• English

1American Desert’s Ted Street has been a failure in life and in death. After he has irrevocably strained his marriage and his chair has fired him from his non-starter of a career, Ted cannot properly commit suicide, his attempt cut short by accidental manslaughter. The circumstances of his death are hardly noble, as a delivery truck swerves to miss hitting a poodle and crashes into his car, which Ted is driving to his chosen place of self-termination. The broken windshield severs his head, which flies away from his body; and lackadaisical cops scoop it up and show it off to thugs for extra pocket money. His undertakers do not waste embalming fluids on him, since his bodily fluids have drained out through his neck, and hastily attach his head for the church service using blue fishing line. Yet even so clearly lifeless, Ted cannot succeed at being dead. When Ted sits up in his coffin during his funeral, he is no typical miracle, as the undertaker had stolen Ted’s pants so that he steps from the coffin half naked; and his sewn mouth can only mumble unintelligibly until someone unravels his stitches. The reaction from the congregation is also undignified; his sister-in-law trips causing her dress to fly over her head, his former department chair farts repeatedly, and a rival faculty member frantically arms herself with pepper spray. On the way home from the mayhem with his stunned family, the formerly forlorn professor finds his situation surprisingly funny and jokes about his decapitation and uncertain state of being. This impulse to resort to humor in pondering death is not a deflection of its gravity, but rather an integral step to apprehending the human condition. Percival Everett’s novel demonstrates the futility of attempting to understand death through either of the usual means – religion or science – and instead demonstrates that laughter is the only effective approach to encountering the unknown and attenuating fear of it.

2Ted’s body, devoid of pulse, breath, and any physical needs (except, to everyone’s surprise, occasional urination and one moment of sexual desire satisfied with his wife), is meaningless except as a signifier of being. Doctors, philosophers, religious leaders, and sundry other experts recoil in fear or anger when their tests and theories cannot explain his undeadness. Ted Street’s ability to act as he did when alive, but with amplified senses, confidence, and bouts of glee, is outside the realm of reason; he is impossibly alive and dead at the same time, Shroedinger’s cat outside of its box. Rather than interpreting this paradox through new theories of matter, ontological arguments, or mysticism (the pairs of philosophers Hegel and Heidegger and theologians Althaus and Heim appear ineffectual in a dream Ted has shortly after his funeral), the narrative leaves it unresolved and instead pokes fun at the discomfort of the baffled characters. Ted thinks of possible yarns about dead guys screwing in light bulbs, and laughs when a news anchor suggests he is an extraterrestrial. In response to a caller saying he was the devil and God would strike him dead, Ted gleefully responds, “he tried,” and repeatedly posits himself as the butt of jokes. (52) Beyond developing the formerly morose Ted’s newfound joviality, the narrative itself unfolds in a wildly comic jaunt around the American Southwest even as it confronts such weighty issues as mass suicide, child abuse, rape, murder, and biomedical military experimentation.

3The narrative and its humor stem, impossibly, from Ted himself. The opening passage of the book mentions, “Ted chooses to relate his own story in third person, an unusual […] but acceptable device, given that, in a most profound way, he stood – or stands even – outside himself, not so much on the parapet of consciousness but of life itself, it being perhaps the case that neither entails, necessarily, the other.” (3) The novel does not return to this consideration of the narrator’s position, but this narrative framing does reenact the paradox of Ted’s body. The last line of the novel states, in a reversal of depictions of Christian saints who retrieve their skulls severed during executions, “Ted grabbed his head between his two hands, removed it and set it in his lap, closed his eyes and stayed dead”1. (291) The idea of staying dead is ambiguous, for while it suggests that Ted has finally died as one would expect without consciousness or the ability to control movements, Ted has nonetheless narrated this final sentence.

4After the end of the novel, the present tense in the opening page grows more complicated. Ted narrates the novel in the past tense, except for this line about his status as the narrator. Does he recount events contemporaneously with his experiences of them, explaining the present tense of his choosing to use third person and his position in relation to himself? This option fails to explain the past tense of the rest of the story or how he can narrate the closing lines. Has he narrated the story after removing his head, in which the present tense describing his narration and the past tense of the novel’s events make sense, but beg the question yet again of how he can narrate without a head as he stays dead? Or, as the opening suggests, is there a further level of deadness with consciousness that he attains after he has “stayed dead,” so that Ted now stands outside his headless self in a different way from how he stood in relation to his undead body during the events he describes? If so, what does staying dead mean? If he is able to narrate, how is staying dead different from his previous death? Does the novel’s narration disentangle the death of the body from that of the mind? Does Ted in fact not stay dead, perhaps reattaching his head to narrate his story? After this impossible Escherian act of recounting his new act of dying, or perhaps suicide, the narrative itself “dies,” there is no more. The unresolved paradox emerges from a consideration of the two acts of decapitation that bookend the novel.

5While American Desert explores the “what if” of remaining conscious and sentient after death through a humorous paradoxical narration, Everett’s 2013 novel, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, develops similar questions through a tone of grief only peppered with moments of comedy. It, too, includes a character ambiguously deceased, for he still writes, but the inclusion of multiple narratives, of shifting signifiers, of a preface placed towards the end, of muddled alterations between a father’s and a son’s voice (and perhaps others), and many more complexities convey the confusion of loss, the collapse of time in remembering, and the untidiness of narration. The narrative paradox in American Desert unfolds in the edges of the text, on the first and last pages, while the mise en abyme of narration is central to Percival Everett (as well as Erasure and other Everett stories). However, the multifaceted ontological questions of Percival Everett shed light on American Desert’s ambiguity not only in its narration but also in its division between life and death. A narrator lists various details of a setting, one that might be included in any novel, but for the fragmented nature of the account and the ending of the passage: “Details telling us who we are, where we are, and why. Telling us everything. Telling us nothing. Because we live inside our heads. So much bullshit!” (42) This passage that interrupts an engaging yet aborted story about a horse trainer is a reminder of the fallacy of believing in a narration rooted in some world outside of the novel and also of accepting that a “real” exists outside of our mental construction of it. The consistent questioning of our desire to believe that depictions are real is both what renders religion and science ineffective modes of explaining death, and what perhaps asymptotically approaches an understanding of it. A later passage in Percival Everett returns to the ontological question as imbricated in our desire to narrate the world. A narrator discusses qualia and the inverted spectrum theory, in which the quality of a thing, such as its color, exists separately from the thing itself, such that two people may perceive the color red in different ways. The narrator explains that this is a “step toward the establishment of [his] solipsistic construction of […] everything.” In response, another (or the same) narrator responds, “That would make the rest of us zombies.” (89) In the context of Ted’s narration that pursues such concepts less directly, this qualia argument throws into question who the “zombie” might be – while Ted’s narration posits him as the zombie, active though he may be, his act of narrating while he stays dead and state of decapitation suggests that his entire external world may be imagined, his family members the zombies alive only in his mind.

6The numerous tests Ted undergoes after his resurrection reveal nothing about his ontological status because there is nothing to test. He has no blood pressure, no internal sounds, nor any pulse, and though his speech requires respiration, he does not need to breathe. As with many scientific experiments, the tests only confirm what the researchers already know, that Ted is both alive and dead. His body holds no meaning, is not the repository of new knowledge, and cannot be tapped for any utilitarian value. The recognition of this inexplicable emptiness is the impetus behind the researchers’ testing, yet they grow fearful when experimentation only reconfirms what they unwillingly know. The illusion that accessing the body’s insides, through listening devices, examination of internal organs, or even vivisection will reveal existential knowledge has grown ever more popular over the past two centuries. In contemporary pseudo-scientific exhibits of “Body Worlds,” for example, a popular marketing figure is that of a plastinated human body holding its own skin at the end of its outstretched arm2. Although “Body Worlds” exhibit halls often show the bodies within educational frameworks, they remain more entertaining than instructional. Like Ted Street’s body, they hold no information beneath the surface, and their clever positioning defamiliarizes the human and demonstrates the contingency of life and how little we know3. The displays of plastinated bodies echo Ted’s droll narration, both abandoning their initial promise of revealing a hidden truth about the nature of life and returning to a witty account of their failure.

7The humor with which Ted narrates the failed scientific studies of his own dead body, as well as his somewhat gleeful depiction of the horror of those who examine him, draws on the long tradition of casting human anatomical displays and dissections as spectacle. Although, as in “Body Worlds,” those who perform such studies in either the novel or in history insist on their purposeful search for knowledge through the fragmentation of the human body, the distinctions between research and entertainment are far from clear, especially when an audience is present. Starting in the fifteenth century, Amsterdam required that yearly cadaver dissections performed on recently executed criminals be open to the public. While doctors and high-ranking government and religious officials (who found the perfection of God’s creation through the study of the human body, as Caspar Barlaeus recounts in his 1646 poem, “On the Anatomy Table”) occupied the rows closest to the body, those without any professional interest in anatomy could purchase a ticket to watch a hanged criminal be metaphorically killed again. Rembrandt’s depiction of one such dissection, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Niclaes Tulp places the 1632 public spectacle in a seemingly private and controlled setting, although three of the viewers look not at the body but towards the viewer of the painting, one of them slyly smiling, appearing more intrigued by his status as observer and subject of the painting than by the study of the corpse. This and similar oil paintings of European anatomy lessons contrast with the chaotic festival-like atmosphere depicted in contemporaneous engravings such as 1609’s The Anatomical Theater in Leiden by Bartholomeus Dolendo after Jan Cornelisz van’t Woud. In this engraving, spectators in various dress throng the amphitheater, standing, sitting, and walking on the stairs, as skeletons wave banners and observe the proceedings while perched atop the live onlookers. The mob of spectators surrounding Ted’s house after his resurrection reenacts this frenzy over the exhibition of death, while the gravity of his closed vivisection in a military base recollects the sense of medical superiority and curiosity that Rembrandt portrays. In these scenarios, Ted plays the role of the criminal, though his crime is only that of not conforming to expectations of his body.

8American Desert restages the academic history of the cadaver in its critique of medicine’s search for answers inside it. Once the study of anatomy became requisite for Western medical school, students again indulged in humorous reflection on the juxtaposition of their live bodies with their cadavers in ways that Ted’s dead man jokes reprise. The history of anatomy labs is rooted in crime and racism, as students and teachers dug up graves or commissioned others to do so and bought the bodies of slaves from Southern plantations. As the perpetrators attempted to justify such acts as serving the pursuit of scientific knowledge, scientists in American Desert also excuse their removal of Ted’s organs or their creation of pitiable pseudo-humans in the name of discovery (as well as national defense). The glee students display in numerous illicit 19^th-century photographs, much like that of American Desert’s military investigator, continues this tradition of scientific disrespect for the dead, as they revel in their privileged position of handling cadavers. Several similar photographs bear the title, “A Student’s Dream,” as they reverse the roles of cadaver and living human. In each, a medical student lies placidly on the dissection table, while skeletons sit atop him and partially dissected cadavers seemingly ponder his form or laugh with their arms around one another. In another variation, students stick a cigarette in the mouth of a cadaver almost reduced to mere skeleton and pose as though he were playing cards with them. In yet another from 1895-96, female students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania drape their skeletons around their shoulders or seat them in their laps, grinning at the sexual innuendoes4. While the students’ irreverent displays indicate their unease when confronting human bodies as inert systems of flesh, muscle, and bone, they also enable a physical and emotional rapprochement between student and corpse not possible through strictly clinical examination. Does one learn more about the body from meticulous fragmentation and a position of detached objectivity, or from holding the body close in a continuation of the fifteenth century’s danses macabres? Marion Bishop’s essay, “On Working with Cadavers,” describes the necessity of tightly clutching a cadaver to one’s chest in order to saw it apart, particles of bone coating her skin and entering her nose and mouth. Though she, like many students, feels despair and revulsion at this intimacy with a dead body, the required actions of contemporary medical students are not so far from those on display in the humorous photographs. American Desert similarly questions who defines death and how and returns to this long-standing irreverence as the path to accepting the unknowable in the somatic and psychiatric human condition.

9While hospitals and palliative care units find that patients with terminal diagnoses often turn or return to religion as a way to make sense of pain and dying and to find comfort when facing the unknown, American Desert demonstrates through the blunderings of the church’s minister, the cruelty of fringe sects, and the absurdity of the rites of various religious followers that the dying are looking in the wrong direction. In a few of many examples, the funeral church’s minister covers his lack of knowledge about Ted through ridiculous reflections on whether his head reached heaven before his body of if his two parts arrived together; a sect’s leader kidnaps and starves small children to use as hostages against undefined enemies; and a small religious order resides in a crammed trailer next to those of alien seekers and Elvis sighters. The novel thus refers to historical problems of religious institutions’ violence, swindling, and molestation, but it also conjures up the paradox in religious belief systems that the irrational can offer knowledge and resolution. In “Scientia Mortis and the Ars Moriendi,” Jeffrey P. Bishop cites multiple studies that show that when terminally ill patients receive spiritual counseling from hospital chaplains and speak with religious leaders of their own faith, the effect is the opposite of what one might expect. Numerous hospice facilities and hospitals in the United States implement such services in the hopes that a spiritual component to end-of-life care would help patients and their families reach peace with dying. However, in these studies, patients receiving regular spiritual care tend to request far more extreme life-prolonging measures, even if they are painful, do not improve quality of life, and are exorbitantly costly. Everett’s novel investigates this failure through its contemporary retelling of the resurrection of a Christ-figure and depictions of religions’ conflicting interpretations of divine or diabolical intervention.

10American Desert’s consideration of the futility of religion is central to several of Everett’s works, from his 2001 short story “Believers” to Percival Everett, though American Desert does not ruminate about but rather enacts what the narrator views as absurd faith. Ted’s tale loosely resembles that of the Christian Jesus, the novel a secular portrayal of Christ’s resurrection that is at once wild and mundane. Before his death, Ted is hardly noble or remarkable in any way except for his consistent mediocrity. He lives a stereotypical American life, with a house, wife, and two children, a boy and a girl. He received his Ph.D. but barely, taking ten years, and Cornell University Press has noted his book manuscript is similar to many others, and no other publisher is interested. He has a stereotypical affair with a student out of boredom with his life, and the novel likens her tongue repeatedly to a serpent. Other than his young son, his family is detached from him and disapproves of him to varying degrees. Ted cannot even commit the noteworthy act of suicide, and the moments surrounding his death are degrading. His funeral is Christian, and the presiding minister commits gaffes, is unprepared to talk about Ted (though admittedly there is little to say), and is ineffectual in controlling his panicked parishioners. Ted’s disapproving sister-in-law inflicted this religious framing on Ted as one final (or supposedly final) act of vengeance, knowing he would not like for his funeral to transpire in a church, especially not in one named Sacred Blood First Christ Church. Ted’s awakening during the service pokes fun at the name, for one of the first things he notices about his new existence is his lack of blood flow. His life is so pedestrian as to parody mediocrity, and the narrative casts him after his death as a comic Christ figure who avidly dislikes religion and insists there is no hidden meaning to his revivification. With the lack of consensus among religious leaders arguing over whether he is a savior or a devil, Ted’s story reveals organized religion as a hoax. There is no truth nor higher power.

11Although science fiction typically depicts the undeath of zombies, to which Ted bears remarkable similarities, as contagious, American Desert casts religious observance as a virus that can turn to cruel fanaticism5. The torqued religion of Big Daddy, who apparently has a “pipeline to Jesus,” interprets scripture as justification for sexual crimes and murder. (103) His disciples engage in common Christian rituals such as prayer, foot washing, and the singing of hymns, but act violently out of desperation stemming from early neglect and maltreatment. Here again, despite the grave subject matter of abuse, kidnapping, and torture, the novel resorts to humor to critique religion as a false redemption, for Big Daddy dresses like Santa Claus with a red coat, black patent leather boots, silver buckle, and all. In Roswell, the bizarre Negatia Frashkart’s Judaic Heavenly Order of Pyromatic Worship of the Ruach Elohim similarly attracts those sexually abused in the name of religion, turning them into zombie-like followers who attempt to kidnap Ted as their messiah. Both benign and terrifying in their adoration, in which Ted becomes a fetichized object who is worshipped but unable to telephone his family or move freely, the followers reenact the steady press of zombie figures, enveloping Ted and his cohorts and crowding them into a filthy trailer. A faultily genetically manufactured Jesus without a mouth and of questionable capacities accompanies Ted in Roswell, and Ted replaces himself with the Jesus as the order’s fetish object, the perfect stand-in for its unarticulated desires. In these portrayals, American Desert equates religion with a siren song heaping more misery upon the desperate who hope for a better afterlife.

12Everett’s novel similarly pokes fun at what might be called the religion of contemporary educated America – science – and its inefficacy in providing a means through which to understand or accept death. Care for patients with terminal illnesses in the United States, especially, promotes drastic life-prolonging interventions, such as brutal rounds of chemotherapy that might extend life by only 6 to 12 months. The quest to keep patients alive, no matter how painful and no matter one’s loss of functions, overshadows concerns about quality of life. Paul Kalanithi’s memoir of his experience with terminal cancer, When Breath Becomes Air, chronicles his and other cancer patients’ desperate search for answers and hope in statistics. Although as a doctor himself, Kalinithi knows statistics say nothing about the individual, the era of Big Data has conditioned him to find solutions in seemingly objective figures. Yet numbers say nothing and adapt to a variety of conflicting interpretations, as flat a screen for projected fantasies as Ted’s body. Scientific definitions of death also change with new discoveries and inventions. Until the 1960s, medicine defined death as the cessation of cardiopulmonary functions. For centuries, doctors would check for pulse and hold a mirror near the patient’s face to test for condensation, a sign of breath. However, the development of heart and lung transplants upended this notion, as patients could be unable to circulate blood or breathe on their own for lengths of time and then reassume these capacities. Rather than call a patient dead for this interim period, in the 1960s Harvard Medical School proposed what is has now become the medical and legal standard for death: total brain death entailing lack of responsiveness, no movement, and a flat electroencephalogram. Yet even this standard is ambiguous. In 2013, Jahi McMath had cardiac arrest and was issued a death certificate based on her lack of brain function. However, because technology enabled her to breathe and pump blood, her family sued to have her death certificate revoked. While this was unsuccessful, Jahi received a second death certificate in 2018. Scientifically and legally, then, a dead person could become undead or die more than once, notions with which American Desert plays as the coroner’s death certificate based on medical definitions conflicts with the life insurance company’s reliance on visual evidence to deny payment. Ongoing medical discoveries are central to the core questions of American Desert on the unfinality and undefinability of death.

13Scientific experimentation and religious faith intermix in American Desert, which creates a humorous alliance between these two futile realms in its account of military attempts to create life with the DNA of Christ discovered in a spearhead. The director of this program, a transvestite named Doctor Lyons, likens herself to God because the military is, she says, “science heaven. I can do whatever I want to whatever or whomever I want and nobody complains.” (167) Oswald Avery, a Frankenstein character whose name nods to the molecular biologist who jointly discovered that DNA carries hereditary material, conducts the experiments in the bowels of Roswell’s military base and has successfully created a series of 27 fleshly masses of varying sentience he names Jesus 1, Jesus 2, Jesus 3, etc. The series of malformed and horrific Jesuses are as ridiculous sites of miracles of either the religious or scientific ilk as Ted. Once again, scientific experimentation trails fiction, for the April 2019 discovery on how to reactivate activity in pig brains four hours after brain death has spurred questions already examined in American Desert and countless science fiction stories. The experiment, called BrainEx, has provoked amateur ethical debates, scientific reframing, and, of course, numerous wisecracks referring to various science fiction works and zombie stories6. The study is in ways parallel to the case of Ted Street, for the 32 pigs studied had all been decapitated with their brains removed. After four hours, in an enactment of mad scientist tales, experimenters placed the brains in chambers, infused them with nutrients, and attached them to a pump circulating blood and oxygen. They successfully restored cellular activity for up to 36 hours in the pig brains, though not the consciousness that the Ted Street scenario would require. The study contests previous scientific “knowledge” that once the brain has been without blood circulation for only a few minutes, it can never regain any functionality. Though some scientists maintain that the study does not change definitions of brain death, others see in it the potential to keep patients alive longer if these methods were applied more closely to the time of, shall we say, the first death. American Desert’s CNN expert on death, the aptly named Dr. Dume, confirms the limits to our understanding of life and decides the paradox Ted embodies must be a hoax or mass hysteria, unable to adapt his knowledge to the new evidence. Many contemporary scientists similarly dismiss the challenges the BrainEx experiment poses, while others supplant further scientific investigation into this discovery with claims that it is unethical7.

14The ragged seam loosely connecting Ted’s head to his body is the locus where life and death meld, an ignoble replacement of Christ’s five stigmata. Such sloppy stitching as the site of scientific irrationality reprises an opening image in Everett’s 1986 novel, Cutting Lisa, in which an untrained husband performs an impossibly successful cesarean section on his wife and hastily sews up her abdomen. As in American Desert, the tattiness of the stitching serves as an opening for surprising narrative romps in the American West. The blue fishing line, an odd choice of color and material for funereal sutures, pulls humor through Ted’s sutures and constantly attracts visual and tactile attention to the site of his paradoxical state of existence. On the taxi ride home from his foiled funeral, Ted finds that he is little bothered by his current state, but “the stitches of his neck disturbed his fingertips greatly, the slickness of the fishing line, the lumpiness of the folded flesh, the uneven spaces between the sutures.” (23) The narrative does not indicate that the seam bothers Ted, but only his fingertips, suggesting that although he can function in human ways again, his body and mind remain cloven. The texture of the seam, slick, lumpy, and uneven, disturbs his tactile sensibility without reaching his mental judgment. His body feels his body in a closed system of touch, which Ted reconfirms by plunging his hand into a scalding bath. He explains, “His hand was not so much numb to the heat of the water as it was acutely sensitive to the exact temperature of it, while simultaneously immune to its bad effect.” (29) Ted’s undead deadness separates sensation from the mental experience of the sensation.

15With 360 stitches, the seam is the cyclical drive of the novel, its gaps and loose connections a location of potential meaning where none can be found. Because the seam is so inexpert and easy to pull apart, it marks existential questions as absurd, the slippage among life, death, and consciousness arbitrary. Ted is both corpse and observer of the corpse, a modern version of the nineteenth-century anatomy lab humor. Ted Street, the medical students of decades past, and the observers of contemporary medical research laugh at our insistence on inexpertly explaining the ultimate unknown and suggest that discursive ways of approaching death and the body might yield more than illusory faith and fluctuating medical understandings.