"I am the DJ I am what I play": The In-Between Space in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude.

When trying to distinguish which parts of American popular culture are ‘Black’ from which parts are ‘white’ we can forget about the people and things which exist at the nexus of the two.

In Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel, the Fortress of Solitude, a coming-of-age story set in Brooklyn in the 1970s, Dylan Ebdus’ character falls into the in-between space which epitomizes American popular culture.

Growing up in the housing projects of Gowanus, Brooklyn, Dylan feels like an outsider since the day he was born. Dylan, like his namesake, cultural icon “Bob Dylan,” is a white boy whose family is lower-middle class (Lethem 6). But in many ways Dylan is akin to his Black friend from the neighborhood, Mingus Rude. While they attend different schools after elementary school, they return to “the same block” and their “two fathers” who both make ends meet as artists, eating “TV dinners” (78). On Dean street, Dylan learns to play “skully” with a Spaldeen for the first time from the Puerto Rican girls on the block, and he hones his skills with Mingus (54). Dylan learns to love comics from Mingus, who regards them as a delicacy (64). While Dylan is white, he is not a part of the high, elite white culture; on these streets and through his relationships, Dylan learns about popular culture.

As Dylan and Mingus transition into adulthood, they remain transfixed by the superheroes, the subject of their infatuation as children, to the extent that they want to imitate them in real life. In some instances, Dylan accompanies Mingus in his endeavors as adolescents. They tag “DOSE,” their graffiti name as a team: one would paint as the other watched guard, mimicking a superhero duo (Lethem 136). In these moments, Dylan is able to “merge his identity...with the black kid’s, to lose his funky-music whiteboy geekdom” (136). In the fleeting moments in which Dylan collaborates with Mingus, the pop-culture expert, he feels comfortable with his identity as a white boy from the streets.

Dylan views Mingus as the ultimate superhero because of this cultural expertise, and puts him on a pedestal throughout the novel. But the façade of Mingus’ heroism fades as the political and social reality becomes evident. When Mingus nearly falls to his death after taking on the persona of imaginary superhero “Aeroman,” it foreshadows the bleak future ahead (225). This is juxtaposed to the opportunities afforded to Dylan because of his whiteness: he leaves the Brooklyn streets for the suburbs in Vermont during summer and attends college at Camden, where he uses Black culture to his advantage to gain social popularity. Dylan goes to Stuyvesant, a specialized test-entry highschool in Manhattan, and he gets to immerse himself in the white, alternative Punk scene (227). Mingus is forever Dylan’s superhero, but he is ultimately limited by the racial power structure, stuck on the streets of Gowanus.

As Dylan gets older, he imagines himself as a savior, a hero, a white boy who could save the block from crime and all of its downfalls. Dylan imagines himself helping “a woman yelling for return of her stolen pocketbook, the classical Spider-Man scenario;” he decides Gowanus needs his rescue (Lethem 190). Dylan’s life’s work is influenced entirely by his experiences growing up on the block, specifically the music of Barret Rude Junior, Mingus’ father. Lethem devotes the entire middle section of the novel to Dylan’s piece, “BOTHERED BLUE ONCE MORE: The Barret Rude Jr. and the Distinctions story” (294-305). Dylan’s role is akin to that of the white Jewish liaison, like the Jewish producer for NWA (Corey, lecture). Even as an adult, Dylan spends his life trying to be the white superhero for Black culture. Lethem uses Mingus and Dylan as foils for one another throughout the novel, and the same can be said about their fathers. Dylan and his father Abraham are not objectively more talented than Mingus and his father Barret Rude Junior. They can attribute their career success to their white skin.

In 1999, Dylan pitches a Hollywood movie which is a distorted reflection of the subsequent action in the novel. Dylan calls the movie “the Prisonaires”—the title of the second half of the book (Lethem 323). Dylan explains the movie is about “ ‘five black guys in prison in the 1950s...who form a singing group for the love of music’ ” (325). This seems to be Dylan’s twisted fantasy about the experience of incarcerated Black people. Meanwhile, the reality is disturbing for Dylan’s Black friends from the block, Mingus and Robert Woolfolk, who both end up in jail by the end of the novel.

In a saddening fantasy that he might rescue his friends from their impending doom of a life of drug abuse and imprisonment, Dylan attempts to sneak his mother’s ring (which they thought had superpowers as children) into the prison to Mingus. Dylan is under the impression that if he gets the ring to Mingus, it could save him from his life circumstances. Mingus rejects the ring and asks that Dylan give it to Robert Woolfolk, the Black man who “yoked,” or in other words, jumped Dylan for money as a kid (Lethem 193). A conversation between two police officers at the jail reveals that Robert committed suicide, a poignant end to the superhero motif. Their comments suggest that Robert thought the ring conveyed magical powers which might allow him to escape the prison, or maybe even allow him to take flight (497). Dylan can appreciate and obsess over Black culture as much as he wants, but he can never be a part of it like Robert or Mingus. To an extent Dylan sees this as a detriment, but it is an advantage: he does not end up in jail and never has to bear the burden of Black skin.

Dylan reveled in the moments in which his identity was validated by his Black friends. He cannot help but feel resentful he is not Black, because in his view, he does not get to have the cultural ownership of an experience that was his: growing up in the projects with a single father. At the end of the novel, Dylan realizes that while his mother’s decision to raise him in the projects of Brooklyn in the 1970s fated him to be an outsider—so that he “pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space”— “her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American” all at the same (508). Dylan learned about American popular culture on the streets without the death sentence of Black skin and used his experience to build a career.

Lethem’s novel suggests that while popular culture is beautiful because of the way it changes lives, forms friendships, and creates an escape, it fails to transform the reality of the racial hierarchy.