Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘He found it all depressing; not that lynching could be anything but. However, the crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.’[1] There is ‘Strange Fruit’ in ‘The Trees’. This blog is about Percival Everett (2022) ‘The Trees: a Novel ’, London, Influx Press. Note that it CONTAINS SPOILERS: so do not read if you do not like that: BOOKER REFLECTIONS ON SHORTLIST 2022.

One problem I have writing about this novel, though I admire it in very many ways, is that I sometimes fail to properly understand exactly what I am facing in reading it. On top of that I find myself having to confess, in doing so, that I am no great fan of its mix of genre components. First, it works as comedy but it is comedy tinged with elements of both the mystery detective novel, focused on serial murders, and supernatural content which struggles to come to terms with the premise of deductive process that is so fundamental to the murder mystery. For if the supernatural can contain unresolved mystery and make it part of its own lack of finite worldly boundaries that it labels the ‘unknown’, in detective novels ‘mystery’ is usually resolved. It even causes concern to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation detectives in the novel who have to contemplate the possible truth of one of their witnesses’ ‘ghost theory’ to explain the murders or face the possible truth that they are “not going to figure out anything here”.[2]

And then the there is the issue of political satire. That last reason is why I have resisted calling this novel a ‘black comedy’ or using phrases like ‘writing with a dark heart’. For these metaphors are themselves intensely political and sustain the emotional and cognitive structures of white racism. Theories about the causes of death throughout are intensely bound up with the folk theories of southern American racism, in its most institutional forms – from the absurd stereotype (convincing nevertheless) that is the Reverend Doctor Cad Fondle (names in this novel are wonderful), the town coroner to President Donald Trump, who the racist white population describes as (however ‘orange’ he be) ‘just like us’.[3] Trump has a chapter, in the form of a monologue, to himself near the end of the novel, which mimes the absurdities of the speech and basis of fake authorities of this most absurd POTUS (‘my people … and they’re good people’, ‘our good policemen … out there on the front lines’).[4]

But the novel is political not because it fights back at stereotypes of black people by understanding how easy it is to stereotype white racists, who indubitably exist in great number, but because it uses its generic elements – serial murder and zombie revolution – to imagine the possibility, never represented as such, of a political rising of oppressed black populations. Its sub-title is ‘Rise’.[5] It ends with the penultimate ominous sentence: ‘Outside, in the distance, through the night air, the muffled cry came through, Rise. Rise’.[6] In such a novel, and in such a vaguely mystical evocation, the persons who might rise might be the corpses of the lynched or whole troops of the oppressed – black, Chinese and Native American. Everett interviewed by Alan Cummings says:

The kernel of it was a song: Lyle Lovett, the country singer, covered the traditional song Ain’t No More Cane and coupled it with another song called Rise Up. I was listening to it before I played tennis one morning and I thought, huh, there’s my novel: what if everyone did “rise up”? It became a kind of a zombie idea, but I don’t like zombies so it morphed into what it became. While I very seldom say what any of my novels mean, one thing I think is true is that there’s a distinction to be made between morality and justice: justice might not always feel moral to us, and that’s a scary thought. (my italics)[7]

This statement comes very near to my discomfort with this novel as a novel. It is that its play with revolutionary themes and the discussion of the relationship of ‘morality’ and ‘justice’ in revolutionary violence sit for me uncomfortably in a comic novel with Gothic elements, as if they were being treated trivially. At one moment Gertrude, the nearest the novel gets to an underground black political activist says to her academic friend, Damon Thruff, that she can contemplate killing people, without calling it murder (just as soldiers do in wars) because she and her allies are ‘simply offering a little retributive justice’. Hence the sexual mutilation of the white corpses in the novel, mirroring what was done in lynching. Of course the avenged also include unnecessary deaths in custody of countless non-white people, mainly (but not only) men. Their names are compounded into the the list ritually recorded at the end of the novel and many of which form the bulk of the mystical chapter 64,. This lists real names of the lynched and killed. including those only represented by lines like ‘unknown male’ but also one of the triggers to The Black Lives Matter Movement, ‘Trayvon Martin’.[8] Surely none of the intention of Everett here is trivial but I still feel that the comedy involved in the death of say, Fondle, in the last analysis, fails to respect the real triggers to violent revolution, and belittles it. Can a comic-cum-murder-cum- zombie novel ever, in fairness, deal with these themes? And in absorbing them into the literary establishment of the Booker Prize, do we do justice to the dead and living people still in need of justice – whether retributive or restorative (and not just in the criminal courts)?

This said, I have to admit that the novel does continually show that this is a problem and seeks to legitimise the notion of a deficit of justice for historical guilt. This in, at least as I noticed, two different ways. First, we see it in the almost ritual treatment of the awesome reality of the vast size of the crime amongst a great number of victims. Second, we see it in the treatment of the haunted figure of Granny C. I will deal with these in order.

The vast number of victims of police and communal violence is often conveyed in lists. I have mentioned already the haunting Chapter 64, but that list’s insufficiency is made manifest as the scale of copy-cat murders (by riot or zombie rising – Everett keeps both meanings in play) that spreads across the whole of the Southern (and Northern) United States, in Chapters 99 and 101.[9] I find the latter chapter very moving, mixing as if does the names of individual towns, cities and states, with rhythmical repetitions of Mississippi. I take my title citation from Chapter 60, which explains the rationale for Chapter 64, as both chapters show the effect on Damon Thruff (the nearest we get to Everett) of recounting and listing the names. As we have seen, the novel ends with this act of recounting (by typing names) hat is also represented as a ‘muffled cry’ from some unknown dark distance – perhaps in internal rather than external space.

Damon Thruff read dossier after dossier, name after name. … What was most unsettling was that they all read so much alike, not something that one wouldn’t expect, but the reality of it was nonetheless stunning. … He found it all depressing; not that lynching could be anything but. However, the crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign.’[10]

The list of alternative ways of explaining ‘lynching’ in this passage (crime, practice and religion) is helpful only in that it shows that our understanding of the phenomenon falls short if only seen in one set of terms. The inclusion of the word ‘religion’ is unsettling but not because of the satire surrounding the links of the Klu Klux clan under the leadership of terrible (supposedly religious) men like the Reverend Cad Fondle. There is a sense that the lynched are a group of hallowed people, who must be revered and respected by those who absorb them, which I share. At the heart of Thruff’s project he finds the ‘mystery’ at the base of all human questions – that of the many and one, that everything can be numbered or is part of a unity which cannot be numbered – considered by R.J. Rushdoony in 2017 to be the basic problem in philosophy, politics and religion:

The one and the many is perhaps the basic question of philosophy. Is unity or plurality, the one or the many, the basic fact of life, the ultimate truth about being? If unity is the reality, and the basic nature of reality, then oneness and unity must gain priority over individualism, particulars, or the many. If the many, or plurality, best describes ultimate reality, then the unit cannot gain priority over the many; then state, church, and society are subordinate to the will of the citizen, the believer, and of man in particular. If the one is ultimate, then individuals are sacrificed to the group. If the many be ultimate, then unity is sacrificed to the will of the many, and anarchy prevails.[11]

In the head of Damon – a man of ‘scholastic’ tendency, as his book on ‘racial violence’ shows, according to Mamma Z, that the reality of violence has been suppressed precisely because it comes from a single impersonal motive – race hate turned, as Mamma Z says at one point, into ‘sport’ – has the capacity to become an ultimate cause. That ‘reality’ claims that justice for the listed is perhaps the only cause worth following, again a point with which I have empathy, given its implications.[12] Philosophy, religion and the philosophical politics of democracy have not solved this problem and I would suggest that the novel leaves this ‘mystery’ where it was – a mystery. If it is approached, it is through the ultimate song of Southern Lynching: Strange Fruit . Use the link on ‘Strange Fruit’ preceding this to see the lyrics and hear the song, whose appearance in the novel is a ritual moment of enlightenment of the meaning of the novel.[13] It is a song parodied in the ritual murder of the town of Money’s police deputies, which too is turned into a moment of parodic prayer as a ‘bloody body’ is cut out of the ‘blood-matted leaves’: ‘Brady’s body did not fall flat but landed on his knees, his rounded back and slumped shoulders giving him the appearance of a man in prayer’.[14] However, I, like Brady, am on uncertain ground here – not least because of a problem I find with this novel’s tone as it plays between comedy and something deeper about what might be going on.

The same problem emerges in the novel’s treatment of the almost religious guilt of Granny C, for she, as a young white girl, was the origin of a lynching frenzy: she lied about Emmet Till, saying he sexually propositioned her, this lead to his lynching and the lynching of others in frenzied copy-cat mode. Her family from the beginning are used to, and indeed exasperated about, her expressions of guilt about Till: ‘I wronged that little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around comes around’. But even at this point the expression of white guilt is buried in comedy because Charlene, Granny’s granddaughter thinks the good book might be Guns and Ammo, hardly pious reading. [15] Granny C however becomes continually haunted by the possible presence of the ghost of Till, although apparently her face is ‘blank, without emotion’.[16] Her guilt becomes increasingly psychotic in appearance; her ‘arms flailed, and her screaming became the word sorry’.[17] Her role as the ‘crazy bitch who accused him’ in the events of the lynching of Till is discovered by the black detectives shortly before Granny sees Till again, or thinks she does, in the body of the black male always left at the murders of White lynching, as if she were looking into the deeper meaning of history THROUGH the present:

The old woman looked at the face, believed she saw beyond the scares, past the dried blood, past the years, into the brown eyes closed by the swollen flesh, back into the little store on that late August day. She didn’t say anything, she didn’t think anything, she simply died.[18]

This passage, we need to note, does not support Fondle’s later view that Granny C died ‘scared to death’. Rather she died because she attained insight to the Justice she felt required in her situation.

Granny C’s redemptive death and the invocation of the ‘one and many’ problem behind history are deeper readings of the history of the American South than are found elsewhere in the novel. I am still though a bit perturbed by the shifts of genre and explanation of racial violence and how it might be addressed that these moments of good writing give way to. Jake Arnott in The Guardian feels that this is because black consciousness, having abandoned the path to re-awoken awareness or the ‘woke’ (perhaps because the word has been repossessed by the right as a smear).

What is truly disturbing is that in the 20 years between Erasure and The Trees we appear at times to be going backwards in terms of consciousness, so that an African American word for awakening can now be used as a pejorative term. In his earlier work Everett might have mused, like Joyce, that history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. Now his analysis is more blunt. As the FBI agent declares: “History is a motherfucker.”[19]

This is a finer piece of critical prose and literary history than I have seen in a long time. It states the reasons for my ambivalence about the novel, whether I am right or wrong to feel this. I certainly feel that I cannot express my point better than it is expressed by Arnott. Moreover, I agree too with his analysis that this is an important novel about a vastly important human issue but one that does not quite cohere. I think, at least, that he says this last point but I may be falsely enlisting him to my view. I am not sure. The novel puzzles me critically still, partly because its satire is so spot on, but its story takes many other turnings into different responses to racial violence.

Do read it, though. Will it win? I am inclined to think not.

All the best

Steve

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[1]Percival Everett (2022: 189) ‘The Trees: A Novel’, London, Influx Press

[2] Percival Everett (2022: 67, 66 respectively) ‘The Trees: A Novel’, London, Influx Press

[3] Ibid: 121

[4] Ibid: Chapter 102 (326-328)

[5] Ibid: 9

[6] Ibid: 335

[7] Anthony Cummins (2022)Percival Everett: ‘I’d love to write a novel everyone hated’ in The Guardian (Sat 12 Mar 2022 18.00 GMT)Available in: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/12/percival-everett-id-love-to-write-a-novel-everyone-hate

[8] Ibid: 213

[9] Ibid: 321, 324f. respectively

[10] ibid: 189

[11] R. J. Rushdoony (2017) ‘Philosophy: The Problem of the One and the Many’ (online April 24, 2017) – Adapted from The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy Available at: https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/philosophy-the-problem-of-the-one-and-the-many

[12] Ibid: 167 & 238 respectively.

[13] Ibid: 246

[14] Ibid: 281

[15] Ibid: 16

[16][16] Ibid: 29

[17] Ibid: 74

[18] Ibid: 122

[19] The final quotation from ibid: 150. Otherwise this is: Jake Arnott (2022) ‘Potent satire of US racism’ in The Guardian (Wed 31 Aug 2022 11.00 BST) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/31/the-trees-by-percival-everett-review-potent-satire-of-us-racism