Black Bacchus? Signifying on Classical Myth in Percival Everett’s Frenzy

A variation on ancient Greek mythology, Frenzy defies traditional notions of African-American literature and the “blackness of the text”, predicated on the “black experience”. The myth of Dionysos and the Orphic cycle are rewritten and woven together in a fragmentary patchwork, mediated through an original narrator, Vlepo, Bakkhos’s companion. The self-conscious intertextuality of the novel will allow us to probe first the “theoretical” dimension of myth, the articulation between the human and the spiritual worlds. As a work of “mythic metafiction”, Frenzy sheds a light on the processes of reading and writing, and on the ideological frames of interpretation. The myth can then become a basis for historical allegory and parody, marking the return of the “signifying black difference” (H. L. Gates, Jr.) as a rewarding interpretive option.