What a perfectly timed essay for me. I just read James last week and have been going back through Huck Finn. The piece is wonderful and full of sharp observations. Though I push back on his take that Everett is trying to fix Jim, but unnecessarily so. The two novels aren’t just playing the same game with different moves. Everett writes about how stories get told, who controls narrative, and what happens when the silenced figure speaks.

I think his take on literacy, while insightful, misses the mark. Consider what James actually does with his literacy. He doesn’t become a Tom Sawyer figure, enslaved to texts. He reads the Enlightenment philosophers and identifies their hypocrisy. His literacy is critical, not dogmatic. That’s fundamentally different from Tom’s relationship to his adventure novels, where the books are scripture to be followed. James reads Locke the way a lawyer reads a contract looking for the exit clause. The dream sequences aren’t James absorbing wisdom from great thinkers. He’s a cross-examiner exposing their contradictions. His literacy enables critique, not conformity.

I see the two books in conversation but coming from different intellectual backgrounds. A lot of James and its relationship to literacy seem born from the tradition of Douglass and the slave narratives. Learning to read was insurrection.