Platitudes by Trey Ellis

First published: 1988

Type of plot: Romance

Time of work: The 1980’s and the 1930’s

Locale: New York City and rural Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Dewayne Wellington, an unpublished novelist
• Isshee Ayam, a successful novelist trying to revise Dewayne’s novel
• Earle Tyner, a shy New York teenager, the main character in Dewayne’s novel
• Earle Pride, a shy Georgian farmboy in Isshee’s revision
• Dorothy Lamont, a popular, even wild girl in Dewayne’s version, who is modest and innocent in Isshee’s
• Maylene, Earle’s mother, an urban socialite in Dewayne’s version and a hardworking farm woman in Isshee’s
• Darcelle, Dorothy’s mother, the owner of a Harlem restaurant in Dewayne’s version and an educated Southern woman reduced to prostitution in Isshee’s

The Novel

Platitudes consists of two novels in progress and the correspondences between their respective authors. Both writers are African American, as are most of their characters. Dewayne Wellington’s writing style is postmodern, hip, and urban. Isshee Ayam, whose work includes such titles as My Big Ol’ Feets Gon’ Stomp Dat Evil Down, Hog Jowl Junction, and Heben and Chillun o’ de Lawd, is more traditional in terms of both her narrative style and her preference for what Dewayne refers to as “Afro-American glory-stories.” She bears more than a passing resemblance to such authors as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, while Dewayne is somewhat similar to novelist Ishmael Reed.

Dewayne’s novel is about two black teenagers in 1980’s New York City, both in private school: Earle, a shy, upper-middle-class “nerd,” dreams of love and eagerly awaits his first sexual experience; and Dorothy, who frequents the city’s hottest clubs, experiments with drugs and sex and hopes to get rich and leave Harlem. When Dewayne, stuck in the writing of his novel at chapter 6, solicits Isshee’s advice, she disgustedly condemns his work as sexist. She also sends him a chapter based on his characters but reflecting her own beliefs about the appropriate functions and components of African American literature. This chapter, and those that follow, is located in rural 1930’s Georgia, with Earle and Dorothy recast as farm children, poor but proud, who walk fifteen miles to school each day. In both works in progress, the two teenagers become friends and, eventually, lovers. Although the two authors have radically different styles and political agendas, they are headed for the same goal, and their chapters work in parallel to tell the story of Earle and Dorothy’s rocky courtship and, later, Dewayne and Isshee’s personal relationship.

In Dewayne’s story, Earle, who seems to have no deeper connection to his African American heritage than watching reruns of The Jeffersons on television (his mother is a spokeswoman for South African Airlines), is led by chance and curiosity to explore Harlem. There, he finds himself in Dorothy’s mother’s soul-food restaurant. For middle-class Earle, Harlem is a dangerously exotic place where he must make an effort to conform to the stereotypes of black behavior he has learned from television. For Dorothy, who hums the theme song of The Jeffersons on the subway, Harlem is the place where she serves grits to her mother’s customers while dreaming of getting out and becoming more “booj” (bourgeois) than her white friends.

Although Earle does not immediately impress Dorothy, her mother Darcelle tries to play matchmaker between the two, and when he gets a job in the neighborhood registering voters, Darcelle sends Dorothy out to deliver free sodas and encouraging words to the enamored Earle. Earle is not popular and has a number of typical adolescent problems, so when one of the popular girls in school invites him to a party, he is pleased and surprised. He is even more surprised when Dorothy, who goes to another school, is also at the party. Unfortunately, she has a date, but Earle’s hopes remain high. In the following weeks, he and Dorothy begin to spend time together, going to films and amusement parks. The slowly developing romance between Earle and Dorothy is being paralleled in the correspondence between Dewayne and Isshee: He invites her to have dinner with him during the upcoming Black American Authors convention, and she accepts. Both Earle and Dewayne are hopeful and expectant, but when Isshee stands Dewayne up to go out with another novelist, he retaliates by writing a chapter in which Earle catches Dorothy with another man, having sex that is described in deliberately brutal and demeaning terms. As the lines between writers and written texts gradually blur, Dewayne punishes Isshee through Dorothy. Isshee’s apology, a chapter in which her Earle and Dorothy make love tenderly and romantically, arrives and is accepted, clearing the way for Dewayne and Isshee to meet. They have dinner and talk, then go back to his apartment and begin to make love, but Dewayne finds himself unable to consummate this real relationship until he has resolved the romantic desires of Earl and Dorothy. Finally, after his characters have reconciled and made love, he is able to do the same with Isshee.

The Characters

Dewayne Wellington, the author of the more substantial of the two novels in progress, is revealed primarily through his writing and the ways that his novel reflects events in his personal life. It gradually becomes clear that despite the juvenile habits of his characters, Dewayne is a committed artist attempting to write with sensitivity and humor about the problems of teenage identity, sexuality, and love. It also becomes apparent that, in part because of a recent and bitter divorce, Dewayne harbors some resentment against women, perhaps black women especially. Earle and his novel are, in part, Dewayne’s way of working through his own feelings about trust and intimacy; when Earle is finally able to reconcile and make love with Dorothy, it is a healing experience for Dewayne as well, freeing him to pursue a relationship with Isshee.

Isshee Ayam is initially contemptuous of Dewayne’s work in progress. She calls him a “No-Rate Hack,” urges him to “learn a trade,” and calls his writing “puerile, misogynistic, disjointed, and amateurish.” She also stands him up for dinner and threatens to co-opt his novel, and her initial apologies are rather casual. She eventually begins to gain the reader’s sympathy with a subsequent, more heartfelt apology. Just as important, it becomes clear that her initial dismay at reading Dewayne’s first chapters reflects her sincere concerns about the portrayal in literature of African Americans in general and of black women specifically. When she realizes that Dewayne does not share Earle’s sexism or indifference to his black heritage, she begins to read his work differently and to find more of merit in both the novel and the novelist.

Earle Tyner’s experiences in high school and his first romantic encounters are believable and familiar, if somewhat predictable. Hiding pornography under his bed and dreaming of falling in love, Earle is an apt mixture of teenage awkwardness and maturity, hope and fear, love and hormones. Earle Pride, Isshee’s farmboy version of this character, is somewhat more sensitive and less obsessed with sex, but the two characters are more similar than different, both looking for love and trust, like their creators.

In both versions of the novel, Dorothy is more confident and experienced than Earle. In Dewayne’s version, while she enjoys slow dates with Earle, she also craves the fast life of New York clubs and college boys. In Isshee’s version, she is both more innocent and better educated than Earle. She is not quite so fully developed a character as Earle, especially in Isshee’s version, but the reader can gain some insight into her feelings about her life and dreams and about being black, poor, and pretty.

Earle’s mother Maylene is a rather sketchily developed character. Her chief function seems to be to provide Isshee with an opportunity to rewrite her as a traditional black super-mother, in contrast to the nagging, self-justifying socialite in Dewayne’s version.

Dorothy’s mother is considerably more fleshed out in Isshee’s version than in Dewayne’s: The powerful black farm mother seems to be one of Isshee’s main themes as a novelist. Like Maylene Tyner, Darcelle is transformed in Isshee’s version into an indomitable life force, enduring poverty and the humiliations that go with it without losing sight of either her own dignity or her duty to her children.

Critical Context

Trey Ellis’s style in this, his first novel, is not identical to Dewayne’s but is also postmodern and experimental. In addition to its postmodern flair, the book is obviously influenced by the development of the African American novel. While Ellis questions and gently parodies some of the assumptions and approaches of the more traditional African American novel, he also pays homage to it: Dewayne is a fan of Isshee’s mainstream novels, while she lists James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison (as well as T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald) among those writers who have influenced her most.

Ellis’s purpose is not to reject or condemn literature that focuses on aspects of African American life but rather to argue that literature by and for African Americans need not focus exclusively on issues of race. In a 1989 article, Ellis describes the “New Black Aesthetic,” a new literary trend being developed by black artists to whom he refers as “cultural mulattoes.” These artists can embrace both African American culture and mainstream “white” culture, both Geoffrey Chaucer and Richard Pryor, “both Jim and Toni Morrison.” Elsewhere, Ellis has stated, “In the past some wanted to force Black artists to only write about jazz and Africa and poverty. Black folks deserve and crave more choices.” By contrasting Earle and Dorothy’s suppression of their identities as black Americans and Isshee’s obsession with blackness and black experience, Ellis seems to be suggesting that neither extreme is a tenable position, that both result in gaps and missed opportunities, and that a middle ground should be sought or created.

Bibliography

Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo 38 (Winter, 1989): 233-243. Ellis describes the art and philosophy of art being produced by a new generation of black artists. Ellis calls these artists, including himself, “cultural mulattoes,” able to appreciate and function in both white and black culture. He states that such an aesthetic is “not an apolitical, art-for-art’s-sake fantasy” but a redefinition of “the black aesthetic as much more than just Africa and jazz.”

Favor, J. Martin. “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby.” Callaloo 16 (1993): 694-105. Martin reviews both Platitudes and Ellis’s essay, “The New Black Aesthetic.” Comparing both works, he focuses on the artistic impressions of black Americans, factors constituting African American experience and expression, sexism, and notions of racial pride.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. African American writing is organized around the figure of the “signifying Monkey,” a trickster in West African folk tales known for his quick wit. This influence of the vernacular trickster tradition is examined in the work of major African American authors including Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker.

Hunter, Tera. “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World: Specters of the Old Re-Newed in Afro-American Culture and Criticism.” Callaloo 38 (Winter, 1989): 247-249. Hunter perceives the black art world (and Ellis’s criteria for the New Black Aesthetic) as male-dominated and misogynist. She comments that Ellis’s article on the New Black Aesthetic disregards most class and gender differences among black artists, but she nevertheless praises his article for opening “a discourse with far-ranging implications.”

Lott, Eric. “Hip-Hop Fiction.” The Nation 247 (December 19, 1988): 691-692. Lott addresses the dialogue between literary styles in Platitudes, calling it Ellis’s “call for a truce in the black literary world.” He concludes, however, that the debate between Dewayne and Isshee is unbalanced and that Dewayne’s “tale is the one finally endorsed; the various jokes on Isshee go unanswered.”

Lott, Eric. “Response to Trey Ellis’s The New Black Aesthetic.’” Callaloo 38 (Winter, 1989): 244-246. Lott chides Ellis for oversimplifying complex literary movements and discussing authors with significant differences as if they were in complete agreement. Lott also states that Ellis’s article largely ignores class differences among black artists and intellectuals.

Peterson, V. R. Review of Platitudes, by Trey Ellis. People Weekly 30 (November 14, 1988): 49. Offers a brief plot synopsis of the novel and praises the book as “a funny, intelligent first novel” and a “vibrant, comical tale.”

Reed, Ishmael. Reckless Eyeballing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. An experimental postmodernist novel that explores Reed’s idea that black men are the victim of a widespread conspiracy against them and that criticizes Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Tate, Greg. “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: The Return of the New Black Aesthetic.” Voice Literary Supplement (December, 1986): 7. African American writing, art, and music have revived the energy of cultural nationalism and placed it in the new context of 1980’s popular culture.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square Press, 1982. Reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Walker’s novelistic affirmation of the vitality of rural black life and criticism of black men for replaying the role of plantation owner in their oppression of black women.