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“Have You to This Point Assumed That I Am
White?”: Narrative Withholding since
Playing in the Dark
Paul Ardoin
University of Texas at San Antonio

More than twenty-five years after the landmark publication of Toni Morrison’s
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), that mono-
graph’s continuing scholarly relevance is clear from its role in recent works
such as Stephanie Li’s Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects
(2015) and Lesley Larkin’s Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature
from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett (2015). I attend to the continuing
relevance of Playing in the Dark in literary texts, where contemporary authors
take up Morrison’s argument that “the readers of virtually all of American fiction
have been,” and continue to be, “positioned as white” (Playing xii). The texts I
investigate, Glyph (1999) by Percival Everett and Zone One (2011) by Colson
Whitehead, refuse a “sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predict-
able employment of racially informed and determined chains” (Morrison, Playing
xi) in texts by and for “a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or
race-free” (xii). Glyph and Zone One not only serve as possible models for far less
“predictable” interventions in the narration of race to an audience that still under-
stands itself to be universal and race-free but they also suggest new modes of nar-
rating politically contentious concerns within a culture that increasingly imagines
itself to be post-racial and often seems inured or openly hostile to both the nar-
ration of disruptive content and disruptive modes of narration. That is, the nar-
ration of institutional statistics or personal testimonies about racism is
unwelcome in a post-racial society: for example, a familiar charge against former
US President Barack Obama was that he was trying to rekindle racism by even
pointing out that racism exists and is problematic. At the same time, disruptive
forms and strategies of narration are unwelcome or ineffective in a reading cul-
ture that often seems already predisposed to recognize, classify, and disregard ex-
perimental narratives—recognized and immediately filtered into the category
“experimental”—or, equally dangerous, a reading culture that recognizes and un-
critically embraces “experimental” narratives or narrated claims with which they
already agree. Everett and Whitehead start from the premise that Morrison’s
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DOI: 10.1093/melus/mly058
160 MELUS  Volume 44  Number 1  (Spring 2019)
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claims about race at the intersection of author, text, and audience were and still
are true, and they suggest unexpected approaches for revitalizing the potency of
narrative interventions on that topic. These authors suggest that if literary con-
frontation, shock, and defamiliarization have lost efficacy in our era (not to men-
tion techniques of open sentimental appeal, a la much abolitionist literature),
then we have to turn to a wholly different set of narrative techniques in order
to achieve a productive outcome.
The Everett and Whitehead texts I reference do not exhaust their catalogs on
this topic; Everett’s Damned If I Do (2004) short-story collection, for example,
challenges lazy, sinister, universal meanings at every turn. However,
Whitehead and Everett, particularly in Glyph and Zone One, deploy strategies
of narrative withholding that both take up an implicit challenge laid down by
Morrison’s work and demand that one locate in that lineage a wholly new narra-
tological category of insistently undisruptive disruption: the novels withhold in-
formation, then conspicuously reveal that withholding, and then insist that both
the withheld information and the revelation of it are of no major concern.1 The
texts’ disruptions offer a major intervention in our understanding of how acts of
reading and writing (and, specifically, reading and writing about race) work in
contemporary American literature. The strategies the texts deploy to insist that
there is not, in fact, a significant disruption at work—that the disruption is min-
imal and to be almost wholly disregarded—may operate, counterintuitively, to
highlight that very intervention. Readers—whether primed to be uncritically re-
ceptive or hostile to an anti-racist critique—are left to wonder why the critique is
treated as insignificant. Focus is shifted away from the moment of initial critique
or disruption in the narrative, a moment likely to be familiar or even anticipated
by this point in our history (especially if readers know they are reading something
categorized as “African American fiction” or written by an “African American
writer”). Instead, the narrative techniques at work may operate to shift a reader’s
focus to the moment when the narrator reverses, refuses, or mitigates the critique,
or a reader may find herself in the position of reflecting on her own puzzled, frus-
trated, stymied, or relieved feelings about that moment of reversal—something
akin to what Sianne Ngai calls a “meta-feeling” (15).2
In many ways, my investigation of these techniques and their potential results
follows Larkin’s project, which surveys texts of “the modern and contemporary
black literary tradition” (6) that “exhibit an impressive range of aesthetic and per-
formative strategies designed to intervene in actual reading encounters.” Like
Larkin, I am interested in “texts that . . . act upon scenes of reading” and that
do so by “interrupting, managing, and manipulating the way readers read.”
For Larkin, this intervention is didactic—“an effort to teach new ways of reading
and enable the emergence of antiracist reading subjects” (5). Glyph and Zone One
importantly purport not to care about such results as teaching new, anti-racist
ways of reading, and they seem to convince at least some readers that their

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lackadaisical attitudes are genuine. This makes for a philosophy of narrative that
lives up to Morrison’s insistence that “narrative is radical” (qtd. in Larkin 211)
while at the same time insisting on its own status as utterly unradical. I do not
mean by “unradical” that these texts ask us to imagine anything like a situation
where anti-racist writing is so normal as to make their interventions appear tame
or typical. I mean instead that these texts specifically claim to refuse anything like
a radical import for their discussions of race—or even an import at all, beyond
possible pragmatic clarification of a plot detail. By raising these discussions and
then conspicuously dismissing them, though, these novels highlight the “radical”
in “unradical.”
Not only do Glyph and Zone One serve as exemplary demonstrations of con-
spicuously unradical, undisruptive narrative withholding, they also do so from
arguably unexpected or minor locations within their authors’ larger oeuvres.
For example, Everett’s Erasure (2001) has become a central and widely researched
and assigned text in the category of critiques of representations of Blackness.
Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999) would seem the most likely place to turn
for discussion about racial revelations, and, of course, his National Book
Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad (2016) has drawn
the most critical acclaim. The relative lack of sustained critical attention to Glyph
and Zone One is both intriguing and fitting.
The relative lack of attention is “intriguing” because one might wonder
whether it is a result of the novels’ strategies of narrative withholding—some
sort of side effect of a bored or frustrated readerly affect resulting from the strat-
egies. After all, the most obvious and likely reader response to a text that stim-
ulates too much confusion, irritation, or any other minor affects similar to the
“ugly feelings” unpacked in Ngai’s 2005 eponymous study is to stop reading
that text. This reaction may be just as likely from a reader opposed to a critique
of universal whiteness, or the cultural fiction of “race,” or the myth of a post-racial
United States as from an experienced reader of the Whitehead oeuvre or the raced
history of the zombie narrative who eagerly seeks a racial critique only to be dis-
appointed, bored, or flummoxed by the anticlimactic dismissal of the potential
moment of critique.
The relative lack of critical attention is “fitting” because the narratives insist on
the irrelevance of the kind of revelation that might be of the most interest to many
contemporary scholarly and critical readers. Such readers seem increasingly to
agree that race is a cultural construct, for example, and that descriptions of
our contemporary moment as post-racial are false, potentially dangerous, and in-
dicative of “a kind of fear . . . of asking the right questions about racism,” as Ta-
Nehisi Coates describes it (“There”). A novel that would dismiss these concerns as
trivial or peripheral could be easily dismissed by such an audience as itself trivial
or peripheral to urgent contemporary studies of literature and culture.

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Morrison: “Eddy Is White, and We Know He Is Because
Nobody Says So”
At our “post-truth” historical moment, with its increasingly popular insistence
that one should be able to select “alternative facts” in place of the undesirable
narratives one might simply reject as “fake news,” it may also seem strange to
pivot to the lineage of Morrison’s relatively brief 1990s study of much earlier
works by Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and others and to her 1983 short
story “Recitatif.” However, in these works, Morrison sketches out both the neces-
sity for and the model of a brand of narrative that potentially complicates easy
rejection. By highlighting and short-circuiting familiar intersections of race and
narration, texts that follow Morrison’s model complicate even easy recognition
of the potentially undesirable narrative.
Immediately ahead of the recent ascendance of rhetorics of “fake news” and
“alternative facts,” Playing in the Dark was still seeing significant citation. In K.
Merinda Simmons’s introduction to The Trouble with Post-Blackness (2015),
Morrison’s text earns praise precisely because it “draws our attention to white-
ness as an invisible norm” that is “constructed by . . . certain scripts” (11).
Morrison describes that interrogation of the narrative of whiteness as inseparable
from an interrogation of the operations of narrative itself. Morrison’s objective in
Playing is to highlight “the powerful impact race has on narrative—and on nar-
rative strategy” (25). Playing revisits major works in (white) American literature
and highlights the impact of (absent or present) race on narratives. Despite
American literature’s attempts toward “racelessness” (46), argues Morrison,
race profoundly shapes work by authors such as Willa Cather and Poe.
Morrison uses their works and others to draw attention to a sort of implied con-
tract between author and reader: white authors assume white readers, and those
assumed-white readers are expected to assume that all characters are white unless
the narrative explicitly indicates otherwise. Morrison highlights a ceaseless cul-
tural production of white narratives in which race is left unnarrated until the ap-
pearance of a nonwhite character.3 She demonstrates the operation of this
contract in her simple explanation of one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters:
“Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so” (72). Eddy’s race,
suggests Morrison, is left unnarrated because the writer and the reader (and
the narrator and most of the other characters) imagine white as a universal de-
fault and therefore unnecessary to name.
Morrison’s contention that race is therefore ceaselessly being narrated to and
assumed by readers through the invisible work of its narrative absence may seem
obvious but is critically invaluable because it is so obvious: that it goes without
saying is part of the insidious operation of the phenomenon. Of course, this
has been said by many, sometimes in direct reference to Morrison and often
not. See, in the first case, critics such as Larkin, Lucille P. Fultz, Elizabeth

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Abel, Valerie Babb, and David Mura. In the second case, see Ruth Frankenberg’s
discussion of “racist classification that notes or ‘marks’ the race of nonwhite peo-
ple but not whites” (232) and David Lloyd on a “philosophical figure for what
becomes, with increasing literalness through the nineteenth century, the global
ubiquity of the white European,” who is “universal where all others are partic-
ular” (70). Morrison herself has written and spoken about the topic of universal,
assumed narrative whiteness in multiple venues. She was perhaps most explicit
about this topic in an interview with Charlie Rose about the related move
she made to withhold the revelation of which is “the white girl” that “they
shoot . . . first” in Paradise’s (1997) opening sentence (3):
Morrison: [W]e have so much baggage ourselves as readers that we bring to a
narrative, that we—you know, if you don’t say somebody’s black—
Rose: You assume it’s white.
Morrison: That’s right. So, that’s true in literature. If you say they’re black, then
they’re black. If you don’t identify race, the assumption is that—
Rose: White.
Morrison: —they’re white.
Rose: You want to break through that?
Morrison: Absolutely. (“Interview”)

Readers and authors, for Morrison, are in a sort of pact, then, in which Blackness
must be narrated, and “[w]hiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable,
pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writ-
ers seem to say” (Playing 59). Readers also seem to understand this, as they bring
to bear the baggage of both a larger culture and a reading culture with a set of
assumptions worth revealing.
Morrison suggests it might be her particular position that helps her to lift the
veil of this dominant racial and narrative assumption. First, she is a writer.
Second, she is a nonwhite writer, and therefore, she implies, she is at least some-
what less likely to be operating under the set of racial assumptions and
“metaphorical shortcuts” (x) of the white writer / white reader contract. As a re-
sult, she writes:
I do not have quite the same access to traditionally useful constructs of blackness.
Neither blackness nor “people of color” stimulates in me notions of excessive, lim-
itless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts
because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can pow-
erfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and
dismissive “othering” of people and language which are by no means marginal or
already and completely known and knowable in my work. (x-xi)

One might look no further for a literary example of this theory than Morrison’s
own postmodernist experiment in unknowability, her short story “Recitatif”

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(which she references in Playing [xi]). Its main characters are fixated on race,
inscribed by it, and divided from each other by it, but readers of the text never
learn which of these two girls (then women) is black and which is white (which
is the “salt” and which is the “pepper,” as “the other kids called [them] some-
times” [132]).
To be clear, readers never conclusively or defensibly learn which of the two is
white and which is black. Anyone who has taught the story has likely come across
students who are quite certain that they know Roberta is definitely black or Twyla
is definitely black. Even scholars have not always entirely escaped this trap set by
the narrative. Abel discusses her own early experience with the text at length: “I
was introduced to ‘Recitatif’ by a black feminist critic, Lula Fragd. Lula was cer-
tain that Twyla was black; I was equally convinced that she was white; most of the
readers we summoned to resolve the dispute divided similarly along racial lines”
(243). The most interesting response along these lines may come from Fultz, who
specifically cites and critiques Abel’s experience while seeming to fall into the
same trap of reaching a conclusion about the race of each character, something
she does through a different door by attending to class and character rather than a
“desire for racial specificity” reached by reading “along a cultural axis” (25). Fultz
warns: “For certain readers, the text’s clearly charted warnings may not be
enough. Abel, for instance, admits to a frustration in trying to sort out who is
black and who is white” (23), and she laments that “readers such as Abel are
not necessarily satisfied with this seemingly inadequate narrative closure” (25).
However, early in her own study, Fultz pairs Twyla and the protagonist of Tar
Baby as
middle-class black women whose education and personal achievements create ten-
sions within and outside the black community. . . . [B]oth female protagonists are
no longer restricted to a defined space—the black side of the track, so to speak. In
fact, Twyla’s world (“Recitatif”) extends beyond the orphanage to an upper-middle-
class community north of New York City. (7)

One should keep such examples in mind as we move into the arguably subtler
narrative interventions at the heart of Glyph and Zone One, both of which similarly
bait, fool, or frustrate even scholarly readers.
In every reading situation, there is the risk that a narrative device will miss (or
partially miss) its mark. When I discuss aims and potential effects below, I do so
with no strong expectation that these effects are actually effective on (or even no-
ticed by) all readers. I do, though, suspect Everett’s and Whitehead’s tactics are
likely to have some effect on readers by virtue of their atypical operations in re-
lation to an absence of attention to race. As Morrison writes, “certain absences are
so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with
intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population
held away from them” (“Unspeakable” 11). By placing race at the center of her

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own narrative (“Recitatif”) that refuses to finally explicitly assign the characters’
races, Morrison risks (likely intentionally) frustrating, confusing, and alienating
readers operating under the familiar contract of white author / white reader.4
“Recitatif” confronts and potentially confounds readers, daring them to make
assumptions about the race of each character based on diet, music, religion,
and other familiar cultural signifiers that are often deployed as racial shorthand.
Everett and Whitehead continue to expose and critique the racial shorthand of a
perceived universal whiteness that assumes no need of explicit narration. These
authors’ attention to absence may, in fact, be especially relevant in the case of
readers who willfully misread unwelcome narratives. For Larkin, this activity is
the target of Everett’s Erasure, which “exposes the capacity of readers to see
what they wish to see, reading past whatever does not match their prejudices”
(149).
Morrison’s confrontational “Recitatif” can be seen as a sort of blueprint for
those authors, whose works follow, extend, and (un)radically modify that model,
continuing an interrogation into the ways in which we construct narratives of race
and the ways in which our narratives assume race. These authors make the lack of
narration, then the narration, and then the un-narration of race conspicuous,
thereby working to both “undermine . . . hegemonic constructions” (Singh
et al. 19) and “extend the boundaries of traditional narrative” (18). Glyph and
Zone One also extend the boundaries of existing subversive strategies: their exten-
sion of the Morrison project is radical enough to stand as a new set of theoretical
perspectives on, and practices of, narrative. The decision to actively not narrate
information about race—to choose to delay it, then reveal that it has been
delayed, then dismiss that revelation as unimportant, then return to that revela-
tion’s supposed lack of importance—works to highlight the ethical elements in-
trinsic to narration itself. Narratologists have long attended to even the most
“reliable” narrative as always a process of selection, exclusion, and omission
rather than a simple and direct report. Vivasvan Soni, for example, extends
this understanding to an implied ethics of narration: “The act of narration is
an act of responsibility, of choosing, of selection” (71). The narrator of
Everett’s Glyph insists that the narration of race is actually something far more
pedestrian. In so insisting, he puts readers in the position of reconsidering the
import of the pedestrian, of everyday expectations operating in “universal,”
“race-free” narrative norms.

Everett: “It Is Not Important Unless You Want It to Be”

Everett’s Glyph serves as a particularly fitting example of conspicuously refusing
the narration of race or, rather, placing race conspicuously under erasure (using
something like a “‘hidden-in-plain-sight’ technique,” as Larkin describes

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Everett’s Erasure [132]) because the novel already explicitly cites the brand of
poststructuralism that brought sous rature to the vocabulary of literary criticism.
The narrator’s skin color is not revealed to readers until more than fifty pages into
the text, as a digression during a moment of excitement in the plot. The infant
protagonist, Ralph, is being kidnapped by a scientist, Dr. Steimmel, and her as-
sistant, Boris, and baby Ralph reflects on a potential flaw in their plan:
Only an efficient net or spray of myopia could have kept Steimmel or Boris
from realizing that transporting me was going to be a conspicuous matter. . . . [M]y
readings in genetics and history and current events made it clear that the people on
the street were going to find the discrepancy between my skin color and my abduc-
tors’ at least notable and perhaps worthy of some explanation. (54)

That is, Ralph’s kidnappers are “two, rather pale, white people traveling up the
California coast with a baby” who is black (54). The narrator positions the
very meaning and import of race as within the contexts of “history,” “current
events,” and “people on the street,” but he uses that insight as simple explanation
for one of the complications his shortsighted kidnappers are likely to face from
the various audiences “on the street.” The narrator then pivots to the larger im-
plied audience—the addressees of Ralph’s narration.
The same “spray of myopia” that has blinded Steimmel and Boris to race,
Ralph suggests, has likely blinded readers as well. The first quarter of the novel
has been absent of conspicuous racial signifiers—an absence likely read as sig-
nifying whiteness. Ironically, readers in the culture of assumed universal narra-
tive whiteness Ralph describes would not even realize that something “worthy of
some explanation” (54) was occurring but for Ralph’s explanation. That is, even
as Ralph purports to be filling in a small detail simply to avoid confusion, he ac-
tually introduces the potential for confusion by troubling the novel’s apparent
white default. Jacqueline Berben-Masi suggests, for example, that Ralph’s delayed
and “apostrophize[d]” announcement of his race demands reappraisal for the
novel’s other characters as well (58n20): what else, one must ask, has been invis-
ible but present all along?
Ralph continues his interrogation of familiar narrative assumptions—and
continues the “demands” he places on readers—with a question: “Have you to
this point assumed that I am white?” The racial revelation this line elaborates
is now complicated by additional, formal features. A section break brackets
Ralph’s question from the “spray of myopia” line (Everett, Glyph 54), creating
a physical gap on the page to mirror the informational gap readers have just
come to realize has been present throughout the text. The turn toward direct ad-
dress of the implied audience, along with that turn’s shift to a second-person ad-
dress, troubles the gap readers may have imagined between themselves and the
narrator and the gap readers might want to imagine between themselves and

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anything resembling an uncareful or, especially, a racist reader. This all occurs
just after Ralph explains that people would likely want explanation of his
situation.
Readers already know Ralph’s immediate situation and the events leading up
to it, but they have also just learned that they do not know everything—they are
not unlike the audience of hypothetical “people on the street,” whose confusion
about the details they are actually seeing (an apparently black baby with appar-
ently white adults) has been presented as a mere nuisance that forces Ralph to
interrupt his narration. In fact, its claimed status as mere nuisance is what defines
it as key narrative moment, something that is underlined when Ralph turns away
from his mere clarification and toward a question to readers and an elaborate ex-
planation about what readers likely assumed and why they assumed it: because
earlier narratives have trained readers to do so. Inside a further digression from
what Ralph claims is an insignificant, merely pragmatic, initial digression appears
an explicit theory on the operations of race in narrative, beginning with a question
for readers but quickly moving into a claim:
Have you to this point assumed that I am white? In my reading, I discovered
that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro
hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom, live in a
certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone. White characters, I as-
sumed they were white (often, because of the ways they spoke of other kinds of
people), did not seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimization,
to exist on the page. But you, dear reader, no doubt, whether you share my pigmen-
tation or cultural origins, probably assumed that I was white. It is not important
unless you want it to be and I will not say more about it, but a physical description
of one kidnapped baby would have to be released to the police and that description,
being delivered by my parents, would be more or less precise and therefore, two,
rather pale, white people traveling up the California coast with a baby possessing at
least one of the attributes of the rendered portrait might have a problem. (54)

The evolution of this passage—from the baby’s curious question to readers, to

the confessional history of Ralph’s own reading, to diagnosis and political claim,
to polite accusation of the “dear reader”—is then abruptly undercut: “It is not
important unless you want it to be and I will not say more about it.” At this mo-
ment, one can no longer recognize this scene in familiar aesthetic terms—a mod-
ernist shock, for example, or a Brechtian interruption.
Larkin draws attention to the term interruption through Benjamin and Brecht,
and she describes interruption as “any literary technique that potentially inter-
feres with the experience of reading as the passive inhabiting of narrative space,
absorption of narrative meaning, or acceptance of an interpellative call.” She
argues persuasively that “interruptions make reading visible as an ideological
process and potentially alienate readers from the hegemonic social order” (20),
but I argue that Glyph’s narrator works to complicate or undercut the work of

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the interruption by dismissing the importance of the detail that caused the inter-
ruption. (Larkin does not address Glyph in her book, but she does read Erasure
and “Recitatif.”) Ralph denies his own interest in the matter; he insists the reader
is actually the one who determines the importance of such things (like the “people
on the street” who may or may not want an explanation), and he brushes the
whole issue off as a minor complication for Steimmel and Boris, who now “might
have a problem” (Everett, Glyph 54) to join the list of other hurdles they face in
their kidnapping attempt. Of course, this is not a minor detail in an insignificant
digression. In fact, readers will be told later that “there is no such thing as
digression” (127), that “there is only authorial intrusion” (128). Whether the in-
truding author in the above digression is Ralph, Percival Everett, or “Percival
Everett,” the text will not allow us to imagine any digression as unimportant, par-
ticularly one that so conspicuously crosses itself out.5
Soon after this coaching about narrative digressions, readers reach the novel’s
longest and most conspicuous digression. By this point, they have seen Brechtian
shock, undermined by permission to ignore it and then underlined by the lesson
about digression. Now, a four-page (134-37) footnote about the history of French
painting interrupts the novel’s most conspicuously racist scene. Ralph has been
kidnapped for the third time and is being passed off by another white couple as
“our adopted African American son, Jamal” (132). Over the next few pages, he is
greeted by a barrage of racial signifiers and assumptions, from racist terms of en-
dearment, such as “what a cute little pickaninny” (133); to affectionate imitations
of African American slang, such as “right on to you, little fellow” (132); to biolog-
ical laudations: “‘He’s a fast one, too,’ Uncle Ned said. ‘In the blood,’ said Chaein
and they all laughed” (135). The lengthy footnote begins right in the midst of this
scene, grinding momentum to a halt and working to distract from the significance
of race and racism in the narrative. With the inclusion of this footnote—a long
diatribe about art that both demonstrates (or purports to demonstrate) the nar-
rator’s disinterest in the scene’s ongoing comments about his race and forces our
attention away from the scene—Everett creates a literal interruption, but one that
reads as both boring and irrelevant and pulls attention away from race rather than
toward it.
If the novel’s reader recalls the instruction to view digression as motivated au-
thorial intrusion, though, that recollection serves to interrupt the interruption,
forcing us to ask about the motivations of the author-figure doing the intruding.
The narrator performatively insists that he is uninterested in race even while a
crowd of race-fixated white adults is subjecting Ralph to a shocking litany of racist
claims and modes of address. He proceeds to change the subject for four pages in
his outrageously unrelated, digressive footnote: erasure by logorrhea. In the
words of the protagonist of Everett’s Erasure: “Of course, it meant nothing and
so, it meant everything” (248).

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Like the readers of “Recitatif” who still make guesses about the races of the
characters even while recognizing Morrison’s trap, so, too, are there scholars
of Glyph who seem to take Ralph at his word. For Michel Feith, in Glyph,
“‘Race’ . . . is neither to be denied nor overemphasized. It is one of the variables
in the text, but in no way is it the most important one” (312). Such conclusions
may be evidence of some of the inevitable limitations of any intended narrative
effect (the kind of limitation also demonstrated by Kimberly Fain’s reaction to
Zone One, as we will see below). Readers may feel invited to simply give in
and agree with Ralph that his race is just a pragmatic plot device and not signif-
icant (or not significant relative to the novel’s other concerns).
To read race in Glyph as merely another storytelling variable, though, even af-
ter it is presented as both a tool for making cultural meaning and a shorthand for
a narrative code tied to legitimization and the right to exist, requires a reader to
turn her head away from, for example, the racist mockery of “Jamal,” in a readerly
contortion as awkward as the narrator’s four-page footnote. The novel, that is,
has already parodically modeled just such a contortion. In the stretched-out mo-
ment of reconsideration initiated by a late rewriting of assumptions about the
protagonist, readers might instead begin to reconsider his original critique about
the typical author and audience assumptions of universal whiteness. Amid the
urgency of Ralph’s increasingly conspicuous distractions and denials, readers
might go on to consider why one might be eager to minimize or “move past”
such a critique. An initial delay and an unexpected revelation begin a critique
that potentially rewrites the reader’s view of the text and the culture it depicts
and the reader’s view of texts and the cultures they produce and are produced
by. The denial that follows complicates that complication, perhaps extending
the period of time a reader might have otherwise considered the point, regardless
of the conclusion she eventually reaches.
Morrison writes of “the passage” that “seems to come out of nowhere because
there has been nothing in a hundred or so pages to prepare us for” it (Playing 22).
The result, argues Morrison, is that “fictional demands stretch to breaking all nar-
rative coherence” (23). Everett’s novel turns that flaw into a potentially construc-
tive undisruption—a disruption that winks at its own narrative operation at the
outskirts of the story and insists that readers stop to ask which meanings really do
not mean, which meanings are ceaselessly meaning without appearing to do so,
and why characters and readers might urgently desire to avoid or minimize at-
tending to such meanings at all.
Elsewhere in his oeuvre, Everett describes an “insidious colonialist reader’s
eye which infects America” and works to limit authors and to help readers feel
“safe.” According to Everett, this problem is a specifically American one: “[I]t
is not just white readers, but African-American readers as well who seek to fit
our stories to an existent model. It is not seeing with ‘white’ eyes, it is seeing
with ‘American’ eyes, with brainwashed, automatic, comfortable, and ‘safe’

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perceptions of reality” (“Signing” 10). Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One use-
fully tracks the undead afterlife of just such a desire for avoidance and safety
through the lens of a more literal undead afterlife.

Whitehead: “The Tremor That Breaks into Discourse on Race”

Like “Recitatif,” and some examples of Everett’s other work—of which he notes,
“I have reacted, in my cranky way, by writing two novels which purposely do not
overtly specify the race of the main characters” (“Signing” 10)—Whitehead’s
novel withholds explicit racial identification. While Morrison’s narrative never
reveals which of her protagonists is white and which is black, Whitehead’s nar-
rative does eventually reveal that the protagonist is black, but it takes so long
(more than two hundred pages) and is greeted with so little surprise (from, for
example, the novel’s other characters, who have already known the protagonist
is black, since they can see him) that it has the potential to read as unimportant,
boring, and anticlimactic. In the context of Everett’s and Morrison’s experiments,
however, Zone One’s eventual revelation reads as more—a major entrance into
the conversations of race and narration, race and genre, and the partnering of
cultural narratives of American nationhood with narratives that trivialize or ig-
nore issues of race. An early reviewer aptly imagines possible readers as likely
to be “fruitfully disturbed, because Zone One will have forced them, whether
they signed up for it or not, to see the strangeness of the familiar and the famil-
iarity of the strange” (Duncan), a result that Derek Maus argues is far “preferable
to settling into the ruts of senseless, uncritical familiarity” (121).6
Zone One takes place after a familiar zombie apocalypse: a plague transforms
humans into undead monsters who then spread that plague to others by biting
them. “Apocalypse” here, of course, means the end of the world, or the end of
the world as we know it, because there is still a world, just a much altered one.
To emphasize the “as we know it” is to return to the association of apocalypse
with the unveiling of knowledge or prophetic revelation. Zone One attends to
both the popular and traditional meanings of apocalypse, depicting a post-
apocalyptic world while also structuring narrative revelation in a piecemeal, non-
linear fashion, with the protagonist’s race—which readers would usually expect
to learn or be able to safely assume very early in the narrative—held back until
late and then revealed with little fanfare. Significantly, this revelation is framed by
two key elements: one is the potential retroactive revelation about how many
times race was actually invisibly narrated right beneath the reader’s nose for
the first two hundred pages of the novel, and the other is a second apocalyptic
turn in the zombie plague. At almost the same narrative moment that the protag-
onist reveals his race (by revealing the racial origin of his nickname in an act of
narration to his companion), Zone One, a barricaded section of Manhattan, is

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invaded and overrun by zombies, signaling not only a setback to the reconstruc-
tion of human civilization but also a blow to the reestablishment of epistemolog-
ical order. Narratives collapse, and they are revealed as always tentatively
constructed atop a history and reality that are less passive and settled than
they seem.
At the most basic level, the novel’s second apocalypse (that is, its set of twin
revelations—one about the fragility of the fictional US nation in postapocalypse
reconstruction and one about the protagonist’s heretofore unnarrated Blackness)
begins with an apparently passive zombie suddenly turning aggressive, biting one
of the protagonist’s companions, Gary. This dooms Gary to die and transform
into a zombie, and it parallels a resurgence of zombie aggression across the
city (and presumably the planet) that will topple the walls of the titular Zone
One. At this moment, Gary asks about the protagonist’s nickname—Mark
Spitz—and the protagonist begins to reveal the name’s origin to his dying friend:
“This is the story Mark Spitz told that final Sunday. The bite had stopped geyser-
ing blood. It was just the two of them. . . . Gary asked, ‘Why do they call you Mark
Spitz?’” (135). Mark Spitz is, in fact, the only name “they” seem to call him and the
only name the narrative has called him to this point. Conspicuously, the name is
always “Mark Spitz,” never just “Mark” or “Spitz,” and this draws immediate and
sustained attention to its artificiality. Gary, after all, is called Gary; their compan-
ion Kaitlyn is called by her first name, too. Despite this conspicuousness, the nar-
rative delays any explanation for hundreds of pages: Gary does not ask about
Mark Spitz’s name until page 135, and the explanation finally comes on page 230.
Throughout this narrative delay, Gary serves as a stand-in for the frustrated
reader, wondering why something so small is being delayed for so long. He inter-
jects a number of times to try to steer Mark Spitz back to an actual answer. Six
pages after his initial question, Gary interjects, “‘You haven’t got to the Mark Spitz
part yet.’” Mark Spitz’s response seems to dodge the question and continue to
defer meaning: “‘It’s soaking through again,’ Mark Spitz said. He ripped open an-
other medi-patch and continued” (141). This phrase—“soaking through”—
operates on the literal level: blood is soaking through the bandages on Gary’s
wound. However, it can also be read as a self-reflexive commentary on the racial
constructs that do not get left behind even after the apocalypse and, in fact, con-
tinue to push through into the new, in-reconstruction world. (The novel’s re-
peated use of the term reconstruction clearly invites comparison to the United
States’ racial and apocalyptic history while also potentially drawing attention to
the construction and reconstruction of narratives.)
Another reaction to Gary’s interjections functions in similar, multiplex fash-
ion: Gary asks, “What do you mean?” and Mark Spitz’s reaction is, “I’m getting
there” (142). Read alongside the poststructuralist section titles of Everett’s Glyph,
this exchange in Zone One brings to mind theories of endless deferral and slippage
of meaning.7 Like Everett’s novel, Whitehead’s seems to draw attention to its own

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telling over and over. Gary insists on a clear meaning for and from Mark Spitz.
Mark Spitz insists on a slow, evolving, historical one—a getting there, rather
than a there. One could read in this a recognition that history is active and always
contributing to the present, regardless of how much we might like to bracket it off,
write it out, or attempt to return to an ideal, pre- or ahistorical state of purity or
stability. Mark Spitz’s name is the conspicuous presence (in the present) of his-
tory, from the history of Olympic swimming, to the history of American racial
stereotypes, to Mark Spitz’s history since the apparent end of history: a battle
with zombies while his fellow survivors jumped into water, the assignment of
a racial nickname even after the apparent end of history, and the repeated con-
frontations others have with his name and his Blackness.
Readers are sure to be frustrated by the slow revelation of a weak punchline:
the protagonist is nicknamed Mark Spitz because he does not jump directly into
the water, he is black, and a common stereotype purports that black Americans
do not know how to swim.
Mark Spitz explained the reference of his sobriquet to Gary, adding, “Plus the
black-people-can’t-swim thing.”
“They can’t? You can’t?”
“I can. A lot of us can. Could. It’s a stereotype.” He found it unlikely that Gary
was not in ownership of a master list of racial, gender, and religious stereotypes,
cross-indexed with corresponding punch lines, but he did not press his friend. (231)

This revelation is one of those small, anticlimactic revelations that Glyph’s Ralph
might claim “is not important unless you want it to be,” but the slow, resistant
pace of the narrative draws a conspicuous amount of attention to it. Rather
than insisting race is central to the story and yet refusing to reveal it, as in
“Recitatif,” Zone One draws out a painfully long back story it insists is not par-
ticularly important.8 The form, then, works against the novel’s own claims,
highlighting what it largely erases, frustrating readers but purporting not to
“press” them.
This model is at work with Mark Spitz himself, who intentionally keeps the
nickname rather than erasing or ignoring it, which would seem to indicate that
the name or its implications have some importance to him, despite his Ralph-
like claims to the contrary. A supervisor asks him, “‘What do I call you?’
‘Mark Spitz is fine,’ he said. It was the truth. ‘It’s caught on.’ ‘Wanted to make
sure. People like to be called what they like to be called’” (93). This short exchange
reveals much. First, there is a formal doubling of Mark Spitz’s lack of concern: the
name is fine, he says, and then the narrative repeats that this “was the truth.” His
claim would not seem to need narrative support, and yet it receives it—an act that
potentially undermines his claim as much as it supports it. If he is reflecting on
the truthfulness of this statement, why is he doing so only for this statement?
Readers are not similarly told, “[i]t was the truth” after other comments Mark

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Spitz makes. Is this an indication that he thinks he should not be “fine” with the
nickname but is? Does the narrator think readers will find something unbelievable
about Mark Spitz’s claim that the name is fine (similar to the way that Mark Spitz
suspects Gary knows more about the racial stereotype than he admits)?
Disguised as a harmless clarification, the statement “[i]t was the truth” oper-
ates as a narrative disruption. That disruption is intensified by the interjection’s
placement in the middle of his dialogue. Rather than a straightforward
explanation—“Mark Spitz is fine. It’s caught on” (or the even more seamless,
“Mark Spitz is fine: It’s caught on”)—the first of the two conspicuously short sen-
tences is followed by the delay of a dialogue tag and then by the equally short nar-
rative reflection before finishing the explanation with the even shorter, “It’s
caught on.” Importantly, the scene appears before readers actually learn that
Mark Spitz is black and before readers learn (or Gary even asks about) the origin
of his nickname, making this a sort of under-erasure revelation that is likely to be
missed on a first reading and that therefore serves as representative of countless
possible missed or multiple meanings throughout the novel.9 On a rereading, the
supervisor’s explanation that he “[w]anted to make sure” (93) has a new reso-
nance: he recognizes the nickname as potentially racial (and potentially racist)
in origin and wants to make sure it is really acceptable for him to use. Despite
Mark Spitz’s insistence throughout the novel that he is utterly average and unre-
markable in every way, the supervisor’s question indicates that Mark Spitz’s race
still necessitates remark and inquiry. A rereading reveals that the characters (and
the narrative as a whole) are having a conversation that is actually entirely about
race, but first-time readers will likely not even recognize the appearance of race in
the scene at all. Later in the novel, when Mark Spitz finally tells the story of his
race, it is a retelling of sorts, since race has been present and active throughout,
embedded in apparently innocuous conversations, apparently innocuous figura-
tive language, and the “reconstruction” culture’s own branding.
For example, the first appearance of the nickname directly and innocuously
follows a reference to slaves that seems raceless and historically unspecific:
“He was fifteen floors up, in the heart of Zone One, and shapes trudged like slaves
higher and higher into midtown. They called him Mark Spitz nowadays. He didn’t
mind” (8). One can see in “[h]e didn’t mind” an earlier version of the later nar-
rative insistence that “[i]t was the truth” (93), which reveals the denial of racial
importance as itself a pattern. What Mark Spitz does not “mind” in this scene is
the same narratively invisible element his supervisor alludes to (but avoids explic-
itly mentioning) in the later conversation. This pattern continues: the first allu-
sion to an explanation for Mark Spitz’s name reads, “They started calling him
Mark Spitz after they finally found their way back to camp after the incident
on I-95. The name stuck. No harm. Affront was a luxury, like shampoo and
affection” (21). In light of this conspicuous, repeated, and belied insistence
that Mark Spitz barely thinks about the name and its racial connotation, it is

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difficult to reread the reference to “slaves” during this period of “reconstruction”
as merely coincidental, either here or when slaves are mentioned again, specifi-
cally in the context of “reconstruction” and with no direct reference to race:
“There had been laws once; to abide by their faint murmuring, despite the inter-
regnum, was to believe in their return. To believe in reconstruction. . . . [B]ut un-
told Americans still walked the great out there, beyond order’s embrace, like
slaves who didn’t know they’d been emancipated” (39). A similar pattern emerges
with (not explicitly racialized) references to gentrification (29) and the
“transitional neighborhood” (167), “genetic desirability” and DNA (72), and so
on. They serve double duty as, first, metaphors that claim contemporary general
recognition and, then, on a second reading, as part of an omnipresent but previ-
ously invisible focus on race. In this way, Zone One performs on itself the kind of
criticism Morrison performs on the invisible operations of race in literary history
in Playing in the Dark:
One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling
subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary
discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are
encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that
breaks into discourse on race. (10)

Morrison is referring to “every well-bred instinct” that anxiously “argues against

noticing” or discussing race “and forecloses adult discourse” (10). Whitehead
dramatizes the tremor of a restless horde that lays bare the fragility of well-
bred instincts and optimistic attempts to build walls that isolate polite society
from yesterday’s horror and violence. Zone One’s dual revelations—
particularly after a slow-paced, repeated delay of revelation—illustrate a literal
and literary “tremor that breaks into discourse on race,” if of a different sort
from Morrison’s.
The novel’s final pages unleash a sudden cascade of remarks on race at the
same time as zombies are flooding the zone. Mark Spitz wonders whether “the
old bigotries [will] be reborn” and the reconstruction will “reanimate prejudice”
(Whitehead, Zone 231). The zombies bursting through resemble an obscene
“melting-pot”: “Every race, color, and creed was represented in this congregation
that funneled down the avenue. . . . No matter the hue of their skins, dark or light,
no matter the names of their gods. . . . Now they were mostly mouths and fingers”
(243-44). In light of the novel’s racial revelations, and with retroactive recognition
of the omnipresence of race throughout the novel, the scene is nearly comical. It
immediately overwhelms the minor revelation of the protagonist’s race with a
much more pressing revelation, displacing (or placing back under erasure again)
the punchline that the narrative took two hundred pages to tell, even as it makes a
gross zombie parody of an imagined American melting pot that would subsume a
multi-century history of constructed and enforced racial difference to a general,

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universal, and only selectively historical Americanness and thereby purport to
eliminate or move beyond race.
Perhaps for this reason—along with a tendency to take Mark Spitz, like Ralph,
at his word—some critics have used Zone One as an entrance into investigations
of the idea of contemporary American culture as “post-racial,” with varying
degrees of insight. Fain, for example, takes at face value the claim that race is
not much of an issue in this text. In a disappointing reading, she finds any “racial
element” largely “absent from Zone One” (148) and cites the delayed revelation of
the protagonist’s race “as further proof of Whitehead’s move toward postracial
narratives” (123). Ramon Saldıvar cautions that one should be wary of such views
and should “use the term ‘postrace’ as Colson Whitehead and other writers have
suggested that we do: under erasure and with full ironic force” (2). Whitehead
himself remarks: “There are underlying narratives which are still pretty potent.
I think you’re only post-racial when you stop asking if you’re post-racial”
(“Colson”). Marlon Lieber describes Zone One’s world as “a ‘post-racial world’”
but clarifies, “I wouldn’t claim that this is a ‘post-racial’ novel.” He also cautions
that although race seems to be treated as irrelevant in the novel, and although
Mark Spitz repeatedly insists that his name is no big deal, “we needn’t take
this at face value.” However, this is only because “‘race’ could play a more sub-
dued role without Mark Spitz or the narrator recognizing it.”
A useful source on Whitehead and the post-racial can be found in the author’s
earlier satirical piece that preceded publication of Zone One by just under two
years, “The Year of Living Postracially” (2009). In the piece, Whitehead declares
(humorously), “One year ago today, we officially became a postracial society.
Fifty-three percent of the voters opted for the candidate who would be the first
president of African descent, and in doing so eradicated racism forever.” The claim
is not only that we tie race to narrative but also that Americans have told them-
selves a narrative about the end of racism, building a sort of historical barricade
around it—the kind that Zone One reveals as both heavily guarded and ultimately
doomed. In this way, Zone One’s argument is in line with the pesky “naysayers” of
Whitehead’s satirical piece: “There are naysayers, however, who believe that we
can’t erase centuries of entrenched prejudice, cultivated hatred and institutional-
ized dehumanization overnight.” In literary discourse, Morrison, one such
“naysayer,” would call the attempt at such an erasure an evasion or a silencing.
Whitehead’s novel suggests the intervention of a tremor of the kind I have de-
scribed as an unradical narrative or an undisruptive disruption: a long delay,
reaching an anticlimax of racial revelation, coupled with repeated insistence that
race is not a big deal. If this is an evasion, then it is a productive brand of evasion.
Both Everett and Whitehead take up Morrison’s implicit challenge, but they do
so in peculiar ways that may sneak up on even vigilant readers, whether they are
predisposed to be hostile or receptive to certain political content or familiar dis-
ruptive forms. Even if we imagine literary shock has the capability to remove us

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from literary and cultural habit (and I do), we should consider the possibility that
a technique of shock can, on repetition, become a new kind of habit or, as with so
many techniques developed by Brecht and others, eventually become subsumed
into the same cultures and ideologies it set out to disrupt.
Unradical strategies have clear risks: Glyph and Zone One certainly do not get
around all of the complications of individual and community reader responses.
However, these novels do seem to recognize that even the best twenty-five-
year-old strategies of narrative disruption cannot be endlessly redeployed in
the same fashion in expectation of the same effects. After all, “are we to believe
that every reader in every epoch most needs that kind of shock, and that there are
no other ethical effects that for some readers in some circumstances might be
equally valuable?” (Booth 71). At their best, these novels may put us in the pro-
ductive position of wondering why they are not deploying traditional tools of in-
terruption and disruption in traditional ways. By doing so, they might force us to
look anew (again) at the ways in which race is narrated and not narrated in our
literature and in our society.

Notes
I owe much to those who have discussed and critiqued this paper and its ideas.
Thanks to the students from my 2015 seminar in post-1950 literature (especially
Eddie Campos, Jr. and Zach Linge) and to Fiona McWilliam, Joycelyn Moody,
Sonja Lanehart, Bridget Drinka, the Percival Everett society, A Ye˛misi Jimoh,
Angelo Robinson, Gary Totten, and a number of terrific, anonymous peer reviewers.

1. I see this brand of narrative withholding as importantly different from extant,

related narratological terms, such as paralipsis and denarration. Arguably, one
could read the Everett/Whitehead brand of narrative withholding as something
of a combination of these two: a long period of “the narrator tell[ing] less than he
or she knows” (Phelan 219), followed by a revelation of the knowledge, with that
knowledge then quickly retracted, disregarded, or minimized by “voices that
erase the texts that they have been creating” (Richardson xi).
2. Sianne Ngai describes a “meta-feeling” as related to
moments of conspicuous inactivity [that] remain affectively charged. . . .
[W]hat each moment produces is the inherently ambiguous affect of affective
disorientation in general—what we might think of as a state of feeling
vaguely “unsettled” or “confused,” or, more precisely, a meta-feeling in
which one feels confused about what one is feeling. (15)

3. K. Merinda Simmons reminds readers to keep a poststructuralist mindset, al-

ways attending to the constructedness and tenuousness of such a category as
“white narrative” (6).

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4. Lezbeth Goodman and Joan Digby sum up this element in Morrison as follows:
“Morrison argues not that readers are all white, but that they have traditionally
been ‘positioned’ as white: assumed to be white, or to be interested in what inter-
ests white readers” (147).
5. Judith Roof describes Ralph as “a hypernarrator” who causes “the persistent dis-
location of the illusion of an organizing source” (212-13) and can “show the
assumptions underlying any investment in coherence, narrative, or meaning”
(210).
6. Similarly, Andrew Hoberek suggests that Zone One makes an implicit argument
for “the breakdown” of both cultural and literary narratives (412-13).
7. Cameron Leader-Picone argues that Whitehead’s larger body of work is “taking
racial identity as a subject matter while continually undermining the reader’s
ability to find purchase within its contours” as part of “an endless deferral of
closure” that “repeatedly pushes the reader to question the substance of labels
and categories” (432).
8. Glen Duncan writes of the nickname’s explanation that it “is withheld so long
that the payoff stakes rise perilously high.”
9. Carl Joseph Swanson writes: “That his [Mark Spitz’s] name reflects a
stereotype—a heuristic—and is applied ironically indicates that problems of
knowledge and representation have been signified through the novel with every
instance of ‘Mark Spitz’” (399).

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