Tanner Conversation with Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s Utah campus events feature discussions of fiction, race, and philosophy
Robert Carson — Associate Director, Tanner Humanities Center — November 5, 2024
The works of Percival Everett, Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern California, feature satirical and ironic accounts of race in American life, experiments in literary form, and philosophically rich reconsiderations of historical periods and events. His 2024 novel, James, retells the story of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved character, Jim. James has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award.
The Tanner Conversation with Everett on October 29th in Kingsbury Hall with Jeremy Rosen and Rone Shavers (Department of English) was followed by dialogues with two cohorts of students: graduate students in Utah’s English and Creative Writing programs, and high school students from Rowland Hall school, who had read both James and Huckleberry Finn in their classes. Both groups of students noted Everett’s generosity in sharing his candid responses to their questions about his own personal writing practices and larger literary traditions. In the words of Kody Partridge, an instructor at Rowland Hall, Everett “made us laugh; he helped advance our understanding of this particular novel [James], of the importance of reading, and more.”
From these events emerges a larger view of Everett’s literary project and ethos:
On race in literature, Everett expressed frustration with publishing's historically limited accounts of Black life, noting in his conversation with Rosen and Shavers that depictions are often limited to two settings: the antebellum South and the inner-city North. These limits constrain literary accounts of Black experience, including his own. As he remarked in his discussion with Rowland Hall students, in the Harlem Renaissance, there was a diversity of Black lives represented in fiction, but publishers later began catering to specific market demands which have persisted—demands which Everett resists as an expression of intellectual autonomy. In the case of his novel, James, Everett stressed that while Twain broke new ground in making Jim a character rather than just representing slavery as an institution, he wasn't equipped to portray Jim fairly. In Everett’s view, Black Americans share common fears of violence and repression by police, but beyond this context, Black culture and thought is so internally varied as to resist easy categorization; to characterize a common Black sensibility is to have “fallen into a trap of singularity that does not exist.” Importantly, on issues such as racial identity, rather than argue for any particular view in his work, Everett seeks to demonstrate the logical conclusions of his own works’ conjectural or experimental premises.
This demonstration takes unexpected turns. In Everett’s own words, he is “pathologically ironic,” undermining both conventional literary modes and conventional social attitudes. However, the goal of this irony is not mere provocation. Rather, “at the core of any irony is earnestness… a real love of something,” whether it’s mathematics or literary theory, as in his works like Glyph (1999). In a response to Rosen and Shavers, Everett discussed his interest in mathematics and logic, in which “identity” is a philosophical concept rather than a socially-ascribed demographic category: “How is it that ‘A equals A’ is different from ‘A is A’? … When I start thinking like that, that's when I know I'm working on something.” He was also asked about the adaptation of his 2001 novel, Erasure, for the film American Fiction in 2023. Everett: “I liked the movie, but even if I hadn't, the idea that somebody can take one work and make a new work of art is exciting.”
Regarding his writing process, Everett described his own compulsive “over-research,” such as his extensive self-training in hydrology for his novel, Watershed (2003). For James, he read Huckleberry Finn fifteen times consecutively until he was “thoroughly sick of it” and never looked at it again while writing, wanting to work from his own memory of it rather than direct reference. Indeed, throughout his remarks, there is an intriguing tension between his encyclopedic mastery of a chosen subject, and his own disavowal of certainty. He often starts writing a novel thinking he knows “something about the world,” but ends up realizing, in his own words, that he knows “less” upon completing it. Luckily, that “less” is the basis of his works’ intellectual abundance. Everett also invited audiences to take careful note that there is no fixed schedule for his writing; if invited, he would happily leave his work to go to a movie.
When asked at all three events about his favorite or most inspiring literary works, Everett responded with: Euclid’s Elements (c. 300 BC); Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759); Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945); Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1884); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915): and finally, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910), which he calls “one of the most beautiful books ever written.”
See also: Rone Shavers’ interview of Percival Everett in the arts journal, Bomb.