In November MTC read Percival Everett’s James (2024). Below is an informal and necessarily incomplete record of our thinking together.
Farah Bakaari: I want to begin this reading journal entry by noting the tremendous joy I have had reading a common text with other folks. Like many academics, I spend most days by myself, writing for long hours about texts very few people in my social circles have actually read let alone want to talk about. For this reason, I often find myself missing coursework, those days when in a constant state of panic, you would slog through hundreds and hundreds of pages of Dickens or Proust or the many more pages on whatever Auerbach had to say about Proust, never feeling competent but always certain that you would leave the seminar room with more understanding of the text but also with infinitely more questions about it. And this is how I felt reading James with MTC.
Obviously, James, much like other Percival Everett novels, is much preoccupied with language as such. I mean you get a Signifying reference on page 22. In the reading group, we talked quite a bit about James’s relationship with not only the source text but also to other classic genres, including the (neo) slave narrative, the literacy narrative, the picaresque novel. One of the things I was most struck by was the somewhat unresolved tension the novel stages between language, especially the vernacular as social, open, co-determined, and collective endeavor and literacy as an inward-facing, private, liberal project.
Early on the novel sets up the vernacular and moments of signifying to be instances of opacity and fugitivity that also carry with them the potential for solidarity, sociality, and even joy. There is that brilliant moment when Luke and Jim trick the white man into going to get drunk. Jim says, “He’s going to get drunk now, not so much because he can but because we can’t” to which Luke replies, “So, when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?”
There are many more instances in the earlier parts of the novel where Jim reflects on the joys of “shared irony,” and this is something that is almost always done with others, whether for pedagogical, convivial, or survival purposes. In contrast, literacy and reading remain hermetically sealed from the collective.
There is that moment when Jim is apprehensive of reading in the presence of Huck, then he has the thought: “How could he know that I was actually reading?” He goes on: “It is that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them […] It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.” Of course, the two versions of language can co-exist, but the tension only mattered to me insofar as by the end of the novel the latter seems to prevail over the former. That is, by the end I was not certain what the status of the vernacular was in the text. It is certainly a form of linguistic fugitivity, but for James (and also for Everett) is it only that?
Maggie Boyd: I will tell anyone who will listen — and, in fact, many who would prefer not to — that I despise the novel Circe. But I found James, and especially our discussions of it, deeply meaningful, even though both books “re-write” a foundational myth (The Odyssey and Huckleberry Finn, respectively). What makes one so frustrating and the other so fruitful for me? So far, I’m thinking it stems from the way each engages with its source text. James strikes me as emerging from a deep understanding of Huck Finn, an awareness of precisely where it succeeds and where it fails, what the original novel does and what it has come to mean over time. It feels not like an attempt at correcting a record but rather deepening it. And it feels less like supplanting some contemporary ideological lens onto a text and more like enlivening a lens that was perhaps always there, or maybe should have been. Going in, I was curious how James would confront that infamously tricky ending — and after reading it together, I felt it had lived up to the challenge Huck poses. Perhaps not so much a “re-write,” James really writes alongside and in answer to the novel Toni Morrison told us could never be dismissed – and perhaps that sort of writerly relationship is exactly the difference I’m looking for.
TJ Calhoun: James is in some ways like the best magic tricks: beguiling, suspenseful and seemingly unrepeatable. Like magicians that hide a prize underneath a continuously and rapidly rotating pair of cups, both James and Everett are taking a critical jab at how American genres such as the minstrel show and the slave narrative can be upended and disguised as one another if they trade places and subjectivities frequently and earnestly enough. It’s a hard trick to master and involves getting the audience to believe things they have not actually seen and see things they don’t actually believe. The neo slave narrative and Antebellum America is hypnotic work. Perhaps we’ve all been duped; the joke is on us. Either way, we’ll always be back for more.
Andy Perluzzo: Huck begins The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) with a direct address to his reader: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” Just as Huck lets his readers know that, although they are dependent on Twain to “know” Huck, it “ain’t no matter” because it’s only “mainly” the truth—there is always more story to tell. The same can be said for readers of Percival Everett’s novel James (2024). While those who have read Twain might already “know” Jim, Everett’s novel challenges any “truth” readers can claim to have about him. Reading reviews and promotional content on James, the different ways the novel is described—a reimaging, a retelling, a conversation—brings unique weight to bear on Jim, or James, as he has been reincarnated, and each of these has many racial, literary and political significance to be further explored in great detail. For those who feel compelled to return to the “original,” …put down that Twain! In James, Everett is a master of narrative for which no prequel will amplify its literary brilliance; James’s truth stands, very firmly, on its own.
Bekah Waalkes: On zoom, we discussed the many genres at play in James, from the standard contemporary retelling of a classic to the neo slave narrative. In the first half of the book, I was convinced that Everett was also riffing on the literacy narrative. Beginning with pages from a minstrel songbook, the novel begins by showing us the paper medium that James uses to write his story, which both gives the novel a quality of a found object (a conceit that reminds me of 18th century novels and their claims to authority) and manages to side-step the literacy narrative’s typical need for authority via white patronage or sponsorship. James himself discovers the model of white patronage early in the novel, in a pile of books stolen from Judge Thatcher that includes A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related By Himself. The words “related by himself” catch James’s attention: we know, as James probably surmises, that Venture ‘related’ or ‘dictated’ his story to Elisha Nichols, a white Connecticut schoolmaster. Clearly James has no interest in his story becoming legitimized through such structures of white authority: he knows that once he gives his story away, it will cease to be his. (We might even read the novel’s recent National Book Award win in the light of what white authority can do for a book.)
Let me close by returning to James, to a moment where reading is portrayed as both risk and reward. In this early scene, James weighs the risk of reading while Huck is asleep, wondering if he could “simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words” if caught, pretending to be looking at the book instead of reading. “At that moment,” he writes, “the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free, and, therefore, completely subversive.”
After each MTC reading group, we ask our participants to contribute to our collective reading journal, an informal and necessarily incomplete record of our thinking together. You can find our upcoming reading groups here, and if you will like to lead a reading group for us, please get in touch at editorial@mid-theory.com