James by Percival Everett (Pan Macmillan)
Title: James
Author: Percival Everett
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781035031245
Ernest Hemingway once said that all American literature comes from one book, The adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Percival Everett, in his Booker Prize 2024 longlist interview, says of his book, James: “Mark Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”
Percival is no stranger to the Booker list. His book The trees, which interrogates the culture of lynching black people in the United States of America, was on its shortlist last year. In the story of Jim/James, a man is also lynched for stealing a pencil, which James uses to write his story. The pencil, in this book about language, represents the power of owning the narrative of one’s own story, which for black people has sometimes come at a great cost. It also neutralises the misappropriation of well-meaning white people, like Twain, who tell other people’s stories in a manner that is sensible only to (white) people who want to hear the story. I won’t go into the rabbit hole of black people’s music, like the blues and folk, which was appropriated and popularised for white audiences by white men like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Twain also did that, perhaps? This is a topic for another time, one which neither I nor Percival is interested in for now.
.........
By telling the story from the point of view of James, Percival has attempted to create James’s worldview, something in which Twain was not interested because he was telling the story of Huck. Percival goes so far as to give James not just literacy, but philosophical acumen also. This is a novelist’s privilege, which we call poetic licence.
.........
The question about whether one can write a novel about a character whose psychic and cultural space one does not possess, is as old as the writing of the novels themselves. I personally believe that a novelist can write about anything into which they invest enough effort to understand. My only proviso is that when they write about those who were previously victims of prejudice, they should do so with empathy and emotional intelligence. The shortcomings of Twain’s novel, particularly in his depiction of black people and the slave man Jim in particular, have been something of a controversy, especially in our “woke” age. Some people have even gone as far as to call for the book or Twain to be cancelled. Instead of taking such a misguided shortcut, Percival did something phenomenal. He thinks that Twain’s book, though an important part of the American literary canon, is not a good novel. And though a great humanist and humorist, Twain was not equipped to write about black experiences. He says that his book James is not a corrective of Twain’s novel, but an attempt to give expression to, and to rescue, Jim’s/James’s agency. He believes that Twain rendered Jim as a two-dimensional slave character, someone with no interiority or psychological thought. By telling the story from the point of view of James, Percival has attempted to create James’s worldview, something in which Twain was not interested because he was telling the story of Huck. Percival goes so far as to give James not just literacy, but philosophical acumen also. This is a novelist’s privilege, which we call poetic licence. James clandestinely visits Judge Thatcher’s library to read books like Voltaire’s Treatise on tolerance and All for the best. Rousseau’s Discourse also features. John Locke often comes in a dream delirium as an interlocutor also. James makes it clear that he’s not interested in the Bible and would rather read a book on training horses instead. The book’s subplot is a sustained critique of the hypocrisy of (white) Christians. Voltaire’s writings are the philosophic wand by which that whip is cracked. John Locke, in a daydream, is accused of hypocrisy for writing the manifesto for both slavery and freedom:
I knew I was dead asleep and dreaming, but I didn’t know whether John Locke knew that.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” I said. “I’ve been pondering hypocrisy.”
“Don’t start up with that now,” he said. “It was a job. After I wrote the constitution for Barbados, the Carolinians asked me to write them one, too, and I wrote it.”
“What you’re saying is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.”
Locke, of course, is the philosopher of the empire, who found respectable language and logic to justify the native land dispossession and the imperial plunder, looting and genocide of American Indians.
Percival’s favourite trick is portraying the hidden literacy of James by using dreams. The first delirium is after James is bitten by a snake as he picks up a stick to throw onto the fire, in the cave they’re hiding in as the river floods the island outside. I chose to resist the temptation of reading too much into the incident as a metaphoric warning for black people who read Western philosophic and literary text. To make the point that those who don’t utilise their faculty of thinking are not free, even when non-slaves, the character Cunégonde – who shows up at the beginning of Voltaire’s Candide – shows up towards the end of James: “I looked at the valley below, the cliché of a stream that split it. ‘And yet you come back at the end of the story.’”
The despair in James’s voice here is palpable. So long as he was able to hold on to morals and ethics, James’s slavery didn’t bother him too much. But towards the end, he reaches a stage where he no longer cares or fears anything, because he no longer has anything to lose. Ethics and morals no longer have any hold on him. He has been completely dehumanised, which in a way betrays the success of the slave project in his life, dehumanising him to the level of existing by animal instincts to protect his wife and young. In a marvellous twist of logic, he showcases that he has now reached the inhumane brutal mode of “whiteness”.
........
Percival is the kind of writer that first disarms the reader with humour before painting the horrors of American life, on which modern Western culture is premised. Humour is the modus operandi of his narrative style. His books are tragicomedies with depth.
........
Percival is the kind of writer that first disarms the reader with humour before painting the horrors of American life, on which modern Western culture is premised. Humour is the modus operandi of his narrative style. His books are tragicomedies with depth. The effective use of language and comedy in his writings is on par with the ancient Greek writer Aeschylus. Enslaved, imprisoned or generally oppressed people find a way into an esoteric language known only to themselves, which doesn’t allow entry and understanding to their enemies. This linguistic code-switching, depending on whether he is speaking with white people or other slaves, is at the centre of this book of language. The overarching idea for James is inventing himself into being, through the written word in his journal.
Many say that it is not necessary to have read Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry Finn to enjoy Percival’s James. This is probably true. But I would at least advise you to read the comprehensive summary of Huckleberry Finn, if only to get an appreciation of what Percival has achieved here in his conversation with Twain’s book. For one, he has come up with a more clinical and less messy ending to Twain’s book, which everybody agrees flounders around the middle section. Percival has rescued the story by abandoning Twain with a tightly knitted drama of shocking revelations towards the end. If anything, this book, James, deserves to be in the American canon. I also hope that Percival finally wins the Booker this time.
Also read:
PenAfrican: Call and response by Gothataone Moeng – a book review
Moederland: Nine daughters of South Africa by Cato Pedder: a book review
Tinnitus: my near north (on The near north by Ivan Vladislavic)