if there is something like a purloined letter, perhaps it has something like a supplementary trap: it may have no fixed location, no definable hole or assignable lack” (442).

27. Wideman's text often alludes to Barth, one of whose favorite characters is Scheherazade. See Letters (1979).

28. Edgar Allan Poe has written a witty tale entitled “Scheherazade's One Thousand and Second Night” in which the vizier's daughter tells another story based on “true” facts but which seem so unbelievable—footnotes prove the truthfulness of her statements—that the King eventually kills her. One story too many!

29. The young sister-in-law represents the Law to which the Master is submitted by marriage. The desire to hear the story is voiced by a young woman who should have remained within the Law (i.e. she should have kept her place). Her position serves as counterpoint to the illegitimacy of the slaves' marriage.

30. Lacan's Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” reads: “And that is why without needing any more than being able to listen at the door of Professor Freud, he will go straight to the spot in which lies and lives what that body is designed to hide, in a gorgeous center caught in a glimpse, nay to the very place seducers name the Castle Sant Angelo in their innocent illusion that the city is being held from there. Look! between the jambs of the fireplace, there is the object already within reach of the hand the ravisher has but to extend” (“Surfiction” 66). Quoted in Bass' translation of Derrida, “Le Facteur” and modified by him (444).

31. Derrida's deconstructive gesture shows that the truth in Poe's tale is actually already inscribed in the narration, awaiting psychoanalytic interpretation since Dupin functions as a double of the analyst. What Lacan left out, however, is the outside frame of narration, the narrator of the story in which Dupin is merely a character. Derrida also indicates that if some letters reach their final destination, it is because others are kept in the dead letter department. This remainder allows the destiny/destination of the others. Barbara Johnson effects another graft on Derrida's graft: see “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 149-71. She argues that Derrida's moves in his discussion of Lacan are already anticipated in the texts Derrida is reading and thus illustrate “the transfer of the repetition compulsion from the original scene to the scene of its reading” (154).

32. Derrida's critique bears heavily on Lacan's eviction of the Uncanny (i.e. dual structures) to be left with triangular structures of intersubjectivity.

33. The analysis of Chesnutt's story deserves a more full and pointed development. What is indicated here are merely guidelines toward a subversive reading of the tale with/against Poe's tale.

34. See Serge Leclaire, “Un semestre à Vincennes,” in Démasquer le réel: Un essai sur l'objet en psychanalyse (Paris: Points Seuil, 1971): “Hence truth can only be uttered or, more precisely, utterance is the order of presence of truth. But this utterance must be made into an enigma. If one defines the enigma as the utterance which in its composition contains a clue which constitutes the enunciation's reference, E (eE), one can understand the interpretative act as the operation which consists in converting the enigma-utterance into another utterance on the basis of that clue” (114). The reference is to Lacan “Le désir et son interprétation,” delivered at a seminar on January 14, 1959, and compiled by J. B. Pontalis in Bulletin de Psychologie, volume 18.6, 329. Leclaire defines what is at stake in “Surfiction”: the function of interpretation and the truth effect (“l'effet de vérité”).

35. It would be interesting to define the relation between work, dreamwork, and sleep in both a Marxist and a Freudian analysis of the slave's subversion of order on the plantation.

36. Lacan writes: “Love letter or conspirational letter, letter of betrayal or letter of mission, letter of summons or letter of distress, we are assured of one thing the Queen must not bring it to the knowledge of her lord and master. Now these terms, far from bearing on the nuance of discredit they have in bourgeois comedy, take on a certain prominence through allusion to her sovereign, to whom she is bound by pledge of faith, and doubly so, since her role as a spouse does not relieve her of her duties as subject, but rather elevates her to the guardianship of what guardianship according to law incarnates of power: what is called legitimacy” (“Surfiction” 57, my emphasis). Reading Poe's “The Purloined Letter,” Lacan surmises that the letter contains something compromising for the Queen: “Ce document mettrait en question l'honneur d'une personne du plus haut rang. Dès lors ce n'est pas seulement le sens mais le texte du message qu'il serait périlleux de mettre en circulation et ce d'autant plus qu'il paraîtrait plus anodin, e uisque les risques en seraient accrus de l'indiscrétion qu'un des dépositaires pourrait commetter à son insu” (Ecrits 26).

37. Derrida summarizes: “By determining the place of the lack, the topos of that which is lacking from its place, and in constituting it as a fixed center, Lacan is indeed proposing, at the same time as a truth-discourse, a discourse on truth of the purloined letter as the truth of “The Purloined Letter.” In question is a hermeneutic deciphering despite any appearances or denegation. The link between femininity and truth is the ultimate signified of this deciphering. […] Femininity is the Truth (of Castration), is the best figure of castration, because of the logic of the signifier it has always been castrated; and Femininity leaves something in circulation (here the letter) something detached from itself in order to have it brought back to itself, because she has ‘never had it: whence truth comes out of the well, but only half-way’” (The Post Card 441-42).

38. The feminization of the slave is a difficult proposition to maintain in view of the fact that the tale contains a female slave character. The feminist argument runs as follows: the specificity of woman disappears if one speaks of “female positions” or “feminization.” The place of the female in both texts in relation to Derrida's critique of Lacan would require a longer development and falls outside the scope of this essay.

39. That the “I” character is “Lost in the Fun House,” the title of one of Barth's novels, is evident, but so is the critic: “Recall your own reflection in the fun house mirror and the moment of doubt when you turn away and it turns away and you lose sight of it and it naturally enough loses sight of you and you wonder where it's going and where you're going and the wrinkly reflection plate still is laughing behind your back at someone” (“Surfiction” 64).

40. If this information is true, this journal constitutes rich material for research in genetic criticism. During question time, Wideman owned that some parts of the story were autobiographical, but, as might be expected, did not identify which ones.

41. The gesture of naming is a recurrent theme in African-American literature embedded in a history of namelessness. (Un)naming of the slaves was followed by a ritual naming. See Kimberly W. Benston, “I yam what I am: The Topos of (Un)naming in Afro-American Literature,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed., Black Literature and Critical Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984), 151-72. See Wideman's remark: “I use actual names of people, but they are not based on people who hold those names. And I thought it's kind of fun for people to see their names in print. And also you know we've had a lot of problems with names in this country and being noticed as people, as individuals, and being on the record, and being part of history, being part of history, being part of what counts” (158).

42. In a similar way, the watermelon and the story were both Julius's. The play is between text and object, the object as text and the text as object.

43. This possible reading is acknowledged by German critic Franz-Joseph Ortheil (Die Zeit, 34.8-14 [1992]: 48). Ortheil qualifies Federman's surfiction as a “surfing” version of fiction which demands from the reader a constant effort to remain on the crest of the text. Another version of this difficulty is the metaphor of the reader on the razor's edge of the text.

44. See Roland Barthes, “L'effet de réel” (first published in Communications, March, 1968) in Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, Eric Marty, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1994), volume 1.1, 479-84. In S/Z, Barthes refines his definition, see XXXV, “Le réel, l'opérable”: “En somme ce qu'on appelle “réel” (dans la théorie du texte réaliste) n'est jamais qu'un code de représentation (de signification): ce n'est jamais un code d'exécution, le réel romanesque n'est pas opérable.” Roland Barthes: Oeuvres complètes 1 (608). Wideman refers to Barthes, even turns his name into a verb used in the third person singular “Barth Barthes Barthelme.”

45. The reader catches the hint and wonders why the master wouldn't. Such a reading was hinted at by Toni Morrison's analysis of Melville's Benito Cereno during her 1993 series of lectures at the Ecole Normale Supérieure after she published Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

46. Chesnutt's tale could also be said to stage the opposition between “realism” and anti-realism which runs through the black literary tradition. The school of Richard Wright can be contrasted to that of Ellison and in turn to the “antirealist” posture of Clarence Major's My Amputations (1986).

47. This technique could be, among others, a pastiche of Derrida, Living on/Borderlines, where two texts are written concurrently, running together, and the reading process moves from one to the other, or can only read one and then the other.

48. As already mentioned, the mixture of autobiography and fiction is a common strategy in Wideman's fictional writing. What is interesting then is the relationship established between the author and the “I” character in the avowedly autobiographical works Brothers and Keepers (1984) and Fatheralong [Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society] (1995). To cite from the preface of Brothers and Keepers: “To learn my brother's story I visited him in prison and listened to what he had to say. I'd take a few notes—names, dates, sequences of events—then, some time later, after I'd had an opportunity to absorb his words but while they were still fresh in my mind, I would reproduce on paper what I'd heard. Robby would read what I had written and respond either when I visited him next or by letter. His suggestions and corrections usually concerned factual matters: As a novelist I have had lots of practice creating written versions of speech, so I felt much more confident about borrowing narrative techniques learned from fiction than employing a tape recorder. … I take full responsibility for a mix of memory, imagination, feeling, and fact.”

49. See Lejeune: “It is in the proper name that person and discourse are linked even before being joined in the first person, as the order of language acquisition by children shows. … All the identifications (easy, difficult, or determined) suggested above from oral situations inevitably result in transforming the first person into a proper name.” “The Autobiographical Pact.” On Autobiography, 11. See also Derrida, Otobiographies: L'Enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Galilée, 1984). Such a definition of “autobiography” is obviously problematic when it comes to the slave narrative.

50. Lacan's rereading of Hegel's dialectics between the master and the slave tries to analyze how the slave waits for his master's death and exchanges this making time and his labor for the certainty that he has of his master's mortality. See Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 314.

51. Making time as opposed to doing time refers to the complex interrelation between freedom and imprisonment which is at the core of the narrative construction of Brothers and Keepers (1984). Robby, Wideman's brother, is doing time, serving a life sentence. Time and life coincide. Another direction would be Derrida's recent work Donner le temps (Giving Time) (Paris: Galilée, 1996).

52. Such a notation seems to hint at the section in Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot (another B!) on the color of Emma Bovary's eyes. “The Prof had met the girl in the boy's novel. Learns her pubic hair is as fiery red as what she wears short and stylish, flouncing just above her shoulders” (“Surfiction” 68).

53. Derrida's critique of Lacan bears precisely on his belief that there is “truth”: “La description est partie prenante quand elle induit une pratique, une éthique et une institution, donc une politique assurant la tradition de sa vérité. Il ne s'agit plus alors de connaître, expliquer et de montrer mais d'y rester. Et de reproduire.” Derrida then quotes Lacan: “L'analyse ne peut avoir pour but que l'avènement d'une parole vraie et la réalisation par le sujet de son histoire dans sa relation à un futur.” See Ecrits (302), quoted in Derrida, “Le Facteur” (509).