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1“The purpose of art,” James Baldwin has argued, “is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers” (quoted in Bogart, 82). Questioning those answers that have ossified into conventions, encapsulated in categories of form and identity, is arguably the most consistent characteristic of Percival Everett’s expansive literary project. This paper zooms in on the crime segment of the author’s fiction and focuses on one convention associated with it: the body of the murder victim. More specifically, I discuss two of his novelistic texts, in which the murder victim disappears. In retracing the textual variation of this motif, I propose an unconventional constellation between three of his novels: The Body of Martin Aguilera, published in 1996, and Assumption, published in 2011, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier, published in 2009. I argue that these texts share a feature figuring prominently within Everett’s wider work: ontological precariousness.

2The Body of Martin Aguilera and Assumption both feature bodies that disappear under initially mysterious circumstances. These missing bodies that are dead but continue to lead a symbolic life of their own, that become evidence in a murder case but lack one stable meaning, are embodied enigmas. Pushing questions of accountability and responsibility, but also of knowability to the forefront, they serve as metaphors for the epistemological and ethical challenges of crime fiction, in specific, and literary writing, in general. I draw on these two novels as a point of entry into my discussion of the affective tactics and structural mechanics of Everett’s storytelling. I will compare the motif of missing body with the satiric coup that Everett scores in I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009). In this novel’s criminal scenario, the murder of a black male adolescent mistaken for the protagonist, who is a young black man mistaken for the actor Sidney Poitier, Everett introduces not a missing body but what seems to be – crudely speaking – a redundant one.

Death and the End(s) of Logic

3Death, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase, is a source of narrative authority. As an ontological norm, it imbues fictional accounts of life with ethical gravity and biographical totality. Tweaking many a variable, both in terms of form and imagination, Everett’s texts experiment with this norm of (fictional) being, too.1 Indeed, Theodore Street, the undead protagonist from his 2006 novel American Desert, whose head is severed from his body on his way to his own suicide attempt, comes closest to those undead creatures that prominently populate the dystopian landscapes of contemporary popular entertainment formats. Slavoj Zizek has described the cultural phenomenon of the living dead as the “fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture,” the “fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living” (22). By transgressing the border between life and death, they offer a peculiar projection foil for our desire for reconciliation, be it with our past or the social ills of a seemingly disintegrating society threatened by a growing surplus-population of the permanently disenfranchised. What I am interested in, however, is a slightly different dubious or precarious quality that the dead evince in Everett’s crime (-related) fiction. His murder victims, though posing no imminent threat to humanity like their apocalyptical fellows, spark unease and uncertainty because they disappear. These dubious bodies remain mysterious, because they cannot be readily integrated in either the category “dead” nor the category “evidence,” for that matter. In the two texts under study they are a key component of the anti-binary aesthetics that defines Everett’s writing at large.

4With his distinctly deconstructionist agenda, Everett works with and against those racial categories of social classification and cultural representation, in which the logical regime of binarity is consolidated. Part and parcel of a long-standing Western thought-tradition, binarity originated with the preeminent Greek philosophers’ attempts at making sense of the ontological and epistemological foundations of being. Its logical regime was further solidified in the Enlightenment idealization of reason and the binaries it helped to implement in the (white European) subject’s self-definition in contrast to its “other” and the world at large. A binary opposition as such, Gilles Deleuze stresses, “teaches us nothing about the nature of that which is thought to be opposed” (267). The notion of negation inscribed into this oppositional relation, rather, tends to reinscribe the potential affirmation of “that which is thought to be opposed.” Thus, the only way to get beyond the binary, or “outside the dualisms,” as Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari suggest, “is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo” (323). Everett’s writing oscillates between bipolar pairs, dwelling in-between poles conceived as self-sufficient and mutually exclusive. It radically questions the “either/or” relation, which categories such as fact and fiction, art and life, or – more to the point – life and death, suggest. Rather, Everett’s texts operate according to the principle of “both/and-ness” that Anthony Stewart has seminally defined (“Theoretical Blackness”).

5In radically challenging the logical regime of binarity and everything associated with it, from the social to the mental structures that shape our Westernized world, it is the “and” of this “both/and-ness” that is key in Everett’s poetics. In other words: how his texts manage to create these conceptual interspheres that allow for new perspectives, or, to stick with Baldwin’s assessment, that raise new questions to received answers. What makes The Body of Martin Aguilera (1996) an inspiring read is its interpersonal framing of a systemic conflict.

The Body of a Dead Friend: Solidarity, Agency and Radical Intimacy

6An understudied yet intriguing text, this novel is a piece of ecocritical mystery fiction set in Taos, New Mexico. It refashions a classic noir scheme featuring an ageing non-professional investigator who exposes a government scandal. The novel puts extensive emphasis on the body or rather the missing dead body of Martin Aguilera, a Mexican American senior and good friend of the novel’s protagonist, professor Lewis Mason, who happens upon Martin’s body shortly before it goes missing. If, as Mason asserts, “[a] dead man is one thing […a] dead man without a body is something else” (9), the novel programmatically ponders this peculiar difference and its wider implications.

7Generally, the term “body” denotes both the physiological unit that is the human body, which may also extend to a larger group of people, in the social, legal and political sense of an entity, as well as the mortal remains of an individual human being. In The Body of Martin Aguilera, Everett taps into this ambiguity to strategically destabilize the false binarism of individual and society. In public discourse, and especially in its media spheres, crime – or any perceived social ill at that – is predominantly framed as an individual transgression or shortcoming rather than a systemic concern. In the case of Martin Aguilera, the old man’s body symbolizes both the criminal act and the mystery of its systematic cover-up. It bears the marks of the environmental injustice problematized in the text. Thus, the burns on Martin Aguilera’s legs stem from some ominous chemical waste that threatens nature and man alike. The fact that the deceased had been the only true friend of Lewis Mason, who is “the only black man in the county” (13), points to another metaphorical layer of Martin’s missing but omnipresent body. Environmental injustice, racial solidarity – Everett’s novel roots its larger socio-critical project in the human body itself, routing the mystery of Martin’s murder case through the ethno-religious theme of tradition. Lewis Mason’s unearthing of the body’s secret, in order to “show Martin to as many people as we can and tell them everything” (154), means to both confront and break with this tradition, here that of the Catholic community of the Penitentes, of which Martin has been a member, and who have abducted his body to ensure his proper burial. In other words, in order to (begin to) come to terms with the environmental scandal the reader has to make an effort to understand the social and cultural background of that particular ethnic group which is most vulnerable to this threat. That this very threat and the political entities responsible for it remain relatively abstract, never being thoroughly revealed, suggests the main aim of Everett’s text. It envisions an act of solidarity across the fault line of the regional and the national, which predicates political agency on interpersonal understanding on the most intimate level: an old friend’s dead body.

On the Assumption that there is a Mystery to Be Solved: Intellectual Crisis Management and the Pitfalls of Postmodern Irony

8The motif of the missing body, which The Body of Martin Aguilera pioneers in Everett’s novelistic project, has peculiar implications for the genre of crime fiction that this novel partially and Everett’s novel Assumption programmatically refashions. Thus, this particular ontological motif serves to destabilize the deductive linearity between the case and its conclusion.

9Consider this causal chain, which undergirds an analytic crime narrative, where the plot starts off with the central incident: the murder. The victim is found and analyzed by the authorities, the criminal case is established and the hunt for the killer thus initiated. Consider the epistemological implication that derives from this logical link: that the crime novel incorporates its own interpretation. All it takes to solve the case, as logic dictates, is a brilliant intellect à la Dupin or Poirot to provide the relief of clarification and, ultimately, of justice. Of course, not every crime novel ends with such a pleasing act of closure. And many of those that do, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, manage to productively complicate their own agenda because they follow the proposition of their deductive program to its very logical or illogical end. It is precisely this self-compromising gist that characterizes Everett’s novel Assumption, too.

10Its protagonist, Ogden Walker, is an anti-hero, a black deputy disenchanted with his own profession, whose father “would have called him a fool for working […] in that hick-full, redneck county” of Plata, New Mexico (3). Within the very first pages of the narrative we are confronted with an extradiegetic narrator portraying Ogden’s failure to anticipate the ominous death of a bigoted white woman in excruciating and compromising detail. The walking cliché that is Ogden is coached by the cunning and self-consciously stereotypical Sheriff Bucky Paz and accompanied by his side-kick Warren Fragua, who is not only the only Native American in the department but a much better detective than Walker. The first two sections of the narrative, internally focalized on Ogden, brim over with blatant skepticism towards the conventions of crime fiction. The metaphoricity of the spider-web and other crime tropes, an investigated investigator, a bullet hole shot through twice – the novel’s assemblage of conventions, clichés, and quasi-fantastic elements makes for a radically open text that constantly displays its own generic constructed-ness while reemphasizing the ontological basis and ethical gravity of its story. The simultaneity that defines Everett’s anti-binary aesthetics here holds true for the literary text as experimentation and intervention, its dissimulation of the crime fiction genre and the American noir, with references abounding to Western, crime and cartoon formats, and its re-problematization of moral responsibility. Assumption, too, is a case in point for how Everett’s fiction characteristically combines linguistic play and philosophical exploration with social and interpersonal issues, in other words, everything that forms the amorphous experiential whole we call life. “Perhaps,” Ogden Walker muses, “it was as simple as a mystery to pass the time in a boring, sleepy village. Maybe it was some kind of sublimation for a stalled life, a life he was not pursuing. Or perhaps he just wanted to catch and stop a killer” (40). In Assumption, significantly, it is the body of the young adult José Marotta that has been snatched away from the authorities by the Penitentes. Whereas Martin Aguilera has been the emblematic victim of environmental injustice, José Marotta is a potential witness of the white woman’s murder, which, despite various other deaths being ultimately clarified, remains unsolved.

11Although both novels share this ethno-religious connotation of the missing body, in Assumption, the lingering question of the proper burial of José’s dead body does not have the same centrality. However, the missing body of this potential witness sheds light on the investigative procedure as such, implicitly questioning the functional nature of evidence constitutive for the deductive process. Instead of catering to the pleasing reconciliation of the detective’s intellectual crisis management it undermines the epistemological teleology of the quest for truth that the crime genre centers on. If the objectification of the crime victim as dead body is a tacit perquisite for this reconciliatory work, Assumption starts off its own self-reflective spiral of ever-misleading evidence by this missing murdered witness.

12Assumption is Everett’s “erasure” of the crime novel, in the truest sense. Both narratives not only share an excessively self-conscious and ultimately compromised character who appears to be the very symptom of the corrupt system he is up against. An unconventional reference point for this constellation might be Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s self-proclaimed “Requiem to the Detective Novel” titled The Promise (German: Das Versprechen), which came out in the late 1950’s. In this novel, which was part of Dürrenmatt’s extensive engagement with the crime fiction genre, the flawless deductive work of a brilliant but self-obsessed detective remains futile because he fails to anticipate the mere possibility of chance, i.e. that he has been unable to get a hold of the murderer because the latter has been killed in a car accident. Here, logic is beaten by mere chance. In Assumption, in turn, the generic integrity of the crime novel is compromised by its very own postmodern irony. Everett turns the narrative against its own corrupt protagonist – Ogden Walker – who is replaced as narrative focal point by his side-kick Warren Fragua. Ironic indifference, thus, succumbs to an ambivalent moral awareness. That Assumption marks the capstone of Everett’s critical engagement with the genre of crime fiction is further suggested by the fact that Bucky Paz and Warren Fragua are among the key characters of earlier crime stories published in the volume Damned if I Do (2004, “Warm and Nicely Buried”) and Big Picture (1996, cf. “Wash”). Significantly, Bucky Paz also makes an appearance in one of Everett’s most prominent satiric investigations of identity from the point of view of race. In I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Everett complicates the corporeal dimensions of identity by confronting his protagonist with a dead body that is sort of the opposite of having become missing: he is his double.

To Be Sidney Poitier, Not Sidney Poitier and Both: The Dead Doppelganger and the Logics of Double-Negativity

13This is even more puzzling as the protagonist himself is a double or rather doppelganger of sorts, namely of Sidney Poitier. A rampant satire of race, identity and authenticity, I Am Not Sidney Poitier centers on the ridiculously rich black orphan named Not Sidney Poitier, who embarks upon a cartoonish quest through a starkly satirized 1980’s America to solve the mystery of his confusion-inducing name. Ironically, he begins to “look more like Sidney Poitier than Sidney Poitier ever did” (124). What Everett here does is to present his protagonist, whose body is the projection foil for commercially circulating images of blackness, namely those of the benign black male epitomized by Sidney Poitier, as a “copy” of the latter who is more “real” than the original actor. This, to be exact, is the flawed logic of authenticity reduced to absurdity: that in re-presenting the true nature of the original the copy has to retrieve and (re-) define its essence, the implication being that the copy is a somewhat “better” or “purer” rendition of this very essence.2

14Coined by Jean Paul, the motif of the doppelganger figures prominently in various literary types, genres and periods. In the literary-historical perspective, the doppelganger has been closely associated with the Gothic genre, where it frequently represents a sign of danger or death, as it threatens the authority and integrity of the original self (cf. Faurholt). According to Gry Faurholt, it is a fictional device of figural duplication that subsumes two types, the duplicated and the dissociated self (web, 2009). The first, sometimes termed alter ego, is an identical double whose semblance of the original character often exceeds natural likeness. The second variation can represent a fragment of a character’s personality (think of Mary Shelley’s monstrous Frankenstein, or Dr. Jekyll’s diabolical Mr. Hyde). As a figure of repression,3 it marks a nexus of the inacceptable and illicit, incomprehensible and irreconcilable, often charged with demonic or horrific qualities. As a figure of repetition and contrast, it ultimately undermines self-identical notions of identity. As such, the central premise of the doppelganger motif poses the paradox of encountering oneself as another; the logically impossible notion that the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’ are somehow identical,” Faurholt concludes (web).

15If, to put it mildly, Not Sidney Poitier “already” has an unstable identity to begin with, his ontological precariousness is further fostered by the appearance of his identical double, namely his dead doppelganger. As Christian Schmidt has pointed out, Everett, here, plays on the colloquial synonym of the doppelganger, namely the “dead-ringer”, a race-horse illicitly smuggled into a contest (123). Upon inspecting his dead doppelganger in the morgue, Not Sidney Poitier states that

The man was young, black, with short-cropped hair. His eyes were closed. His lips were slightly parted. He was circumcised. He looked just like me. He looked exactly like me […] I wanted to say, “That’s me.” The thought of saying it was strange feeling and scary. My chest was tight, and my ears were ringing. I was lying in the chest, and yet I wasn’t. I said, “I don’t know him.” I was lying, I thought. (211)

16The identicalness between the living and the dead young black male “is apparently lost” on the Chief Bucky Paz with whom Everett’s protagonist tries to solve the mystery of his murder in the vein of the Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night (1967).

17His dead doppelganger is a curious literalization of Not Sidney Poitier’s split racial self, a de-ontologized version of the black body reduced to its phenomenological presence. Almost like a skin he has shed, his dead doppelganger announces and concludes Not Sidney Poitier’s transformation into Sidney Poitier: “I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of logic and double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier. I was Sidney Poitier” (212). Here, the timing of the appearance of Not Sidney Poitier’s dead doppelganger is telling. At a point, when Not Sidney Poitier has been confused with Sidney Poitier so often, this game of mistaken identity has begun to appear just like that – a game –, Everett manages to refocus our attention on the very corporeal dimension of race and racial identification. In “another turn of the screw” kind of fashion, Everett allows for the possibility of Not Sidney Poitier to actually (or fictionally) be Sidney Poitier. This climactic transformation serves to highlight what the author teases the reader to ponder from the very beginning of Not Sidney Poitier’s cross-sectional quest: that being black in America equals living up to the image of Sidney Poitier (or not).

18For Not Sidney Poitier’s dead doppelganger, not fulfilling this tacit imperative has had terrible consequences, obviously. If this doppelganger has been murdered for looking like the fictional Not Sidney Poitier, his identical corpse offers a disturbing analogy: that not looking like, i.e. not being perceived as or similar to Sidney Poitier can get you killed. The pitfalls of identity that Everett’s text showcase, the ways subjects are constituted and situated in society, point to the social and legal structures that shape the organization of a community. In the basic sense, Everett’s missing and redundant bodies serve to expose a social system that fails to account for its murdered members. This inevitably reflects back not only on our rationalist tendencies, our self-reassuring obsession with truth and justice, but also on the taxonomic violence inflicted upon the living.