Conversations with Percival Everett

Joe Weixlmann, Joe Weixlmann

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781496806499
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books, Everett has established himself as one of America's—and arguably the world's—premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his many honors since 2000 are Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded —the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize. Interviews collected in this volume—several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time—display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work being described as "characteristically uncharacteristic." At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about "Jim Crow, " a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more.

Uncategorizable Is Still a Category: An Interview with Percival Everett

Anthony Stewart / 2007

From Canadian Review of American Studies, 37.3 (2007), 293–324. Reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (www.utpjournals.com). Copyright © Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 37, no. 3, 2007.

AS: It is my great pleasure to be talking to Percival Everett, the author of fifteen novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poetry, and a children’s book. Professor Everett is distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he teaches creative writing and critical theory.

So, thank you again for agreeing to do this. One of the aspects of your work that fascinates me most, at least right now, has to do with what looks to me as a contradiction between the reception of your novels. Every review I read is very positive about your work; my students love your work when they encounter it in my classes, invariably for the first time, and, of course, they’re always surprised that they’ve never heard of you before. So, I’m hoping we can talk at least a bit about that.

I said to you when we were chatting yesterday, first of all, that I should admit that I’ve gotten the impression from published interviews with you that you don’t particularly like being interviewed. Is that a fair assumption?

PE: Yes, that’s fair. I’m not an antagonistic sort, but I tend to be pretty reserved.

AS: Because you work in an English department, you sort of have a split perspective on the world of literary culture, let’s call it, as both an academic and an artist. And this split perspective sometimes appears in your fiction. I have often thought that most artists hate academics or, at least, hate critics, maybe because critics try to limit and pin down the necessarily expansive view of the artist and, in a sense, I’m guilty of such an enterprise in being here and interviewing you. Do you agree with that assessment of critics or, for that matter, of the artist? That is to say, maybe you don’t think most artists have an expansive vision.

PE: I don’t know whether I think of artists as having an expansive vision. What’s interesting about artists usually is that they have a fairly narrow vision, and that’s what makes us interested in what they create. I mean, a painter is not trying to paint the whole world. They’re just trying to paint a piece of it. If I were trying to write an everyman story, it would be terribly boring and stupid. I’m trying to write an individual story about an individual person, about an individual life, and as far as critics limiting what I can do, they see different things in my work than the things I would see. So, if anything, it makes my understanding of my work expand. Now, it doesn’t mean I agree with it, but it also doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.

AS: That’s interesting, because when you think of something, and I want to get back to Ellison in a bit, but when you think of something like Invisible Man, one of the things that seems most attractive to a lot of people about Invisible Man is, in fact, that the unnamed narrator is characterized often as an everyman figure.

PE: After the fact, certainly, but there was no way for Ellison to work on that thinking of him as an everyman. If he had, then the life would never have emerged as a real one. He has experiences that are unique to that character, but from reading and extrapolation, they become those that we have all experienced, and that’s true of any fiction.

AS: I’m thinking of the relationship between, on the one hand, the everyman figure and, on the other hand, the individual. The working title, as you probably know, of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. And so, on the one hand, there’s that figure who is worried about being a minority of one, as he says, and worries that the figure who is a minority of one is, by definition, insane. And, on the other hand, if he does not represent something that other people relate to, then, in fact, he does look insane. Or at least non-representative of anything that matters to anybody else.

PE: Yes. That connection is made because we all live individual lives. We look at stories and we supply the extrapolation to the general. If you read a biography or an autobiography, those things have lessons for all of us. They become stories that are more expansive necessarily. This is what we do with stories. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be interested in them. But that person living her or his life cannot live it thinking, “I’m going to live this for everyone.” Nor are they telling it in that way.

AS: It ties in with another point, which is maybe a more central problem in the relation between critics and artists, that a lot of critics assume that writers see their own work as sort of an overall project. And I know, from our brief conversations, you really don’t, do you?

PE: Well, I see all the works as fitting together, as an overall project. I’m writing one big novel.

AS: How do you see it? What is that one big novel about?

PE: I can’t tell you that. If I did, I’d have to kill you. But it’s constantly growing. These books are in a dialogue with each other. It’s a conversation that I’m having with myself, and the work is having with itself, and I’m having with the work. It’s my way of understanding the world. And that’s what it does for me, personally. Then, once it’s outside my experience, who knows what it does? I can’t control what it does, or whether anyone will see it as a project, or as a literary life.

AS: You did say before that maybe what holds it all together is the line between the signifier and the signified.

PE: Well, philosophically, that’s what interests me. Trying to understand how that line between the meaning that we might intend and the meaning that we do perceive or receive, how that line at once divides it and holds it together.

AS: The line of the fraction.

PE: The line of the fraction.

AS: I’ve said this to students, in fact, that the hyphen between African and American can be seen as a hyphen or as a minus sign.

PE: I love that. That’s great.

AS: And I guess the oblique stroke, the slash, in the same way that you’re describing the line between the signifier and the signified, works in the same way.

PE: Yes. Or it can be a break in the stanza.

AS: As I’ve mentioned already, my students have thoroughly enjoyed your novels, and when I have given conference papers or lectures on your novels, people have been very quick to ask about other work by you that I might recommend. What three books of yours would you recommend as an introduction to your work? And why these three?

PE: I wish I could take credit for this line. “I love all my children, geniuses and idiots alike.” I feel closest to the book I’m working on at the time, and I really divorce myself from the books when I’m done with them. There’re some that I haven’t read in their entirety after they’ve been published. In fact, a bunch. I don’t think about it. And, I don’t know what I think at any given moment, what I will think, or what I have thought, and so to say that one or the other is representative of my work, well, I just feel is being unfair to the work as a whole. I can tell you that Glyph was probably the easiest book for me to write.

AS: Glyph was the easiest book to write?

PE: Yeah. It’s the closest to the way I think, and the connections I make. And so, in a way it just kind of came out. Structurally, it was a challenge to make. But it was, for me, not even the most fun, but the easiest.

AS: Because it’s a very complicated book!

PE: Then you can imagine what it’s like to live inside my head! That’s not necessarily a good thing!

AS: Is Glyph still your favorite? You had said in another interview, you said two things and this is part of the reason I asked the question. It was an interview at a very specific time and it had to do with giving readings of erasure, which you said you hated doing, and you said that you got to a point where you really didn’t like the book anymore.

PE: Well, that’s true of all the books, though.

AS: But you did say as well that Glyph was your favorite.

PE: To read from. It’s just easier to read from. Again, it’s just the rhythm of my thinking. Also, I can’t read line-by-line. I pretty much see the page and I really recite it from memory, and so I change things all the time, and for some reason it’s easy for me to memorize those pages, though I can’t do it now, but when I look at it, it just kind of comes to me.

AS: Your French translator, Anne-Laure Tissut, has told me about two conferences on your work that she has attended, in Tours and in Grenoble, both of which you also attended, I think.

PE: Yes.

AS: And I also noticed, a couple of years ago, on a trip to London, that Glyph was just being released in paperback, and it was in pretty much every London bookstore I went into, as usually was erasure. That has not been the case in Canada, certainly, or in the United States, I’m thinking, and so, as I said, while pretty much every review I’ve read of your work has been positive, what do you suppose accounts for your higher profile, or what looks like a higher profile, in England and in Europe than in North America?

PE: I don’t know. I don’t think about those things too much. I think they’re more reading cultures than our own. Word of mouth is a different thing in England because it’s such a small country. And in France, there’s a love of books that we just don’t have here. Every town has a book festival. French people like books.

AS: Just what you said about reading cultures, you said this in “Signing to the Blind,” about black writers specifically, “I do not believe that the works we produce need to be any different; the failing is not in what we show but in how it is seen. And it is not just white readers, but African American readers as well who seek to fit our stories to an existent model. It is not seeing with ‘white’ eyes, it is seeing with ‘American’ eyes, with brainwashed, automatic, comfortable, and ‘safe’ perceptions of reality.” And so, on some level, what you were just saying about French and English reading cultures, which don’t seem to exist in America, at least not to the same extent, I guess that’s what you’re getting at in this passage from “Signing to the Blind.”

PE: Of course the writer benefits from the fact that more people read. But I don’t know if they, in those countries, escape the same acculturation that we do. I think often their expectations do mirror ours, or at least their experience with expectations is the same as ours. Their expectations might be different. And one can’t deny that they have a fascination with American authors often. So, once again, I’m the exotic, which is not exactly a comfortable space to inhabit, but I recognize, I’d be stupid to not recognize, that’s part of the appeal.

AS: And yet, the exoticism seems to work differently there than here, insofar as there, to the extent that you’re the exotic, it seems that that causes people to read you, and to provide your books in their bookstores, whereas here . . .

PE: Being black in America, you’re exotic in certain places and certain times. You’re exotic if you’re in New York and you’re brown and you happen to be a Cheyenne Indian. But if you’re black, “you’re not exotic, we’re used to you.” You’re exotic in that awful way if you show up at a fancy party and you’re the only black person there. But on the street, you’re not exotic. And the same would be true of white Americans who wander into a party full of black people. But they’re not exotic. They’re simply out of place. And that’s how it’s perceived, by everyone. It’s a wonderfully fucked up culture we live in.

AS: The difference between being exotic and being out of place. Being exotic is something that somebody else can put to use. Right? You can sell exoticism in a way that maybe you can’t sell being out of place.

PE: Exactly, which is why the easy road for American publishing has been to publish novels about black farmers or inner-city, you know . . .

AS: Slaves.

PE: And slaves. Because these are pictures that are easily commodified. But if it’s the black middle class, and it’s not so different from someone else, then what’s exotic about that?

AS: And, more to the point, what’s saleable about that? Well, the hotel I’m staying in provides the USA Today every weekday morning.

PE: Oh. A fine newspaper!

AS: I was going to say, it’s a nice hotel anyway! And, the USA Today has produced a list of twenty-five books that “leave a legacy,” as it says. And the two books on the list by African American writers are Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan. And, the little blurb with the Morrison book has to do with “Morrison’s masterpiece,” “Pulitzer Prize,” “propelled her to Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993,” and points out—this is something I did not remember—she is the last American to win it. But the blurb for McMillan says, among other things, “Terry McMillan’s groundbreaking novel about black women looking for satisfying relationships was a wake-up call for the publishing industry. Readers of all races were hungry for entertaining stories about African Americans.” And it’s clear that you don’t buy that, do you?

PE: No. And it’s a sort of amusing little comment on the culture. I cannot imagine—ever—someone saying that the culture is going to “awaken to the needs of white women for relat...