Perspectives on Percival Everett

Chapter Seven: “Do you mind if we make Craig Suder white?”: From Stereotype to Cosmopolitan to Grotesque in Percival Everett’s Suder

113 Chapter 7 “Do you mind if we make Craig Suder white?” From Stereotype to Cosmopolitan to Grotesque in Percival Everett’s Suder A N T H O N Y S T E W A R T He wondered, as he had many times wondered before whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it has been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun: today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong. — G E O R G E O R W E L L , Nineteen Eighty-Four Nobody writes about Suder.1 Percival Everett’s first novel, published in 1983, seems to attract less critical attention than the rest of his considerable body of work, and this is quite an assertion when taking into account how little critical attention his work receives in general. The reasons for this novel having been overlooked probably come down to its apparent formalistic modesty when compared to the pyrotechnical virtuosity of Glyph (1999), Erasure (2001), American Desert (2004), and The Water Cure (2007), for instance. Even when I teach Everett’s fiction, nobody decides to write his or her term paper on Suder. All of this is a shame, because an understanding of Suder helps us understand much of the rest of Everett’s oeuvre. Its position as his first novel emphasizes this foundational importance all the more. For instance, the mechanisms by which individuals are rendered as stereotypes are critiqued throughout Suder. In itself, this is not surprising, since much of Everett’s work attacks the ways in which categories are formed and—more problematically—become conventional A N T H O N Y S T E W A R T 114 and, as a result, habitually unexamined. More interesting with respect to Suder are the title character’s strategies for resisting being rendered as a stereotype. These strategies, what they promise to teach about Everett’s work, and how we might rethink our conventional ways of viewing the “Other,” focus this paper. Stereotyping and cosmopolitanism make logical and appropriate complements in a discussion of Suder, since both are responses to one’s coming into contact with—or at the very least awareness of—someone who is unlike oneself. As Homi Bhabha makes clear, stereotyping, irrespective of its cause, requires not openness but a closed mind, which he describes as a desire for “fixity”: Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place,” already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved. (66)2 The need to reiterate the stereotype makes all the more patent its eventual conventionality. Reiteration leads to habit. Habit becomes easier to leave unexamined. Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the notion of cosmopolitanism as follows: “cosmopolitanism shouldn’t be seen as some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (xix). “Habits of coexistence” sound very promising when compared to the desire for and imposition on others of fixity. Replacing one set of habits with what appear at first to be a more progressive set of habits looks like improvement. However, Appiah acknowledges underlying threats to this potentially progressive set of new behaviors: “We enter every conversation—whether with neighbors or with strangers—without a promise of final agreement” From Stereotype to Cosmopolitan to Grotesque in Suder 115 (44). In other words, there are no guarantees that cosmopolitanism will lead necessarily to political progress. The conflict between fixity and conversation, then, results in logical incongruities that are ideological (i.e., constructed), and seem natural, but which actually require close scrutiny. This conflict...