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.
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