My Dissertation - Is Existo Amo Ut Interdum – it be like that sometimes: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Satire and Modern American Racism

 

Introduction: Tu Dormis, Tu Perdis – You Snooze, You Lose[1]

To read satire is to read a culture. To understand satire is to understand a culture. There is an effective historical example that supports the very concept of the accurate efficiency of satire in cultural comprehension. Plato, upon being asked by the tyrannical Dionysius of Syracuse for a text that accurately described ancient Athenian society, didn’t turn to the legal works of Solon and Draco, the tragic works of Euripides, the histories of Herodotus or even his own philosophical ancestors in Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. Rather, Plato sent the tyrant his copy of the plays of Aristophanes, the man renowned in the West as being the first comedian and a potential forefather of satire itself[2]. Plato is insisting that, in order to understand the culture of ancient Athens, you first must read between the lines of said culture. Satire inhabits that microscopic interstice between reality and fiction. His suggestion of Aristophanes as an apropos vehicle for understanding a cultural context more accurately than any other available text is analogous to what I am doing: using Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2016) to explore racism in modern America.

 

The Sellout is a rip-roaring, no-holds-barred polemic against the cultural and historical structures that have allowed racist institutions to pervade and pollute American society. It is a post-racial narrative that itself satirically criticizes the conceived existence of a post-racial America. To summarise, the nameless narrator decides that, once his father is gunned down by policemen and his hometown is removed from civic cartography, he must reintroduce slavery and segregation into the neighbourhood to put it back on the map, both literally and metaphorically. The narrator mingles with an old man named Hominy, a fictitious former child star of the very real series Little Rascals; a bus driver named Marpessa; and a group of social-climbers founded by his father, dubbed the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, now led by the hyper-revolutionary Foy Cheshire. It is Foy Cheshire who calls our narrator “The Sellout” (95) for the first time in the novel, one of the nearest instances where our narrator is explicitly titled. The novel explores every prejudicial and societal vice it can find and openly mocks it[3], leaving nothing unchallenged so that, by the end, there is a feeling of cathartic relief that we are now free from being satirized or mocked once more.

 

And the novel is inherently and hilariously satirical. It caustically ridicules societal structures, using the classic technique of exaggerating the truth and creating a hyper-reality to commentate on the true reality, undermining hierarchical structures by means of a “militant irony” that Northrop Frye argued was the key definition of satire itself[4]. However, Beatty has been very hesitant to call it a satire and himself a satirist, saying the label is “so limiting” that he tries to resist it[5]. I believe Beatty, by trying to avoid the label “satire”, is in fact satirizing the literati for trying to label him as such, like they cannot wait to declare someone the next Swift, Twain or Orwell. He is also deflecting the notion of exceptionalism being assigned to him, exceptionalism being a concept I will return to later. The word “satirist” could indeed be pigeonholing for an author, seeming more like a Twain-esque caricature. But The Sellout is emphatically satirical as we shall see, and so Beatty must be a satirist in some fashion. Beatty thus fits into a twenty-first century American movement of satire that is analogous to the eighteenth-century satires in Britain and Ireland perfected by Pope and Swift, among others[6].

 

To look at exactly what satire is will help in understanding its value to a given culture. The word’s origins have been a bone of academic contention since the dawn of the twentieth century[7]; however, it does etymologically mean “a medley” when taken from the Latin phrase “lanx satura”. The word now has distinctly modern connotations; more often than not it refers to a political weapon used by writers to highlight social iniquities. The way a satiric mode is employed is so diverse that to call satire a “genre” is to do it a disservice. Satire relies upon a reader that is willing to “bring to the text what they know of the world”[8] in order for it to be successful. The end-goal isn’t to make one laugh but think. In this way, if we take Horace Walpole’s maxim that “the world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel”[9] as gospel, satire is the ultimate vehicle for tragicomedy: it makes us laugh while thinking, weep while feeling, all simultaneously. A satire must construct its tragedy in a humorous way and its comedy in a lachrymose fashion in order to be satirical. I believe this is why Beatty chose satire as his mode for talking about racism. There are very few other modes that can create that atmosphere.

 

I am going to begin by exploring the history of Beatty’s satire, looking at two thematic predecessors in the Roman satirist Juvenal and the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. I will explore how those writers used satire to comment caustically on their cultures and highlight how Beatty’s satirical voice reflects “many of the same modalities[10]” that were used by older satirists, chiefly Juvenal and Swift. My second chapter will take an in-depth look at the prologue of The Sellout and how that is a perfect litmus test for the novel as a whole and its satirical overtones. I will explore key concepts concerning racism and how Beatty manages to deal with such a heavy topic in such a light and humorous manner. My third chapter will take a broader overview of the two most important characters in the book (the narrator and the old man Hominy) and explore the different literary techniques that Beatty uses to contextualise these characters in a post-racial America. In doing all this, I will try to make clear why Beatty’s use of satire is a more effective and realistic way to build a literary conversation and thus a cultural conversation regarding race than another literary mode or style of cultural performance.

 

 

Chapter One: Semper Fi, Semper Funky – Always Loyal, Always Funky[11]

It’s worth starting off by analysing what I believe are the satirical forebears for The Sellout: the works of Juvenal and Jonathan Swift. Juvenal’s Satires, written at the beginning of the second century AD, are a scathing indictment of the city of ancient Rome and its citizenry. Juvenal believed in an order, and thus his most violent invective was often reserved for the people that threatened to disrupt the existing pattern of society[12]. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal was written in Ireland in 1729 at a time when Irish poverty was on the rise and the pleonectic landlords were apathetic to the plight of their tenants. Juvenal’s Rome and Swift’s Ireland are both societies that are greatly echoed in Beatty’s America, with the satirists presenting what could be described as a hyper-real version of their actual society[13]. However, in constructing fictional realities that are fake or impossible, as far as our reality is concerned, the three writers force the reader to examine or re-examine their own concept of reality and understand more clearly the world in which they live. All the authors too reveal analogous pictures of the assumed moral superiority in their respective cultures despite the satirists showing that the opposite is an almost axiomatic truth.

 

To start chronologically, when Juvenal is thought to have been writing[14] his Satires, Rome was attempting to recover from the imperial reigns of Nero and Domitian, two emperors who are probably best-known nowadays as metonyms for excess, indulgence, and moral depravity. It was a period of unparalleled licentiousness. So, when Juvenal writes “it is harder not to be writing satires”[15], you really feel his disdain for the society at the time. He doesn’t see any vindication in writing an ode, a dramatic play, or a treatise of some kind; he must satirize Rome because it needs to be satirized.

 

It’s important to examine how he satirized a society of such extravagance. One notable aspect of Juvenal’s Satires that isn’t exactly absent in Swift or Beatty but certainly isn’t as prevalent in their works is the sheer violence of his verse. Taking aim at the sexual debauchery of the time, Juvenal snaps at one point and says scornfully, “his niece (…) had her row of abortions, and every embryo lump was the living spit of Uncle”[16]. Maybe the irony is lost in translation, but neither Beatty nor Swift seem to have such poison in their pens, such odium in their hearts; or, if they do, they aren’t necessarily as shameless about revealing it. But such abhorrence was deemed necessary in order to mock the ruling classes sufficiently. Similarly scathing opprobrium can be found once Juvenal writes the following as a warning to an enemy: “you should undress and waddle into the bath, your belly still swollen with undigested peacock-meat – a lightning heart-attack, with no time to make your final will”[17]. Roman society was built on moral superiority, with emperors believing in their power to legislate morality, something that has not gone down well historically[18]. In this way, one can look at the Bishops’ Ban of 1599[19], the 1737 Licensing Act[20] and modern-day cases of censorship[21]. These laws attempted to control and raise the moral standards of the society, in the same way licensing acts and laws concerning free speech do in modern societies. Satire is the most belligerent literary mode and one that will always be the first to be stricken down in a war on freedom.

 

It is crucial to note that the Satires were written over the course of Juvenal’s whole literary life, probably spanning a thirty-year period. So, the Rome that Juvenal satirizes at the start of Satires is one that no longer exists when he finishes writing[22]. The emperors Trajan and Hadrian had led Rome out of moral depravity and into the time period that the eminent historian Edward Gibbon remarked was “the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”[23]. The satirical elements at the beginning are very different to those at the end because Juvenal had to redirect the target of his satire, like a hunter slowly and carefully stalking their prey[24]. Rome was an erratic enough society where only a few years could drastically shape the course of the principate, so writing over the course of roughly twenty-six years makes satirizing the society no small task. Whereas Juvenal’s earlier verses were brutally harsh, his later satires take on a more forthright tone. When he says that “some are so blind with greed that they live for their fortunes rather than making their fortunes enhance their lives”[25], the violent imagery is replaced with punching adages and moralizing verse. Over time, Juvenal’s tone had to change because Rome changed. The same tone that satirically mocked Nero, an emperor of ill-repute, would not have the same effect upon Trajan, a more honourable and distinguished emperor. Juvenal’s ability to satirize the whole time period shows the adaptability of satire as a literary mode and shows how, in the words of Terry Eagleton, Juvenal’s satire is part of the “rich heritage of social satire” that is dotted throughout literary history[26].

 

Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal does not contain such outward violence as Juvenal; instead, Swift’s mockery of avaricious landlords and the ruling classes could be considered the apotheosis of irony in the English language[27]. Both Juvenal and Swift create the shock factor in their works that chill an audience to their core. Where Juvenal uses violence, Swift’s speaker presents such a moral vacuum to the reader that one can’t help but think that A Modest Proposal is the masterwork of a deranged psychopath in the field of economics. Swift’s parody of literary style and form lends itself to the satirical nature of his work, too. His adaptation of the classical rhetorical mode for his diatribe into a more modern style of writing still connects him strongly to Juvenal[28]. Both satirists take aim at the moral depravities of their respective times. This is the duty of the satirist.

 

Swift’s tract attacks the poverty that has afflicted an Ireland that is at the hands of rapacious English landlords. His solution to mend Ireland’s economic inequalities is to promote infantile anthropophagy, or at least the selling of poor children for the purposes of consumption. Even the shock factor of Swift’s solution is analogous to Beatty’s story of resegregation and the reintroduction of slavery. Swift’s narrator uses such a blasé tone when he says things like “the Want of Venison might be well supplied by the Bodies of young Lads and Maidens”[29] that the reader could be forgiven for being convinced by his reasoning, or even for missing the cannibalistic overtones.

 

The spirit and structure come across so logically and with such erudition that the tract reads just like a modern economic paper, modern anthropological paper and travelogue all rolled into one. The narrator’s belief that he is correct is like Beatty’s narrator not effectively realizing that what he has done is so abhorrent. An assumption of moral supremacy is highly satirical in relation to Swift’s work precisely because his plan is unimplementable in a society that cares. Swift is attacking this very presumption that the current society is morally strong enough and needs no moral correction.

 

Of course, in order for it to be moralizing, satire must be grounded in historicity; indeed, it is one of the few technical requirements of it as a literary mode. Juvenal is effectively reporting on day-to-day life in Rome at times and he relies heavily upon history himself as a moralizing factor in attempting to emend perceived vices. Swift’s work is grounded in the fact that infanticide was a growing social problem amongst poorer people in Ireland. This stemmed from greater inaccessibility of sufficient foods, due to a serious crop failure for the preceding two years, and a general inability to keep all family members alive[30]. This inequality likely emanated from the generic attitudes of the English ruling classes towards Ireland, seen more notably than anywhere in Edmund Spenser’s vitriolic justification of colonization from the 1590s, A View of the Present State of Ireland.

 

Swift ironically rewrites Spenser’s tract to chide those exact ruling classes and take them to task over their poor governance. Swift’s “view” of the poor Irish people, if he weren’t being ironic, almost confirms an English presupposition that they were all savages. Swift has a moral obligation to chastise the avarice of the English ruling class because that is the satirical intention: to mock power. His assertion that the increasing number of children the poor people are having is “a very great additional grievance”[31] is written as if from the point of view of someone in power. Swift’s ironic satirisation of this voice wryly undermines upper-class indifference to lower classes. If T.S. Eliot’s comment that “the satirist is a stern moralist castigating the vices of his time or place”[32] is to ring true, then there are few who are better at their job than Jonathan Swift and few places where that work was more effectively done than in A Modest Proposal.

 

The “militant irony” that Northop Frye pinpoints as the key to the satiric mode is found nowhere more strongly than in Swift’s satire. So influential has A Modest Proposal been that The Sellout could itself be considered a modest proposal in how to mend race relations in the United States. Juvenal, Swift and Beatty all try to formulate a solution to their respective societal evils. Juvenal chooses scathing opprobrium as his medium; Swift crafts a quasi-academic paper; and Beatty constructs a novel filled with cultural pinpoints and historical depths. There is a clear satiric thread stretching from Juvenal’s ankle-biting harangues, through Swift’s ironic juxtaposition of social stratification, to Beatty’s post-racial “utopia”. The three satirists instilled in the reader the belief that the world in which they lived was in need of mending, and that if they didn’t have the solution to the problem, it is because nobody who should have the solution was capable of solving the problem.

 

Arthur Pollard declared that the satirist must act like a preacher because their sole aim is to “persuade and convince”[33]. Juvenal, Swift and Beatty are solely focused on persuading and convincing their readers of something. Notwithstanding the great gaps in history between the three writers, and the fact that they are each criticizing three very different societies, their works share a common thread. These three satirists have found in their culture something deplorable to which society is turning a blind eye. For Juvenal, it’s the licentious degradation of Roman imperial society; for Swift, it’s growing inequality and food shortages in Ireland; and for Beatty, it’s the institutionalized racism that pollutes modern American society.

 

The role of the satirist in any society is by definition incredibly limiting and almost paradoxical. They have to portray accurately their own cultural context, to such an extent that satiric works could be considered historical records, while also relating to the human condition in such a way that their work has long-lasting relevancy. That is the reason Juvenal and Swift have thus far passed the test of time: they are satirical artists with a keen sense for cultural analysis. Satire is an inherently social production, a highly specific form of cultural criticism[34]. Juvenal’s observation that only bread and circuses concern the working-class[35], so the ruling class can get away with their venality and bribery, is echoed in Rousseau’s famous paraphrasing of a princess’s advice to “let them eat cake”[36]. Juvenal’s portrait of the city of Rome is a direct forebear of Beatty’s Washington D.C.; Beatty himself even compares the two cities on multiple occasions throughout The Sellout.

 

Satirists must straddle the line between cultural and historical relevancy. Satire is definitively “of its time” and strictly defined by its intentions; it wouldn’t be satirical if it weren’t. However, the best satires are the ones ungoverned by ephemerality. They must fight on the fronts of relevancy and posterity simultaneously. There are strong satires that accurately portray the society of their times but have lost cultural currency to the tides of time. The satire of Harper Lee springs to mind. But the stronger satires, like those I’m discussing here, go beyond their present day and end up concisely questioning the human nature that governs the ills they are satirizing while also being documentary records of their societies. The common thread between Juvenal, Swift and Beatty is that, over the course of history, human nature has not evolved as much as one might presume. Juvenal’s relevancy stands in the violence required in his verse in order to scold the Roman élite. His monologue and rhetorical style influenced Jonathan Swift, whose lampooning of British élites required the highest levels of ironic and parodical absurdity. Swift’s absurdities thus influenced Paul Beatty, whose savage wit and masterful plotting have created a satire so visceral, so damning and so poignant that it creates a highly accurate picture of modern-day America and its relationship with all races.

 

Chapter Two: Pecunia Sermo, Somnium Ambulo – Money Talks, Bullshit Walks[37]

Beatty’s prologue and epilogue are a successful synopsis of the whole novel’s tone, themes, style and cultural context. Beatty’s novel was published in 2016, a year of paramount importance when one is discussing race relations in modern-day America and the hypothesis of the “post-racial”. It is the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency and the year Donald Trump was elected, a definitive shift in America’s interracial relationships. Beatty’s story can only be satirical in a world where an African-American person has been president. Its use of slavery and segregation is directly juxtapositional to the feeling that came over people when Obama was elected; a feeling that “racism is over” and that race was no longer a “barrier to success”[38].

 

The Sellout opens highly irreverently with the subversive and comedic line, “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything” (1). We laugh at this line due to what the philosopher Simon Critchley says is the “relief theory” of humour: laughing because it is a release of pent-up nervous energy[39]. This joke could make a white audience uncomfortable as it plays on stereotypes that they like to think they refuse to acknowledge. Therefore, the audience laughs because they know that they should respond in some way, and they believe laughter is the easiest escape from an uncomfortable situation.

 

But what else does this joke say? It establishes the novel’s jovial mood, its jocosity grounded in real-world solemnity. By showing us the madness of the world, “humour calls on us to face the folly and change the situation in which we find ourselves.”[40] That is to say, humour challenges us to think. Horace Walpole’s aforementioned apothegm still rings true: the world is a comedy to those who think. Therefore, to joke about more serious topics is to blend the tragedy with the comedy into the satirical. The power of Beatty’s satire lies in the thought-provoking manner in which it uses humour. He doesn’t sacrifice humour for plainspokenness so that his message is understood by its readers, he does quite the opposite: he embraces and revels in drollness.

 

The narrator is in Washington D.C. because he is on trial at the Supreme Court for the enslavement of old man Hominy and the segregation of a middle school in Los Angeles. So, Beatty sees it fitting to draw a comparison between Washington D.C. and ancient Rome, noting the common “wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues and Doric columns” (4). The similarities between the two run deeper than mere mentions of analogous architecture; he also historically binds the two together by saying, “be it ancient Rome or modern-day America, you’re either citizen or slave” (6). Beatty satirically shows that, despite the passage of time, not much has changed in the human inclination to enslave. There is a multiplicity of important ties to ancient Rome that Beatty includes in the prologue, most notably his tongue-in-cheek search for a Latin motto for the African-American race, a point I will come to presently.

 

I’ve highlighted some rather general points of stylistic or modal similitude between Beatty and Juvenal, but certainly in Beatty’s prologue, the characteristic “black misanthropy”[41] of Juvenal’s work is found when Beatty’s narrator visits the public zoo in Washington. A white woman remarks how “presidential” the silver-backed gorilla looks, and that the gorilla is even named “Baraka” (5). Beatty’s dehumanization of the former president and his narrator is simultaneously grounding his story in reality and acting satirically towards that very same reality[42]. This animalization is further grounded in both satire and reality when Beatty points to the landmark story of Dred Scott at the Supreme Court[43]. Here, Beatty cites the real words of Justice Roger Taney, calling Scott a “black biped ‘with no rights the white man was bound to respect’” (8). Juvenal often animalized humans in order to mock them too, using animals’ “natural sociability” to criticize human perversion[44]. Dehumanization is seen in Swift too when he explains how children have to be a certain age in order to be a “saleable commodity”[45]. Beatty’s designation of Scott as a “biped”, and the metonymic use of Scott for the African-American experience at the Supreme Court, grounds him not just in historic legitimacy, but satirical authenticity too.

 

Tim Wise, the American writer and racial activist, highlighted a “new kind of racism” that emerged during the campaign, election and presidency of Barack Obama. He called it “Racism 2.0”. Previous forms of racism, or “Racism 1.0”, were constructed on what Wise calls “old-fashioned bigotry”[46]. They were structured upon an America whose principal problem was the “color-line”, in the words of W.E.B. DuBois[47]. Racism 2.0 is an entirely different beast when compared to Racism 1.0. While an obvious color-line has possibly been eradicated, Racism 2.0 is effectively a form of exceptionalism; that is, where one race assumes racism is dead because they have accepted someone exceptional from another race into their own. Barack Obama is the perfect lens through which exceptionalism can be scrutinized. He is acclaimed by white America because he is exceptional and not because he is African-American; his race is merely a lucky coincidence for white America. Racism 2.0 could therefore be defined as a latent form of racism because it is harder to identify.

 

So how does this new-grade Racism 2.0 fit into The Sellout and Beatty’s prologue? To start with, the narrator is indeed a figure of what is called “black exceptionalism”. It is easy to see how figures like Obama, or even Paul Beatty himself, could be considered figures of black exceptionalism. They have excelled in their respective fields in ground-breaking ways. Beatty’s narrator too is a figure of black exceptionalism because his recognition comes from “selling out” his people with the reinstitution of slavery and segregation.[48] If anything, the narrator is the satirical version of a figure of black exceptionalism because his fame is acquired certainly through exceptional means, but in a markedly satirical manner. This satirical view of black exceptionalism reflects Beatty’s laconic statement that “everything is satirical”[49]. Beatty himself has lambasted the concept of exceptionalism in terms of race because he has said that racism is at its worst when it is forced[50]. Black exceptionalism is undoubtedly the forced empowerment of African-American people by white people, so it is therefore the worst kind of racism. The latency of Racism 2.0 carries more danger with it than it would appear at first glance.

 

Beatty’s narrator views himself at times as an exceptional figure because he tried in his adolescence to devise a Latin motto for the African-American people, taking it upon himself to designate a phrase to a whole race of people. His search for a “calling card for an entire race that was raceless on the surface, but quietly understood by those in the know to be very, very black” (10) leads him to belittle his own race when compared to others who already have a motto. This allegorical search for a phrase that could be “embroidered onto kitchen wall-hangings” (10) speaks to a lack of representation for African-American people in governmental affairs and public life in general.

 

Obama’s election was thought to be a post-racial panacea but, the truth is quite the opposite. Tim Wise cites polls from Gallup that say that fewer than fifty percent of African-Americans feel they have as good a chance of getting a job as white Americans; the same percentage stands for African-Americans who feel they have equal access to education; and fifty-two percent feel they can access affordable housing as easily as anyone. For white Americans, when asked the same questions, the polls produce percentages of more than seventy-five percent, eighty percent, and eighty-five percent respectively[51].

 

By joking about the deviation between how white Americans view the African-American experience of modern-day America, and how African-Americans view their own experience, Beatty plays upon forms of humour. He toys with what Critchley calls the “accepted practices of a given society”[52]. Beatty’s narrator’s attempt to conjure up a motto for African-Americans is conflicted with the woman in the zoo who says apologetically, in order to make up for her racially-insensitive gorillian calumny, that “some of my best friends are monkeys” (5). The white woman in the story believes her abject racism is excusable, proving the satirical shortcomings of her own race.

 

These two paths of life in America are juggled by Beatty exquisitely because he manages to mock everyone equally. When he says of his narrator’s search for the Latin motto that “the shaky noun declension (…) would be the closest most of them ever get to being white, to reading white” (13), he is scorning everything: the lack of access to a Classical education for African-Americans, the attitudes of white, waspy Ivy League-educated Americans to those who try to diversify the field of Classics, and the fundamental futility for some in learning a dead language. Beatty’s war on all fronts is his work’s essence. In the midst of all the gravity that could come with a satire about racism and slavery, his tone is undoubtedly light-hearted and risiferous[53]. It’s worth exploring further how and why Beatty longs to provoke that laughter that most people feel shouldn’t be provoked.

 

Beatty makes efficient use of the three theories of humour that John Morreall has highlighted in his Philosophy of Laughter and Humour: the relief theory, the superiority theory (superiority over others), and the incongruity theory (the expectation of the unexpected). Relief as I said stems from the release of pent-up nervous energy through laughter; superiority is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “the sudden glory arising from sudden Conception of some Eminency in ourselves, by Comparison with the Infirmities of others”[54]; and incongruity is what Francis Hutcheson says is “some out-of-the-way descriptions of natural objects, to which we never compare our state at all”[55]. There are many instances in which Beatty deploys these three theories to produce moments of humour.

 

Relief comes, more often than not, from laughing in an uncomfortable situation. Beatty certainly makes a large part of his reading demographic uncomfortable with repeated use of the ‘n’ word and a consistent mention of what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek would call ‘unknown knowns’[56]. Beatty’s joke at the end of the prologue, “let’s get this hanging party started” (24), is evidence of the relief theory of humour in action. The humorous feeling of superiority is triggered when the narrator is getting help from a policewoman in lighting his joint for smoking. He says, “I’m getting high in the highest court in the land” (7). The narrator’s feeling of superiority over all notions of the law is palpable and produces humorous moments. This joke could also be considered an example of the incongruity theory, but one of the funniest jokes in the prologue fits that category too. As the narrator is approaching the Lincoln Memorial, he remarks:

If Honest Abe had come to life and somehow managed to lift his bony twenty-three-foot, four-inch frame from his throne, what would he say? What would he do? Would he break-dance? Would he pitch pennies against the curbside? Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, that the people he freed were now slaves to rhythm, rap, and predatory lending, and that today his skill set would be better suited to the basketball court than the White House? There he could catch the rock on the break, pull up for a bearded three-pointer, hold the pose, and talk shit as the ball popped the net. The Great Emancipator, you can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him. (4)

 

With each clause, Beatty takes us further from the source of the joke, only to return to its roots by the end of the paragraph. Each non sequitur manages to fit within Beatty’s waggish system. We laugh because the joke gets more and more implausible and ridiculous than it was at its conception. Beatty’s wide-ranging and repeated deployment of the three theories of humour that Morreall and Critchley have highlighted must lead us to question why Beatty wants his audience to laugh about topics that one could be forgiven for thinking were not potential sources of humour.

 

The use of humour as a means of implanting ideas into your audience or getting your message across to your audience could be considered a definition of satire. This brings me back to Plato’s use of Aristophanes as a means by which one could understand Athens. In order for us to think, Beatty must make us laugh and force us to examine the lines between reality and culture. Beatty’s epilogue is the ideal illustration of this. The picture Beatty draws, of Los Angelians celebrating wildly at the inauguration of “the black dude” (289), is somewhat bifocal: it is simultaneously hilarious while also leaving something of a sour taste in your mouth. The reader ought not to laugh, yet they do. The other striking image, of Foy Cheshire jingoistically waving the American flag and feeling like “the United States of America had finally paid off its debts” (289), is hilarious when coupled with its grave political undertones.

 

Beatty’s epilogue brings with its humour something that has been discussed in American life for roughly three decades now: color-blindness. Americans have been “constantly bombarded by depictions of race relations in the media which suggest that discriminatory racial barriers have been dismantled”[57]. Beatty’s epilogue with its “settling of the debt” to African-Americans seems to mock this belief because obviously, racial barricades have not been torn down. As Beatty’s narrator sardonically puts it back to the overjoyed Foy Cheshire, “what about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor?” (289) In the events of the novel’s world, the narrator is still able to recognize the blatant hypocrisy in the color-blindness argument. The problem for America is still the color-line; the triumph of individuals cannot serve as empirical proof of widespread systemic change[58]. The election of someone like Barack Obama, or even Paul Beatty himself winning the Man-Booker prize for The Sellout, becoming the first American novelist to do so, is not evidence for a shift in culture. They are exceptional achievements by people who happen to be African-American, but their success does not rest solely upon their racial background; rather, their success should not rest solely on their racial background. The arguments that base themselves off the outstanding accomplishments of these men are grounded in this new-grade Racism 2.0 that is safer than older forms of racism initially. It could end up being far more dangerous, however. Much like the power of satire itself, Racism 2.0’s perilousness could lie in the likelihood that it outlasts the time period in which it was established.

 

Beatty’s prologue also provides a strong example of his lampooning of tradition, a key to any satirical text as the mode has to mock the tradition it inherits[59]. Beatty’s narrator, inhabiting the courtroom in such a nonchalant manner, is a spoof of a canonical text of literature about the African-American judicial experience: Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960). Beatty has already nominally mocked Lee’s novel when, in his previous novel Slumberland, he titled a pornographic film involving a chicken “To Fill A Mockingbird”[60]. He also chided Atticus Finch for the loss of the court case with his traditional wry tone in another previous novel, Tuff[61]. The narrator even mentions later in The Sellout how he expected the courtroom to be the exact same as it is in Lee’s novel (269). However, in The Sellout, Beatty takes the judicial process to task, diverging from the approach Lee took. Lee presents it in a seemingly pragmatic way, whereas Beatty’s irreverence serves mostly to undermine the judicial system and accentuate its flaws. Beatty’s narrator’s quip that it’s a “trip being the latest in the long line of landmark race-related cases” (8) is concurrently hilarious and thought-provoking. Harper Lee went about portraying the African-American experience at trial in an explicitly realistic way, Beatty did not. However, Beatty’s portrayal is more accurate because of its status as an evident lampoon which forces us to examine what is really occurring and think about it, instead of looking at Lee’s realistic piece of fiction and taking that as gospel. Realism holds a mirror up to real life, satire a magnifying glass.

 

Lee is somewhat satirical in her use of child narration for a discussion on race-related issues, but I feel she doesn’t go quite far enough to portray accurately the African-American experience. On the other hand, Beatty’s full-blown satire doesn’t just tell us how things are, it shows us how bad things could be. In doing so, it causes us to contemplate what we perceive reality to be and allows us to attempt to adjust suitably. In this way, Beatty successfully lampoons Lee’s novel but also shows that his vision of the post-racial courtroom is more realistic than Lee’s. Beatty’s satire magnifies the social problems he has highlighted instead of merely reflecting them like Lee does. Whereas Lee’s discussion of race possibly misses the mark due to the counter-productive lionization of the white Atticus Finch as fiction’s “most enduring image of racial heroism”[62], Beatty’s discussion of race is as accurate now as it would have been in the 1960s, and potentially as accurate as it will be in fifty years’ time as well. It’s no wonder that there are calls for To Kill A Mockingbird to be removed from schools: it’s outdated[63]. To Kill A Mockingbird mocks Racism 1.0, whereas The Sellout is an antidotal pasquinade for both Racism 1.0 and Racism 2.0. While The Sellout hasn’t quite had the opportunity to outdate itself yet, there is no doubt in my mind that its relevancy will outlast that of To Kill A Mockingbird. Beatty’s parody of Lee’s work magnifies the problems African-Americans experience in the judicial system. Instead of just telling us how things are, Beatty satirically scrutinizes them in order to show us how they really are.

 

Beatty’s prologue and epilogue are farcical jibes at the latent racism that has been established alongside the rise of Barack Obama. The humour within those chapters exposes faults in modern-day America’s conversations about race. Beatty’s narrator and his lawyer Hampton Fiske realise that what awaits them is not a “simple case of standard black inner-city absurdity” (15), but something far more exceptional. The narrator recognises that he is an exceptionalist and yet he still “others” himself in the eyes of other characters in the novel. When he sees a woman in the courtroom staring at him and giving him the middle finger, he remarks that “to her I’m like a remixed Anglo-Saxon appropriation of black music” (16). The narrator views himself as exceptional in a potentially positive way, but he knows the feeling of otherness that people direct towards him is a form of exceptionalism, too. The exceptionalisation of Beatty’s narrator magnifies the treatment people like Barack Obama have been subjected to throughout their lives. Beatty’s prologue, a subversive and humorous take on this exceptionalism and on the latency of Racism 2.0, is an inherently accurate portrayal of race relations in modern-day America, possibly more accurate than most audiences would have liked it to be.

Chapter Three: Ullus Niger Vir Quisnam Est Non Insanus Ist Rabidus – Any Black Man Who Isn’t Paranoid Is Crazy[64]

Beatty’s characters are immense creations, at the same time lampooning America and themselves, contradicting one another and acting in a way that seems decidedly unreal on the face of it, but is far more accurate once their complexities are further explored. The two main characters I will focus on are the narrator and Hominy, the old man who submits himself to the narrator’s proprietorship. Hominy views himself as a “Race Man” but he is inherently a satirical realization of a “Race Man”[65]. I must first look at how the narrator found himself in the position of relying upon Hominy to aid him in his post-racial quest to reintroduce slavery and segregation into his hometown.

 

The narrator’s father, a social scientist and local “Nigger Whisperer”, a role where he talks down suicidal members of the African-American community, is killed at the hands of the police in what is the novel’s only moment of tragic realism. Killings of African-American people by police disprove the conservative idea that America is “post-racial”; race-related violence occurs mostly because people kill those who are near them, and only police can “kill with the weight of the state behind them”[66]. This is symptomatic of the hangover from slavery and Jim Crow laws[67]. In a world where the Foucauldian nature of Juvenal’s seminal question “who is to keep guard over the guards themselves”[68] has rarely been more pertinent, Beatty too questions the system of checks and balances in modern America. People of colour are disproportionally killed by law enforcement officers in America[69], and Beatty’s inclusion of this tragic episode grounds his story in reality while still questioning whether America can ever be “post-racial”. Despite his narrative being one that could only exist in a post-racial world, the satirical nature of Beatty’s work means that he can still call into question the systematic killing of African-Americans by law enforcement agencies.

 

Beatty makes use of the Jungian principle of enantiodromia, the tendency towards an unconscious opposite, to upend our expectations when, instead of taking a moment to take stock of the tragic killing of his father, the narrator says, “I thought his death was a trick. Another one of his elaborate schemes to educate me on the plight of the black race” (43). Beatty has reached the tragic extreme of his story, so the novel turns into the opposite of that: a comedic, farcical outlook on race in America. Beatty’s use of psychoanalytical principle is not only hilarious because the narrator’s father was himself a social scientist, but it also serves Beatty’s satirical purpose in making the reader laugh when laughter isn’t necessarily expected.

 

One literary technique that Beatty deploys is the use of neologistic language and what Emil Draitser specifies to be “lexical variety”, something emanating from satire’s very definition[70]. Beatty’s creation of the word “beigeoloid” (142) to describe a bi-racial family is one such example of neologism. The comedic effect of neologism is woven into a text’s fabric by the author[71]; it becomes an integral part of the work’s DNA because language has the capability to harness its own comedic effect without any context. However, then to contextualise it here is to give it further humorous meaning while also allowing it to mean something by itself. The word “beigeoloid” can thus only fit into a narrative concerning the reintroduction of slavery and segregation, just like it could only work in the post-racial world of the novel.

 

Lexical variety as well is a key technique used by satirists[72]. It is a way to enliven a story and keep it interesting, two facets upon which satire is dependent if it is to be satirical. The use of obscure vocabulary is prevalent in The Sellout. Examples include: “cumulonimbus” (47); “omphaloskepsis” (124); “hikikomori” (274). It’s worth looking at the context of each of these words in the novel to explore why Beatty chose them over more normal words. Cumulonimbus, the only type of cloud capable of producing thunder, hail, and lightning, is used in a simile to describe a talk the narrator’s father is going to give entitled “Income Disparity as Determined by Race”. Omphaloskepsis, the technical term for staring at your navel to act as a meditation guide, is the word with which the narrator’s opponent in a childhood spelling-bee won, while he lost out on the word “bonbon”. Hikikomori, the Japanese term for severe social withdrawal, is used to describe the keyboard warriors who have racism-fueled quarrels on the Internet. These three words, just three of many, provide humour to Beatty’s story through their incongruity while also adding to the story as a whole. The cumulonimbus perfectly describes the torrential downpour of income inequality in America; the omphaloskepsis, effectively a technical term for navel-gazing, is used humorously to describe the precocity of children; and the hikikomori perfectly describes the type of people and type of discourse that have polluted America extensively since the turn of the twenty-first century and the widespread advent of the Internet. Beatty’s lexical variety assists in grounding the story in reality while retaining the humour.

 

The names that Beatty uses in The Sellout are also particularly significant for the text’s overall meaning. Marpessa, the bus driver whose name literally means “gobbler” or “the snatched”, is a character from Greek mythology who found herself the subject of a love contest between the god Apollo and Idas, a renowned soldier[73]. Her involvement in a love triangle in mythology echoes the view that Beatty’s narrator gives us on Marpessa. It speaks to the pain the narrator felt when she hit puberty and left him and Hominy to watch cartoons while “the lure of older boys with drug money and sperm counts” (72) took her away from them. This act of satirical quasi-euhemerism by Beatty is intriguing because Marpessa’s name links her to the repressed past of the narrator.

 

Using the name Dickens for the main town of the novel is highly shrewd by Beatty. Not only does it link him to Charles Dickens, one of the great novelists of the English language, but it also satirically lends itself to the story. By calling the city Dickens, readers will instantly imagine smog-filled Victorian London, a place of cruel and intense life and work. The industrialized city of London, soon to be a concrete jungle, is on the surface the polar opposite to the “urban safari” (67) of Dickens, but that does not mean that this “Last Bastion of Blackness” (150) is any less disillusioning. Dickens doesn’t exist anymore, hence the narrator’s attempts to “reanimate” (93) it, much like industrializing London is no longer explicitly visible in present-day London, but the legacy of both survives to this day. Beatty shows the deeper meaning of the name Dickens while also grounding himself again in satirical authenticity. After all, Dickens’ satirizing of machinery in Hard Times (1854) could be seen as tonally analogous to The Sellout’s return to slavery over mechanical farm-work[74].

 

Hominy is the dish that results from the nixtamalization of dried maize kernels with an alkali solution. It has been passed down from older cuisines and is also used in Mesoamerican territories. In this way, it is both old and an outsider. That might be the perfect description of the character of Hominy, a man who is very outdated and who feels so strongly like an outsider that he must submit himself into slavery in order to feel like he now belongs in the post-racial world of the novel. It feeds into the feeling of otherness that pollutes the novel. Not only is there a feeling of otherness between races, but even amongst their own race, characters like Hominy and the narrator feel like outsiders; they feel as if they have been othered.

 

That could possibly answer the question as to why our narrator is nameless. Some journal articles refer to him as ‘The Sellout’, ’Me’, or ‘Bonbon’, but there is meaning in the namelessness. There are many reasonable hypotheses for his namelessness as well as the names other articles have used. For namelessness, Beatty could be harking back to Ralph Ellison’s seminal nameless main character in Invisible Man (1952), a foundational text of African-American literature; or, Beatty’s world could be so dysfunctional and dystopic that names are valueless, aligning itself within a post-modern tradition in American literature that sees Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Philip Roth’s Everyman (2006) as forebears. However, in leaving the narrator nameless, Beatty could also be drawing our attention to the other “names” he is given in the novel: Bonbon could be how his skin colour is described, taking a satirical jibe at traditional depictions of African-American people in media and culture[75], or because food is so crucial to the narrator throughout the story, the name Bonbon reflects that[76]; calling him “Sellout” is an interestingly accurate sobriquet for him either because he “never sticks up for himself” (139) or because he is a traitor to his race for “thinking it’s still 1950 and seeing fit to reintroduce segregation to the American ethos” (261). The collectivism that Foy Cheshire ardently promotes to the detriment of the narrator is precisely why he is called a ‘sellout’, though this is done satirically by Beatty to suspend collectivism as a form of cultural authenticity[77]. If Draitser is right and names are “just as important as other literary devices”[78], then it is peculiar how there is such ambiguity about our narrator’s name. The narrator does admit that he has a “proper name” (95), but it is never used in the novel. A nameless narrator is an allegory[79] befitting the disjointedness felt by African-Americans towards the social and political systems of modern America in spite of the presidency of Barack Obama. The namelessness strengthens Beatty’s overall point in the novel: the majority of African-Americans feel disillusioned by the America in which they currently live.

 

Now to turn to the old man Hominy, an exceedingly hilarious and intriguing character. He is the most explicitly humorous character in the novel, making use of the three theories of humour I explored above in fascinating and subversive ways. He is simultaneously the mentor and slave of Beatty’s narrator, giving him a cultural education in his youth by showing him the old Little Rascal cartoons in which he acted as a child. He is first mentioned to be the “gray-haired relic to Uncle Toms past” (66) that the narrator’s father avoided like a pre-historic plague. The narrator sees it as his duty to preserve Hominy, an artefact for the post-racial world, feeling like he “owed Hominy something for all those afternoons” (73) they spent watching cartoons. The dissolution of Dickens from municipal maps provides Hominy with the same disappointment as did the lack of fame in his life on television, notwithstanding his goals and desires to “step into the oversized, curly-toed genie shoes of the great pickaninnies that preceded him” (68). Hominy longs for that exceptionalism from which people like Sidney Poitier profited during their careers. What Hominy longs for is a warped acceptance that can only be afforded to the effects of Racism 2.0.

 

This leads Hominy into believing that he must “act” as the narrator’s slave in order to save himself and, eventually, save Dickens. He says, “sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play” (77). By satirically standing up for his race, Hominy shows himself to be the “Race Man” in the post-racial world of the novel. The tendency to make light of slavery is common among the “sardonic neo-slave narratives” that have started cropping up in African-American literature[80]. Hominy’s ultimatum to the narrator that he must “beat me to within an inch of my worthless black life” or “bring back Dickens” (78) shows the absurdities of the story. Yet these absurdities are the sites for both much humour and potent social commentary. The absurdities of the text reflect the absurdities of the social order, of the racially-segregated past and the latent racism of Racism 2.0 and the black exceptionalism of present-day America[81]. Hominy’s absurdity is American absurdity insofar as to say that American absurdity is viewed through the notion of the post-racial world it so greatly claims to have but evidently isn’t close to achieving.

 

The artifice of acting and performance is something deeply symbolic to Hominy. He acted on the real show Little Rascals[82] which followed a group of impoverished children in America from the 1920s to the 1940s. He was an understudy to the main black child of the show, Buckwheat Thomas. It was Hominy’s experiences growing up while filming the show that shaped his controversial attitudes towards minstrelsy and blackface[83]. Indeed, America’s “insatiable desire” to use the African-American experience as a site of laughter has its starting point in late nineteenth-century minstrelsy[84]. However, to Hominy, blackface is “just common sense” (240) because he is the “Race Man” of the novel, even if he is simultaneously the satirical anathema to the advancement of the African-American race. If Beatty’s proclamation from Slumberland that “the Negro is now officially human”[85] is true, then Hominy’s view on minstrelsy is satirically apt and he is probably ahead of his time. When Hominy is incapable of understanding the controversy of blackface, he matter-of-factly says that “we called it acting” (240). Hominy’s view of acting and the role of the performer in society is unquestionably “post-racial”, inasmuch as a post-racial world is the utopic world that these characters inhabit in the context of the narrative. Hominy’s surprisingly developed view of the past is a satirical jibe at the very exceptionalism of which he secretly desired to become a part. His view on race is simultaneously retroactive and progressive. His obituary could read as the living embodiment of what the narrator quips when he says, “if imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery, then white minstrelsy is a compliment” (241).

 

Walter Benjamin opens his sixth thesis in ‘On the Concept of History’ with the following insight: “articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”[86]. There are fewer critical phrases I have found that suit the character of Hominy more appropriately. The relationships that he draws between the past and his present almost single-handedly gloss over history itself. If “the beauty of minstrelsy is its timelessness” (189), then so too could the beauty of Hominy lie in his timelessness, timelessness taking on a different meaning here; Hominy doesn’t really seem to fit any epoch particularly well. As if inherently antipodal to Rosa Parks, Hominy “couldn’t wait to give up his seat to a white person” because he is the “grandfather of the post-racial civil rights movement known as ‘The Standstill’” (127). Hominy is a man stuck in time, but not exactly sure what time that is. The satirical poster-boy of the Civil Rights era has survived past the ramifications of that time period and now inhabits a world fundamentally indifferent to him. The world has moved on, but Hominy doesn’t want to. He was “born to play” (77) the role of a slave, but the world has decided that that is no longer a role worth playing. Hominy recalls the dangerous moments of his personal history in humorous and satirical ways, mocking the way modern historians write about the past and how the reappropriation of the past for the present is a treacherous use of history.

 

Hominy enters the canon of African-American literature as a backward, confused old man with reactionary views on just about everything. He is more than just a typical father-figure character; he is the satirical proof that the America not of the novel is not an America that can be considered post-racial. In the same way the killing of African-Americans by police is sociological proof that Beatty’s satire works, Hominy is literary proof. He is stuck in some sort of time loop for he can neither move on from his past nor welcome the future. His racial mission, if indeed he had one, is almost an antithesis to that of characters like Foy Cheshire. Kenneth W. Warren wonders if the overthrowing of Jim Crow laws was possibly both a loss and a gain[87], and Hominy is evidence of this quandary. He is the “race reactionary” (169) while also recognizing that for him, “true freedom is having the right to be a slave” (83). Overthrowing Jim Crow laws gave Hominy the freedom to articulate his feelings, which is a gain, but his unrefined, reactionary post-racial views are inherently a loss. He is a man whose racial mission is not about progression but regression because, in his eyes, it isn’t regression. Hominy longs to live in the bygone world of Racism 1.0 with its straight-up bigotry; he doesn’t want some African-American person to stand out and thus let everyone off the hook for their racism. In the old world of Racism 1.0, Hominy was able to get laughter out of people for his Little Rascals antics. In the new world of Racism 2.0, everyone is shocked at him precisely because he is post-racial or because he doesn’t believe in racism. Hominy believes the world was a safer place when Racism 1.0 was rampant.

 

Hominy comes across like the fool when he innocently asks an audience, “what’s blackface?” (241). Draitser calls this mild ignorance “stupefication” and highlights it as a key weapon in the satirist’s arsenal. By making Hominy appear foolish, Beatty gains much in the way of humour because the fool as an object of laughter “has appeared in art from time immemorial”[88]. It is this that makes Hominy such an exceptionally satirical character; his foolishness seeks purely to expose our own foolishness for the part we play in racist discourse. His foolishness also satirically jibes at Erasmus’ notion of the “wise fool” that appeared in his In Praise of Folly (1509) and has recurred in literature ever since, another instance of Beatty mocking traditions he inherits.

 

So, what is Beatty’s endgame with Hominy? What is the purpose of a character who is so fictitious, so superficial, so parodical, that he sends up everyone? A character who says with such satirical aplomb that “freedom can kiss my postbellum black ass” (83)? Hominy reveals to the reader, if they are not already aware, that Beatty is, like Juvenal and Swift, a satirical artist. His satire works on so many levels that it is almost guaranteed to resonate with people. I’ve explored the various ways Beatty makes us laugh in the prologue but that is a mere litmus test for the rest of the novel. Beatty’s satire is a scathing fulmination of the racist institutions that have brought America into the twenty first-century; it is also a magnifying glass for the reader. In this way, Beatty has accurately portrayed the way race is discussed in modern America. Satire and realism are, in essence, two diametrically opposite ways of understanding literature’s relationship with the world it represents[89].

 

Realism seeks to replicate the world; satire seeks to ridicule. Realism does not require the reader to think because what they read is what they directly experience in their day-to-day life. Satire forces the reader to think precisely because of its larger-than-life characterization, its lexical variety, and the inherently ridiculous nature of this literary mode. When reading a realistic novel, the events of the novel are well-known because it is an attempted replication of everyday life. Satire forces us to think more precisely because it is not the real world, but a farcical version of the world that uses humour to make us think. When we laugh, we then start to think about why we laugh. Humour makes the truth audible, using exaggerated language to deal with real topics[90]. Exaggeration is the universal comic device to all other means of provoking laughter[91]. So, if the world is indeed a comedy to those who think, then The Sellout is a most accurate vehicle for thinking about and understanding the exceedingly complex discourse about race relations that continues to be propagated throughout modern-day America precisely because it presents this narrative in a most humour-filled way.

 

Conclusion: Cogito Ergo Boogieum – I Think Therefore I Jam[92]

The Sellout is a masterwork of satirical writing. It manages to dissect racism, a touchy subject no matter who the author is, with the utmost aplomb, shattering any concept of prejudice by the time the reader has finished the first sentence. Beatty’s novel is inherently timely, written and published when racist discourse in America was on the rise and partisan politics sought to drive a wedge between those who are racist and those who are not[93]. The Sellout accomplishes the task of pushing back on that wedge by highlighting how painfully flawed it is.

 

But why does Beatty choose to be humorous when discussing racism, a serious and painful topic? As an author, Beatty must make us think. If we do not think, then we do not buy into the world he has created. To get us to think, Beatty must simultaneously engage us within his world while also making it clear that the world he is writing is not the same world the reader inhabits. Beatty must force us to read between the lines. To draw this response, Beatty must captivate us somehow. He chooses to use humour. Beatty has said that he sees laughter “as a learned response, not a reflexive one”[94]. I don’t fully agree with that, but if we run with it regardless, then Beatty uses humour and the provocation of laughter as if he were writing didactic literature; that is, Beatty teaches us about the subject at hand through laughter. Laughter is the best form of medicine, but it also is the best textbook. If Rosa Parks “bitch-slapped white America” (184), then Beatty pummels it and everything else with medicine, textbooks, and every form of humour residing in the satirist’s arsenal.

 

Plato knew that comprehension lay in laughter more so than tragedy, and so too does Beatty. He chooses satire because it is belligerent, because it is metamorphic, because it is covert. Just like Racism 2.0 is harder to identify because of its exceptionalism, satire is harder to recognise because of the understanding most often required of the reader. Satire forces the reader to think in ways no other literary mode does. The mystical powers of satire are analogous to the mystical powers of poets, an ancient belief still surviving today with practitioners such as Beatty[95]. Satire’s central problem is its relation to reality[96], and thus, the best satirists are the ones who survive the passage of time between their own culture and the wider satirisation of human nature that all satirists earnestly attempt. I feel Beatty will succeed in this. If satire is what Highet called the “clear-eyed, sharp-tongued, hot-tempered, outwardly disillusioned and secretly idealistic Muse”[97], then Beatty is as adept at its deployment as Juvenal, Swift and the other satirists who have so far survived the tests of time.

 

Beatty grounded himself in satirical and historical veracity by adapting techniques and styles perfected by Juvenal and Jonathan Swift. Juvenal’s misanthropic tone and violent verse feed into Swift’s realistic lampoon and masterful irony which then feed into Beatty’s jocose tone and parodical reality. The shared DNA of all these works relies upon the accuracy with which they mock their given societies. Juvenal scolds a Rome profoundly troubled by moral ambiguities; Swift impressively jibes at the attitudes of the ruling élite towards poorer people; and Beatty creates such a riotous journey of self-deprecation through modern America that one can’t help but feel that he is right in saying some of what he says.

 

It is the facetiousness of Beatty’s satire that stands out from his work, however. Beatty tackles Racism 2.0, the newer form of racism that has started to plague modern American society. While racism has taken on particular forms throughout the entirety of American history[98], the latency of Racism 2.0 makes it a form of exceptionalism, which is more perilous to society than appears at first glance. Space is carved out for figures who strike white America as exceptional, such as Barack Obama who was given an eighteen-month campaign to show the public how great he could be. Yet as Tim Wise says, “most job interviews don’t last for eighteen months”[99]. This form of racism is worked into Beatty’s narrative through the satirical exceptionalisation of the narrator for his extra-judicial actions. The narrator feels that he has made himself an exceptional figure when he remarks that he “felt a refreshing hint of the dominion the landed Confederacy must have felt” (83) when Hominy is serving him as a slave. The narrator knows where he now stands in the African-American community. He is the satirical send-up of African-American fame and the hyperlionization of some African-Americans by white America.

 

Beatty deploys intelligent strategies to inject humour into a story and topic that could be considered distasteful if not dealt with deftly. His use of Morreall’s three theories of humour reveals to us how he makes the reader laugh about a subject so delicate, exploiting feelings of relief, superiority, and incongruity in the reader. We laugh to express relief through an impulsive reaction to something to which we don’t know how to react; we laugh for superiority through the denigration of others; and we laugh for incongruity when a joke subverts our expectations. By using these theories to make us laugh, Beatty forces us to think about his subject with more focus.

 

That subject is racism. Miasmatic showers of racism. Both the classic “old-fashioned bigotry” of older racism, and the newer, shinier Racism 2.0. Through the characters of the narrator and Hominy, Beatty explores tropes both of African-American literature and wider culture and destabilizes them for the purposes of his narrative and his intentions. The names of characters, or lack thereof, carry great meaning with them; a nameless narrator fits Beatty’s novel into the chrestomathy of African-American literature and also reflects the detrimental inefficacies of American bureaucratic bodies towards African-Americans all over the country. Hominy himself is then a fascinating character as he is a satirical version of the “Race Man”. His perspective on slavery appears antiquated but is, in many ways, timeless. He is sending up all previous neo-slavery narratives. In doing so, he stands out from the crowd as a timeless figure of the theoretically-possible post-racial America.

 

Beatty blends theories of humour, literary techniques, philosophy, pop-culture riffs, and psychoanalytical theories in his attempts to make us laugh and talk about racism. He forces us into a real-world discussion of racism precisely because his novel, while set in the real world, situates itself outside the realm of realism. If Beatty had written a realist novel on the plight of everyday African-Americans, I have no doubt that it would have been masterful and insightful, but its message would have been muted by the limitations of realism. Satire, a constrained literary mode when in the wrong hands, permits such literary liberty that it allows Beatty to take the real world, put it in a satirical blender and produce the results in his unique voice. Readers will not learn from a realist novel because it is their world; they will believe there is nothing more to learn. Readers will learn from a satirical novel precisely because it is not their world; it is a ridiculous magnification of that which they thought they knew. The world is a comedy to those who think, and The Sellout’s humour forces us to think. It is only then that a re-examination occurs, and one understands how intelligent and grounded the satirical work was. Satire, in the hands of someone like Beatty, is more realistic than realism because it is not real. If realism is a mirror and satire is a magnifying glass, then the magnification is so strong, so acerbic and so accurate, that one can’t help but think that they understand the world in a better way than before.

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[1] Beatty, The Sellout, p. 13. All direct quotations and paraphrasing from The Sellout will appear parenthetically throughout. All chapter titles will be translated and footnoted.

[2] Willi, The Languages of Aristophane p. 1 features this anecdote in its entirety.

[3] Beatty mentions that an actress character they meet is “too Jewish” (137) and that his hometown Dickens is twinned with “the Lost City of White Male Privilege” (149), examples of no prejudicial stone being left unturned.

[4] Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p.223

[5] Paul Beatty, interviewed by Tom Gatti for The New Statesman, November 2^nd, 2016

[6] Levinson, Time-Binding Western Satire. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA679792187&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=0014164X&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=tcd. Accessed 13 February 2022

[7] Ullman, ‘Satura and Satire’, pp. 172-194 is seemingly the first that explores the etymological origins of the word.

[8] Connery & Kombe, Theorizing Satire, p.1

[9] Walpole wrote this famed aphorism in a letter to the Countess of Ossory on August 16^th, 1776. See Smith, Letters, p. 231 for the whole letter.

[10] Powell, Going There: Black Visual Satire, p. 22

[11]Beatty, The Sellout, p. 9

[12] Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, p. 23

[13] In Umberto Eco’s terms, an “authentic fake”. See Eco, Faith in Fakes, for a full discussion on authenticity and hyper-realism.

[14] The exact dates of Juvenal’s work have always been uncertain. See Uden, The Invisible Satirist, for his argument on the possible dates that I’m using for the purposes of this dissertation: 101 AD – 127 A.D.

[15] Juvenal, p. 66

[16] Ibid, p. 76

[17] Juvenal, p. 70

[18] Frank, ‘Augustus’ Legislation on Marriage and Children’, explores the belief the emperor Augustus held concerning moral legislation. The Leges Juliae, laws intended to encourage marriage and criminalise adultery, are an example of this legislative moralising.

[19] Satires, unlicensed histories and other belligerent forms of literature were banned from publishing in Britain, and published versions were recalled and burned at the end of the sixteenth century. See Jones, ‘The Bishops’ Ban’, for a discussion on how this then influenced the development of satire.

[20] This act prohibited the writing and performing of plays in Britain that were deemed to undermine the government in any way. See Liesenfield, The Licensing Act of 1737, for a comprehensive exploration of the history and implications of this act.

[21] Lady Chatterley’s Lover was censored upon posthumous publication, leading to Britain’s most notorious literary obscenity trial. See Rolph, Lady Chatterley’s Trial, for an in-depth look at this trial.

[22] Uden, The Invisible Satirist p. 1

[23] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, I, p. 93

[24] Green, ‘Juvenal Revisited’, rightfully calls Juvenal the “envious sniper at corruption”.

[25] Juvenal, p. 242

[26] Eagleton, Humour, p. 42

[27] Hedrick, ‘A Modest Proposal in Context’, p. 852

[28] Beaumont, ‘Swift’s Classical Rhetoric in A Modest Proposal’, p. 307

[29] Swift, A Modest Proposal and Other Writings, p. 234

[30] Kelly, ‘Infanticide in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, explores how newspapers covered the rise in childhood mortality in Ireland.

[31] Swift, p. 230

[32] Johnson, London, A Poem and The Vanity of Human Wishes, p. 15

[33] Pollard, Satire, p. 1

[34] Mackie, ‘Swift and the Progress of Desire’, p. 173

[35] Juvenal, p. 212

[36] Barker, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’, contains a full exploration of the significance of this famous quote being misattributed to Marie Antoinette.

[37] Translated to “Money talks, bullshit walks”. Beatty, The Sellout, p. 13

[38] Love & Tosolt, ‘Reality or Rhetoric?’, cite quotes from Rudy Giuliani and The Wall Street Journal that echo these myopic sentiments.

[39] Critchley, On Humour, p. 3

[40]Critchley, p. 18

[41] Critchley, p. 31

[42] As reported by Edward Helmore in The Guardian, December 24^th, 2016, Michelle Obama was called a gorilla by one of Donald Trump’s advisors months after this book was initially written and published.

[43] Scott tried to sue the American government for his freedom and that of his family but was struck down due to their lack of citizenship, a status slaves could not hold in mid-nineteenth century America.

[44] Fredericks, ‘Juvenal’s Fifteenth Satire’, p. 174

[45] Swift, p. 232

[46] Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place, p. 9

[47] DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 16

[48] Wolfson, ‘The Necropolitics of Black Exceptionalism’, p. 620

[49] Beatty, Hokum, p. 9

[50] Paul Beatty interview with Lola Okolosie for London Review of Books, 2017

[51] Wise, p. 22

[52] Critchley, p. 10

[53] A word seemingly only attested once in the English language by the poet William Woty in his poem ‘A Mock Invocation of Genius’. It means ‘something that brings about laughter’ and I’ve used it precisely because I haven’t found another word that conveys the meaning risiferous conveys. See Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, p. 322 for the Woty poem

[54] Molesworth, The Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, IV, p. 46

[55] Hutcheson, Reflections Upon Laughter, p. 13

[56] Žižek, ‘What Donald Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows About Torture and the Iraq War’ in In These Times.

 

[57] Gallagher, ‘Color-Blind Privilege’, p. 23

[58] Wise, p. 20

[59] Blaustein, ‘Flight to Germany’, p. 726

[60] Beatty, Slumberland, p. 169

[61] Beatty, Tuff, p. 218

[62] Crespino, ‘The Strange Career of Atticus Finch’, p. 10

[63] See Ako-Adjei, ‘Why It’s Time Schools Stopped Teaching To Kill A Mockingbird’, pp. 182-200

[64] Beatty, The Sellout, p. 13

[65] A ‘Race Man’ is a loyal member of the Black Race who dedicates their life to directly contributing to the betterment of Black people.

[66] See Coates, ‘There Is No Post-Racial America’ in The Atlantic.

[67] Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the southern states of the United States that enforced racial segregation and discrimination from the late 19^th century up to 1965 when they were abolished.

[68] Juvenal, p. 140

[69] Ellis & Branch-Ellis, ‘Living in an Age of Colorblind Racism and Police Impunity: An Analysis of Some High-Profile Police Killings’

[70] Draitser, Techniques of Satire, p. 101

[71] Ibid, p. 103

[72] Highet, The Anatomy of Satire, p. 18

[73] Graves, The Greek Myths, pp. 246-7 tells the story of Marpessa in full.

[74] Welsh, ‘Satire and History: The City of Dickens’, fully explores how Dickens satirizes cities and industrialization.

[75] Beatty does this on p. 143

[76] Baker, ‘You Are What You Eat: Connecting Food with Identity in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout’

[77] Murray, ‘Black Crisis Shuffle’, p. 218

[78] Draitser, p. 144

[79] Sacks, ‘The Rise of the Nameless Narrator’ in The New Yorker

[80] Blaustein, ‘Flight to Germany’, p. 728

[81] Delmagori, ‘Super Deluxe Whiteness’

[82] Beatty’s use of Little Rascals as the television show where Hominy got his start is in itself satirical: it was the first to show white and black children interacting as equals in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. See my next footnote for how the show still fell short of dealing with interracial parity.

[83] Little Rascals has been subjected to criticism for its depiction of race, whether it be in the “Negro dialect” used for African-American characters or Buckwheat Thomas being given white measles instead of dark ones. See Lee, Our Gang, for a broader discussion of depictions of race in Little Rascals.

[84] Manning, Played Out, discusses the role of minstrelsy in modern satire.

[85] Beatty, Slumberland, p. 1

[86] Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, IV, p. 391

[87] Warren, What Was African-American Literature, pp. 20-21

[88] Draitser, p. 51

[89] Matz, Satire in an Age of Realism, p. 2

[90] Hoagland, ‘No Laughing Matter’, p. 42

[91] Draitser, p. 137

[92] Translates to “I think therefore I jam”. Beatty, The Sellout, p. 183

[93] Foley, ‘Claudia Rankine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Untimely Present’

[94] Beatty, Hokum, p. 7

[95] Elliott, The Power of Satire, p. 257

[96] Highet, The Anatomy of Satire, p. 158

[97] Ibid, p. 243

[98] Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place, p. 12

[99] Ibid, p. 16