Contrivance Does Not Shoot Me Through the Heart

A New York Times book reviewer, Dwight Garner, claims Percival Everett’s James will “shoot readers straight through the heart.” Why not mine? Because for me, contrivance flattens an emotional response to literature. I do admit, however, on the subject of verisimilitude (likeness to reality and fact) I can be “tahsome.” Call me a Mark Twain character, as when Huck says of Aunt Sally: “She can keep a-raging right along, runnin’ her insurrection all by herself…” That is what I wanted to do in a recent book club meeting on Huckelberry Finn and James.

Whereas Twain’s improbabilities and hyperbole delight me, this was not true for Everett’s novel. Things clawed at me and kept getting stuck in my jaw. In James there is a pencil that keeps growing like Pinocchio’s nose despite its use. Okay, this is Everett’s metaphor for a writer who must not be erased but keep emerging. But the slave, who stole the pencil for Jim/James, ends up being hanged. That makes a pencil a mighty expensive one for the master. But it’s such a magical object that the slave about to be hanged can see James hiding among nearby trees, the two slaves eye to eye, though the white crowd gathered for the hanging does not see Jim. I’m also asked to believe the “golden tablet” of a notebook is able to keep returning like a magic carpet; that it survives time in the river and is perfectly dry for later use. But page 293 was the one that surely saved my heart from puncture. This is when James becomes Harry Houdini, as he ties the seated slave owner, Judge Thacher, to a tree. This while holding a gun and making a not too tight knot. (You, the reader, might try to do this. Hold a large stapler and use rope.)

I love coincidences! While writing this blog, I stopped to look up contrive in the OED. What did I find beneath the word? This line from the short story writer, O Henry? “To contrive the rope into an ingenious noose-bridle.”

Ah, noose! Everett would have taught O Henry short stories. I suspect his mind retained this image. Also on page 293, what famous writer does James possess?  None other than John Stuart Mill, the English founder of the Unitarian Church, who wrote a famous essay on Liberty. Let’s not forget that Mark Twain claimed the most notable attribute of the “free man” was (is) gullibility. Is Dr. Everett testing this?

Well, I am a woman. I’ve never felt entirely free, especially now in the continuing Ides of March. And Mark Twain wrote something else that I find pertinent today. “We, the wanderin’, exiled, trampled-on (Trumped-on) sufferin’ folk.”  But I end this blog with thanks to Percival Everett for his stately character James, a reflection of the urbane author who lives in Los Angeles and teaches at USC. March on, as we Trojans say. Eventually, I will read Erasure, the novel that preceded James.

Next week: On to Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux

My Two-Bits on Percival Everett’s James

A favorite expression from my Southern father was “two bits worth.”  This confused me until I realized he meant a quarter. Then when I grew beyond the literal, I realized Father was making a statement about the worth of what had been said (or written).  Today I will offer my “two-bits” on Percival Everett’s novel, James.  I met this urbane author years ago at the Bread Loaf writer’s conference where he was a visiting instructor and I, a student there. He and I shared a USC connection: I, a USC graduate from the Department of English, and Percival, a USC professor in the same department.

I think in James, Dr. Percival Everett is having fun…yanking a reader’s gullibility chain.  I definitely feel he is pulling mine. Although I accept that Mark Twain did any damn thing he wanted in Huckleberry Finn, regarding coincidence and plausibility (and I loved Twain for it), I’m unable to accept Everett’s James in the same way. I liked the author’s conceit, his idea, of casting a new Jim for Huck. And I’ve read enough to have gotten Everett’s intellectual jokes. Yet I cannot believe Jim has read Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophical work on ‘fear and trembling’.  I admit, however, it’s an apt work for a slave to read (if he knew his A thru Z’s). I’m also asked to believe the literate James is well acquainted with John Locke. This famous Enligsh philosopher decreed that judgments should be made on the basis of personal experience and Probability! In James a reader gets Voltaire, too.  Mark Twain shared the thinking of this French dramatist, and Everett’s James is fond of Candide. Both Voltaire and Twain came to realize the world could not be cured of greed, fraud, superstition, and violence. Which led Voltaire to believe the only course for a wise man was to cultivate his own garden.  And this, of course, is what James will be able to do with his wife and children in a free state (as long as no bounty hunters come after them). Yet James and the sophisticated knowledge of philosophical literature and drama (not to mention the vocabulary) created a nagging question in my mind for author, Percival Everett. How did your James learn to read?

I ask this question because I am slowly reading David W. Bright’s 726 page Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Frederick Douglas. Reading, as we all know, is not learned through osmosis.  After reading about Douglas learning to read, I questioned how James learned to read. Next week I will share thoughts about how contrivance in literature and absence of verisimilitude affect me. Nothing high falutin’.. just a bit more on James and Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn & James: How Did the Two Novels Score?

On February 27th when the RILL book club met for the first time this year, I borrowed an idea from Flannery O’Connor. This unique Southern writer said when it came to fiction, she could only be a “literary midwife” and declare whether a story was dead or alive. I did admit to the ten members there, that Flannery’s statement, logically speaking, was an either/or fallacy.  But I used it anyway and asked for a one-word answer. “Did you find Huckleberry Finn, dead or alive?”  Ten of us (I voted too) said, “Alive.” One said dead! Next I asked about James. This 2024 novel is in hardcover at $28.00 and currently a big best seller. Still and all, only four members said, “alive,” while seven of us saying “dead,” though not without caveats.

I will say that using Flannery’s quip of being a “literary midwife” provoked good discussion, often passionate and forceful about James, along with some wonderful humor. One member, born in Louisiana, spoke with zeal about Everett’s novel and called herself, “an activist in my mother’s womb.”  She added at the end of two and a half hours, that our session had been welcome; that we hadn’t been Southern ladies at a tea party. I also appreciated the response from one member who said “six-feet under” for James. Except for Everett’s Jim/James, in contrast to Twain’s depiction of the slave Jim, she asked if we didn’t already know what Everett portrayed. Her comment caught my attention because in my notes for the meeting, I had made a check list for James. Is the reader provided a lynching? A rape? A beating? Fear and Trembling? A Nate Turner murder?  

Yes, all and more. While reading James, I kept thinking of the graphic and unforgettable series Roots, televised five decades ago in the 1970s.  

There is much to say, so next week I will return to James with more thoughts about Percival Everett’s novel and Mark Twain’s Huck.