Pulitzer. The triumph of a black writer in an aspect and stupid time

His « subversive » reimagination of the classic Huckleberry Finn, who earned him the praise and distinctions of the usual, immediately gathered the unanimity in critics, and being buried in a series of premiums and distinctions, including the National Book Award and Kirkus Prize, made him an too obvious candidate to earn this reward.

Last week, Percival Everett responded once again to that category of those who seem to be punished in the prestige of a literary career that serves perfectly to illustrate the good consciousness that dominates cultural trops. When you are attributed to the Pulitzer for fiction by the novel Jamesit cannot be said that he has done something more than abiding this kind of privilege that is deposited in a black writer in a little subtle way of seeking redemption in a political context of clear regression of social rights, particularly of minorities, after the election for the second time of a racist self-eager who is trying to rewrite this fundamental chapter of American history, that of slavery. In its stente and impotence, the cultural system is doing its best to give a sign of resistance, but as Everett recognized days in an interview with Publicthings evolved to such a point where everything became a bit anecdotic at the same time «Scary and stupid». The satire of little serves in these circumstances, because as can be moved after the state of Florida has presented a proposal to replace the term « slavery » with « involuntary relocation ». «He is hilarious, if it was to be grace»admits Everett. “The irony of this has its beauty, because no one with a minimum of common sense can fail to realize the irony of this stupidity. At the same time, the urge to erase the story by using the excuse that whites should not feel guilty is quite wicked ».

But in this plot that absorbs everything to a sordid irony regime, Everett will not fail to assume that he has been captured himself. His « subversive » reimagination of the classic Huckleberry Finn, who earned him the praise and distinctions of the usual, immediately gathered the unanimity in critics, and being buried in a series of premiums and distinctions, including the National Book Award and Kirkus Prize, made him an too obvious candidate to earn this reward. At so many, Everett led to that tape of those who can afford to come with a disinterested stance, between the deflationary and the cabotine, saying that so many what would have been joke was if someone wrote a criticism that really put an end to the encomastic choir, a reading that disagreeed. It is almost a challenge that launches, knowing that a truly subversive work of a black author would never be welcomed with such a degree of enthusiasm. In any case, JamesThis novel was not even on the list of the three favorites of the jury, but was subjected after failed to reach a consensus. Faced with the impasse, the 17-member commission with a vote over the finalists suggested this fourth option, and it can be said that the jury swallowed it. Then there was a certain annoyance when it was known as the process had taken place, and the alternative would have been not to deliver the prize, as happened in 2012, causing the cholera of the literary world. As for Everett, having been pleased with Pulitzer, on other occasions acknowledged that the awards are offensive, because they force «Wicked comparisons between works of art». What is certain is that your books have received many. At age 68, and since his debut as a novelist in 1983, this natural writer of Georgia has published approximately a novel every two years, as well as dozens of short stories, rehearsals and articles, but from time to time he likes to cut with the balm side of the profiles that trace him, most of the things he writes as « Shit ». «I am almost sure that all I write is shit»I told a journalist from The New Yorker. «I am just trying to make the best shit I am capable of».

Everett’s most popular work

This writer who was having a very discreet route until a few years ago, perhaps the need to defend himself from the excessive enthusiasm that he was surrounded, especially from the moment his novel Erasure 2001, was adapted to the cinema by Cord Jefferson two years ago, in American fiction. Their synopsis can be as promising as a deceiving, with the premise to intrigue us with a writer to whom it is said that his universe is not sufficiently enough « black »and that in accounting for a series of bookmakers who have obtained enormous commercial and critical success for corresponding to the stereotypes that the general public understands how «The Black Life»He also decides to vomit his simple version of a romance set in the ghetto, signing it with a pseudonym, and obtaining the so embarrassing acclaim and the profits they had always escaped. «Call you, if you feel like, localized irony, or convenient rationalization, but whatever I was going to keep the money»says the protagonist. And it is nonetheless ironic that Erasure So far it was Everett’s most popular work. This may be about to change, but before we set JamesIt is good to point out how the novels of this writer have always walked the bulha with conventions, whether molding or reinventing them. Everett writes quickly and often takes advantage of the balance sheet in receiving a book and some suggestion that he removes to launch the next work. Wrote Westerns, Thillers, a soap opera in the style of television pirosos and a manual for slave management. Also makes its concessions to the postmodern regime, and Erasure referred to in the plot of I Am Not Sidney Poitierpublished 8 years later, when a character admits to the author’s character, named Percival Everett, who did not like the book, and he is not overwhelmed, but acknowledges that he did not like to write it, nor was he very convinced of his quality when he handed him to the editor. Deep down, this writer has a certain ease in scribbling plots, brings a good deal of humor, wit, and is capable of more cerebral works, books in which his passion for philosophy, which is imposed on the plot, as capable of more faithful to realistic proceedings, being mostly ambient books in the American, and placing a consciousness of people, but establishing it, but redemptive margin of affective bonds. Another decisive point in its fiction is the way they hold themselves in the very element of language production and how this itself generates a kind of belief or, alternatively, a series of superstitions. Thus, Everett does not fail to point out how the ability to extract meaning, playing with the meaning of things, is a dance of false promises and voluntary illusions, comparing it to a scam: «Because we want language to mean something, it means everything.

The ‘trap’

In fact, this writer removes his element of rebellion from a certain melancholy reserve, is not a satirist, because he understands the devastating irony of culture, and, in his view, even this subgenre of “African American fiction” is just an impostation, a commodity that tries to be taken seriously as an autonomous genre. In 1991, at a time when he still seemed availability to comply with what they expected of him, he published an essay on the state of the American authorship. «We are at the mercy of a market that seeks to affirm their beliefs about African Americans»he wrote. In the following years, although his work has been able to triumph while the critic has praised an author who knew how to escape this deceit, because it gives breath to black characters who are supposed to evade the archetypes to which we usually see them confined, the truth is that their books do not escape something paternalistic, and the ethnic question continues to the condition of a commentary on the condition Racial tensions and this genre of bullshit that turns out to be limiting for a writer. In such an essay, Everett recognized this trap: «Even when our work seeks to be something else, it never escapes to be read as a reaction to the position in which we and our works have been placed».

James, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

In JamesWe see Everett Picar the Point, present themselves to the office to do a coversly milestone works. And then this time reverses the perspective of Huckleberry Finn’s events, following the general lines of the novel of Twain, but now submitting him to a drastic revision and reinvention as a narrative in the first person in the voice of Jim, the enslaved fugitive of the novel. If the duo’s adventures when descending the Mississippi River in a raft seemed, from Huck’s perspective, a huge downside, from James’s point of view we see how it all assumes much more drastic and terrific contours. And we remember the moment Jim says to Huck in the original novel, as it was already fed up «Adventures». Everett’s comment is very pertinent, but by giving interiority and literacy to the perhaps most famous fictional emblem of American slavery following Uncle Tom, Everett is still subjected to this tradable trope to respond from the margins, exorcising the old racial baggage to confront that form evolved readers with that foundational romance in literature American. The problem is that Everett’s novel is a derivative, coming to rewrite Jim like this James, an ambitious reader, who understands that the Bible is just an instrument of his oppressors and that keeps inner soliloquies with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and John Locke, often about slavery. It is a character who is inscribed as a form of delirium in Marginalia, serving as very pathetic expedients, as if the dignity of such a slave had to be rescued to a swollen tone, that of a scholar who has to pretend a certain retardation not to become threatening to the whites. Thus, early in the novel, we learned that Jim’s famous ocular dialect in Huckleberry Finn is a strategic way to camouflage himself, go unnoticed: the enslaved were led their speech to calm the nerves of the whites. But barely these saw back, among them, blacks speak in a crystalline and scholarly English. («Is this an example of proletal irony or dramatic irony?asks a character). In the background, this explains well the pathetic element of an intellectual environment that creeps with the more than 200 incidences of expression “Nigger” In Twain’s novel, which prefers this imposture to pass Jim through a king-philosopher, one of the great mercurial geniuses of his time. It gives a feeling that Everett, who in the interviews he was not tired of repeating that he read Twain’s romance 15 times, and that he did to turn it into a stain, and blur it, until he got sick of him, really read it until he noticed anything. Had to rewrite Jim, to make him something else, because in fact, there are worse ways of degrading a man than calling him “Nigger”. Some still imagine that human dignity is reached only through a philosophy that penetrates misery and reinvent the foundations, and never understand the misery of this philosophy. In fact, it is Mark Twain who continues to laugh, and it is his romance that ends up leading to the best of this Jamesdemonstrating the danger of cultural colonization that leads a black writer to have to falsify Jim to “raise”, being unable to recognize the character’s fabulous dignity in the original. The recommendation to do to Everett is to read Huckleberry Finn a 16th time, now already free from the subjection of having to write a romance to impress whites.