Percival Everett's 'Glyph'
A Fictional Exploration of Intelligence and Meaning
Glyph, 1999, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-22112-2, by Percival Everett, follows Ralph, an infant struck by an extraordinarily accelerated intelligence. Through subversion, deconstruction and sardonic humour Ralph breaks though a flood of philosophical, sociological, historical and literary theories and ideologies locating within them all some familiar wisdom.
Plot
Ralph's talents are discovered and he is accordingly stolen from his family and transported across America against his will by those eager to exploit, study and otherwise manipulate his unique precocity to their own aims. Those captors, featuring both psychologists and government operatives, are at turns comic, feeble, cold and brutal. They consistently hamper Ralph’s attempts to return to his mother, he escapes from one only to fall into the arms of another.
Ralph’s simple desire to be rejoined to his mother drives the narrative forward like a force, as does his urge to understand the rhythms that underpin the life he has been thrown into.
A Book of Ideas
It is difficult to pick up Glyph without learning something, witnessing the world with new eyes, though it is not necessarily a didactic novel. Revelation comes slow and, for the most part, Everett allows the reader to make the steadfast conclusions, not his absurdly intelligent protagonist.
Glyph is, amongst other things, a book of ideas – suggestions, not statements. Everett introduces the reader to a flashing vortex of concepts riding the backs of one another, addressing topics as diverse as the purpose and function of art and the ontological argument for the existence of God. Everett brings his audience into the realm of extreme youth – that eagerness, that animal hunger to learn felt as a child and adolescent, here is displayed, re-doubled, extrapolated; pushed into a deluge of widely varied subjects. Portrait of the artist as a child prodigy.
For all the intellectual asides, Glyph does not saunter. The reader may be overwhelmed but never made to feel inferior. Through the evocation of Roland Barthes, post-modern philosopher, the reader are shown the idiocy of certain brands of intellectual theory. Bathes is undermined and disrespected by all characters we are led to sympathize with.
Ralph reveals Barthes monologues to be absurd, meaningless and, so, boring. Later in the novel when, out of character, Barthes utters a ‘simple declarative statement’ to Ralph’s mother, she is startled that something he said finally ‘had some meaning, and, no less, meaning in the world in which she lived’. Not all points of focus for our intelligence are meaningful, despite how complex and sophisticated they may be. If it doesn’t connect even on the most basic level with life as we live it, Everett seems to say, then what is the point? It’s just wasted energy.
Narrative, Characterisation and Zeitgeist
In keeping with this vein, Everett’s narrative prose equals his philosophical asides in both tone and depth. The two feed off one another, aiding the progression of the story. The characters range in depth from the sometimes caricature of Barthes to the full blooded personages of Ralph and his mother. At all turns, however, the individuals in the novel are complex and contradictory, making Glyph more than just a book about ideas, it is a book about people for people, something, strangely, which is often hard to come by.
Mid-way through the novel a sentence occurs which could be the books zeitgeist –
‘Genius means finding a way back to the beginning where the truths are uncorrupted and honest and maybe even pure’
The challenge Ralph and Everett set for themselves, perhaps, is to take a glimpse at a few of these foundational truths. Judging how you are reverberated by certain passages and phrases which manifest themselves in so many different forms, from the comic to the somber, it strikes one as true that protected under the compost heap of intelligentsia, academia and the sheer volume of thoughts and theories in the world, there lies some undulating root, still growing and organic, casting away the shadows.
Percival Everett is the author of fourteen novels. Everett's 2001 novel, Erasure, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0-571-21588-2, won the 2002 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction.
Glyph
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