Interdisciplinarity. Wow, there is a lot of interdisciplinarity in Zulus. Within the narrative itself, Everett generally limits himself to a story that’s relatable enough to avoid needing much support in a specialized field or to one so fantastical that it bunny hops over subjects of study onto another planet where they don’t even exist, along with other Earthling luxuries like basic biology. Where I’ve found hidden caches of references snaking out beyond the discipline of literature is in the chapter headings.
I’m currently in the process of combing through said chapter headings, for… research? Curiosity? The misguided assumption that novels should make sense?
I’m currently in the process of combing through said chapter headings. It’s a slow process. Each sentence needs to be Googled and then cross referenced with each other sentence. I’m starting to feel a bit like a conspiracy theorist, like all I need is a cryptic URL and a messy bulletin board before I’m on some government list. There are patterns, you see, in the references that are made. Many of them are interdisciplinary ones, like historical figures and events (the Zulu tribe, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Boston Massacre all on page 21), philosophical figures (Plato, Arsitotle, Immanuel Kant), mythological and theological figures (Zeus, Hades, Daniel, Lazarus), and biological buzz words (conceptus and evolution, evolution appearing at least twice), while some of them are references that remain mostly within the field of literature, like his multiple allusions to both John Dryden and James Joyce. There are also several references to African and American black culture and esteemed figures, like Ralph Waldo Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Marcus Garvey, who was a Jamaican black rights activist.
The problem is that I have absolutely no idea how most of these relate to the narrative. Everett doesn’t explicitly discuss most of these topics, as far as I can tell, and I’m starting to think that’s my fault for assuming that an author would think about everything that’s put into a book. But if Everett really didn’t give any great amount of thought to these allusions then my frustration is also partly his fault. It’s his fault for creating a subject of literary analysis that yields nothing to that analysis. It’s his fault for being cryptic without reason.
But I hope that he isn’t just being cryptic. I hope he included these references as a clue, as part of the themes that he’s trying to develop. The two that I’m most interested in are race and religion. Race because it’s infuriatingly ambiguous throughout the novel. Alice’s race is neither stated nor properly implied, and although there are certain indications throughout the novel, anyone could interpret those indications in entirely different ways. That’s the trouble though. If Everett is trying to make a statement on race, he isn’t doing a very clear job of it. It’s possible that he stretched himself too thin in trying to address all of the different topics that he alludes to in his chapter headings. Or it’s possible that he didn’t stretch himself at all, that his work has no communicable intentions, that it’s all just a giant “fuck you” to his readers.
Religion. Religion is another interesting potential topic of discussion within the narrative. Alice works in the Department of Religion, categorizing citziens’ beliefs all day long. The rebels, who are without religion before Alice arrives, proclaim her to be a Devil-woman and adopt some sort of superstitious pseudo-theology after witnessing her preternatural feats. And the chapter headings are full of religious allusions — specifically, allusions to the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But again, what the novel is saying about religion is murky if it does say such a thing at all.
Zulus is, in short, exceedingly frustrating. I’ve wondered more than once while reading the allusions to other subjects and other works of fiction if Percival Everett wasn’t just desperate to get this book into different curriculums so that he could move copies. If that really was his intention — if post-structuralism and New Critical formalism haven’t sunk far enough into my brain to keep me from guessing at authorial intent — then you could say a lot of things about it, but you couldn’t say it didn’t work.