Van Go’s Pharmakon: “Pharmacology” and Democracy in Percival Everett’s Erasure

Long overdue are scholarly close readings that shed light on the irreverent homage to the Ralph Ellison pervading Percival Everett’s Erasure, a novel less about Everett than about Ellison’s democratic aesthetics. Narrator/protagonist, “Monk” Ellison, keeps faith with his esteemed precursor’s aesthetic idealism until his writing career is on the verge of collapse, his ensuing disillusionment perverting his idealism into vengeful, comically villainous malice against an American public that confines black novelists to the role of feeding its addiction to the “drug” of bestial black stereotypes—a poison not a remedy to an ailing democratic body according to Ellison.