Perspectives on Percival Everett

Chapter One: “knowledge2 certainty2 = squat2” (re)Thinking Identity and Meaning in Percival Everett’s: The Water Cure

3 Chapter 1 “knowledge2 + certainty2 = squat2 ” (re)Thinking Identity and Meaning in Percival Everett’s The Water Cure J O N AT H A N D I T T M A N Many of Percival Everett’s works question how identities and perceptions of reality are created in society and expose the inherent flaws that exist within these systems of understanding. For example, in Erasure (2001), Everett’s most critically acclaimed novel, Thelonius Monk Ellison wrestles with the need to “prove [he] was black enough” when describing a review that criticizes his retelling of Aeschylus’ The Persians because it “has [nothing ] to do with the African American experience” (2). In The Water Cure (2007), Everett continues this discussion of meaning and identity within the narrative of Ishmael Kidder, a man whose daughter is raped and murdered . Everett uses this narrative to frame his argument on how people do not exist with a preestablished identity or definition, but are represented through visual and linguistic signs that create specific meanings within a culture. Everett also demonstrates how these ideologies can be confronted or altered through the language used to define them, thereby changing the interpretations that had previously existed. The relationship between identification and meaning not only applies within the narrative of Ishmael Kidder, but also in the larger context of Percival Everett’s own construction of racial and authorial identity; while he is racially identified by society as an “African American writer,” he chooses for himself to exist as a “writer” who happens to be African American. How are we to understand the “African American” literary tradition when writers like Everett J O N AT H A N D I T T M A N 4 challenge our very conceptions of what that actually means?1 What is the criterion for a work to be considered “African American” and must it represent “the black experience” to be considered as such? As a result of this uncertainty , all notions of identity and meaning become displaced through the language Everett uses to construct it and new interpretations of truth (or perceptions of truth) derive from within this framework. In an interview with Anthony Stewart, Percival Everett is described as “An African American who does not presume to write about ‘the African American experience’” (293), a signification furthered by Everett, who states, “I can’t represent African-Americans. No one can” (303). In explicating the distinction between projection and perception, Everett claims that works written by African Americans are not required to differ in terms of genre or content from any other collection of writers: the failing is not in what we [African American writers] 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 . (“Signing” 10) The disruption of these preexisting conceptions is a major focal point in The Water Cure, emerging from both within Kidder’s narrative and also through the system of identification in Everett’s broader discourse on linguistic meaning. Paralleling a discourse that explores how “most language users have not been educated to identify ideologies, but rather to read texts as natural, inevitable representations of reality,” Everett examines the way that these cultural assumptions define meaning (Eggins 11). What is seen, or perceived, by society is not necessarily a result of authorial intention but rather a product of adhering to ideologies that are embedded in our systems of understanding; systems rooted in the past as well as in present cultural contexts. In The Water Cure, Kidder’s name allegorically represents the protagonist’s tendency to play with language, and it is significant to Everett’s point since it alludes to the unstable and perhaps inaccurate portrayal of his narrative, reconfiguring the ways in which texts are read, and diverging from the “comfortable” or “safe” approach referred to above. (re)Thinking Identity and Meaning in The Water Cure 5 Everett explores the assertion that readers are trained with certain preexisting frames of reference by stating: “It’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing. This is the culture in which we live . . . It’s not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing...