Page 161 →Conclusion

Anthony Stewart has contended that the ending of Assumption also “highlights the pointlessness of the desire for the post-racial, a desire to resolve something we cannot definitively understand” (“Talking” 6). Stewart sardonically defined this “desire for the post-racial” further as “trying to resolve questions of race once and for all, principally so they will not keep coming up and leaving some people feeling embarrassed or uncomfortable” (1). He also asserted that Everett’s fiction issues numerous “challenges” that fly in the face of this desire, one of which is “the mundane, although apparently fine and difficult, balance to strike between being aware that a character is black, on the one hand, while simultaneously resisting the urge to be preoccupied exclusively and reductively by this fact, on the other” (2). At the same time that Everett is satirically “signifyin(g)”—in Henry Louis Gates’s sense of the term (passim)—on narratives of race and identity within American culture, Stewart’s observation profoundly directs us to note that he is simultaneously also insignifying, that is, trying to render those narratives less “exclusively and reductively” significant. This latter tendency is a mark of Everett’s distinctly Menippean and degenerative approach to storytelling.

Walker’s final utterance sums up Everett’s career-spanning skepticism toward tidy explanation, whether of race or seemingly anything else. Like Walker, Everett has demanded throughout his career that his readers take him “the way [he is], [often] not making any sense.” As this book, hopefully, shows, he also mirrors Walker in offering his audience a number of possible interpretations for his work before rhetorically asking whether “any of those reasons help this make sense.” If Everett had his way, a symbolic fate similar to Walker’s would befall him, inasmuch as he would undergo the “death of the author” of which Barthes wrote. Everett’s work has consistently attempted to expose the folly of trying to make the world—whether real or fictional—conform to preconceived assumptions, whether related to his identity, to Page 162 →literary conventions, to religious precepts, or to any other rigid philosophy dependent on categorization and classification.

In his The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Kevin Young offers a means of approaching the racial dimension of Everett’s overarching authorial project that touches on both Menippean satire and degenerative satire without mentioning either one by name. Young’s concept of “storying” bears passing resemblance to what Delgado similarly called “counter-storying.” If one slightly dials back some of Young’s premises, though, his version of “storying” corresponds much more with the “counter-counterstorying” that Mullins has derived from Delgado’s concept (see above):

Storying is both a tradition and a form; it is what links artfulness … with any of the number of stories (or tall tales or “lies” or literature) black folks tell among themselves…. By storying, or what I sometimes call here “the counterfeit tradition,” I don’t mean falsehood or some fake blackness…. The black imagination conducts its escape by way of underground railroads of meaning—a practice we would call the black art of escape. In contrast, both realness and truthiness—distinct from a funky, vernacular “troof” that’s part proof and part story—miss the ineffable lyric quality found in the imagination, and in the tradition traced here. Throughout, I am interested in the ways in which black folks use fiction in its various forms to free themselves from the bounds of fact. (Young 17–19)

Young’s identification of this simultaneously subversive and creative concept as intrinsic to African American culture is not what makes it most germane to considerations of Everett’s work. Like “Monk” Ellison in Erasure, Everett does not deny his own blackness; instead he rejects the extent to which that characteristic is either prescriptive or predominant among the various traits that might define him. Although such works as Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that Everett is conscious of and deeply conversant with black literary traditions, both of those works also illustrate how he is no more or less beholden to them than any others. Rather it is Young’s comment about “us[ing] fiction” to break free from the “bounds of fact” that most powerfully echoes Everett’s prevailing attitude toward his own writing.

As Young develops his framework further, it continues to resonate with Everett’s work in articulating a desire not just for escape from restrictions but also for transcendence of them: “To distinguish it a bit from mere fiction, counterfeit is a term I use to discuss ways in which black writers create their own authority in order to craft their own, alternative system of literary currency and value, functioning both within and without the dominant, supposed Page 163 →gold-standard system of American culture…. One crucial aspect of the counterfeit is a renegotiation of borders—and a freedom from insular identity itself” (24). Although Everett would almost certainly quibble with the contention that his construction of an “alternative system of literary currency and value” arises primarily from his own blackness, this passage otherwise fits his lifelong authorial project quite snugly. It is only when Young asserts that “counterfeit is the way in which black folks forge … black authority in a world not necessarily of their making” (24) that his conception begins to diverge from Everett’s, inasmuch as Everett is loath to assert any kind of authority in the vast majority of his works; if anything, he actively resists the notion that such authority truly exists—black, white, or otherwise—as anything other than a discourse with the power to resist and/or to rebuff scrutiny of its premises and conclusions. As Handley has noted, Everett’s stories are self-conscious reminders that “the ‘truth’ of history is never objective but always subjectively imagined” and that “‘history’ … is itself a record of discourses” (306). His novels do not function as counter(feit)-histories; rather they are satirical metahistories that emphasize the damage inflicted on individuals and societies by uncritical acceptance of such “subjectively imagined … discourses.”

Young is absolutely correct in attributing a liberationist bent to the African American artists and works he surveys in his book, but Everett’s own blackness has never been the focal point of his writing, even when blackness has figured prominently in the construction of his characters and authorial stand-ins. As his pointed response to Sven Birkerts’s review of American Desert revealed, Everett considers his own race to be another form of “insular identity” for unsophisticated readers to impose on his works, insofar as it becomes “all they can see” (“Color” 4). Although he often joins them in “critiquing white-dominated past and present realities,” Everett departs from Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and the other authors Young mentions in his opening chapter by refusing to “substitut[e] an alternate black one” in their place (Young 27). Young asserts that “the counterfeit is the ‘literary lie.’ Which is to say, it is, in that way, useful” (33), but Everett does not “usefully lie”—that is, write fiction—for reasons of sociopolitical exigency or even survival in the manner that Young attributes to Hurston. Rather he does do so to maintain his integrity as an artist in the face of various cultural processes—“the dominant, supposed gold-standard system of American culture”—that would try to limit him in some way to remaining in the “bounds of fact.” For Everett, this “gold-standard system” is as apparent in mainstream publishing and academia as it is in South Carolina or the American West, and the artistic strictures he faces in all these realms include race without necessarily always centering on it. He creates his own authority just long enough to remind the reader of the Page 164 →fleeting, imprecise, and illusory nature of such authority. He will not even be bounded by the seemingly indelible “fact” of his own name, much less the supposed signification of his race or place of origin/residence.

Despite this initial departure, Young’s book ultimately leaves room for Everett within its discussion of black art without constituting a new category for him to reject. Although he does not explicitly include Everett in his discussion thereof, Young describes the “post-soul” mind-set that has developed since Nelson George coined the term in 1992: “Post-soul knows well that black is not just a color or a state of mind but also a state of being; and that black art is whatever art is made by black folks. We should not want to place any limitations on such an aesthetic, whether using white or black standards” (Young 284). Young also notes that the “post-soul” generation attempts to avoid one of the pitfalls of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement: “After discarding limitations on what black art can be, it proves difficult, however well meaning, to impose new, albeit ‘blacker,’ ones. Once achieved, freedom is difficult to relinquish” (284). Everett’s unwillingness to “relinquish” his artistic freedom in any context is perhaps the most enduring quality of his writerly career, and it is not difficult—or, one hopes, overly presumptive—to imagine him nodding in agreement with Young’s assertion that post-soul authors “saw and see blackness as a given, both as a subject matter and a subjectivity. The what and how any such writer would choose to write, from epic to blues to both, are not so obvious. Or proscribed” (289).

Three separate critics—Gillian Johns, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, and Christian Schmidt—have used the expansive and inherently elastic concept of “post-soul” black identity to discuss Erasure and A History of the African-American People in a collection of critical essays entitled Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (2014). Like these three authors, Lavelle Porter explicitly has insisted that there is value in emphasizing the “given” of Everett’s racial identity, provided one also engages in self-critical reflection on how and why such emphasis can skew a reading of Everett’s work. In his 2015 review of Assumption and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Porter began by calling out not only would-be readers but also seemingly Everett himself: “If you haven’t read Percival Everett, you are missing out on one of the greatest black writers working today. Yeah, I said it. Black Writer. African-American. Colored. Negro. Afro-American. Etc. Everett can obfuscate and complicate and subvert these designations all he wants, but to the extent there is such a thing as African-American literature, he’s one of the most important writers doing it” (L. Porter).

The last sentence reveals Porter’s post-soul affinities, his skepticism about the existence of a discernible “African-American literature” corresponding Page 165 →closely with Young’s radically self-evident comment about “black art [being] whatever art is made by black folks.” Porter outlined the “meta-racial” perception of Everett’s work as follows: “In his entire body of work one finds an ongoing meditation on all the sloppy, simplistic, lazy, and inevitable ways that we rely upon … racial signifiers. Sifting through his books, and the growing critical tradition around them, we find a writer who is committed to confronting, disrupting, and just plain fucking with conceptions of race at every turn.” However, Porter ironically undercut any sense that what “we find” by seeing Everett this way has created a sense of obligation in the author: “Or he might write about baseball, horses, woodworking, literary theory, and hydrology if he feels like it.” Porter closed his essay by once again insisting that “Percival Everett is one of the dopest black writers around,” but he also illustrated his understanding of Everett as a degenerative, Menippean figure: “go ahead and listen to him as he tells you otherwise, and while doing so understand you are hearing from the best kind of unreliable narrator.” In short, Porter repeatedly lauded Everett’s preeminence among “black writers” while reminding us not to believe that we can (or should) know exactly what that terms signifies, because a large part of what makes Everett so great is that he is “expand[ing] the possibilities for black literature” (L. Porter) to the point that the blackness of its creators may no longer convey any constricting forms of meaning.

Everett’s particularly “post-soul” expression of blackness over the course of his career is an “existential and narrative ouroboros” (Taylor, “Lucid” 84) that both destroys and re-creates itself ad infinitum. However, it is perhaps only in the frequency of its recurrence that this particular theme is significant in Everett’s work. One can remove the words “racial” and “race” in the passage by Lavelle Porter above without significantly altering its accuracy regarding what “we find” in Everett’s work. As Lavelle Porter has noted, a “Percival Everett novel is never just about race, never limited to race,” and this volume has hopefully illustrated the extent to which Everett’s “commitment to confronting, disrupting, and just plain fucking with conceptions” via Menippean and degenerative satire encompasses myriad other realms of human thought. Stewart has suggested the ultimate value of accepting Everett’s work in terms of its playful—and, in Young’s parlance, “useful”—subversion:

As often as not, when Everett’s work comes to critical attention, critics succumb, even in the face of the work’s encouragement to the contrary, to the temptation to make some sort of either/or choice—compromise, really—either seeing Everett’s work as interesting for being the literary theoretical tour de force it often is, or discussing it in the context of African American literature and exploring how it does or (more often) does not satisfy some Page 166 →pre-existing expectation that attaches to this heavily freighted, limited, and limiting term. My question here is, Why do we succumb to this temptation? … His work is not “only” African American literature, nor is it “only” significant for its literary theoretical displays. It draws our attention to the infinity of the continuum in between these two categories. (“Setting” 218)

Everett’s jestingly earnest rejection of categories—for example, “‘Uncategorizable’ is a category. Which I resent” (Stewart, “Uncategorizable” 303)—is another reminder to his readers to focus on “the infinity of the continuum” rather than any fixed poles therein. After all, as the narrator of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell puts it, using a mundanely literal definition of “lying” while echoing Young’s more figurative one: “lying here like this I have learned some things about us and learned nothing at all and it is the nothing at all that sings to me in this cucumbery trance … the things we think when we know we know nothing when we know there is nothing when nothing is our last safe cave of language, and vegetable, vegetable, vegetable me, the sky’s in the river, the moon’s in the sea, the birds speak in riddles and dolphins tell lies, that we’ll all live forever and that nobody dies” (222–23).