Archive, Intertextuality and Genre in Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021)

Abstract

This article reads Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021) as a novel of racial terror that is both about the reading and interpreting of an archive of this violence and, in some senses, formally archival, too. Drawing on Theodore Martin’s theory of the “drag of genre” and “drift of the contemporary,” we consider the ways Everett’s novel modulates through different generic modes while critiquing and disrupting the ideological currents that move within them and normalize violence via generic conventionality. In The Trees, an extensive set of allusions complement the inherent intertextuality of the crime and gothic genres to form an archive which is further constituted by a literal (fictional) archive at the heart of the novel. This archive, kept by an elderly root doctor, features “almost everything ever written about every lynching in these United States of America since 1913” (103). From this point we draw on Saidiya Hartman’s and Toni Morrison’s critiques of the archives of slavery and an American literary archive, respectively, locating Everett’s project as a timely intervention that rightly positions state and state-sponsored terrorism at the heart of America’s history.

Keywords

• Percival Everett
• Lynching
• Terrorism
• Genre