This week, I’ve decided to finally buckle down and put some thought into a recurring quote from our class. All semester, Dr. McCoy has told us in various contexts “[i]t is incredible that a sentence is ever understood”, a quote from Percival Everett’s Erasure. I think, at last, the quote is beginning to resonate with me, especially as our class nears the end of another Everett novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier. The book and quote combined have me considering language itself: the weight of our words, the importance of our statements, and the unpredictability of meaning.
There is actually more to the quote than mentioned. It continues as “[i]t’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean something, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention”. It’s intriguing to consider. Think of how much you talk in one day, or even how often you write. We spend a lot of time communicating! But I feel like the supposed ease of communication is taken for granted; if you think about it, everything has the potential to be misconstrued. A sentence or even just a word is not restricted to one meaning; it’s easy to define a word one way, but it’s just as easy to give the same word a brand new meaning.
There’s a character in I am Not Sidney Poitier named Percival Everett (not the author). He’s Not Sidney’s professor for a class called Philosophy of Nonsense. Students in this lecture always struggle to keep up with the professors abstract use of language, and Not Sidney is one of those suffering students. At one point, a test is about to begin, and here’s how Professor Everett introduces it: “[t]here are three questions, and I urge you to divide your time unevenly on them, as they are of equal value. Since one hundred is not divisible by three, there is no way for you to get a perfect score. Unless of course we decide that ninety-nine is a perfect score, and I wouldn’t mind that at all” (Everett, 133). The students react with shock and anger. Really, who in our class would enjoy hearing that a perfect exam score is impossible? But the key here, for my point, is the final sentence. By its commonly accepted meaning, ninety nine is not perfect. However, a different meaning can be assigned, which Everett sees as fairly simple action. With this, he captures the chaotic nature of language. While at the moment “ninety nine” is not synonymous with “perfect”, it has the potential to be. A word can mean anything; all it takes is an agreement between parties (the phrase stipulative definition comes to mind). An agreement may not even occur; the speaker may intend a word to mean one thing, but the listener may take it to mean something entirely different. I suppose that may represent part of what Everett aims to say: words are rarely restricted to one set-in-stone meaning.
If I go all the way back to the beginning of the semester, when our class read some interviews of Everett, a lot of what we learned about him reveals that he’s not an author who enjoys being defined as one particular genre. And honestly, that’s not hard to believe; his literature is full of word play. This prevents the reader from becoming preoccupied with one specific meaning, because the perceived meaning may change at any moment. Everett uses language far differently than any author I’ve read, and it’s quite eye-opening. He seems to encourage the reader to question their preconceived notions of a words meaning, or even question their understanding of language itself.