JAMES by Percival Everett — reviewed by Thomas

What is the relation, he asked himself, or anyone who would listen, between humour and the horrible? Surely, the best humour, without going into what constitutes best, arises from the horrible, is a way, perhaps of withstanding what would otherwise be intolerable. Perhaps that is what humour is for, or at least what it does, if that is not the same thing. Without the horrible, humour would be lacking in what we could call seriousness; a tickle for the comfortable, an irritation really. Humour arises when all else is lost, no, not all else, I find no humour in genocide, he thought; humour gets its agency from hope, however slim that hope, but for there to be humour, he thought, there must be at least some hope. Percival Everett has (again) written a very funny novel that is also a very horrible novel (his 2021 novel, The Trees, is a hilarious police procedural about racism and lynching). In James, Everett matches (and outdoes) Mark Twain’s special mixture of humour, meanness and social critique and takes the template of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to tell a deeper and more horrible story that is largely hidden by the limited perspective of Twain’s narrator, Huck. Where Twain, for all his ‘humanising’ of the runaway slave, Jim, perpetuated many of the racist tropes that persist in portraying Black people as simple and somehow ludicrous, Everett turns this on its head, making James the narrator of his story and suggesting that the modes of speech of the Black characters in Twain, and attributed to Blacks in much of American culture, is actually a kind of camouflage, faked for the oppressors’ ears. The ultimate disguise is to ‘pass’, not as White but as the Whites’ misconception of Black. To what extent, he wondered, might a stereotype that is put around an Other like a fence also provide some space for those inside to be free at least from being seen by those who put them there? Running throughout the novel, this reflexive mechanism of ironic mimesis (or ironic mechanism of reflexive mimesis) reaches its crescendo of irony when James falls in with an itinerant troupe of Blackface minstrels that includes a Black man ’passing’ as white. James isn’t ‘Black’ enough to meet the audience’s expectations, so has to apply boot polish before he appears on stage: “Ten white men in black face, one black man passing for white and painted black, and me, a light-brown black man painted black in such a way to appear like a white man trying to pass for black.” The irony folds in on itself with great delicacy and horrible precision. When the minstrels in Blackface mock the Cakewalk Dance performed by slaves they are seemingly unaware that the Cakewalk Dance is itself a mockery of white dances and mores. “‘Double irony,’ I said. ‘That is amusing. Can one irony negate another, one cancel out the other?’” What then are we left with? As soon as a slave achieves even the slightest agency, their relationship to their circumstances is ironic. Is the relationship of anyone to their circumstances ironic, he wondered, to the extent that their liberty is constrained by these circumstances? In James’s case, mortally ironic. Although race is a fiction, slavery is a terrible physical reality, and it seems that all the trees along the Mississippi have their branches worn smooth by lynchings. Everett shows how identity is constructed or imposed but relation is absolute; how prejudice is attitudinal but power is practical; and how these modes of harm make an unbridgeable divide between the powerful and the powerless. Slavery is a very thorough expression of Capital. James, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is an adventure novel, and perhaps adventure novels are all about their protagonists’ relation to the horrible. Such novels without the horrible would not be adventures but rather romps, so to call them, for want of a better term. But this is no romp: Huck’s involvement in the story he tells, though not without its hazards, is infinitely more carefree than that which James can narrate. As a runaway slave, the degree of freedom he maintains is the degree of mortal danger in which he finds himself. “Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anxiety, but at that moment, I felt anxiety. Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I felt anger.” Adventure novels protect their protagonists by the momentum of the narrative: they are carried onwards past the dangers that beset them; and this is to some extent true in James: James survives improbably to catalogue the fates of slaves. The adventure exhausts itself at the end of the book when James arrives home, seeking his wife and daughter, to the ultimate dehumanising full stop of the slavers’ rationale. At this point, the appealing, gentle individual character of James that we have come to love is subsumed by the horrible circumstances and he becomes an instrument of the entirely understandable but brutal response that the brutality of the horrible requires. Will freedom follow? Just look at the world. James has written his story in a pencil that cost the slave who stole it for him his life. “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here,” he writes. “But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.”