Perspectives on Percival Everett

Chapter Three: Frenzy: Framing Text to Set Discourse in a Cultural Continuum

35 Chapter 3 Frenzy Framing Text to Set Discourse in a Cultural Continuum R O N A L D D O R R I S [S]omeone in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, as far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world . . . the historian has no right posing as a scientist to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between the two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten time over. — W. E . B . D U B O I S , “The Propaganda of History,” Black Reconstruction (1935) Percival Everett’s Frenzy (1997), modeled on the storyline of The Bacchae by Euripides, is a postmodern revision of the story of the god of wine, madness, fertility, and ecstasy, Dionysos.1 The narrator of Everett’s novel informs us that in the midst of the “frenzied Bakkhanal,”2 the story of Dionysos is told through Vlepo, “an unfrenzied observer” (3) without form that manifests only at the command of Dionysos. Vlepo says of himself, “I was there to tell the participants what it was they enjoyed or did. My usual place was at the side of the god Bromius as his aide, his chronicler, his mortal bookmark. I am Vlepo” (3). Vlepo without form serves as chronicler of bacchic unfolding. As a governing definition for this analysis, that which is bacchic is connoted as the attempt on the part of a people in an uprooted environment to balance emotion and intellect, which encompasses growth pattern bound in the rhythms of organic life and all its integral variations. From this base, this analysis engages Percival Everett’s Frenzy not as fiction centered on R O N A L D D O R R I S 36 protagonist(s) and antagonist(s), but as the framing of text to a set discourse in a cultural continuum. This continuum references the cross-cultural connections between Afro-Asiatic and Greek cultures. In Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (1993), George Brandon offers a perspective centered on the emergence of such discourse: In a cultural continuum the differences in thought and behavior derive from a shared pool of ideology, history, myth and experience. But people relate to this shared pool differently because of their place in society and because of their place on the continuum. Thus these differences can be used as a way for people to represent themselves to others and to themselves . Into this shared pool fall racial and ethnic concepts, stereotypes, and images, the relationships between symbols and economic and political power on the one hand, and tradition and self-identity on the other. The reality of the intersystem then is the bridges of transformations necessary to get from one end of the intersystem to the other. (Brandon 161) Euripides’s The Bacchae, which frames Everett’s novel, complements Brandon ’s perspective relative to a cultural continuum. Dionysos as a principle character in Frenzy is the character positioned as understudy, rather than the sole chronicler of his tale. Correspondingly, the emphasis that is placed on how each chronicler in Frenzy addresses that importance of command of the WORD to tell the tale is what gives life to and shapes Frenzy’s bacchic unfolding. It is an unfolding that mirrors a postmodern narrative aesthetic underpinned by fragmentation and multivalent truths about the lives and histories of all of the characters. In the novel, Dionysos is immersed in conflict with other characters; and as understudy in the text, he is also immersed in conflict with himself. His discursive engagement with himself and others centers not only on his ulterior motive to understand what constitutes love but also to learn how love feels or how one feels love. The characters in the novel—what I call sermon-voices—Dionysos , Pentheus, Kadmos, and Semele, Agave, and the maddened women aid in an examination of Dionysos as understudy central to Everett’s textual framing in Frenzy. Everett’s employment of The Bacchae as a frame for his novel is not unprecedented in an African American literary and historical continuum, Frenzy: Framing Text to Set Discourse in Cultural Continuum 37 although his approach is certainly...