Jesting in Earnest

Percival Everett and Menippean Satire

Derek C. Maus

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611179637
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

A critical analysis of Percival Everett's oeuvre through the lens of Menippean satire

Percival Everett, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the author of more than thirty books on a wide variety of subjects and genres. Among his many honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the Huston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, and the Dos Passos Prize in Literature.

Derek C. Maus proposes that the best way to analyze Everett's varied oeuvre is within the framework of Menippean satire, which focuses its ridicule on faulty modes of thinking, especially the kinds of willful ignorance and bad faith that are used to justify corruption, violence, and bigotry. In Jesting in Earnest, Maus critically examines fourteen of Everett's novels and several of his shorter works through the lens of Menippean satire, focusing on how it supports Everett's broader aim of stimulating thoughtful interpretation that is unfettered by common assumptions and preconceived notions.

CHAPTER 1

An Overview of Everett’s Life and Career

Everett has consistently been reticent to divulge details of his personal life, a practice that aligns with a comment he made to Ben Ehrenreich in a 2002 interview: “my mission has always been to disappear” (26). Though this comment was intended as a Barthesian response to a question concerning his role as an author in influencing the interpretation of his works, it is equally applicable to the extent that he avoids the limelight generally: “Though the literary market is demonstrably more interested in celebrity than in language, he [Everett] stubbornly keeps his head down, and does so without any of the paranoid staginess of better-known reclusive writers. He rarely agrees to be interviewed. He has always refused to do publicity tours for his books, though he made an exception for [Erasure], only because, he says, ‘I need a new roof on my house in Canada’” (Ehrenreich 25).

Everett is far from reclusive, having worked in numerous academic settings over the course of three decades, but he generally shares little about himself beyond the basics. Taylor prefaced his 2017 interview by noting that Everett “asked that we keep our focus on his work and make as little reference as possible to his life off the page” (42), a request that speaks volumes to Everett’s lack of desire for any kind of authorial celebrity. My wish here is not to violate Everett’s desire for privacy but merely to compile already available information into a single narrative that might serve as a reference; accordingly, some of the following information is comparatively sparse, gleaned a particle at a time from scattered interviews and biographical essays as well as from more inherently limited sources, such as the blurbs on dust jackets of his books. Furthermore, since much of Everett’s work beyond Erasure is likely to be unfamiliar to readers—not even dedicated Everett scholars have read all of his books—a brief summary of each publication along with a representative sample of the critical reactions to it are provided in order to paint a picture of his life and career that is both comprehensive and comprehensible, if also necessarily somewhat sporadic.

To Be (or Not to Be) from South Carolina

Percival Leonard Everett II was born to Percival Leonard Everett and Dorothy Stinson Everett on December 22, 1956, at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his father was stationed as a sergeant in the United States Army. Not long after the younger Percival’s birth, his family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and his father took up dentistry, continuing a family tradition—his grandfather, paternal uncles, and younger sister were or are also physicians (Taylor, “Art” 56–57)—from which the future author excused himself: “I had to break the chain” (Markazi 16). In addition to noting the history of doctors in his family, Everett traces his ancestry back in other ways that “dispel some of the stereotypes of the South. I have a ‘white’ great grandfather, a Jew who lived in Texas where he married a former slave. He sent my grandfather to medical school in Tennessee, which he left to eventually become a practitioner in South Carolina” (Mills and Lanco 230). His family lived “on a hill off Harden Street” near the University of South Carolina in the center of Columbia. He has described his memories of growing up in Columbia as “very pleasant” and remembers “books being around the house and accessible” during his childhood. He likewise recalls “sneak[ing] over to McKissick [Library] on the university campus and into the stacks, … [which] were so musty and the books so strange and wonderful I could read forever” (Starr, “I Get Bored” 19). His early literary experiences developed his taste for both breaking rules and solitude: “I remember quite well, early on, reading something I thought I shouldn’t be reading, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, which I got from my father’s shelf. I think I was nine. It was fun because I didn’t think I was supposed to read it. As I look back, I think that it’s reading, probably even more than writing, that I find important. Reading is subversive because you necessarily do it by yourself” (Taylor, “Art” 69). The hook for reading and inquiry was evidently set quite profoundly during Everett’s childhood.

Despite these kind words for Columbia, Everett has also stated elsewhere that he has “a troubled relationship with the South and with the United States in general” (Mills and Lanco 230). He graduated in 1973 from A. C. Flora High School—coincidentally also the alma mater of the controversial political strategist Lee Atwater—at the age of sixteen and quickly departed for Florida, never again to live in South Carolina. After being invited in the late 1980s to address the South Carolina legislature as the recipient of the Governor’s Award in the Arts, he was outspokenly disdainful of South Carolina’s continued display of the Confederate battle flag on the State House grounds. In a 2001 essay entitled “Why I’m from Texas,” Everett renounced his South Carolinian origins while recalling his aborted speech before the lawmakers of the Palmetto State:

I don’t discuss South Carolina and the confederate flag anymore because I’m sick of it. Since telling the South Carolina State Legislature in 1989 that I couldn’t continue my address because of the presence of such a conspicuous sign of exclusion, I have not really considered South Carolina. I was invited to Charleston’s Spoleto Festival by my dear friend Josephine Humphreys to participate in a writers’ protest over the Confederate flag, but I could no longer generate enough concern. There were two things at work. First, the flag probably ought to be there—in the same way that a big sign saying “Land Mines!” ought to be set at the edge of a field containing land mines. If it is so hard for the government of the state to decide to remove the stupid thing, then there must be a reason and that reason can’t be good. Second, who gives a rat’s ass[?] It’s a waste of energy to fight over it. It’s an ugly flag with an ugly history becoming the emblem of a state with more than its share of ugly people. (62)

Although he has expressed his fondness for the topography of the state and for “a few people there,” there is no mistaking his vitriol toward those South Carolinians who insisted that the Confederate battle flag stay aloft at the State House until it was finally removed under protest in the summer of 2015: “the image of those neanderthal, pathetically under-educated, confederate-clad, so-called descendants of pathetically under-educated cannon fodder of the middle 19th century sticks in my head like a John Waters version of the Dukes of Hazzard” (63). Everett demonstrated that this view does not encompass all South Carolinians by accepting his selection into the South Carolina Academy of Authors Literary Hall of Fame in 2011.

Comparatively little of Everett’s fiction is set in South Carolina or in the South generally; nevertheless, three moments from Everett’s career in which he does use southern settings illustrate the ways in which his downplaying of southern and/or South Carolinian identity goes beyond his claim not to “write out of any loyalty to a place” (Dischinger 260). Everett finds it a “vacuous marker to say that someone is a Southern writer” because the “implication is that their concerns as a writer and a person are going to be different than a person somewhere else” (261). He does not, however, merely reject the “southern” label; he also actively transmogrifies what those who would affix it to a writer are intending to signify by doing so.

Everett has stated that his “entire relationship with the South has been formed by [his] family background” (Mills and Lanco 230), and his second novel, Walk Me to the Distance, is an early instance in which Everett questions the extent to which such ties actually bind an individual. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the novel, there is a brief section in which the protagonist, David Larson, leaves his newly adopted home in rural Wyoming for a visit to his native Savannah, Georgia, which is separated from South Carolina only by the unimposing Savannah River. David has not been back to Savannah since returning from the Vietnam War, during which his parents were killed in a car accident, and before leaving Wyoming he can articulate his reasons for wanting to go back only in formulaic terms: “He needed some distance from the ranch. Especially with winter coming. And he did feel, or thought he felt, some need to connect again with family” (139). While back in Savannah he has several brief and stiff conversations with his sister Jill and her husband, both of whom have gone from being antiwar activists to advocates helping Vietnam War veterans “adjust to the system” (38). He also encounters a high-school friend named Stan Grover, who is missing an eye and now working as a security guard in a labyrinthine and “disorienting” (148) shopping mall. Furthermore he inadvertently engages in a series of increasingly awkward interactions with three women: a divorcée named Elaine, with whom his sister attempts to set him up; Stan’s alcoholic wife Beth, who reveals that Stan is missing his eye because he mutilated himself to avoid being drafted; and a woman named Carol, who picks him up in a bar and who lives with her Parkinson’s-afflicted grandfather.

After these “quickly passing, uncomfortable days in Savannah” he hastens back to his new life in Wyoming, and the narrator remarks that his brief sojourn in Georgia had “left David with a haunting sense that something significant had presented itself to him” (163). That “something significant” seems apophatically to be the understanding that nothing significant is left for David in the city where he grew up. The novel’s opening has already rejected another possible influence related to geography, noting that David returned from Vietnam “as unremarkable as he had been when he left” (3). The narrative thus suggests that neither Savannah nor Vietnam—synecdochical analogues, respectively, for the compulsory aspects of familial and national identity—has formed David in the ways that both the human and natural environments of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, potentially can. By the end of the novel, David decides that even though it is not true that “he was there [in Wyoming] because he wanted to be,” it is also true that “he couldn’t be anyplace else” (207).

On numerous occasions Everett has noted his belief that “truth has nothing to do with reality or facts” (Champion 166). In “Why I’m from Texas,” Everett employs this philosophy as he bypasses South Carolina entirely, eschewing factual biography in favor of emotionally truthful biography: “I’m from Texas. My grandfather was from Texas, from outside Dallas. Great-grandparents flipped a coin to determine whether my grandfather or his brother would head east to attend Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. My grandfather won the toss, I guess. And after working his way through school playing trombone in a circus band, he married my grandmother who was from South Carolina and that’s where they lived. That’s where my father grew up. That’s where my mother grew up. And that’s where I grew up. But I’m from Texas” (63). Although one should always beware of drawing parallels between Everett and his characters, this passage illustrates that David at least resembles his creator in recognizing his emotional detachment from the places in his past.

More than a decade later Everett published a short story entitled “The Appropriation of Cultures” (1997), which was later included in his collection damned if i do (2004). The story’s protagonist, Daniel Barkley, shares even more biographical details with Everett than David Larson does, but he departs from both Everett and David in having moved back “home” after being away for a while. In Daniel’s case, home is Columbia, South Carolina, to which he returns after receiving the “degree in American Studies from Brown University that he had earned, but that had not yet earned anything for him” (Everett, damned 91). Daniel lives a relatively idle life in Columbia at first, casually maintaining himself by spending a monetary inheritance while simultaneously becoming aware of his desire to claim a different and unusual cultural inheritance. One night while Daniel is sitting in with a local jazz band, “some white boys from a fraternity … began to shout ‘Play “Dixie” for us! Play “Dixie” for us!’” (91). Rather than being either offended or threatened by this ignorant request for “the song he had grown up hating, the song the whites had always pulled out to remind themselves and those other people just where they were” (92), Daniel performs the song in a way that reclaims it as part of his own heritage, not just that of the powerfully racialized elite that the fraternity boys represent: “He sang it, feeling the lyrics, deciding that the lyrics were his, deciding that the song was his…. The irony of his playing the song straight and from the heart was made more ironic by the fact that as he played it, it came straight and from his heart, as he was claiming Southern soil, or at least recognizing his blood in it. His was the land of cotton and, hell no, it was not forgotten” (92–93). Encouraged by his success at transforming “Dixie,” he returns home and reads about the Confederate infantry attack during the Battle of Gettysburg known as “Pickett’s Charge,” dreaming afterward about confronting rebel soldiers en route to the battle and demanding that they “give back my flag” (93).

This dream spurs him to action in his waking life, and he proceeds to answer a classified ad for a pickup truck decorated with a decal of the Confederate battle flag in the rear window. Daniel’s interest in the truck baffles the white woman selling it, especially when he claims that he feels exceptionally fortunate “to find a truck with the black-power flag already on it” (100). Later, when a pair of angry rednecks with a “rebel front plate” on their car demand to know why he is driving a truck with the flag decal on it, he coolly explains that he is “flying it proudly…. Just like you, brothers” (101). When a carload of young black teenagers pulls up just as the two white men begin pushing Daniel, the rednecks drive off and Daniel exhorts the teenagers to continue the symbolic expansion/undermining of the nostalgic mythology of the South that both “Dixie” and the Confederate battle flag represent: “Get a flag and fly it proudly” (101). Although the text does not indicate the teenagers’ response, the final paragraph of the story suggests the ultimate outcome of Daniel’s efforts at appropriating the previously exclusionary symbols of southern heritage:

Soon, there were several, then many cars and trucks in Columbia, South Carolina, sporting Confederate flags and being driven by black people. Black businessmen and ministers wore rebel-flag buttons on their lapels and clips on their ties. The marching band of South Carolina State College, a predominantly black land-grant institution in Orangeburg, paraded with the flag during homecoming. Black people all over the state flew the Confederate flag. The symbol began to disappear from the fronts of big rigs and the back windows of jacked-up four-wheelers. And after the emblem was used to dress the yards and mark picnic sites of black family reunions the following Fourth of July, the piece of cloth was quietly dismissed from its station with the U.S. and State flags atop the State Capitol. There was no ceremony, no notice. One day, it was not there. (102–3)

Eighteen years before the actual removal of the Confederate battle flag from the S.C. State House, Everett imagined a means of turning the “ugly flag with an ugly history” (“Why I’m from Texas” 62) into merely “a piece of cloth” by the simple act of asserting a different, idiosyncratic truth about its meaning. As Everett stated in an interview conducted not long before Gov. Nikki Haley finally decided to remove the flag from the State House, “It’s pretty obvious that if you appropriate something, you can change it” (Dischinger 262). William Ramsey has noted that the change Everett envisioned does not simply invert racial power “in the spirit of black cultural nationalism”; it achieves an alteration “through mutation rather than a rationalistic clash of abstract ideas” (129). It is, as Anthony Stewart asserted, an “opportunity to see differently an artifact so steeped in a very specific reading” (“About” 190). The incredulity of the white people in the story when faced with Daniel’s act of (re)appropriation illustrates Everett’s broader concern with any act of “specific reading” that prescribes meaning. Daniel’s act is simultaneously subversive and creative, mirroring Everett’s own stated preference.

Everett continued this mutational approach to southern history and identity by confronting the mythology surrounding one of South Carolina’s most controversial and most beloved sons in A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004). This wondrously strange book is discussed at length in chapter 3, but the basic premise is that Everett and his University of Southern California colleague, and actual coauthor, James R. Kincaid are approached via letter by a man named Barton Wilkes, apparently an overzealous, and possibly insane, junior aide to Sen. Strom Thurmond. Wilkes wants the two of them to ghostwrite a book on African American history that will be attributed publicly to the then-nonagenarian politician in an effort to articulate the “true and unmistakable understanding (ripe to the core)” of “the colored people (aka Afro-Americans, negroes, people of color, and blacks)” (7) that Thurmond has ostensibly acquired during his decades of stalwart public support for legal segregation and other racist policies. Kincaid wrote about the book’s intentions in 2005: “Strom was so brilliantly successful because he operated with so little awareness of any world but his own. He was a laughing stock and a power; a dangerous segregationist and a softie…. Strom, we decided, was an ideological marvel and we would treat him as such”; doing so entailed “mak[ing] the novel turn from satire into something more serious” (“Collaborating” 370). Everett noted, “I realized … that I didn’t dislike him as much as I thought I did. Not that I would ever champion him at all. He’s a racist asshole, but he became a little more human for me, and he became interesting to me…. Thurmond isn’t important enough for me to vilify him so greatly. He’s interesting to me historically and culturally, but he’s just kind of a sad man, in many ways, who did have a very full and strangely important American life” (Stewart, “Uncategorizable” 309, 311). This comment hearkens back to Everett’s previously noted comment about needing to “respect” the things he writes about despite not agreeing with them—as is clearly the case with Thurmond. Even in the case of a target as ripe for satirical savaging as Thurmond would seem to be, Lavelle Porter has insisted that Everett still prefers to dismantle his legacy and mutate the resultant fragments rather than simply lampoon him: “Thurmond is already a cartoon character on his own, and yet Everett manages to spin a madcap story out of this ludicrous, deadly life, all the while showing America its ugly true self sans all the patriotic bluster about exceptionalism, integrity and honor” (L. Porter).

An Everett in Motion Tends to Stay in Motion

These three moments from Everett’s career not only illustrate his relationship to his personal past in South Carolina but also shed some light on his tendency to keep moving, literally and figuratively, throughout his adult life. His lack of interest in his prospective audiences’ expectations or desires—“I write to make art…. I don’t think about the audience” (Bengali 113)—suggests his comfort with thinking and writing in the moment, and Everett’s connections to ideas, to places, and to people are neither absolute nor eternal, regardless of their intensity. Where some might be inclined to see instability or restlessness in Everett’s frequent physical relocations; his extreme variations in style, genre, and medium as an artist; or perhaps even in the fact that he has been married four times, it is more productive to see this penchant for vagabondage as the natural by-product of a personality that freely admits to being “pretty bored with myself” (Anderson 52) and constantly needing to discover “stuff that’s smart, stuff that challenges me and makes me think differently, that introduces me to things I didn’t know before” (Shavers, “Percival” 48). Moreover, when Everett encounters suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Overview of Everett’s Life and Career
• Chapter 2: Everett and Menippean Satire
• Chapter 3: Five Exemplary Menippean Satires
• Chapter 4: Menippean Satire through Tonal Multiplicity
• Chapter 5: The Menippean West
• Conclusion: A Post-Soul (but Not Post-Racial) Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index