I’m still thinking about James: A Novel, by Percival Everett, which is sure to win some huge prize for the wrong reasons. I’m still stuck on the notion that it’s fundamentally a meditation on language, which is inevitably, then, a parody of and a commentary on a canonical predecessor—it works that way in non-fiction, too, when, for example, you’re up against received wisdom in your field and you know you can’t very well ignore its representatives, so you write your way into and through them, using their categories and vocabulary because that’s what your readers expect (and know), but turning and twisting them, exposing them to new lighting and different angles or degrees of exposure. Suddenly those categories and vocabulary—the words themselves—have new meanings, new scope, new purchase on what was already designated as factual reality, and now they have produced something even more, a larger or different set of facts, a whole new world.
That’s what you feel happening in this novel. Early on, I complained to the girlfriend that the fun of reading was in the dialogue, where Everett tries out the dialects of English deployed by Americans on this middle border (Missouri) between slave and free states, where the color line is clearly marked by how the characters speak to each other. Jim—he doesn’t rename himself “James” until Part 3—keeps switching codes between what the White folks need to hear (‘Yes, suh, Massa, whus my name, you gots to know, why dat’s,’ etc.) and the way Black folk communicate with each other, in spare language that sounds like reported conversation from the 20th century. But when Jim is telling his story, narrating his movement and thoughts without speaking to his “superiors,” to Huck, or to his equals, the prose is painfully plain, at the edge of boring. Until it isn’t.
To explain my change of mind, let me work backward from Part 3, which turns the world conjured in Mark Twain’s canonical novel upside down. (Huck disappears altogether from this fiction soon after he tells his father—that would [have to] be Jim—that he’ll consult with Tom Sawyer on a rescue operation: “James” knows how badly that will turn out because he knows that white boy is a silly romancer, and so he leaves this only son behind when he sets out to save his wife and daughter from the slaver to whom they’ve been sold in his absence.)
Having returned to Hannibal, Jim becoming “James” knows he needs the bill of sale, and to read a map, if he is to locate and liberate his wife and daughter. By this time, he’s already suspected or charged with several crimes, including the theft of himself for having run away to forestall his impending sale downriver. So he sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s office, still carrying the pistol he has taken from Tom Hopkins, the overseer he strangled to death on Jackson’s Island to revenge the white man’s repeated rape of a friend’s wife. Thatcher shows up and expects the slave to bow and scrape, even though the man sitting in the chair behind the desk is holding a gun. The white man can’t believe this is happening, of course, but what disturbs him most is not that the slave has a weapon, but that the person opposite him speaks the wrong dialect.
“‘Jim?
“‘James,’ I said.
“‘Boy, they’re gonna lynch you every day but Tuesday. . . . ‘
“‘Where are my wife and daughter? I know you handled the sale of them. I need to know where they’ve been taken.’
“‘Why are you talking like that?’
“‘Confusing, isn’t it?’ I said.
“‘Slaves get sold. It happens,’ he said.
“‘Who bought them?’ I cocked my head. I pointed the pistol at him again. ‘Have a seat.’ I nodded to the chair in front of the desk.
“He sat. ‘Why are you talking like that?’
“‘I’m pointing a pistol at you and asking about the whereabouts of my family and you’re concerned with my speech? What is wrong with you? Where is the Graham farm? That’s where they are, correct?’ . . . .
“‘Are you going to kill me?’
“‘The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ‘cided, Massa.’
“I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.”
OK, so we didn’t need that coda. But this is what the novel is “about,” this is how it makes you think that language games or “linguistic paradigms” are as creative, causative, and consequential as the philosophers and the literature professors say they are. Form determines the content of our thought, it does not merely reveal such content. You can’t scrape away at the metaphors and the slouchy, slangy expressions that adorn a sentence, so that you can get down to the naked truth of it, as if these words or phrases are barnacles, “afterthoughts,” mere ornaments hung on or impediments in the way of what that sentence “really means.”
So, how you (re)present yourself as you move through the world is, for all practical purposes, what, or who, you are. But of course you are born into language—you don’t get to decide on how you represent yourself, not, at least, if you want to be understood by the people who surround you with their words and signals, their speech and their gestures, their clothes and their demeanor, their expressions and their gait, all of which instruct you by inserting you into a more or less hierarchical system of meaning.
Over time, your differences with this system, and your departures from it, will be increasingly sublimated, that is, what began when you were a child as physical struggles against constraints on your mobility will become a “war of words,” a way of situating yourself that is mostly a matter of verbal expression and inscription.
But for or against that system, the only words you got are those the language and its dialects have given you—unless you’re Martin Heidegger, who tried (and failed) to invent a whole new language to comprehend Being because he thought the original Greek, the spoken words, had been corrupted by their translation and encryption in written philosophical treatises.** You can’t abstain from language: all you can do is change how, and therefore what, it means.
That is what Everett the author, James the novel, and Jim becoming James the character are “about,” in every sense, but mostly, decisively, in the active sense of that word—it’s what they’re up to, what they’re trying to do, where they’re headed. They don’t get there, none of us ever will, not on our own, but goddamn, it’s worth a try, and it’s exhilarating to hear them tell the old stories in these new voices.
I’d like to suggest, for example, that Part 2 is a retelling of Dante’s Inferno: this is when Jim and Norman, the black man who’s been passing for white as part of Daniel Emmett’s original minstrel troupe—he can no longer bear playing his roles in triplicate, as Jim’s confidant—steal aboard a riverboat by way of the boiler room, where the enslaved Brock can’t remember sunlight because he shovels coal all day and night to feed the ship’s fire, but knows, by mere faith, that the invisible Massa Corey reigns from on high, above deck. This retelling also inverts the ending of its antecedent.
But I’ll leave it at the pencil’s itinerary. Recall Jim’s exalted experience of reading from my earlier post. As Part 1 unfolds, he feels the need to write as well as read—to narrate his journey up and out of slavery, down the river and back—and so asks Young George, a fellow slave, to steal him a pencil from his master’s supply. George eventually pays dearly for the minor offense, presumably because this writing device is somehow mightier than any sword: he is flogged, flayed, and hanged. When Jim learns of the serial punishment, at the very end of Part 1 (Chapter 26), he doesn’t repent, or express some semblance of guilt. Instead:
“I could feel the pencil in my pocket. I was taken by the fact that I thought of it as the pencil and not my pencil.”
In Part 2, Chapter 1, with no comment, and merely in passing, Jim refers to the device as “my pencil.” And thus begins his transformation, which is finally announced by the change in his self-designation—when he renames himself “James”—in Judge Thatcher’s study. As the pencil, it stood for an abstract principle, of representation as such: as his pencil, it’s become the material thing that lets him record his movement through space as a journey in time. It’s now his story, and he can tell it in his own voice.
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**See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “What Are Poets For?”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. & ed. Alfred Hofstadter (1971), pp. 17-142.