Interview: Percival Everett @ The Center for the Study of the Novel
"I’m just a cowboy."
Percival Everett is an acclaimed writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He visited Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel on May 13, 2022, to deliver a reading at CSN’s conference addressing “The Turn Against Fictionality.”
While on campus, Everett kindly agreed to be interviewed for an episode of CSN’s podcast, CSN Café, hosted on this occasion by myself and my friend and colleague, Mitch Therieau. The show is edited and introduced by Casey Patterson.
After the recording, I briefly introduced Everett before his keynote talk.
We are grateful to Casey Patterson for organizing and engineering the recording, and to Margaret Cohen for directing the CSN and planning the conference.
Note: My and Mitch’s respective questions are bolded in the text below and have been left untagged for ease of reading. Those who know us may have some scrap of fun trying to guess who asked what…
When I first emailed Percival Everett, back in March 2022, to ask whether he would like me to mention any ongoing projects in my introduction to his talk, he replied in what I soon learned was a characteristic manner: “Whatever you say is fine with me, though short is better. Something like, ‘We were hoping for Chester Himes, but here's Percival Everett.’ Could even be shortened to ‘Here’s Percival Everett.’”
There was, of course, little chance that I would do that in front of a packed room (which included not a few people whom I was duty-bound to impress). “Well, with apologies to the latter,” so I said in my actual introduction, responding to his request for the first time,
“I at least have to do a conventional enough job such that no one sees it necessary to revoke my access to this building. On the other hand, there’s something futile inherent to introducing someone who has written over 30 books, most of them novels, and has won more awards for his efforts than I have the time to name. What I mean is that litanies can only tell one kind of story, something wholly unfit for a writer who has told just about every kind of story there is. The New York Times, in a review of Everett’s next-to-most-recent novel, Telephone, called his body of work “genre-defying.” This strikes me as precisely backward. What readers of Everett’s work admire above all is that, like almost no one else writing today, he is a jack of all genres and a master of all, too, from the Western to the hard-boiled detective plot to the poststructuralist mise-en-abyme novel—placing him squarely in the proud tradition of literary imitators peopled by the likes of James Joyce. He is, indeed, an imitator whose act cannot easily be followed, so it’s a good thing I’m going first. I’m pleased to say that we were hoping for Percival Everett, and we got him.”
That said, I leave you with our brief yet lively conversation, which has been edited with fidelity for you, the reader.
We’re convening today on the occasion of a CSN conference on “The Turn Against Fictionality.” Often this turn comes in the form of a desire to collapse the author into the narrator, or to collapse a narrated event into a supposed real event, or to collapse, say, beliefs or opinions stated within the text into [those held by] the novelist who wrote them. What comes to mind when you think of the turn against fictionality? And how might it bear on your work and your career?
Well, the first thing that occurs to me is a mantra that you hear in film, one that betrays the inability of a public to read fiction and come away with meaning, and that is: “based on a true story.” It’s used to sell movies, denying a couple of things. One is that any story is true. And the other is that, somehow, authenticity resides in actuality. And so the conflation of truth and authenticity is at once dangerous but also misguided, and I think it incapacitates an audience.
Abstraction is a central term in the talk that you’ll be giving [later today]. It seems like a very flexible, labile term that has many resonances and connotations in different registers. How do you understand abstraction and its role in your work?
Basically, one can approach the notion of abstraction [in two ways]. One is by saying that there is something that’s represented in the world, and that, step by step, you abstract that idea or image until it’s not recognizable as that thing that it was. The other is the abstract expressionist model that you’ve suggested, and that is that [abstraction] is merely an expression of feeling. Obviously, it can’t be pure idea, because an idea like language is based on a representation of something in the world.
The problem I have with either notion is that it assumes something called realism—and this is something I’ve only come to recently in my own thinking, though it seemed pretty pedestrian once I thought of it. There is no such thing as realistic representation. Even when we look at things in the real world, we see in two dimensions. We can’t help but do that. All we see are surfaces, and it’s our minds that change things into three dimensions, which is why we can trick the eye or the mind with three dimensions on film.
That said, this privileging of the idea of mimesis is what drives my interest in abstraction. We’re always starting with abstract thinking, abstract representation. So we’re doing something else, and [that something else] is not addressing reality. It’s addressing this notion we have of what reality looks like. In my work, because the constituent parts of my medium are representational—words—I really believe that I should be able to make an abstract novel. Unfortunately, I can’t say what that looks like. [Laughs.] I can’t say what it would sound like. I have no idea if I could even recognize it if I made it. But, being mentally ill, I continue to try.
It’s so interesting this error of thinking that there is such a thing as realism and that mimetic representation is possible in some way. If a writer or an artist is laboring under this illusion, are they missing out somehow? Can the delusion tamper with one’s artistic project?
It certainly can. The idea, say, that one might take a conversation from a real-life recording and simply transcribe it and have it serve as dialogue in a story or a novel—that would yield a really bad novel. And, of course, the job of the fiction writer, of the novelist, is to create an illusion of real speech. It is not real speech. And conversely, if we were to memorize the best dialogue we’ve read, and we were then to go sit on a bus and act it out to each other, the people around us would think we were nuts. Because it’s not real. It only sounds real, and only in context.
So is the abstraction you’re after in some sense more “real” than these realist attempts?
So you’re asking me if I know what I’m doing. And I do not. All I know is I think I should be able to do it.
In other interviews, you talk about how you look for the form that makes the most sense [for a given content]. And not all forms are able to go the distance. Reading many of your books, it’s clear that each of them takes a different generic approach to the given story. Do you think that this problem of abstraction is a problem of the same kind? That is, do you have to simply find the right form for it? Or is it a problem that throws form into question?
I wish I could answer that. It certainly is the case that I’ve thought, on several occasions, that I had achieved a step toward what it is I want to make, only to step back and realize I’ve failed. Now, that’s not uninteresting to me, and in whatever perverse way I enjoy that failure. But it doesn’t get me any closer to my goal. In fact, in some ways, it causes me to move in my thinking away from it, away from understanding it.
When I think of my works, perhaps the one that’s the most “naturalistic”—and I always use that in quotation marks—or the most realistic, is the one that seems to me to have gotten closest to that abstract nature, though I can't say why I believe that. The novel [in question] is The Water Cure in which, as someone once mentioned, I was trying to attack the fourth wall. Trying to attack the fourth wall, only to realize that all that does is move the wall back. And so I didn’t meet with much success there.
So there is no outside and that sense?
No, no. There’s no ceiling either.
Well, you do paint. And I’ve seen a few [of your paintings] that might be called abstract, though there are some figural elements within them. Could you not simply go there, to painting, and say, “I could just abscond into this other artistic medium of mine where abstraction might be more possible than in the medium of language”? Or is that cheating?
Yes, it would be cheating. Also, it wouldn’t address what I would want it to, and that is to take an art that relies on representation [and bring] it to that abstract place.
I’m not sure whether “abstract” or “non-representational” is the better word. I don’t like “non-representational” because I don’t like describing anything negatively. I'm always sort of amazed by the term “nonfiction.” Really, what is that? And so they [abstract and non-representational] are not the same thing. They inform each other when I go to work. And for the first time, I just had a show of paintings that were based on my last novel, The Trees. They are abstract, until you know what they are. And I’m fascinated by that, because then they no longer are abstract. So what does it mean to say that they are abstract in the first place?
Since we’re talking about the relationship between visual art and your writing, the book of yours that comes to mind is So Much Blue. Were some of these questions about non-representation and figuration in the swirl of your thinking as you were writing that book, in particular?
I have to admit to something that we in my house call Work Amnesia. Once I’m done with a novel, I don’t remember it. And so I vaguely recall working on this book. Often people ask me about particular scenes or characters, and I look at them dumbly. Not dishonestly, I don’t remember the events that occurred [in the novel].
I remember the painting and the desire of the artist in the book to destroy it before anyone could see it. And that’s a notion that I constantly have because I tenaciously guard my process. And I see that process as a part of the creation of the work. So I guess I was thinking about my own relationship to visual art and to that notion of abstraction when I was making the novel; but also, I was trying to work through my understanding of it by addressing my own desire to protect myself.
The book almost invites the reader to think that the protagonist’s formative and traumatic experiences are going to be expressed, finally, in one canvas that sums everything up. But ut the process of translation that those emotions would have to undergo is not ultimately available to us in the narrative. And so there’s almost a ruse or a delightful misdirection involved. The reader thinks that they know what kind of abstraction is going on, but it ends up not being the kind of abstraction that is actually taking place.
Sure, I’ll take credit for that. [Laughs.]
Appreciate that. I would really love to ask you about your position as a writer who’s also institutionalized, as it were, within a university.
I’m glad you added, “within a university.”
For now, it’s just the university. There’s an anecdote, probably apocryphal, about Vladimir Nabokov’s candidacy to teach at Harvard. Apparently, a dissenting Roman Jakobson stood up and said, “Would we hire an elephant to run the zoo?” He was expressing the timeworn tension between the teaching of literature and the making of it. I wonder if you feel that tension in your existence as both an academic, broadly speaking, and also as a novelist, and how that tension might kind of play out in your work or your process.
No. [Laughs.]
You don’t?
I’m just a cowboy.
You’re just a cowboy.
That’s it. You sit on the top of the horse, and you ride. None of this is hard. Universities are great. I get paid to hang out with smart young people. That's what it comes to; we get to talk about things that I don't understand. I’m only interested in the world because I’m interested in things that I don't understand. And I suppose if I set to thinking long enough about it, I could, just like any other person, work myself up into a lather and get confused, and be “institutionalized,” as you said. But no, it’s not difficult.
But it’s interesting to read something like Glyph, or to read those earlier moments in Erasure, when Monk is going to the Nouveau Roman Society conference and being accosted by the post-structuralists. Where do that world and that vocabulary register with you? Where does it sit in your mental cosmology?
Oh, I have a good bullshit detector. And I would never lie, there’s plenty of that to be found in academia. There’s plenty of lip service paid to jargon, plenty of jargon that is just jargon. And there’s also plenty of jargon to be decoded for something interesting. There’s a lot of carving out space for careers. I don’t begrudge anyone that, though it might bore me to tears. But I suppose if I worked in an advertising agency, somebody would be working on a campaign for a deodorant that I didn’t like, you know, one that involves aluminum that kills people.
I want to come back to genre. It’s one of the ur-narratives about recent literature, this turn to genre. But it’s something that you’ve been doing for a long time: the detective procedural, the western, the thriller, the speculative fiction. What role do genres, or the elements of genre, play for you? What do they help you do?
First of all, anytime somebody does something more than twice, it’s a genre. The idea that literary fiction is described as not fitting into one is kind of strange. [It does], though I can’t give you the necessary and sufficient conditions to make that claim. [Literary fiction] is not formulaic in that way. But as soon as I say it’s “not formulaic in that way,” I've given you a criterion.
I have never made a study of—I can’t read detective fiction. I’ve never been able to read it. I’m not drawn to it. But all of us have seen all of its tropes all around us, and so we know them. And that’s available for me to exploit as a writer in the same way that humor would be. You know, it’s part of the trap of fiction. There are tricks. That’s how magicians work. Nobody believes that [card] really turned into a king; it’s that you can't see how it becomes a king.
Do you read other so-called genre fiction? You’re a cowboy, do you read westerns?
I teach a course on the American western. And I do not read them. But I did read 150 of them because I wrote a parody of the western, and so I read a lot and watched a lot, mainly because I wanted to create a language of the western that didn’t exist. In order to do that, I had to learn it, and then own it, and then change it.
Have you returned to the western since writing that novel? Did you exhaust westerns in your media consumption diet after doing that?
Never say never. Now that you’ve put it in my head…
On the topic of reading, then, who are the writers you read in order to write?
Well, one of my heroes is J. L. Austin. Not just his work on sense data and sense theory, and not just How To Do Things With Words, which is about performative language and illocutionary acts and all that stuff. It’s more his essays, like “A Plea for Excuses,” where he gives a great argument about the difference between a mistake and an accident.
What is the difference?
Oh, it’s a long story. And a great story. And I love Bertrand Russell. I love Bertrand Russell in a fairly narrow way. I’ve always had this dream and this desire to teach Principia Mathematica as a literary text, even though there’s not a single sentence in it. [Laughs.] I think it’s a beautiful work of literary logic, if you will.
Do you love the Russell who disliked Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations?
I agree with the Russell who didn’t like it. You know, the Philosophical Investigations is fantastic. And you have to put another book on top of it, or it’ll just float to the ceiling. And it will give you a headache every time you open it. It’s a remarkable document about not doing what you preach. But there are some great ideas in it and ones that I returned to frequently, not the least of which is the Beetle in the Box.
I would note from that answer that the writers who get you writing, at least the ones that you mentioned, are not novelists.
I mentioned those because one of my interviewers steered me that way.
[Laughs.] I apologize.
No, one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and I read it every year, is The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. No one talks about it. Everyone—well, six people talk about his novel Erewhon. But I love The Way of All Flesh. I also love the work of Chester Himes, who is not read enough. And when he is read, it’s his genre work, the detective stuff, that’s talked about. But his three literary novels (I can only think of three of them), and one posthumously published novel called Plan B, I think are remarkable.
When you think through Wittgenstein or Russel, are you finding a way to incorporate something like philosophical propositions into your novels? Or are those two things anathema?
I don’t know exactly how it’s happening. I do know that there are certain logical questions that drive my interest in identity, not the least of which is the remarkable understanding that “A equals A” is not the same as “A is A.” That gives me a headache. And that gets me working.
Can you explain that a bit more?
No. [Laughs.]
We’ll take that. A mystery to be pondered. Before we go, we’d love to hear a little bit about what you’re about to read [at the conference].
I have not decided. I have a problem with the idea of readings in general. And that is, that I already wrote this down. So it’s available for people to read. And I find it strange that anyone wants to hear a writer read what they’ve written out loud.
Actually, given the context of the conference, I think I will tell an instructive story. And we’ll see. I can always fall back on a book sitting beside me. That’s the comfort of having written a book. I can always say, “Oh hell, I’ll just read this.” But I have something in mind, which is always a frightening thing to hear and say.