Perspectives on Percival Everett

Chapter Six: A Bird of a Different Feather: Blues, Jazz, and the Difficult Journey to the Self in Percival Everett’s Suder

94 Chapter 6 A Bird of a Different Feather Blues, Jazz, and the Difficult Journey to the Self in Percival Everett’s Suder U Z Z I E C A N N O N Much of the recent critical interest in Percival Everett’s literary contribution focuses on the author’s seemingly easy ability to move beyond race in his novels. Indeed, Everett indirectly resists being identified as any specific type of writer, even an African American writer, as he explains, “I don’t want to talk about race . . . I just want to make art.”1 Of course, his aesthetic observations are not without precedent. Black American writers as diverse as Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Petry, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin have all written fiction that purports to be “raceless.”2 But like them, this is not to say that Everett’s fiction avoids race; rather, often in his work, race within a specifically African American cultural experience is not always foregrounded. Instead, when characters in Everett’s novels happen to be racially identified as African American, one could argue that they perform a “postmodern” blackness in which their experiences as human beings transcend race. Significant to Everett’s theorization of race in his fiction is satire and parody, and he has made it clear that in addition to African American writers and thinkers, his work has been influenced by the likes of EuroAmerican literary and popular cultural figures as eclectic as Laurence Stern, Samuel Butler, Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, and Bullwinkle.3 Further , while satire and parody tend to pervade his oeuvre, the author appropriates in typical postmodern fashion other narrative strategies to tell a story. Everett experiments with absurd characterization, unpredictable plots, and nonlinear time that in some ways have marginalized him as an Blues, Jazz, and the Difficult Journey to the Self in Suder 95 African/American writer. Certainly, for Everett, this is not necessarily a bad thing, for his position as an “experimental” African/American writer reflects what LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka wrote almost fifty years ago about the then-contemporary African American literary scene: “There are now a great many young black writers in America who do realize that their customary isolation from the mainstream is a valuable way into any description they might make of an America. . . . The vantage point is classically perfect—outside and inside at the same time” (Home: Social Essays 164). One can certainly see how Everett, as a writer, works outside and inside of African American and Euro-American literary traditions. In many of his fictions, the characters are not racially marked as black or white. And this, as Everett is well aware of, may or may not affect the way one reads these stories. Yet, despite his resistance to his work being seen as always already race-specific, Everett’s first novel, Suder (1983), continues in, yet significantly diverges from, the African American literary tradition. While Suder eschews the “social realism” and “dialect tradition”4 that some critics seem to suggest ultimately defines the African American literary tradition, the novel represents through its protagonist, Craig Suder, a text significant to the study of contemporary “postmodern” African American literary representation. Often comic, the novel portrays through flashbacks of his childhood Craig Suder’s struggle with his inability to value himself on his own terms; it is an existential crisis that frames most postmodern narratives written by both black and white writers. Moreover, the nonlinear plot showcases unpredictability and absurdity that is also a hallmark of postmodern literature . Everett’s postmodern fiction, in the words of Bernard Bell, “moves beyond modernism of the 1950s in an effort to expand the possibilities of the novel and to reconstruct the liberated lives of the generation of the 1960s” (283). The deployment of postmodern narrative strategies by post-1970s black writers allowed them to begin to more radically redefine “blackness” in all its variances. Certainly, Everett’s portrayal of Craig Suder’s journey toward self-mastery is an important trope in the African American literary tradition with Margaret Russett having claimed that Suder is “[p]robably the ‘blackest’ of all” Everett’s novels (360). Yet, however sincere Russett’s statement might be, her proclamation risks espousing an essentialized notion of blackness, something falling into the trap of essentializing that U Z Z I E...