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1In an interview, Percival Everett, speaking about detective novels declared: “I don’t know anything about them”2. This statement has to be taken with as much defiance as his claim that he writes poetry to prove that he cannot write poetry. Or else, to use a word the author dislikes, we could consider Assumption as an experimental piece of detective writing, officially meant to prove that Everett cannot write detective novels. What is at stake here is not so much the matter of proving (made nonsensical by the fact that the reader holds indeed a piece of detective fiction in her hands) as the central feature of writing. The book has all the ingredients of a piece of detective fiction: an identified detective, Ogden Walker, summoned in spite of himself to solve a series of mysteries: the murder of one Mrs Bickers in the first section of the triptych, entitled “A Difficult Likeness”, the disappearance of a woman, initially called Fiona McDonough in the second, “My American Cousin” and lastly the murder of Terence Lowell, a game and fish patrolman in “The Shift”. The three murders trigger a number of codes in keeping with mystery narratives and which contribute to creating a familiar literary context: stereotypical characters such as pimps, hookers, drug users and FBI agents, treasure hunts, mysterious heritages, seedy casinos and bars, clues, red-herrings and the quest for truth. The setting is imaginary Plata County in New Mexico and combines the awesome landscapes of New Mexico and the incursions into necessarily corrupt cities like Albuquerque, Dallas or Denver, oscillating therefore between the classical eventful uneventful country town à la Agatha Christie3 and the social setting of noir fiction. The main character himself, Ogden Walker, has all the characteristics of the lone ranger, a “cowboy”, as his friend Warren Fragua calls him (62), adding further that he is “a stubborn son of a bitch with a messiah complex” (163). He embodies the figure of the antihero detective, a counterpart to his TV series namesake, Walker Texas Ranger, whose sense of moral duty meant to promote American values goes along with an unusual mastery of martial arts. On the contrary, Ogden Walker performs his duty as a deputy sheriff in a disillusioned, faithless way and repeatedly says that he does not like violence (163). This rather rough summary of the three cases and of the general setting of the book proves that Everett knows how to create a whodunnit narrative, a story that will meet, if not the assumptions of the readers, at least their expectations, evolving as it is on the familiar grounds of a genre. In other words, he does know a few things about detective novels, and uses this knowledge to bond with his readers.

2But Assumption is not just an exercice de style meant to fuel the eclecticism of Everett’s work. Because whereas it exposes many of the features delineating the genre on the surface, it also performs a gesture of dissemination, toying with the usual trope that there is more than meets the eye in detective fiction and that detectives and readers alike should learn to see, not necessarily beyond appearances, but just what is in front of them. In other words, while staging the codes of the genre, the text keeps playing with assumptions and deconstructing them. Like in any good or bad detective novel, clues are disseminated throughout the text, clues as to the different cases at stake, but more importantly, literary clues. Those clues create a network of references which mislead the readers into believing that they are on familiar grounds, all the more so since those clues operate on clichés. Thus, to distort Derrida’s concept of writing under erasure, Everett’s Assumption rather presents a case of writing under exposure, displaying a theory not only of the detective genre, but of writing as a gesture. We will try to see to what extent Assumption is a book concerned with writing and language, to what extent it can be read as fiction offering elements for a theory of certain forms of language-games that question the making or unmaking of meaning.

3Even though the different mysteries presented in the book are set in a specific albeit imaginary place, the characters and situations seem easily transposable since they appear as overt and more covert re-writings of detective fiction. From that perspective, the novel triggers the memory of the readers, provoking effects of déjà vu akin to the dreams that pepper the narratives in the book. The scope embraced by the text is a very broad one since it feeds on a large array of references, ranging from literary works to TV series and films. Allusions to Columbo (20), Sherlock (208), even Derrick (206) sprinkle the stories, like snippets of memory contained, if not in overt references (as is the case for Columbo and Sherlock) at least in conscious or unconscious connections triggered by words or situations. Such is the case for example of Derrick, the name of a drug dealer in “The Shift”, who has very little in common with the German detective of the TV series yet whose name brings about the parasitic, incongruous superposition of the placid German policeman and the violent drug dealer. Similarly, the character of One Hand (aka Hicks), who has only one hand in “My American Cousin” brings back to mind the 1960s series and the 1993 film both entitled The Fugitive in which the murderer is the one-armed man, named Sykes. A connective chain is thus made possible here between different media relating a TV show, a movie and Everett’s book. And the now obsessional reader will detect more and more references. To Breaking Bad, for example, when in a story in which meth production and consumption is at stake, Ogden Walker, who has become a person of interest in his own case, asks his partner “Looking bad, eh?” (195). Innocuous in itself, the question rings a bell in the reader’s mind both because it remotely sounds like “breaking bad”, but also because the story exposes the character as breaking bad indeed, in a context of drugs to boot. The reader is thus led to create a strange assemblage which points to the referential therefore constructed and a-subjective nature of characters and plots. She is thus on familiar grounds, within generic frames which, although they might offer variations nonetheless propose a number of clichés likely to frame the reader’s expectations.

4Yet the different clues to the detective genre are interspersed with more unexpected references that disrupt and upset familiarity by mixing the written world of detective novels, the visual universe of detective shows and movies and cartoons. For example, allusions to cartoon characters, like Bugs Bunny (the sheriff, Bucky Paz, is on a diet of carrot sticks, which he chews while sitting at his desk and asking for updates on the cases in a manner reminiscent of “what’s up Doc?”) and Woody Woodpecker are made. The following example points to the hybrid nature everywhere present in the text. Warren Fragua, Ogden Walker’s friend and partner remembers how in his youth he asked

a Navajo singer, a medicine man if he only used eagle feathers for his ceremonies. The old man shook his head and said, “No, no, we use many feathers. We use hawk feathers, crow feathers, owl feathers, Woody Woodpecker feathers.” Warren sat there with his cousin and they just looked at each other, wanting to laugh and wanting to show proper respect. So at thirteen Warren learned the way the white world, for lack of a better or worse term, had eaten or bored its way into his culture. But that was not a good or a bad thing, just a thing, he thought. A chick cannot stay in its shell forever. That was how his father had put it. Then his father would squint, smile and say, “It becomes a bird or breakfast. That’s just how it is.” (212)

5Just like the mixture of genres in the book is unexpected, the passage just quoted contains within itself much of what the novel is about. It appears like an excursion out of the plot: Warren Fragua’s memory of his youth is brought about by the sight of “feathers everywhere” (212), a “distraction” (212) in his endeavor to find Walker, who might be in danger, a distraction as well from the slaughter of three men he has just witnessed the result of. But what seems at first sight to be a moment of suspension in the narrative (after all the feathers are suspended in the air) may appear at close quarters as a figuration of the displacements at work in the text, the “shifts”, as the title of the third case would have it. Indeed, the passage contains a number of collisions, first of birds. The signifier “feathers”, whose repetition six times in this short passage grants it an almost incantatory tone, a rhythm not unlike, perhaps that of the woodpecker’s drumming on wood or the “singer’s” song, is diffracted by the different birds those feathers belong to: eagles, hawks, owls, Woody Woodpeckers, therefore introducing plurality and instability in the otherwise solemn repetition of “feathers”. The signifier expands into a plurality of objects whose symbolic meanings diverge. Woody Woodpecker appears in a focal position in the medicine man’s enumeration, which has the double effect of drawing particular attention to it and of subverting the ceremonial aspect of the whole scene, as shown by the mixture of respect and laughter experienced by the cousins. It is an intrusion of “the white world” into Warren Fragua’s culture, a sign that the stability of reference has gone amok, that the surface meaning of things (feathers) has been disconnected from any form of transcendence whatsoever (the ceremonies), therefore perhaps that truth lies more in unexpected associations than in universality or definite meaning. If a chick can become a bird or breakfast indifferently, then everything is brought down to casual connections, to “connective tissue”, as the narrator of The Water Cure4 might say.

6The displacement from woodpecker feathers to Woody Woodpecker feathers is not only a breach of popular culture into another form of popular culture (here the word popular diffracts into its contemporary meaning referring to mass media culture and, on the other hand, but simultaneously to the culture of a people). It blends categories into one another. But more than that, it figures a kind of graft of two cultural sets, a sort of “textual graft”, to use the words of Derrida, who describes this as the “space of writing”5. He writes:

A writing that refers back only to itself carries us at the same time, indefinitely and systematically, to some other writing. At the same time: this is what we must account for. A writing that refers only to itself and a writing that refers indefinitely to some other writing might appear noncontradictory: the reflecting screen never captures anything but writing, indefinitely, stopping nowhere, and each reference still confines us within the element of reflection. Of course. But the difficulty arises in the relation between the medium of writing and the determination of each textual unit. It is necessary that while referring each time to another text, to another determinate system, each organism only refer to itself as a determinate structure; a structure that is open and closed at the same time6.

7The graft is therefore the sign that points to this simultaneous openness and closure of writing. Then perhaps, writing in this passage has to be taken literally as such and textual unit has to be taken down to its most infinitesimal constituents. Indeed, the focal position of the phrase “Woody Woodpecker” not only creates a form of comic relief in an otherwise dark context (the series of deaths and murders at the heart of what is becoming Fragua’s investigation). It also literally materializes two things.

8The first is the sense of rupture and distortion that pervades he whole novel, and this goes along with the rhizomatic networks the text is built upon. “A Difficult Likeness” opens on the physical exploration by Ogden Walker of a bullet hole: “Ogden Walker put his finger, a once-broken index that still held a curve, in the glass of the door through which two bullets had passed, a neat hole with spiderweb etching out and away” (5). The mystery of the two bullets shot in the same hole will remain just that, a hole in the (w)hole of the door, a (w)hole mystery, announcing the sense of irresolution, the absence of definite meaning for the three mysteries proposed here. What those two bullets do, though, is not so much delimit the scope of one bullet-hole as “open the determined structure”. Indeed, the clean cut through the glass door misleadingly points to the possibility of a “neat” resolution and the more the reader progresses in her reading of the novel, the messier things get. More than offering the simplicity of unit suggested by the single hole, what happens here is a connection between inside and outside, a point of passage announcing perhaps both the passages from one genre to another and the diffraction suggested by the “spiderweb” design “etching out and away”. The front door is ruptured, just like the protagonist’s finger, twisted to the point of being “curved”. Hence, from the get-go, the indicating function of the index, the finger that points to and shows, is put into question. Because it is curved, it cannot straightforwardly designate, it cannot draw a straight line, likely to “connect those goddamn dots”, as the sheriff suggests (46), in order to draw the whole picture, to fit the pieces of the puzzle together “if in fact these were pieces, if in fact this was a puzzle” (220).

9Although written in the third person, the first two cases are entirely perceived through the lens of the protagonist and this inner focalization narrows the reader’s point of view, focuses it on the bullet-hole of Walker’s gaze. Yet, the broken finger indicates from the start the possible shifts and displacements that will intensify throughout the book. Or to put it differently, it announces at once that “something is wrong”, a sentence that recurs throughout the book (26, 76, 128, 168…), a sentence admittedly not surprising in the case of detective novels yet not only providing a sense of suspense but also suggesting that, for all the recognizable features of the genre interspersed in the text, Everett’s opus challenges expectations of resolution. For example, in “A Difficult Likeness”, even if an alt-right conspiracy is defeated as the result of Walker’s investigation, the initial murder of Emma Bickers remains unexplained. The villains are arrested and the reader can assume that they are the culprits, but nothing comes even close to suggesting it. In “My American Cousin”, although the mystery of Fiona McDonough’s disappearance is solved, it is at the cost of twists and turns: the physical wanderings of the protagonist from Plata to Denver to Dallas to Plata, but more importantly the multiplication of names and aliases that disorient and lose the reader on the way: Fiona, Caitlin, Carol, Carla, who turn out to be “Carol, Petra, Carla and Tina” (160) in a sing-song succession evocative of a nursery rhyme, another odd fleeting breach in a story of bloodbaths. And the final twist is to be found in the section aptly named “The Shift”, in which the physical crookedness (the broken finger) of Walker is met by the fact that the investigation is turned to Warren Fragua, whereas Ogden Walker gradually becomes the perpetrator, inviting the reader, if we are to believe the cover of the book that this is a “novel”, to reconsider the other two mysteries in this light, to read the three stories in a continuum not just because of the name of the serial character, to put all three stories in the same hole. The serial structure of the novel might thus suggest that Walker is a serial killer of sorts, which would perhaps lead one to assume that he killed Emma Bickers in the first part. In short, “none of this makes sense”, as Warren says when he exposes Ogden for the different murders committed in the third part of the triptych, undermining in the process the very coherence of the ternary “novel”. The answer Walker gives to Warren’s remark that “none of this makes sense” resonates with his own father’s conclusion after the Woody Woodpecker episode: “That’s just how it is”. Indeed, Ogden says:

I wanted some drug money, I’m hooked on meth. Do any of those reasons help this make sense? I was tired of being a good guy. Was I ever a good guy? How about that? Does that have it make sense to you? This is the way it is, Warren, simply the fucking way it is. Sad, sad, sad, sad. Shitty, shitty, bang, bang. Nothing makes sense and that’s the only way that any of it can make sense. Here I am, the way I am, not making any sense. Blood in the water. Blood on my shirt. (225)

10In other words, the incongruousness of the name Woody Woodpecker supplementing a noun pertaining to a chain of signifiers equates the nonsensical quality of the whole plot. There is no accounting for facts or at least, those facts cannot be explained by or fit into a truth that transcends or encompasses them. Rather, the repetition of “this”, “is”, “I” “am” places the utterances in the here and now of presence, miles away from the representation Warren is trying to make of the picture, from his trying to understand it and comprehend it in a structure of meaning. By refusing to find reasons for his actions, Ogden refuses to delineate a stable identity that would explain his actions, the same way identities are, to say the least, fluctuating in all three stories. They are not the result of a chain of causality, they just are, on the surface, because there is nothing more and nothing less than surface. As the narrative voice in The Water Cure says, “the Is are different”7, suggesting that no essential and stable referents are to be found, suggesting, in the case of Assumption that the name “Ogden Walker” misleadingly designates a recurring, serial character and yet reflects a diffraction that opens the path to nonsense rather than to coherence and stability. The name is no more a stable referent than truth or meaning. Therefore, the quest for truth at the heart of the detective genre is not only questioned but jeopardized, if truth is to mean unit, stability, one (w)hole. In other words, delineations and frames that would allow a return to order, sets of binary oppositions (truth/lies, good/evil, mystery/resolution), reassuring categories (the good detective on the path to truth and justice/ culprits) tend to disappear, because they are on no more stable grounds than making sense. Or rather, they feed on assumptions that are in fact no more than language games, and all it amounts to is an assemblage of language.

11From that perspective, the statement by Ogden Walker at the end of the novel when he says: “I’m an evil man. live is evil spelled backward or is it the other way around? I’m evil. I suppose that’s what they’ll say. I’m possessed by the devil, lived spelled backward” (225) is to be taken more seriously than as just the ravings of a madman or the cynical gesture of a nihilist. First because it is a commentary on the whole book, literally written backward. The short opening section enacts the death of Ogden Walker in the desert, a prefiguration of or a variation on, or an altogether different story than the death of Ogden Walker by the river in “The Shift”. Or it can be read as one of the dreams that sprinkle the novel and that might account for unexpected discrepancies in the very making of the character (for example when after being interrogated by two FBI agents “he thought he might faint” (78) or when he “let[s] out a short scream” when a rat blots out from the garbage (56), rather unbecoming attitudes for a cop. Something is wrong indeed). In all cases, what this opening section does is disturb and even undermine any form of relation to the real. If the “novel” is to be read in a linear way, from beginning to end, then the first few paragraphs place it under the tutelage of death, but not of any death, the death from the very beginning of the main protagonist, of the lead investigator. Not only does this announce the end in the beginning, but we might go a step further and contend that the whole writing of the book is but the trace of an already dead character and world.

12The frontier between life and death becomes from the start as thin and even indiscernible as the frontier between live and evil, suggesting in the process a blurring of lines between reality and unreality, undermining even the very idea of reality (after all, this is a piece of fiction, which induces an ontological gap, a dismemberment of referentiality), but also between signifiers. From that perspective, the whole novel can be read as a hole in the texture of the real, a fantasy of the dying man, as the meeting point of life and death, just like Ogden is the meeting point (the hymen, as Derrida would have it) of live and evil, provoking what Derrida describes as “an effect of indefinite fluctuation between two possibilities”8. In Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Deleuze and Guattari write; “the philosopher, the scientist, the artist seem to return from the land of the dead”9. Ogden is no artist, no philosopher and no scientist and yet, the narrative(s) offered to the reader seem(s) to point to the fact that indeed, the novel is a return from the dead, a simulacrum whose origin is at once erased, an unreality from the first pages, or as Derrida might say, “the phantom, the phantasm, the simulacrum.” He adds:

This signifier of little, this discourse that doesn't amount to much, is like all ghosts: errant. It rolls (kulindeitai) this way and that like someone who has lost his way, who doesn't know where he is going, having strayed from the correct path, the right direction, the rule of rectitude, the norm; but also like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed, a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum. Wandering in the streets, he doesn't even know who he is, what his identity-if he has one--might be, what his name is, what his father's name is. He repeats the same thing every time he is questioned on the street corner, but he can no longer repeat his origin10.

13No wonder then if the novel opens on the remembrance of Ogden’s dead father, a ghost that will haunt and hole out the whole text, “a dead voice” (3), an absent presence that triggers in a way the narrative, an absent origin. The dead father then might be read as the ever-present signifier unrelated to any signified whatsoever, the initial letter or signifier that fails to make sense anymore because of its very absence. And yet that haunts the text, just like the smallest units present in the novel haunt the novel.

14The opening passage already allows for this form of dissemination of the signifier. The mention of a “chat-little” would have been only a descriptive element had not its backward reading appeared two pages later under the form of a “little chat” Ogden has with Emma Bickers (6). Not to mention that much emphasis is laid on the small cat (little chat, for French speakers) that is missing from the picture when Ogden visits Emma Bickers. The cat, another hole in Walker’s familiar landscape, acts therefore, under the written form of chat, diffracted into different meanings, if I may, as a signifier running on the surface of the text. So does the mention of a “beetle11”, which will recur in the last section of the novel in the form of a meth addict, whose name is Beetle and who will be misnamed Bug at one point, thus conjuring not only the same hesitation as the different feathers do, but also, just like the cat, bringing to mind, for Poe readers, the bug and cat of his tales. Signifiers thus spread on the surface of the text, weaving networks of associations like those triggered by the focal position of our Woody Woodpecker, itself a reminder of Ogden’s poor skills as a detective, he “who wouldn’t know a clue if it bit him on the pecker” (26).

15Thus signifiers act as the crooked indexes that disseminate the undoing of meaning on the surface, and, from that perspective, the focal position of Woody Woodpecker acts as more than just a comical discrepancy. The second element this brings to the attention of the reader is the power of the letter. If language proves inadequate to signify and make sense, letters are exhibited in the novel and create effects of dissemination, the traces of present absences. The letter W, capitalized because the former nouns have given way to a name known to all, stands out on the page and exhibits the obsessive pregnancy of this letter in the passage. Apart from the eagle, discarded through the repetition of “no”, all the birds enumerated contain this letter (hawk, crow, owl), proposing a variation of the pronunciation of the vowels, introducing sameness within difference. Then Ws stand out everywhere in the passage (Warren, with, wanting, wanting, Warren, way, white world, way…), as if, just like Poe’s purloined letter, it was displayed for all to see, yet invisible at first sight. W is also the initial letter of Ogden Walker’s name, whose near anagrammatic nature, suggested by the backward-spelling fertility of words, might, through a twisted manipulation of language (but everything being twisted in the novel, please indulge me), could read as Edgar Know. Granted, the letter L is missing from my anagram, unless, through another dubious twist, it is inserted as Edgar L. Know. Granted, if “Know” is to be read as a verb, the final s is missing, a hole in the grammar that might reflect the impossible unit of meaning. But Edgar L. Know vaguely brings to mind Edgar Allen Poe, the present-absent literary father of Assumption, himself fond of destabilizing anagrams and paradoxes. Just like Ogden seems to be drowning in the desert in the opening section of the book (4), the readers will remember how Arthur Gordon Pym nearly dies of thirst while at sea, his “faint ejaculation to God” resulting in the appearance of his dog, named Tiger and perceived by Arthur in his dream like “a fierce lion of the tropics”12. A chain of signifiers not unlike the succession of feathers already mentioned creates another effect of distortion, pointing to unstable signifiers once more. An apparently innocuous version of this episode of Poe’s novel is briefly offered to the reader of Assumption, when the cat of Ogden’s mother is mentioned: “Eva’s old cat walked across the room and rubbed against Ogden’s leg. He reached down and scratched his back. “Hey Moose.” His father had given the cat that name almost fifteen years ago, a kitten as big as a labrador puppy” (35). The anamorphosis present in Poe’s text is mirrored here by a cat named “Moose” and looking like a dog (a labrador, like Pym’s pet). The mention in passing that Ogden’s father is responsible for naming the kitten sets those distortions in a line of filiation. And the cat and the bug take on another dimension, becoming the memorial traces of one of the fathers of detective fiction. Also, the three parts of the triptych appear like a distorted variation cum displacement of the Dupin trilogy. Like in Murders in the Rue Morgue, “A Difficult Likeness” proposes an unexplained murder: no clues, not prints except the deputy sheriff’s, but more than that, the description of Emma Bickers resembles that of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye, the only difference being that whereas the one is “thrust up the chimney”13, the other is lying right below a trap door, a distorted mirror image of the former. Emma Bicker’s corpse is described as such: “She was there, dirt-covered, face, eyes open and death-gazing, pupils finding different lines, her throat bruised” (20), an echo to her predecessor, whose “face was fearfully discolored and [whose] eyeballs protruded” and whose “throat was greatly chafed”. (424). “My American Cousin” bears likenesses (although difficult ones) to The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, in fact the transposed story of Mary Cecilia Rogers, her American version. Poe’s text thus establishes specular relations between his fictitious story and a news item, dislocating it from America to Europe, twisting the names, just as names are everywhere twisted in Everett’s novel, proposing a distorted version of the facts, just as the disappearance of Fiona McDonough brings back the case in the United States and only fleetingly reminds the reader of the original text. And The Purloined Letter makes a cameo appearance in “The Shift”, in a short passage toward the end:

Warren sat at his desk, thinking about Ogden, recalling everything he could about his good friend. Ogden was hiding someplace and Warren knew that to find him, he’d have to think like him. Then he saw the small foil-wrapped candy on his desk. He’d lifted a bag of them from his daughter’s Halloween haul one year and had liked them so much that he’d told Ogden to hide them. Ogden would pull one on occasion to tease Warren. Finally Warren asked where they were hidden. Ogden showed him. He had placed them on the corner of Warren’s desk, in plain sight next to an empty wrapper. (222)

16Just like the letter, the candy is “in plain sight” and it only requires the right focus to find them, to not being blinded by the assumptions related to the petty mystery of their being hidden. The empty wrapper is just a decoy that not so much hides the candy as induces Warren into believing that the candy is out of sight. So, just like the letter in Poe’s tale, the candy is in full sight, keeping the gaze away while drawing attention to itself.

17The letter in Assumption is perhaps therefore to be read as the most minimal unit of the written text, as what points to the infinite possibilities of language in sense-making, but also as what allows to think that, more than an experimentation of the detective genre, the novel points to the act of writing (after all, Woody Woodpecker’s W opens words like word, writer, writing), a condensation within letters of the possibilities of writing as the supplementation of meaning by anamnesis and networks of associations. The absence at the heart not only of detective fiction (there is always someone or something missing, a clue that would allow to get the full picture) but also of writing itself (words correspond to no outside reality), the holes in the door are never so much filled as hauntingly present. The truth therefore is not so much in the content of the letter (the content of Poe’s letter is never disclosed and alphabetical letters have no content: they are signs on the page) as in the possibility of meaning or lack thereof it bears. What the text does is to revive memory, through clichés and also references that are themselves simulacra. But it also points to language as the only “truth”, as what allows for the text’s texture, for its being.

Poe, Edgar Allan, Tales of Mystery and Imagination [1908], London, J.M Dent & Sons Ltd, 1987.