1For more than forty years now Percival Everett’s work has been delighting its readers with engaging plots, rich with suspense and surprises. The diverse gallery of his characters offers many an opportunity for sympathy, identification, empathy, criticism, amusement or estrangement. One of the feats achieved in Everett’s work consists in blending sometimes complex theoretical and philosophical backgrounds into his breath-taking plots, thus granting further degrees of satisfaction to the attentive readers. The extra layers thus admitted into the reading experience, variously perceptible according to the readers, contribute to the singularity of Everett’s style. Despite the variety in genres, tones and topics from one book to another, all are marked by such tension between realism and theory, mimetic, illusion and metafiction, all happily resolved in Everett’s unique literary pieces.

2Theory and more specifically philosophy feed his narratives, and visibly appear through quotations, of authors’ names or words, and inform the structures of his novels and stories. Literary criticism, its excesses and deviations are targeted in Erasure, for instance, through a parody of S/Z and the depiction of a caricatural Nouveau Roman society, as well as in Glyph, whose subtitles draw attention to poststructuralist concepts while subverting them.

3Mathematics and more precisely logics widely inform Everett’s work, as perceptible in Glyph for instance, through baby-genius Ralph’s calculations and speculations. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell includes mathematical formulae, while mathematical symbols offer their structures to the title of Everett’s poetry collection Re: f(gesture).

4Many a passage throughout Everett’s works consists in playful logical arguing, as ironically emphasized through numerous logical links and markers. Dialogues especially bring out the ambiguities and logical discrepancies in communication, hence the numerous opportunities for misunderstanding. At the heart of such playful dialogues, sometimes verging on the absurd, Everett’s studies in Language Philosophies pervade his whole oeuvre, partly turning it into a playfield. The great names of Language Philosophies run throughout his work: Wittgenstein, Austin, White, Russell, Frege appear in Glyph, The Water Cure, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, to name but a few. According to Everett himself, fiction allows one to try out language structures much more efficiently –and enjoyably– than in readymade, artificial sentences, disconnected from any actual situation or context. Yet in his fiction many a dialogue, in its forms and structures, is redolent with those artificial test samples, as in The Water Cure, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, with its ontological quiz set by the protagonist’s first name, “Not Sidney”.

5More generally Everett’s whole oeuvre abounds in puns, jokes and witticisms. Overtly or more insidiously the many ways in which language escapes its user’s control are being explored, to enhance the infinite possibilities for ambiguity, misunderstanding and creativity offered by language. The distorted passages in The Water Cure bring to the fore the vulnerability of meaning and language while exposing some of the main principles upon which reading and communication rely, mostly anticipation, thus opening ways for prejudice to deviate the speaker’s/writer’s originally intended meaning. The question of responsibility as well as that of the canon and more largely of norms, in all their ethical resonance, are thus raised in Everett’s work, through both its topics and forms.

6Alain Badiou, as he emphasized the necessity to reconsider the relationships between philosophy and art at the dawn of the 21st century, put forward the concept of “inesthétique,” that may offer an angle of approach of the specific place of philosophy in Everett’s art: “By ‘unaesthetic’ I mean a specific way for philosophy to relate to art, itself understood as a source of truths, so that philosophy in no way claims to take art as an object of philosophical study. Against aesthetic speculation unaesthetics describes the strictly internal philosophical effects generated by the independent existence of a few artworks.”1

7The reflection carried out in common during the “Everett and Theory” conference developed as an attempt to bring forth some of the truths produced by Everett’s work, or at least some of the main phenomena observable in the work, as related to both our perception of, and modes of being in, the world. In the process, “the ambivalent role and the absolute singularity of the literary fact” (Jean-François Favreau, Vertige de l’écriture, 8) was highlighted, as well as its subversive power. Indeed Everett’s work brings to the fore the nature of artistic writing as resistance, according to Foucault’s view of literature as “some kind of monster as well as a resource, but also as a formidable resistance”, the “permanence of some subterranean trend in Western thought that has been kept aside by the ruling order” (Favreau, 9).

8The object of the present collection is not only to explore some of the complex interactions between art and philosophy, creative practice and critical thought, the canon and the margins in Everett’s work, but also to enhance the many ways in which it opens out potentials for renewing modalities of thinking, speaking and being, through questioning them.

9How do theory and philosophy inform Everett’s narratives in their topics and structures, at the macro- and micro-levels both? Which are the various sources of inspiration flowing into the making of a book and how do they inflect the nature and definition of fiction, allowing for a renewal of the genre? Which are the forms taken by the quest for abstraction and by metafiction in Everett’s work? How do they contribute to blur the limits between tones, genres and possibly art forms while questioning the very creative process? What can narrative and fiction in general bring to the theoretical and philosophical fields?

10Such are some of the questions addressed in the collection, through article drawing, among other things, from theories of literary genres, narrative theory, medical discourses and animal studies.

11In her paper entitled “I’m a fat old man who doesn’t like mysteries”: investigating detective fiction in Assumption,” Sylvie Bauer offers a close reading of Assumption which demonstrates how Everett’s work as a whole displays a theory of genres to expose “writing as a gesture”. Even the apparently most coded of genres, here the detective novel, becomes, in Everett’s uses of it, an opportunity for questioning “the making or unmaking of meaning” and, beyond, the characters’ and readers’ very sense of reality. As the clues disseminated through the text fail to be explained by any chain of causality or any transcending truth, the readers’ attention falls back on the here and now, with nothing beyond the surface of the text. Through the Wittgenstein-influenced exploration of language games as well as through poetically enhancing the power of the letter, Everett’s work “points to language as the only ‘truth’,” held not so much in the content of the letter as in “the possibility of meaning”.

12Johannes Kohrs also explores Everett’s take on the detective novel, more precisely his crime fiction, to examine Everett’s ceaseless questioning of conventions “encapsulated in categories of form and identity.” In his article “Caught Between Death and a Hard-Boiled Place”: Ontological Precariousness in Percival Everett’s Crime Fiction,” Kohrs brings together The Body of Martin Aguilera (1996), Assumption (2011) and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) to analyse Everett’s “anti-binary aesthetics” through the recurring motif of the missing body, which again is strikingly featured in The Trees (2021). Kohrs argues that Everett’s “radically open texts,” combining “linguistic play and philosophical exploration with social and interpersonal issues, in other words, everything that forms the amorphous experiential whole we call life,” create “conceptual interspheres that allow for new perspectives.”

13Christelle Centi, in her article entitled “‘Upon the remembered earth’”: unraveling territories in Percival Everett’s Watershed” endeavors to study Everett’s subversion of binaries as well as the political meaning of forms, specifically in the representation of Native Americans, their traditions and spoliation. Thanks to the outsider’s point of view through which the narrative is delivered, as well as to the intricate play on the juxtaposition of heterogeneous discourses, including “excerpts from treaties, medical records, articles of laws, scientific reports, short explanations on fishing techniques, speeches by both the colonizers and colonized,” either texts belonging to public records or fictional texts, Watershed “performs what it means to write about another community than one’s own.” Going “beyond the injunction to authenticity” addressed to authors, which often turns Native American texts into “one-dimensional avatar[s] of an uncomfortable past,” Watershed “performs” these as “worthy of intertextual allusion and reactivated interpretive work” and as “fully part of American history and American present.”

14In “Non illegitimi carborundum”, Judith Roof analyses the workings of Everett’s irony and the intricate layers of interpretation thus opened out in his oeuvre. Starting from a comparison with the similarly multi-layered form of irony developed by her colleague Chuck Stone, a prominent Black journalist in the 1990s, Roof puts forward a model of “performative rhetoric that turns on itself to distribute the act’s hidden multidirectional critiques of pretension to several targets, including the speaker himself.” Through her article, she unwraps the “condensations” of Everett’s rhetorical moves, “dense, cleverly-designed paradigms that in themselves enact the dynamics of certain relations or attitudes (pretension, racism, stereotyping)”. Focusing her analyses on Erasure and Glyph, Roof brings to light the subtle modalities of signifying unfolding in Everett work, “beyond any structural binary between signifier and signified”.

15Annie Lowe devotes her article, entitled Everett’s Fictional Modal Realism,”to the exploration of the endless duplication of illusion in Erasure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Navigating the maze of the embedded novel Fuck! and its resonating web throughout Erasure, Lowe unfolds the layers of irony that keep turning on themselves while opening out extra ones, eventually depriving both protagonist and readers of any sense of a concrete, stable world. In Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Lowe analyses the complex play on names and deliberate fusion and confusion of identities. As the whirlpool of reversals and deviations develops, the hackneyed defiance towards surfaces becomes an object of play while the power of language and fiction is asserted anew.

16In “Perversion and Pleasure in the Narrative Middle,” Bren Ram offers an analysis of Everett’s disruption of the idealized linearity of narrative to show how it questions “the impulse to read narratives as if they were lives.” Ram reads Erasure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell through the lens of “the perverse” to enhance “difference and deviance as sites of re-narrativization and pleasure.” Using emerging critical race narratologies, for instance Scheiber’s blues narratology, Ram shows how Everett’s texts challenge or even defuse the readers’ illusion of mastery by depriving them of the resolutions they aspire to, inviting them instead to surrender to the thrills of the largely unpredictable text.

17Melissa Bailar, in “Cutting Up: Humor and the Severed Body in American Desert,” brings to light the subtle ways in which Everett mocks “the futility of attempting to understand death through religion or science” or again through contemporary mystiques of the irrational as offering “knowledge and resolution”. Bringing in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, which also explores “the ‘what if” of remaining conscious and sentient after death” through a feast of ceaselessly mutating narratives, Bailar shows how the ontological questions raised in this novel shed light on the ambiguities in American Desert. Indeed, Bailar argues, the ontological question is “imbricated in our desire to narrate the world.” Still, while “our insistence on inexpertly explaining the ultimate unknown” may well be laughed at, “discursive ways of approaching death and the body” remain crucial to human beings. Bailar calls for attention to such discourses, as they “might yield more than illusory faith and fluctuating medical understandings.”

18In “Zootropia: Animal Figures in Percival Everett’s Western Fiction,” Michel Feith, drawing from the discipline of Animal Studies, attempts to “set up a typology and tropology of animal presence in several of Everett’s Western stories and probe their philosophical bearing on the relations between man, nature, and animals.” Focusing mainly on Walk Me to the Distance, which “establish[es] an ethical parallel between the treatment of animals and human beings, as a criterion of humanity,” Feith compares it to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and its metaphorical mirroring of the animal and human realms,” to show how Everett’s Western fiction creates a “biotope […] featuring widespread coexistence between human and nonhuman animals, an implicit advocacy for a humane […] treatment of living creatures of all species, and a fundamental questioning of the boundaries of our humanity.” While submitting the “Darwinian naturalism” of Steinbeck’s novel to “critical reconfiguration,” Everett’s Walk Me to the Distance performs a “systematic deconstruction and debunking […] of all ‘assumptions,’ cognitive or generic” and a “dismissal of simple causality” that may suggest some shared “premises with Steinbeck’s non-teleological thinking, in spite of the differences between the two authors.”

19Consistently eluding categories, Everett’s oeuvre “constitutes a fictive space where writer and reader can explore existential, ethical and philosophical options by probing and questioning our mental and linguistic assumptions” – an apt conclusion to the ensemble of articles gathered in this volume.