Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Synthesizing Black Voices (Report‪)‬

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. "The New Black Aesthetic," an essay that he first published in Callaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on "the future of African American artistic expression" in the postmodern era. (1) According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such mate experimental writers as Ishmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker. (2) Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay. While Ellis's essay has captured positive attention from authors and critics, Platitudes unfortunately remains obscure, although it best represents the literary ideology that he describes in "The New Black Aesthetic." Too few critical articles have been written about Platitudes, and those articles generally have focused more interest on his essay than on the novel itself. Yet the novel demonstrates Ellis's virtuosity in employing innovative postmodern techniques in a narrative, and in "Hip-Hop Fiction," a review article on Platitudes, Lott notes that the novel is "a call for truce in the black literary world" and that Ellis accurately perceives the prevalent "Reed-Walker paradox" within African American literature, in which male authors tend to focus on sexual freedom white female authors emphasize black folkloric heritage and domestic harmony. (3) Lott categorizes Ellis's Platitudes as parody, (4) but Doris Jean Austin treats it as satire. (5) The terms parody and satire often overlap in their definitions. J.A. Cuddon points out that parody itself "is a branch of satire," (6) so the two critics place Ellis's novel under related rubrics, which I shaft refer to henceforth as satire. Unarguably, Platitudes is an innovative Literary work that thematically and stylistically deviates from the mainstream of African American literature, which traditionally has focused on racism, slavery, oppression, and black identity.