“Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” – T.S. Eliot (sorta)
Percival Everett’s novel, James, is the best I’ve read in years, and I almost didn’t read it because its first 5 pages are printed in small and lightly inked elegant script under the heading THE NOTEBOOK OF DANIEL DECATUR EMMETT. ‘Twas hard to uncipher the script with my aging eyes…as though nothing else were aging. I did persevere – 2 friends also loved the book – and when I’d finished it I decided I knew why it began with those 5 lightly printed, unnumbered pages. – Take a shot yourself.
Excerpts from pre-trial maneuvering before Judge Learned Pen of Percival Everett, charged with being a great writer:
Prosecution: “Percival Everett, your Honor, has stolen enough from Samuel Clemens (the Mississippi River, steamboats functioning and wrecked, snakes, minstrel show dialect, Jackson Island, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pap, Judge Thatcher, Miss Watson’s big nigger named Jim, canoes, rafts, Hannibal, N’Orlins, Cairo, the widow Douglas…Yes, your Honor, I’ll be brief… In short, Your Honor, Everett has stolen the heart and soul of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the (forgive me, Your Honor) sole and soul purposes of widening the discourse of American literary history…Yes, Your Honor, Prosecution does wish to make 3 opening points.
“First: Our expert witness Dr. Hindsight Quibble, Emeritus Professor of American literature, has testified under oath that there are many minor themes…Yes, Your Honor, his list is long. My team’s favorite is…Yes, Judge. We agree, about the soul of wit…Dr. Quibble swears the principle theme of James is deconstructing without anesthetic Mr. Clemens’ representation of pre-Civil War white possession of black slaves. Dr. Quibble says that resistance to that system is an avatar of our 21st century’s contest over equal nominative presence in the mundaneity…Yes, Your Honor, Dr. Quibble is somewhat prolix. And yes, wordy is a better…well, word than ‘prolix.’ Let’s see, I’ve lost…Thanks, Your Honor: equal nominative presence in every level of our society… Yes, black slavery produced some Black guerrillas (our current president might call them “the enemy within”)…Yes, Your Honor, no politics in your court…equal nominative presence in all the activities of modern life, usually at huge costs for society and for Blacks often terrorized silence or loss of their freedom and too often their lives. For whites the loss of valuable property and status.
“Second: Dr. Q. emphasized the narrative tone of 1st-person narratives. Tone, he says, inflects everything the narrator says. Dr. Q. says that a first-person narrative is a long tone poem in the key of self. He quoted the opening line of James: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them plain as day.” Dr. Q. then, even movingly, said, “For a fraction of a second, I thought I was reading an account of a night time ambush patrol. A mid-tour, combat grunt psyching himself up for another firefight by diminishing his deadly equal enemies to “little bastards” as he readies his M-16. That tone of alert and focused fury juices James’s narrator everywhere, except when he’s in the cabin he cannot own with wife and children from whom he may be sold down the river at any moment.
“Third: Your Honor, Prosecution acknowledges that both Mr. Clemens and Mr. Everett use the word ‘nigger.’ They both do so for purpose of verisimilitude – real people used and use that word to dehumanize Black people to this day. Mr. Everett steals the word and segregates it in the craws of his White people. Dr. Q. is currently researching the possible code switch: where White people say ‘nigger’ to demean, Black people say ‘white’ for the same purpose.”…
Judge Pen adjourns proceedings for lunch and instructs all parties to be in court at 1 p.m. When they return there are two notes on the locked door: 1) There’s been a credible seismic warning that the Palace Hotel may collapse into the Courthouse” 2) “Judge Pen will render his verdict after the Cubbison matter is resolved and Gobbi Street is repaved.
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