Cliché’s Cringe: Aesthetic Judgment in Percival Everett’s Erasure

For a novel that so keenly interrogates how the literary marketplace restricts forms of minoritarian representation, Percival Everett's Erasure (2001) irritatingly renders its sole queer character as a composite of clichés. The characterization of Bill, the once-closeted brother of protagonist Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, dredges up many of the stereotypes about gay men that persist in contemporary United States culture. Bill bleaches his hair, fails to find durable love amongst a revolving cast of boyfriends, frequents the gym, dips into bouts of drug- and sex-fueled hedonism, and — the first sign of trouble for Monk — even speaks with something close to a "stereotypical lisp."1 Erasure is haunted by a paradox that has, to my knowledge, remained completely unexamined in scholarship: if the novel trenchantly criticizes how the mass market has restricted the forms of aesthetic expression and self-representation available to Black artists to a limited set of tropes, Erasure nonetheless adheres, at least superficially, to unimaginative clichés about male homosexuality.

Scholars have tended to argue that Erasure thematizes how the publishing industry compels Black artists to accede to market-ready forms of representation, that it explores the vexed relationship between contemporary Black literature and the "African American literary tradition," and that it underscores the arbitrary nature of racial signification.2 Yet across my reading, I have encountered no scholar who has substantially engaged with Bill despite the clear relevance of his plotline to the novel's interrogation of representation, commodification, identity, and aesthetic form. Bill's negotiation of his sexual identity and experiments in queer stylization illustrate how the problematics of artistic production and aesthetic judgment in a market context might also materialize in the realm of self-fashioning. Additionally, Bill's narrative trajectory self-abnegation echoes how Monk's authorial persona, Stagg R. Leigh, threatens to subsume him completely. It is curious, then, that Bill sis all but absent from scholarly criticism on Erasure when his plotline both reinforces and recontextualizes some of the central themes of the novel. Could Bill's glaring absence from extant criticism indicate less the sign of an irrelevant subplot than a muted scholarly embarrassment over his depiction in the novel? Are the same scholars who have indispensably elucidated Everett's exploration of the limits and expectations that United States culture sets on Black representation, unsure of what to do with Bill, worried that his reductive characterization might dampen critical enthusiasm for the text? 3 Yet for all of the readerly discomfort that Bill's depiction risks provoking, the diegetic embarrassment that he elicits suggests that Everett employs Bill to buttress his critique of aesthetic conventionalism. Consider Monk's report of a phone call with his brother: "a man's voice spoke to Bill and he answered, calling the man 'darling.' I couldn't deny that hearing it made me cringe a bit, and I felt badly for the reaction."4 Monk's cringing reaction responds less to Bill's male lover than it does the conventional verbal form through which Bill expresses his affection. Bill's cliché causes Monk to feel vicariously embarrassed, suggesting aesthetic judgment's importance to both Everett's representation of Bill and, as I will argue, to the novel's ideas about artistic production and the market.

In this article, I contribute to scholarship on Erasure by restoring Bill to critical attention, illustrating how he functions as a figure through which the novel thematizes the relationship between the aesthetic infelicity of the cliché and the fashioning of a self in mass culture. Criticism on the novel has often interrogated the relationship between conventional social and aesthetic forms and the literary marketplace, more frequently through the concept of the "stereotype" than that of the "cliché."5 Although these terms are semantically and etymologically related and sometimes used interchangeably, I consider them subtly distinct in terms of what they connote and in the range of aesthetic forms and phenomena that they encompass. While stereotypes seem to more narrowly concern the concept of representation, clichés can broadly refer to repeated and worn-out forms that may or may not serve representational ends. Further, stereotypes frequently bear a metonymic function in which a representative figure or trope stands in for a larger group in a manner that clichés do not -- one reason, perhaps, why minoritarian writers and activists have marshalled this term to mount their critiques. Meanwhile, as a category more recognizable as a form of judgment, the cliché seems to concern "merely" aesthetic rather than "social" content. If the aesthetic clumsiness of the cliché may annoy us, it does not connote the same kinds of harm as the stereotype, which seems to be deleterious, demeaning, or negative in nature. It is no surprise, then, that the stereotype is the category that predominates in Erasure criticism, particularly insofar as scholars have incisively described the novel's critique of "authentic" Blackness as, really, a set of culturally recognizable tropes.6 Still, despite the prevalence of this term in writing on the novel, critics have not tended to theorize how stereotypes and clichés operate as aesthetic categories rather than as social problems. Everett's own engagement with clichés as formal problems with which minoritarian artists must grapple encourages me to offer such a theoretical account in the pages that follow.

Through a close reading of Bill's appearances in Erasure, I make two related interventions into extant scholarship. First, I propose that the cliché is the aesthetic category most important to Erasure and a category germane to Everett's oeuvre at large because it concerns aesthetic judgments that are not limited to whether a given representation is good, bad, nuanced, or reductive --or, the kinds of evaluations that are typically involved in noticing stereotypes. Given that Erasure links aesthetic virtuosity with individual expression that is relatively autonomous from overdetermined social forms such as "race" or "sexuality," the cliché is the most appropriate category for analyzing the novel. Second, I build upon extant scholarship by theorizing the cliché as an aesthetic category. Specifically, I draw out an implication latent in theories of the cliché by illustrating how it is more accurately defined as an aesthetic judgment rather than as a positive and objective entity in the world. Cliché, I argue, is an aesthetic judgment aligned with the moment of circulation which indexes a set of anxieties over the possibility of artistic virtuosity in a period of expanded mass production. Along with provoking affects such as irritation, annoyance, and frustration, this aesthetic judgment also induces a particular kind of shame called cringe, a form of displeasure that I propose arises from our embarrassment about the potential imbrication of the self with the aesthetic scene unfolding before us. Although the cringing subject may disavow proximity to their object through a set of implicit or explicit disidentifications, cringe is more adhesive than it may first appear. In particular, cringe registers a fear of being circulated as a flattened type -- that is, as a cliché --whose aesthetic sovereignty has been compromised. Critically, this novel understands alienation from aesthetic autonomy -- defined as the capacity to produce art and representations of oneself or others outside of given forms -- as an erosion of individuality itself. With this concept of autonomy in mind, I demonstrate how Erasure addresses the paradox that Bill comes to represent by illuminating the relevance of aesthetic embarrassment to minoritarian cultural production. As the novel suggests, minoritarian subjects must provisionally adopt conventional forms -- or at least, already existing ones -- as a prerequisite not simply for representation on the mass market, but also for artistic production itself, an impasse that registers as an embarrassment for Monk and Everett alike.

Derivative Queerness

Bill comes to his queer identity along a trajectory that eventually results in the waning of his character and his exit from the novel's narrative space. From the outset, Monk renders Bill's sexuality in no uncertain terms: "Bill had a wife and two kids, but we all knew he was gay."7 Yet when Bill arrives in D.C. for his sister Lisa's funeral, he reveals to Monk that he came out to his wife and children, and has faced familial and financial ruin as a result. Stuck in Arizona, where he dutifully contributes alimony to his now-estranged wife and children, Bill nonetheless begins to live a more open life as a queer man. Monk first glimpses his brother's burgeoning gay stylization over the course of a series of phone calls. In the midst of a discussion about family finances and the sacrifices Bill could make to support their mother, Bill interrupts Monk:

"Actually, Monk." His pause was a fat one if not terribly long and I could imagine his habit of looking at the ceiling before speaking. "I've taken a lover." Taken a lover was how he put it. Removed one from the closet? Conned one out of his savings? Taken a lover.

"So?" I said.

"His name is Claude."

"I don't care what his name is," I told him. "What is he? French?"

"I want you to meet him." And suddenly, Bill's voice was different, but it was more than just the sound of a man in love. His pronunciation changed. It was not quite that he developed a stereotypical lisp, but it was close.

"Why are you talking like that?"

His voice went back to normal. "Like what?"8

This passage features the basic elements of what will come to define Bill's appearances in the novel and Monk's reactions to him. Importantly, his appearances in the narrative present of the novel are, at first, purely auditory: the form of the phone call itself focalizes the verbal, underscores language itself in a manner that draws our attention to the cliché. Here, for instance, Bill interrupts Monk with a non sequitur — "I've taken a lover" — whose linguistic form is jarring, odd, and altogether trite. Bill's voice even begins to change, and we are told that this is "more than just the sound of a man in love." If Monk does not clarify what he means by this, his invocation of Bill's new "stereotypical lisp" hints at the nature of his true critique. The problem for Monk is not necessarily the gender of Bill's new lover or Bill's manner of speaking in and of itself, but that his brother's language and comportment are rife with clichés. That Monk specifies it is a near-stereotypical lisp which marks Bill's speech also hints that this is not a voice that belongs to Bill; as clichés, the lisp and the phrase "taken a lover" have been drawn from the cultural surround. Bill's elocution is seemingly unconscious, given that it is "not quite" the stereotype, "but it was close." He is not aware, in other words, that he has adapted the form of his speech to what is conventionally associated with its content. Indeed, the phrase "taken a lover" seems as though it could be lifted straight from a mass market romance novel in its overtly formal and antiquated diction, and Bill does not seem to be camping it up in a self-conscious manner. By repeating the phrase twice in the passage — and making fun of it by underscoring its semantic vacuousness — Monk registers the hollow nature of the statement itself. He responds to the form of Bill's locution, the signifiers of his speech rather than its signified. Rather than understand this passage as (only) a sign of homophobia on Monk's part, expressed as a disdain for the lisp, I suggest that Monk's bemusement stems from how Bill employs clichés in place of an individualized rendering of gay selfhood. Bill has therefore undergone his own form of erasure as an individual as he forges his gay identity via conventional forms such as the lisp, and this passage mounts an aesthetic critique of Bill's coming to queerness.

What I am calling the aesthetic critique of Bill's queerness crystallizes as the novel sees him duly checking off cliché after cliché about gay male subjectivity. Beyond his new "stereotypical lisp," Bill adopts other practices that United States culture has associated with gay men. Each time Monk calls him, Bill has a new boyfriend, yet neither Tad nor Claude nor Adam prove to be an enduring lover. He comports himself to a bodily norm that gay men know well, informing Monk that he is "in the gym every night."9 An air of drug use lingers about Bill, too: during the brothers' final in-person confrontation, Bill "seem[s] high" to Monk, having come off of what appears to have been an all-night bender.10 Promiscuity and failed love, obsession with physical fitness, wanton drug usage: these were stereotypes of gay men in 2001, and they are stereotypes now. Everett is taking a risk here, as these facets of Bill's characterization may ultimately amount to little more than a homophobic caricature. Yet the conspicuous nature of these clichéd character details — facets of Bill's character which quickly stack — draws attention to them as tropes and Everett's intended use of them as a formal device.

Importantly, Bill's figuration as a trope foregrounds the racialized dimensions of mainstream representations of gay subjectivity. Such figurations function as identity genres through which individuals can express their desires and sense of selfhood in recognizable forms; they connect the individual to the social whole.11 Bill's characterization therefore rhymes with the novel's critique of the limited forms of Black representation available on the marketplace, whether literary or sociosexual. The novel's depiction of the particular form of gay subjectivity that Bill inhabits clarifies that this is a racialized social type. Take, for instance, Monk's stunned reaction to Bill's new hairstyle: "My brother's hair was blond. I recognized his face as he sat on a bench near some conga players. But I thought only That guy looks just like my brother. My brother had blond hair. It was my brother and his hair was yellow. His skin was still light brown."12 These short, repetitive sentences reflect Monk's shock at Bill's transformation, as if rearranging the order of the words may clarify the matter. That Bill's hair becomes "yellow" rather than blond by the end of this passage amplifies its alien status. The novel signals that this should be understood as a scene of racial transubstantiation, for Monk remarks that "[Bill's] skin was still light brown," as if his brother's complexion could be altered by a different hairstyle. While Monk does not voice it as such, this aesthetic change hints that Bill's adoption of affected and stereotypically "gay" mannerisms and practices can be understood as, perhaps, a response to sexual racism. What Bill attempts to approximate is a conventional version of gay male identity, but it is one that is implicitly racialized as white. Although it results in an incongruous image to Monk, Bill's adherence to these racialized codes of self-stylization enables him to market himself as a legible sexual subject in his newfound gay social worlds: he seems to have a new boyfriend in every scene in which he stars, however ephemeral these relationships might be.

In this sense, we can interpret Bill's subplot as a reverberation of a central theme in the novel: the tension between the minoritarian individual and the forms of representation that this subject can employ in order to access cultural, social, and market legibility. Much of the novel's satire targets how the mainstream publishing industry requires its Black writers to adhere to stereotypical representations of African Americans. As Margaret Russett writes, such a demand for "authenticity" from Black writers "cloaks essentially generic expectations."13 The novel most bitingly satirizes this requirement when Monk adopts the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh and writes My Pafology, a parodic novella that occupies sixty-and-some pages of Erasure's real estate that no character in the novel save for Monk's literary agent recognizes as a parody. Monk makes plain the generic and narrative expectations that U.S. culture imposes upon its Black writers. Reflecting on his novel, he declares:

I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation (though all writing in some way is just that), and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint.14

Monk's litany of such generic expectations churns through a series of negations; he asserts that his writing fails to meet a mandate of minoritarian cultural production by representing the experience of an abstracted demographic group of "people." This rhetorical gesture also found on the very first page of the novel. There, Monk disabuses his reader of any ideas they may have about this work's Black author, remarking that, among other things, "I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south."15 It is no surprise, then, that Stagg R. Leigh's novel achieves national success in satisfying these demands, even if Monk's in-person performances as "Leigh" do not always meet the racialized expectations of his white interlocutors.16 As Monk remarks: "I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression."17

Queer theory has offered methods of thinking about identity and identification outside of such linear and merely "expressive" models that reflect some essential aspect of an individual or demographic group. As José Esteban Muñoz argues, minoritarian subjects negotiate restrictive yet paradoxically enabling tropes as they navigate the phobic public sphere. In his theorization of "disidentification," Muñoz remarks that the representations circulating throughout dominant culture with which minoritarian subjects may identify tend to be "spoiled" identities or toxic tropes. Rather than merely opposing such dominant identifications through an oppositional counter-identification — a strategy that, "through the very routinized workings of its denouncement of dominant discourse, reinstates that same discourse"18 — minoritarian subjects such as the queers of color who star in Muñoz's study work "on and against dominant ideology" by creatively reinhabiting and redeploying clichés.19 Through disidentification, "damaged stereotypes" can be rewired as "powerful and seductive sites of self-creation."20 Muñoz's description of disidentification clarifies that subjectivity itself can be thought of as a formal problem: one works with, against, and to the side of culturally available stereotypes, discourses, and representations in inhabiting an identity. As Muñoz puts it in a riff on James Baldwin:

The price of the ticket is this: to find self within the dominant public sphere, we need to deny self. The contradictory subjectivity one is left with is not just the fragmentary subjectivity of some unspecified postmodern condition; it is instead the story of the minoritarian subject within the majoritarian sphere.21

From what we can glean through Monk's limited perspective on his brother's activities, Erasure gives us little evidence that Bill is engaging in acts of disidentification; he seems, instead, to uncritically repeat a mainstream gay style.22 Still, Muñoz underlines how minoritarian subjects must inevitably negotiate culturally dominant clichés that threaten to subsume individuals into generic forms. Following how critics have frequently remarked — with some disagreement23 — that Stagg R. Leigh represents the abnegation of Monk's self, we could view Bill's clichéd self-stylization as following a similar trajectory of dissolution. Regarding Bill, Monk writes, "my brother was finally finding himself, I suppose, but seemingly losing everything else in the process. I wouldn't use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery."24 Although in the context of this passage, the "everything else" that Bill loses most directly refers to his familial and financial standing, it also paradoxically refers to his own individuated sense of queerness. Finding no stylization of gay identity that can make room for his Blackness, Bill must conform to a generic white standard — a clichéd gay male identity — that the novel implies does not suit him. In Erasure, then, the price of the ticket is to become a cliché. Indeed, Monk's invocation of the concept of the "cliché" in attempting to describe his unusual predicament underlines the importance of the concept not only to Monk's sense of artistic self, but also to the concerns of the novel as a whole, in which aesthetic virtuosity and formal innovation are alloyed by the strictures of market-friendly representation.

Cliché's Circulation

Scholars have understood Erasure as a novel that sardonically parodies how the literary marketplace proliferates racial stereotypes and clichés despite its claims to multicultural representation. In an essay directly addressing the concept of cliché, Anthony Stewart argues that the novel "demonstrates how the African American exception has in fact been rendered a racial cliché that satisfies a desire within the larger American culture."25 In his view, the cliché itself exists to satisfy a set of ideological expectations attending — and I might emphasize, predicating — the appearance of Black subjects. Hence, readers in the novel consider the tale of My Pafology's Van Go Jenkins to be an authentic reflection of reality rather than a representation circulated by the publishing industry. In this cultural context, Monk cannot find an audience for his experimental, formalist works, for they exceed the bounds of what United States culture expects Black authors to produce. Monk seeks artistic autonomy in a cultural marketplace that hungers for representation, but only in a limited repertoire of forms — or, as Everett himself has put it, through variations of the "existent model."26 Even the emergence of a "multicultural" marketplace cannot offer truly diverse forms of representation. As Scott Thomas Gibson argues, this sense of possibility and heterogeneity is a mirage, as "contemporary generic and aesthetic categories generate sublimated forms of invisibility that give the appearance of legitimizing heterogeneous African American subjects while simultaneously and subversively regulating the available range of supposedly 'authentic' Black representations."27 This is not to say, though, that the Erasure posits that something like "authentic Blackness" might be represented at all. Rather, from Monk's struggles to find an audience for his expectation-defying artwork to Bill's absorption into a readymade gay identity, the novel queries how clichés set representational limits on the conditions of legibility for minoritarian subjects in the social field.

Erasure is "about" how the mass market circulates clichés and racial stereotypes. It satirizes the motives of mainstream publishing houses in what Dan Sinykin has called the "conglomerate era." Such corporations, "in submission to the market, publish writers of color who [reproduce] popular stereotypes."28 Quite obviously, this is the manifest content of the novel, and it requires little deciphering. Yet while critics have thoroughly described the novel's critique of the market-ready clichés that burden Black authors, they have tended to undertheorize or otherwise neglect to define the concepts of the cliché and its semantic and etymological cousin: the stereotype. Given their clear thematic importance in Erasure and elsewhere in Everett's oeuvre, these concepts merit further examination. Everett treats clichés and stereotypes as formal problems, drawing our attention to their status as figures of speech and visual tropes rather than as symptoms of prejudice alone. In doing so, Everett finds company with Rey Chow by shifting our attention from "stereotypes as a problem in cognitive psychology" to "their function as a representational device, a possible tactic of aesthetic and political intervention."29 In treating the cliché as a formal technique, we may grapple with a larger question of the novel: whether or not the cliché is an inevitability of representational practices themselves.

Critics have tended to toggle between two obverse conceptualizations of the cliché. First, there is the cliché as an easily assimilated form that critics suppose can variously facilitate, inflect, or crudely determine thinking in a passive reader. Anton Zijderveld proclaims that this capacity of the cliché to "bypass reflection" and "bring people unobtrusively into a certain mood" has inaugurated the "clichégenic society" characteristic of post-industrial modernity.30 Clichés, he writes, "tend to become the moulds of consciousness."31 Second, there is the cliché as an expression of critical evaluation, or as an aesthetic judgment. Ruth Amossy writes that the cliché emerges "[o]nce a familiar stock figure loses its exemplary nature" and "calls for two reversible and complementary types of deciphering."32 These "two contrary attitudes," which Amossy calls a "double reception," are the following: either the reader instantaneously "assimilates" the tired figure, or it "prompts a sudden awareness coupled with a critical assessment" of the cliché.33 While the deterministic, assimilative form of the cliché outlined above has occupied scholars of Erasure, I am more interested in how the second sense of the cliché — that is, as an aesthetic judgment — operates in the novel. Amossy brings us closer to this conceptualization when she remarks, "In identifying a cliché as common property and, consequently, as the sign of a dizzying expropriation, [the reader] combines recognition with critical evaluation."34 When readers notice clichés, they enter into a critical engagement with the broader social field from which the cliché has been drawn, or what Amossy calls the déjà-dit.35 But before this moment of "recognition," which would assign determinate concepts to the object before us, there is the immediate, snap judgment or "sudden awareness" of the cliché that snags the reading process and interrupts our smooth assimilation of the content before us. This is a moment of affective response: it is one of irritation, annoyance, and sometimes cringing embarrassment. Like all aesthetic judgments, this is a reaction that initially involves no conceptual understanding of an object as such. Marshall McLuhan helps us see this dimension of the cliché when he writes that the cliché is "not necessarily verbal ... it is also an active, structuring, probing feature of our awareness."36 Clichés, in this view, are subjectively rather than objectively defined; they emanate from our awareness, and do not necessarily pertain to concepts intrinsic to the object itself.37 In this sense, clichés align with the traditional form of aesthetic judgment, which Immanuel Kant described as one which "affords absolutely no cognition (not even a confused one) of the object, which happens only in a logical judgment."38

It may come as no surprise that the cliché involves evaluation, especially when so much of the body of scholarship on cliché itself so frequently involves judgments of taste.39 It seems self-evident that pointing to a cliché induces an aesthetic judgment, for it has the ring of an accusation. When we notice a cliché, we tend to weigh its effectivity against its intended function. We evaluate, in other words, if the author has purposefully employed the cliché, or if they have deferred to it out of artistic laziness. But it is perhaps more surprising to consider the cliché an aesthetic judgment that precedes the conceptual thinking associated with cognitive judgments. How can this be so, if naming the cliché seems to verbally assert taste and distinction by identifying an infelicitous form that other readers, viewers, or listeners cannot discern? Does this not imply a conceptual act? It does, but only as a form of second-order judgment. In the Kantian scene of aesthetic judgment, the imagination and understanding are set into a state of free play that is "indeterminate" insofar as it does not yet aim at cognizing the object.40 Pleasure arises from the free play of these faculties and from the "consciousness of the merely formal purposiveness in the play of the cognitive powers of the subject," by which Kant means a purposiveness with no purpose or end.41 If beauty is "the form of purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end," then the displeasure of the cliché first results from our ability to rapidly submit it to a determinate concept, thereby prematurely ending the state of free play.42 Monk's own evaluation of My Pafology as boring affirms this description of displeasure, for he remarks "there was no playing with compositional or even paginal space" and "nothing in the writing that self-consciously threw it back at [him]" that could prolong the scene of aesthetic experience.43 These reflections on aesthetic judgment accord with how scholars and Erasure itself illustrate the experience of the cliché: it is first apprehended as irritation, annoyance, exhaustion, contempt, or embarrassment. There is something irritating about the cliché, a repeated encounter with the same form that rankles or induces a sigh or a wince. We are both accustomed to seeing the cliché, and tired of noticing it.

I propose that the aesthetic judgment of the cliché indexes our exhaustion with the repetition of the forms of mass production itself, ranging from the ever-annoying meme to infuriatingly persistent racial, sexual, and gender tropes. More specifically, this aesthetic judgment responds to the material processes of circulation through which the commodities of mass production impinge upon our senses, whether these commodities are thing-like, visual, or verbal. This aesthetic judgment affectively registers our unease with the incessant repetition of verbal, social, and political forms.44 Tom Grimwood clarifies this matter when he remarks that "the circulation of the word, rather than its classification, renders it a cliché."45 Grimwood's point is that clichés are not exactly "dead" words or forms — in fact, precisely the opposite — but rather that critics tend to use the term when they are describing the sensorial experience of the repetition of mass production's circulatory processes. Here, I submit to an obligatory gesture in scholarship on the cliché by underscoring how the word emerges from the printing press itself. As Grimwood summarizes:

Etymologically, the cliché is rooted in the French clicher, to stereotype. In this original sense, the stereotype was a plate of type metal used within the workings of the printing press from the early 19th century. The cliché -- a term coined from the clicking noise of the stereotype at work -- was an imprint of original type. These imprints allowed for the quicker, cheaper, and far more numerous production of prints and illustrations for public consumption.46

Referring to the acceleration of the production and circulation of media, "cliché" and "stereotype" attained figurative meaning over time. Although I agree with Grimwood that efforts to historically "place" the cliché as a symptom unique to modernity are doomed,47 I invoke this material history of the printing press in order to suggest the following: the cliché itself is an aesthetic judgment about the circulatory processes of mass production, one that mediates our relationship with the broader field of social relations into which we are installed.

Much like our other contemporary aesthetic categories, the cliché raises questions about labor itself. Describing its ability to streamline meaning, Walter Redfern refers to the cliché as a "labour-saving device,"48 the very phrase that repeats so often in Sianne Ngai's account of the gimmick. For Ngai, the gimmick is an aesthetic judgment about an uneven relationship between (abstract) labor, time, and value encoded in the object; it is "bound to appraisals of deficient or excessive labor encoded in form."49 At first glance, the cliché seems similar to the gimmick: both seem to arise out of a desire to save labor, and both reflect our misgivings about the value of the object in front of us. Still, while Ngai reiterates how gimmicks might enchant us with their odd displays of ingenuity, we register the cliché as a deficit of creativity or imagination. This suggests that the cliché is a judgment that indexes a set of material conditions which differ from those adumbrated by the judgment of the gimmick. If the gimmick registers the crises of expanded capitalist accumulation through its misalignment of labor, time, and value, the cliché more narrowly reflects misgivings about artistic virtuosity and labor in the era of mass production.50 Erasure thematizes such questions when Monk reflects upon his writing My Pafology: "It was a parody, certainly, but so easy had it been to construct that I found it difficult to take it seriously even as that." As he tersely surmises, "[t]he work bored and had as its only virtue brevity."51 This ease of composition also surfaces in his conversation with an editor at Random House, where Monk (as Stagg R. Leigh) reports that the novel took him "just a little over a week" to complete.52 The editor's remark that it is "about as perfect a book as [she's] seen in a long while" is meant to register as ridiculous to readers; indeed, we have just read the work itself, for Erasure includes My Pafology in full.53 Suggestively, both of these passages tether aesthetic judgment (boredom, perfection) to labor and underline the anxieties around production that attend our encounter with the cliché.

Such anxieties undergird the novel's treatment of the concept of the "real," through which Erasure formally registers not only how cliché's provoke irritation, but also how they capacitate or otherwise undergird the production and circulation of artwork on the mass market. As the novel illustrates, clichés produce an ideological version of the "real" through the circulation and repetition involved in the braided processes of mass production and consumption. For this reason, "real" is a dirty word in Erasure: in each of its appearances, we are meant to understand its opposite. Kenya Dunston, Everett's Oprah Winfrey parody, says the following about author Juanita Mae Jenkins's trope-ridden novel, We Lives In Da Ghetto: "The language is so real and the characters are so true to life."54 In fact, the "Atlantic Monthly or Harpers" review of the book repeats this language, writing that the book represents "the typical Black life" in "haunting verisimilitude."55 This evaluation travels to Monk's My Pafology, described as "the real thing" by one of his fellow book award committee members, and "real as hell" by movie mogul Wiley Morgenstein (presumably a stand-in for Harvey Weinstein).56 "Real" recurs so many times, in so many of the same verbal forms and phrases, that its appearances echo the irritation invoked by the cliché. As if driving home this point, the Times review of Fuck itself employs the phrase "so real" twice, exposing the phrase as a crutch, or at least, a stock response to the cliché conflated with typicality.57 Indeed, the repetition of "real" renders it a kind of mass-produced judgment, a stock response built into the structure of the cliché itself that treats such repetitious representations as veridical. Formally, then, the cliché's recursivity parallels how consumption itself emerges in the moment of production; it registers, in other words, the dialectical relationship between the conglomerate fiction house and the reader, in which the former instantiates the latter in the scene of production. Given the deleterious status of the "real" in Everett's lexical map, we should not interpret the novel as proposing that "authentic" representation is really possible. Rather, Everett allegorizes how the cliché supplants the real when the characters in the novel — and Americans more generally — confuse the ceaselessly reproduced images of the culture industry for reality.

Cringing Judgment

Let us return to where this discussion began, with the question of how the novel renders Bill's homosexuality, to understand the relationship between judgment and identity's representation or expressive form. Monk's aversion to cliché clarifies that his negative reaction to his brother's coming to queer selfhood is primarily an aesthetic judgment. Bill is not aesthetically autonomous or virtuosic; to put this crassly, he is what we would call "basic." If Monk is bemused — or even really aware — that Bill is acceding to whitewashed gay subjectivity, his aesthetic sensibilities are offended by Bill's performance of homosexuality due to his brother's seemingly uncritical adherence to conventional forms. Whether speaking with a not-quite "stereotypical lisp" or recycling the trite phrases from schlocky romances, Bill does not appear to fashion an individual self that is distinct from the tropes that circulate in mainstream culture. This emerges as a problem because of the novel's critique of the relationship between social and aesthetic form. Consider how Erasure introduces Monk's relationship to homosexuality. The novel is at pains to establish that while queerness might be something that is possible to "know," it does not derive from external signifiers in a direct way. For Monk, "sexuality" -- much like "race" -- provides an object lesson for the sliding relationship between the signifier and the signified. Monk's early encounter with a gym teacher is instructive:

It wasn't difficult to conclude that Bill was a homosexual, whether it was true or not. He liked being with men in a way different from the way heterosexual men liked being with men. Effeminate behavior, I learned when young, served as no measure of sexual orientation. My gym teacher, whom I imagined eating rail spikes for breakfast, was gay and I knew it not because he held his hands a certain way, not because he made a pass at me, not because he would park himself by the showers and listen to us bathe, but because I saw him late one night walking hand in hand with another man.58

Everett carefully establishes the obviousness of Bill's sexuality prior to his entrance into the novel's narrative present. While clearly "a homosexual," Bill is not identifiable by anything so stereotypical as "effeminate behavior," and Everett moves him — at least initially — outside of the realm of convention. Monk summons his gym teacher to illustrate the discrepancy between outward signs and the "measure of sexual orientation." Negating a series of potential "tells" that are culturally associated with the stereotype of the covertly homosexual gym teacher. Through its treatment of queerness more broadly, Erasure stresses that it would be a mistake to conflate one's individual identity with the reified social forms that serve as the appearance of identity's expressive, external manifestation. If the novel celebrates a purposefully ambiguous relationship between an external signifier and identitarian signified, the Ellison family and Monk himself denigrate individuals who do meet these conventions, who are visibly marked by their sexual and gender non-normativity. "My parents talked rather badly about the queens that paraded the street near my father's office," Monk remarks, "but, more than anything, thinking of sexual preference, or that there was sexual preference, didn't exist."59 "More than anything," these queens raise the ire of the Ellisons because their sexual and gender difference is visible and marked. This sentence's italicized text underscores the ease with which such "queens" can be distilled into an abject social type distinguished by overt, surface qualities rather than their complex interiority. Paired with the passage about the gym teacher, this moment establishes how an aesthetic conventionalism that can render one a type is fatal in the logic of this novel.

In Erasure, to be typical is to surrender one's distinct individuality to clichéd forms, a predicament that surfaces the social content of what may seem to be a mere matter of taste. Whether employing clichés or articulating one's identity through a set of tropes, to become typical is to submit to the repetitious, infelicitous aesthetic demands of the market. For Monk, Bill has bad taste, as do the readers of Juanita Mae Jenkins, as do the readers of My Pafology. In the moment of aesthetic judgment, the cliché solicits irritation, anger, and fatigue -- affects Monk experiences with the parties above. But as Erasure demonstrates, clichés can also induce an embarrassment specific to our reception of aesthetic ineptitude. In the logic of the novel, this ineptitude is the result of an overreliance on convention, whether as a "labour-saving device" or as a means of achieving legibility in the mass market. As another affect associated with the cliché, embarrassment adumbrates the compromised terrain of minoritarian cultural production within the mass market, in which marginalized artists must work with and against existing forms in order to access circulation itself.

This aesthetic embarrassment becomes most pronounced within a passage I quoted in this article's introduction, and I will repeat Monk's report here: "A man's voice spoke to Bill and he answered, calling the man 'darling.' I couldn't deny that hearing it made me cringe a bit and I felt badly for the reaction."60 This moment occasions a squint: is this a homophobic reaction? As if acknowledging the wrongness of his immediate response, Monk admits that he "couldn't deny" that Bill's cooing made him cringe. His cringing is twofold: he is spontaneously — that is, affectively — embarrassed at Bill's address to his lover, and then subsequently — and in the language of theories of aesthetic judgment, conceptually — embarrassed at his own reaction. I am interested in the assessment that Monk's spontaneous reaction discloses, a snap judgment that slots into the larger conceit of aesthetic evaluation in the novel. Rather than (merely) understand this scene as a disclosure of Monk's homophobia, we might (also) contextualize it as part of a broader pattern in the novel: Monk's cringing embarrassment in the face of conventional forms. Like Bill's earlier pronouncement of having "taken a lover," "darling" rings as worn-out, over-circulated, cliché language, no matter how sincerely he means it. Given Monk's wincing reaction, it is clear that clichés induce not only irritation or disdain, but also deep aesthetic embarrassment associated with the embodied response-cum-aesthetic category of the cringe.

If extant scholarship has theorized the cringe as primarily an embodied response to the temporal experience of awkwardness, Erasure can enrich our understanding of this concept by illustrating how cringe is also an aesthetic judgment about the embarrassment induced by a clichéd object. Employing an archive of durational media to theorize this affective response, critics have frequently turned to "cringe comedies," a genre that includes television shows such as The Office, Girls, and Veep, as well as online reaction videos, documentaries, and other forms of time-based media.61 For some writers, cringe's vicarious embarrassment can ultimately generate an empathetic relationship between viewer and cringey object. Katja Kanzler writes that "[c]ringe aesthetics differ from the aesthetics of schadenfreude in that they reduce this distance, prompting the viewer to feel for the character, to empathize with their troubles rather than to laugh at them."62 Still, the theories of cringe outlined by these scholars do not quite map onto the kinds of aesthetic embarrassment staged by Erasure, nor do they satisfactorily describe how "cringe" currently circulates in contemporary media. Monk may cringe at Bill's performance of self, yet this embarrassment does not ultimately elicit empathy for his brother. Equally, the aesthetic embarrassment that My Pafology solicits through its sardonic intensification of existing racial and formal tropes compels distance rather than proximity. Everett seems to deliberately pose the novella as a challenge to our readerly attention: its sixty-some pages feel gratuitous, threatening to ironize any well-meaning literary critic's attempt to nestle up to the work through close reading. Additionally, this scholarship does not account for the cringe felt in an instant. When one of my fellow millennials is accused of being cringe for wearing skinny jeans, complaining about "adulting," or posting photos of their meals on social media, I doubt that this "cringe" is the same kind invoked by the genre of cringe comedy. We do not wince through our fingers, waiting for the scene before us to end. Instead, we spontaneously groan at the aesthetic form that has presented itself to us, from which we subsequently distance ourselves. In fact, the grammatical slide from cringe as a verb to cringe as both an adjective and a noun, as something that someone can be, indicates that we have entered a different semantic territory that discloses cringe as an aesthetic judgment.

As an aesthetic judgment related to clichés, cringe has particular resonance for minoritarian subjects who may feel embarrassed by reductive representations and the discomfiting identifications they may induce. My account of cringe draws from and builds upon Weishun Lu's account of "ethnic cringe." Through her reading of poems by Ed Bok Lee and Marilyn Chin that deliberately employ tropes, Lu draws our attention to the dimensions of cringe associated with aesthetic evaluation, writing that "when minority difference is dramatized to a degree that creates the impression that the author is only engaging in identity writing, cringe ensues."63 Lu demonstrates how the detection of clichés is central to her definition of ethnic cringe. Drawing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theorization of the paranoid position, Lu writes that "ethnic cringe implies a knowing subject who is hyperaware of the tendency to reduce race and ethnicity to one-dimensional and neatly classifiable differences."64 This is a subject, in other words, who can recognize the aesthetic infelicities of the ethnic cliché. While I do not wish to analogize the inscription of ethnicity with that of other categories of social difference, Lu's theorization opens up pathways to viewing cringe as an aesthetic question with particular importance to minoritarian production in the wake of multiculturalism.

Given its close relationship to the cliché — an aesthetic category tethered to circulation — cringe can index an embarrassment over the putatively representative or typical character of the infelicitous object. If the cliché irritates because of its aesthetic ineptitude, it also induces discomfort over the possibility that one might be reduced to a similarly circulable and de-personalized type. Such fears around typification surface for Monk right before he composes My Pafology. Staring at an image of Juanita Mae Jenkins on the cover of Time magazine, Monk feels "the world opening around [him]."65 In one long sentence stacking conjunction after conjunction, Monk's normally even-keeled prose buckles under the memory of "passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy" and the imagined scene of "people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre!" Although these two novels seem a far cry from Amos and Andy, Monk suggests that each of these objects has contributed to a narrow representation of Black Americans in the cultural sphere, particularly through the use of vernacularized speech. "I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn't sound like that, that my mother didn't sound like that, that my father didn't sound like that," says Monk.66 Whatever the conditions of his actual parentage — in this case, the American Black elite — Monk fears that the publishing industry will inevitably slot his writing into a literary genealogy concerned with the representation of a particular class experience that might speak for and over him. When Monk imagines himself cringily responding "Why fo you be axin?" to an imaginary interlocutor by the end of this passage, he manifests an anxiety of being totally subsumed by cliché, an embarrassment that cannot be negated through counteridentification alone.67 Indeed, as Nick Salvato has written, the cringe can involve a "complex disidentification — predicated, in the first place, on identification" with the disparaged object.68 Here and elsewhere, Monk's fervent negations tend to summon a typified object only to try to stave off a potential or partial identification that is cringe-worthy in its reductive, depersonalizing form.

Rebuking the cliché can curiously lock one into a repertoire of stock responses, a form of recursivity that generates embarrassment rather than staving it off. Such is the problem that Tom Grimwood describes when he recounts the modernist critique of how the cliché gives way to "stale" responses;69 such is the conundrum that plagues Monk and which discloses the formal constraints on the representation of minoritarian identity in dominant culture. The success of My Pafology forces Monk to confront his principles as an artist, reflections which induce a newfound shame about his artistic practice. "In considering my novels, not including the one frightening effort that brought in some money," Monk writes, "I find myself sadly a stereotype of the radical, railing against something, calling it tradition perhaps, claiming to seek out new narrative territory, to knock at the boundaries of the very form that calls me and allows my artistic existence."70 As Monk suggests, oppositional practices, such as his own rejection of forms of realistic fiction that purport a relationship to a "broader" Black experience that he does not share, run the risk of reifying the very object they seek to subvert. What's more "sad" — or perhaps embarrassing — is that "pretend[ing] to challenge" these institutions can lead to stereotypical, clichéd forms in and of themselves.71 Yet this seems an apt description of minoritarian representation writ large. Forms are parasitic on other forms for their existence; the novel suggests that this is true of both literary and social forms. In this sense, then, Monk's desire for artistic authenticity, for "seek[ing] out new narrative territory," is a fiction that denies the real condition of minoritarian production in a market that conditions its circulation and reception: its forms do not really belong to the individual artist.

If cringe is based on the recognition that our own representations do not belong to us — that we may be reduced to a type in order to participate in a broader field of cultural production — then it follows that this embarrassment is also a recognition of the limits of aesthetic autonomy in a market context. The publication background of Erasure acutely raises this issue. In his account of the conglomerate era of fiction, Dan Sinykin reconstructs Everett's career with Graywolf Press, quoting Everett's sanguine assessment that the Press has "allowed [him] the freedom to write as an artist" and protected him from "the noxious political traps this culture lays for its 'writers of color.'"72 While Everett believed that Graywolf allowed him artistic autonomy, Sinykin argues that his viewpoint is blinkered: Everett unintentionally reproduces a liberal multiculturalist vision that ignores how the nonprofit publishing sector imposes its own strictures on racial representation, even if these differ from those of conglomerate publishing. As Sinykin suggests, a better way to view Everett's fiction is not as a critique of markets in toto, but of "markets that propagate inauthentic and constraining racial fantasies."73 Rolland Murray sees Everett responding to these pressures with greater acuity than Sinykin: he reads Erasure as one response to how the market has "incorporated" Black literature by centralizing its production and distributing funding to institutional centers of Black criticism. "For Everett," he surmises, "African American literature is at odds with the very social relations that have raised the social standing of contemporary black letters."74 Regardless of which argument we find more persuasive, both writers are attuned to the mediations of Everett's writing, which must incorporate or negate the forms of cliché that predicate its circulation on the market, whether aided by a non-profit press or a conglomerate. Read dialectically, the novel's rejection of convention and celebration of aesthetic sovereignty is itself a mediation of the real pressures of the market felt by Everett and other minoritarian artists, a relationship that is disclosed in the moment of aesthetic embarrassment encoded in the cliché.

Conclusion

The cliché is our aesthetic category about circulation insofar as it indexes our frustration with the persistence of repetitious, mass produced, and unoriginal representations and aesthetic forms in our mediated interactions with the market. Yet as Monk's anguished feelings of aesthetic embarrassment suggest, the cliché also encodes the compromised agency of minoritarian subjects in U.S. mass culture, who must often reduce themselves to recognizable and reproducible types in order to circulate. As Bill's plotline demonstrates, such pressures are experienced not only in the sphere of artistic production but also in the performance of selfhood -- a set of stylistic and identificatory practices that irreducibly transpire within the web of social relations. Erasure contributes to our understanding of cringe, then, by illustrating how it can function as an embarrassment specifically about the experience of aesthetic ineptitude. Cringe registers unoriginality, typification, and unwanted yet nonetheless sticky identification. In this context, we can read Bill as a figure who summons some of these anxieties, functioning primarily as a screen through which we can evaluate Monk's own judgments. He is a foil to Monk's languishing over the limits of artistic autonomy on the market, and to Everett's own solution to the problem his novel raises — that is, Everett wrote a novel that thematizes the strictures facing late-twentieth-century African American literary production rather than simply acceding to or rejecting the representational demands of the market and the mass reading public. In contrast to Monk and Everett, Bill serves as a bad object by seemingly adopting clichés in an uncritical fashion to express his queerness and seek love and pleasure. Although we might hope for Bill to evolve past the readymade identity forms that await a late-in-life and newly uncloseted gay man, his trajectory never conforms to the narrative arc of the Bildungsroman, in which he would transcend the clichéd articulations of gay male life and cultivate an autonomous, individualized, and aesthetically virtuosic self. Through the filter of Monk's narration, then, Bill appears to lack such a clearly defined sense of self because he has fallen victim to the cliché.

The argument I have unfolded in this article began with my own initial spontaneous irritation with and embarrassment at Bill's depiction. Over the course of this discussion, I have attempted to demonstrate how Everett has tactically deployed his character as a figure who crystallizes some of the text's major ideas about clichés, representation, and aesthetic autonomy. Still, perhaps some readers might feel disappointed that I have not produced a subversive reading of Bill — a reading that, against the grain of the novel, finds queer potential rather than ruin in Bill's trajectory. It is worth asking, then, where the novel leaves Bill after his cringe-worthy performance. Concluding a final argument with Monk, an irritable, erratic, and hungover Bill delivers the following monologue: "Go on. Go see Mother without me. Time has a way of deflating purpose and becoming all those things that the center of our being would rather reject. Be that as it may though, my center is far more centered than that tainted middle of yours. I'm true to myself in spite of the detours and interruptions I have encountered beyond the shelf of what is my beach."75 At first, Bill appears to offer a rebuttal to Monk's judgments about his adherence to tropes: he proclaims that, appearances to the contrary, he is "true to [himself]" and that his "center is far more centered" than the "tainted middle" of Monk, who has compromised his artistic principles in selling My Pafology. But what appears to be Bill's flight of unexpected lyricism, a moment of aesthetic originality and shrewd judgment, is, in fact, Monk's interpolation, hinted at by the italicized text and subsequently confirmed by his imagined encounter with Dr. H. Bledsoe of Invisible Man in the following scene. Monk therefore expresses his own anxieties about his compromised principles through the prosthetic of his brother's "linguistic show."76 Bill has become so one-dimensional, so literarily thin, that his speech is voided by Monk. If Monk can muse, "I wondered if Bill was dead. I wondered if it mattered,"77 we might say that Bill's erasure took place as he was overwritten by the conventions of aestheticized social forms.

But then there is the matter of Bill's last words. These appear in a left-behind note which he promises will "[explain] everything" but simply reads, "FUCK YOU!"78 It's easy to hear this line as a final explosion from the unstable queen who has been written out of the novel. More optimistically, however, I wonder if we might read Bill's last words as his way of speaking back to how the novel has rendered him. Novels ironize their characters, after all, and we should not take Monk's judgments at face value. Instead, we might feel our own vicarious embarrassment over Monk's indecorous cringing. If the cliché adumbrates the restricted field of activity that awaits the artist who strains against its restrictive forms, it can also potentially make us aware, however uncomfortably, of the protocols which produce our own judgments.

This is the first article from a forthcoming Post45 special issue titled "The Potential of Cliché."

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Connor Spencer is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is writing a dissertation on vernacular gender-sexual typologies in the last century of American literary and visual media and the aesthetic category of the "type." His research spans 20th/21st-century American literature, queer and trans studies, aesthetic theory (particularly concerning judgment), the history of sexuality, and visual culture studies. His writing is published in Post45, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, College Literature, and Esse arts + opinions. 

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Banner Image is taken from Popular Science Monthly (c. 1899-1900), courtesy of WikiMedia.

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References

1. Percival Everett, Erasure (Graywolf, 2001), 135.[⤒]
2. For scholarship that addresses the literary marketplace and the production of commodified Black identity, see Scott Thomas Gibson, "Invisibility and the Commodification of Blackness in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Percival Everett's Erasure," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 37, no. 4 (December 13, 2010): 353-369; Rolland Murray, "Not Being and Blackness: Percival Everett and the Uncanny Forms of Racial Incorporation," American Literary History 29, no. 4 (December 1, 2017): 726-52; and Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2023). For scholarship that more directly ties Erasure to the African American literary canon and Black aesthetic movements such as Black Arts, see Brian Yost, "The Changing Same: The Evolution of Racial Self-Definition and Commercialization," Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008): 1314-34; John Brooks, "Antiessentialist Form: The Bebop Effect of Percival Everett's Erasure," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134 (October 1, 2019): 1042-55; and Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (University of Illinois Press, 2017), particularly 67-70 and 137-166. Margaret Russett provides an indispensable introduction to the disruption of racial and other forms of signification in Everett's oeuvre; see "Race under 'Erasure' for Percival Everett, 'A Piece of Fiction,'" Callaloo 28, no. 2 (2005): 358-68.[⤒]
3. It is notable that some non-academic readers have been quicker than scholars to register their discomfort at Everett's typifiying depiction of Bill. As one Goodreads user puts it, "parts of this book are so incredibly moving ... but then [Everett] goes and makes caricatures of women who exhibit some sexuality ... and allows his characters to pretty much blow off the issue of homophobia (note the number of queens in the book, and the avoidance of gay brother bill), and one is left... headscratching." See Ryandake, review of Erasure, by Percival Everett, Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/235863660.[⤒]
4. Everett, Erasure, 182.[⤒]
5. See, for example, Brooks, "Antiessentialist Form"; Gibson, "Invisibility"; and Russett, "Race."[⤒]
6. An important exception to this trend is Anthony Stewart's essay on the concept of the "racial cliché," in which he adroitly demonstrates the different functions of the cliché and how it is a "subjective creation based not on fact but on opinion refracted through convention." Stewart, "Giving the People What they Want: The African American Exception as Racial Cliché in Percival Everett's Erasure," in American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey, ed. James Taylor Carson and Sylvia Söderlind (SUNY Press, 2011), 171. Still, Stewart does not indicate what makes a cliché different from a stereotype, nor why this is his preferred term. In this article, I attempt to build on the work of Stewart and others by theorizing and defining the cliché as an aesthetic category alongside describing the uses to which the novel puts it.[⤒]
7. Everett, Erasure, 3.[⤒]
8. Everett, Erasure, 135.[⤒]
9. Everett, Erasure, 207.[⤒]
10. Everett, Erasure, 213.[⤒]
11. My thinking here follows Lauren Berlant's writing on femininity as a "genre." See Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2008).[⤒]
12. Everett, Erasure, 206.[⤒]
13. Russett, "Race Under 'Erasure' for Percival Everett," 360.[⤒]
14. Everett, Erasure, 212.[⤒]
15. Everett, Erasure, 1.[⤒]
16. For instance, movie executive Wiley Morgenstein tells Monk, then acting as Leigh, that he expected the latter to be "tougher or something ... more street" -- or, as Monk succinctly puts it, more "Black." Everett, Erasure, 217. It is worth noting that Monk uses the Stagg R. Leigh persona to play with the expectations of his interlocutors; he does not, for instance, simply deliver a straightforward stereotype to Morgenstein. Still, Monk fails to consistently wield this persona towards satisfying ends. For instance, he shuts down when "Leigh" is interviewed by Kenya Dunston on television late in the novel.[⤒]
17. Everett, Erasure, 212.[⤒]
18. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (New York University Press, 1999), 95.[⤒]
19. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11.[⤒]
20. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 4.[⤒]
21. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 95.[⤒]
22. Here, readers familiar with queer theory may find potential resonance between Bill's stylization and Leo Bersani's
    argument in favor of the radical sameness of "homo-ness." Bersani argues that, from a psychoanalytic perspective,
    the sameness of homosexual object choice renders difference non-threatening and desirable, for the gay cruising
    subject finds himself everywhere repeated. For reasons that will soon become clear, if Bill recalls the sociological
    archetype of the gay clone who hovered around Bersani's theorizations, there is little in the novel to support a
    reading of the pleasures of the cliché's repetitions. See Leo Bersani, Homos (Harvard University Press, 1995) and
    "Sociability and Cruising" in Is the Rectum a Grave? (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 36-62.[⤒]
23. In particular, see Anthony Stewart's critique of Greil Marcus's and Margaret Russett's arguments in "Giving the People What They Want," 179-184.[⤒]
24. Everett, Erasure, 159.[⤒]
25. Stewart, "Giving the People What They Want," 168.[⤒]
26. Percival Everett, "Signing to the Blind," Callaloo 14, no. 1 (1991): 10.[⤒]
27. Gibson, "Invisibility and the Commodification," 354.[⤒]
28. Sinykin, Big Fiction, 156. See also 152-58 for a discussion of Everett and Erasure.[⤒]
29. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2002), 53-54.[⤒]
30. Anton Zijderveld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (Routledge, 1979), 5, 13.[⤒]
31. Zijderveld, On Clichés, 26. Zijderveld's intensely deterministic account of the relationship between the cliché and thought rhymes with the definition of the stereotype that the American journalist Walter Lippman provides in Public Opinion, the 1922 book cited in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of the term. He writes that the stereotype "precedes the use of reason; [it] is a form of perception, imposes a certain character on the data of our senses before the data reach the intelligence." See Lippman, Public Opinion (Harcourt, 1922), 98, emphasis mine.[⤒]
32. Ruth Amossy, "The Cliché in the Reading Process," trans. Terese Lyons, SubStance 11, no. 2 (1982): 35.[⤒]
33. Amossy, "The Cliché in the Reading Process," 36, 35.[⤒]
34. Amossy, "The Cliché in the Reading Process," 35.[⤒]
35. Amossy, "The Cliché in the Reading Process," 43.[⤒]
36. Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype (Viking Press, 1970), 55.[⤒]
37. Writing on the cliché affirms this fuzzy ontological status: it is not precisely something that we can point to "out there" in the world. This is why Amossy defines the cliché as a "reading effect" rather than something that could be defined in "purely formal terms." Amossy, 34. Tom Grimwood, meanwhile, argues that attempts to "objectify" and disambiguate the cliché from other forms of speech will be shaky at best; far from treating the cliché in postlapsarian terms, we cannot clearly define an "original" and meaning-rich language that has been lost to the overworn forms of modernity. Tom Grimwood, "The Meaning of Clichés," Diacritics 44, no. 4 (2016): 107.[⤒]
38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113.[⤒]
39. To write on the cliché perhaps requires one to assert such judgments, and to do so with utter conviction. For instance, Nicholas Bagnall pans William Wordsworth for abandoning "the poetical devices of his age," bizarrely claiming that he is an author whom "no one reads today except for reluctant schoolchildren, or students of Eng. Lit.," or those who want "a laugh." Nicholas Bagnall, A Defence of Clichés (Constable, 1985), 32.[⤒]
40. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 104.[⤒]
41. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 107, emphasis mine.[⤒]
42. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 120. Conversations with Benjamin Rutter helped me sharpen this point, for which he has my gratitude.[⤒]
43. Everett, Erasure, 160.[⤒]
44. In the case of the closely related aesthetic category of camp, however, the cliché may produce a specific kind of pleasure rather than irritation. After all, when we deem something to be "camp," we register the infelicity or artifice of the object in question, yet we can nonetheless regard its exaggerated, excessive, or trope-ridden qualities with "a tender feeling," as Susan Sontag remarked. Sontag, "Notes on Camp," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Picador, 2001), 292. "[T]he Camp eye," Sontag wrote, "has the power to transform experience." Sontag, "Notes on Camp," 277. But if camp can revalorize the cliché, it may do so with a sardonic edge. Jack Babuscio argues that "[i]rony is the subject matter of camp, and refers here to any highly incongruous contrast between an individual or thing and its context or association." Babuscio, "Camp and Gay Sensibility," in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 21. Michael Dango has productively linked the incongruity of camp with the economic moment of distribution to illuminate camp's taxonomic and descriptive functions. Dango argues that camp stages the differentiation intrinsic to capitalist distribution by collating elements from far-flung cultural sites and contexts. Therefore, camp is an aesthetic category with totality aspirations with special relevance to minoritarian criticism. As Dango writes: "The camp subject, as a site on which social differences positively converge and are referenced at the same time they are assembled into collage, indexes what groupings come together to form something like a society even as they cannot be conflated or collapsed. Camp is the aesthetic category of distribution because it presents condensed taxonomies of a social world excessive of any one subjectivity; it is a strategy of relieving minoritized subjects of the burden of social belonging by making the subject a site for the description of society itself." Dango, "Camp's Distribution: 'Our' Aesthetic Category," Social Text 35, no. 2 (2017): 59. What is potentially campy about Bill's performance of homosexuality is precisely the incongruous nature of its elements paired with Bill's apparent unawareness of his own adherence to cliché, What Dango's account of camp additionally elucidates is how Bill's "self"-stylization might instead illumine a transsubjective social map of differentiated and collaged experiences. Monk, of course, does not see Bill through a camp lens. As will become clear, camp differs from cliché in that it is not weighed down by the pronounced feeling of aesthetic embarrassment, an affect that I call "cringe."[⤒]
45. Tom Grimwood, "Cliché," in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Deirdre Shauna Lynch (Oxford University Press, 30 June 2020), Oxford Academic, no page number.[⤒]
46. Grimwood, "Cliché."[⤒]
47. See Grimwood, "The Meaning of Clichés," 97.[⤒]
48. Walter Redfern, Clichés and Coinages (Basil Blackwell, 1989), 17.[⤒]
49. Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), 5.[⤒]
50. Jakob Norberg makes a related point in his adroitly argued article on the relationship between cliché and copyright law. He argues that "[t]he cliché is a problem in a literary system in which individual authors are supposed to profit from their words, because those who repeat formulations must be condemned as free riders." See Jakob Norberg, "The Tragedy of the Commonplace: Clichés in an Age of Copyright," Fast Capitalism 15, no. 1 (2018), no page number.[⤒]
51. Everett, Erasure, 160.[⤒]
52. Everett, Erasure, 156.[⤒]
53. Everett, Erasure, 156.[⤒]
54. Everett, Erasure, 53.[⤒]
55. Everett, Erasure, 39-40.[⤒]
56. Everett, Erasure, 261, 217.[⤒]
57. Everett, Erasure, 260.[⤒]
58. Everett, Erasure, 45.[⤒]
59. Everett, Erasure, 45, emphasis in original.[⤒]
60. Everett, Erasure, 182.[⤒]
61. For a recent collection of this scholarship, see the 2021 special issue of Humanities on cringe: Wieland Schwanebeck, ed. "Media and Politics in the Age of Cringe." Special issue, Humanities 10, no. 4, 123 (2021). Jason Middleton treats cringe as a subset of a broader aesthetic category of "awkwardness" in his excellent monograph, Documentary's Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship (Routledge, 2014). For a book-length essay on awkwardness itself — one that many of these authors draw from — see Adam Kotsko, Awkwardness (Zero Books, 2010).[⤒]
62. Katja Kanzler, "The Cringe and the Sneer: Structures of Feeling in Veep," Humanities 10, no. 4, 114 (December 2021): 3.[⤒]
63. Weishun Lu, "Shrugging at Ethnic Cringe in the Works of Ed Bok Lee and Marilyn Chin, Contemporary Literature 65, no. 4 (Winter 2024): 542.[⤒]
64. Lu, "Shrugging at Ethnic Cringe," 551.[⤒]
65. Everett, Erasure, 61.[⤒]
66. Everett, Erasure, 61-62.[⤒]
67. Everett, Erasure, 62.[⤒]
68. Nick Salvato, "Cringe Criticism: On Embarrassment and Tori Amos," Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 687.[⤒]
69. Grimwood, "Cliché."[⤒]
70. Everett, Erasure, 155-56.[⤒]
71. Everett, Erasure, 156.[⤒]
72. Quoted in Sinykin, Big Fiction, 157.[⤒]
73. Sinykin, Big Fiction, 156.[⤒]
74. Murray, "Not Being and Blackness," 729.[⤒]
75. Everett, Erasure, 214.[⤒]
76. Everett, Erasure, 215.[⤒]
77. Everett, Erasure, 256.[⤒]
78. Everett, Erasure, 216, emphasis in original.[⤒]