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English Studies Forum The Forum Reviews |
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Heretical Songs Brian Evenson. The Wavering Knife. FC2, 2004. 210 pp. $13.95. By Trevor Dodge
“Writing,” Brian Evenson said in a 1995 Storyquarterly interview with Ben Marcus, “is perhaps a means of metaphorically constructing a new religion, one that, at least for the time one is writing or reading, makes all other religion obsolete. In that sense writing is both religious and heretical.” At the time, the twenty eight-year old Evenson knew all too well of what he spoke, freshly having walked away from his teaching position at Brigham Young University. Evenson’s well-publicized flap with BYU that year came amidst a decade-long purge within the Mormon university’s humanities programs, the lowlights of which were the firing of Hebrew scholar David P. Wright, the dismissal of feminist Cecilia Konchar Farr, and the pressured resignation (and subsequent excommunication) of historian D. Michael Quinn (Ostling and Ostling 233-235, 357). School officials (that is, high-ranking members of the Utah-based Mormon Church) were particularly troubled by violent depictions in Evenson’s 1994 award-winning collection of short stories, Altmann’s Tongue, to-wit they delivered the author and professor an ultimatum: cease writing fiction or risk immediate termination at BYU, as well as excommunication from the church. Having grown up the son of a BYU physics professor and eventual dean, his decision to leave the university tested his resolve, his art and his faith in ways that his contemporaries could never imagine. (The afterword to the the University of Nebraska Press’ 2002 edition of Altmann’s Tongue features a particularly candid discussion of these trials and tribulations.) But as the saying goes, the past is prologue. Brian Evenson’s writing has elicited a wide range of responses, from philosophers (Gilles Deleuze) to prophets (Gordon B. Hinckley), ranging from exultation to excommunication. Not bad for a decade’s work. Today, in 2004, Evenson’s writing and teaching career is not only intact but flourishing; five books of fiction published since 1997 and a teaching position in Brown University’s prestigiously innovative MFA program testify to his perseverance. His sixth book (and seventh overall), The Wavering Knife, furthers his emergence as one of the most important and prolific fiction writers under the age of forty in the country. The Wavering Knife’s eighteen short fictions continues Evenson’s dark psychological dance within the long shadow of Edgar Allan Poe. But where Poe’s narrators and occasions are almost exclusively of derangement, ever-building to that copulative crescendo of the “single effect,” Evenson’s stories are fueled by a violence of domestic banality. In other words, violence isn’t found in the hopeless dementia of a psychological Other; violence is situational, and much more familiar to us. In Poe, violence is envisioned and then ritualistically enacted in precise physical measures, so we can easily distance ourselves from the Other; in The Wavering Knife, violence is inherent to what makes us human beings in the first place, and takes other forms besides clichéd derangement. In “Promisekeepers,” for example, a group of brotherly devouts use drunken peer pressure—not with fists, but with impeccably-timed questions—to discourage cross-dressing among their ranks and reinstill male dominance in one brother’s particularly troubled marriage bedroom. Even as gothically-charged and viscerally repulsive the descriptions might be in “The Gravediggers,” wherein the principal characters desecrate a corpse in order to make it fit into its burial plot, the underlying implication is that, more or less, digging graves and bleeding bloated corpses is a pretty fitting metaphor for what it’s like to have to have a job. But to reduce The Wavering Knife to oversimplified comparisons to Poe is to do Evenson’s work a tremendous injustice. Evenson’s most intriguing stories in the collection, the title namesake “The Wavering Knife” and “Moran’s Mexico: A Refutation,” forsake such gratuitous details, in favor of a systematic blurring of the lines between fiction and scholarship. In these particular fictions, the reader is engaged in ways akin to Vladimir Nabokov’s violently subdued narrator Charles Kinbote (of Pale Fire), Paul Auster’s mysterious Quinn in City of Glass, Mark Z. Danielewski’s layering of critic upon critic upon critic in his impressive encylo-novel House of Leaves, and, most recently, in Curtis White’s opus Requiem. Evenson’s stories occupy similar territory, by forcing us to contemplate violence in a way we are most unprepared to do, that is, to consider it as epistemological truth. The title story is a first-person, journal entry-of-sorts, in which the narrator/critic is wrestling with the manuscripts of fictional philosopher Eva Gengli[1], who might be best described as Ayn Rand cross-pollinated with Simone de Beauvoir. The narrator’s problem stems from an inconsistency in Gengli’s seminal essay “Aphorism on Aesthetics,” in which two versions of the same statement appear:
“The ten fingers of the pianist compose the two hands of the lover.” The narrator’s quest to ascertain which statement originated in Gengli’s own handwriting—and thus, which one contains the truer essence of Gengli’s philosophy—simultaneously underscores the reader’s own process for authenticating the story and its characters (and, naturally, Evenson’s agenda). At the same point that the narrator believes he has found the definitive answer in the metaphor of “a wavering knife,” the reader realizes that the subtitle of this particular section of the story/analysis, “Zwischen[2],” operates as an objective correlative for Evenson’s larger narrative project: At one time I had thought to have found, in the trope of the wavering knife, the proper and perhaps only unified approach to the book, the device that would lay bare certain fundamental consistencies of Eva Gengli’s thought and make it manageable. But as I looked closer, I realized that Eva Gengli could not be reduced to fundamental structures or strictures, that her philosophy simply refused to conform to “thought” as I understood the term. (89) “Thought” here implies the traditional Western constructs of either/or binary oppositions in the arenas of philosophy, art, and rhetoric; that Evenson chooses this particular story to flagship his collection makes perfect sense. Evenson and his reader have a prepositional relationship at best (zwischen!), one based not in the build-up and release of a singular effect, but in the juxtaposition and undermining of binary constructions. Where the collection’s title story and the aforementioned “Moran’s Mexico: A Refutation” strategize these issues like the brilliant, Nabokovian chess problems they are, Evenson is most direct in the short piece “House Rules,” in which Thurm posits, “if the breaking of rules go unpunished, are rules still rules?” (149). And while this sounds all very theory-driven in that overblown, postmodern-schmaltzy sort of way, the reader must keep in mind that—in real-world terms—the very act of writing for Evenson involves both the “religious and [the] heretical.” Returning to the 1995 interview with Marcus: Evenson further describes his fiction as “a religion of the collapse of the ethical will,” “hopeless from the start” in that “it will convert nobody.” This is a particularly revelatory way to consider fiction, especially in the United States, where so many of our contemporary novelists and short story writers are caught having to “sum it all up” for the likes of Charlie Rose, Katie Couric and Oprah. Evenson isn’t interested in this wholesale project of art-as-redemption; “Writing for me is about moving through obstacles and establishing a trajectory inward, moving by way of intensities into more and more unsettling and revealing territory. Anything that blocks the path you must cut through, including religion, including yourself.” Evenson’s prose slices through us with equal doses of grotesquery and philosophy, but this is also a collection of remarkable style, humor and wit. In the collection’s most satirical piece, “Barcode Jesus,” Evangelical terrorists Leon, Burl, and B. Gordon[3] spur on Armageddon in an Oklahoma City Wal-Mart, complete with strap-on explosives and a converted school bus (brandishing a mural of Jesus on the side, no less) they’ve christened The Soulmobile: “It’s not just any ordinary WalMart,” says Burl. “It’s a Supra-WalMart. Open 24/7. They got a grocery store and a video rental and a hair salon and even a bank—not just a cash machine but whole fuck-all bank,” says Burl. “They got a tire center and you can get hunting licenses from squirrel to deer and there’s an electronics center and a shitload of toads and frilly hats and God knows what else.” “You could live there,” I say. I am thinking Toads? “They got everything but a goddam church,” says Burl. “Well, why not?” asks B. Gordon. Burl, drawn up, looks at B.Gordon. “What?” asks Burl. “Why don’t they have a church? They got every damn thing else.” B. Gordon reaches out, pulls both of us close. “Brothers, I ask you,” he asks us. “Has WalMart been saved?” (125-126) By refusing to essentialize at every turn—refusing to bury his metaphorical knife, so to speak—Evenson clearly swathes a different path through the underbrush of contemporary fiction. These are fictions of resistance, not for the mere sake of resisting, but for the sake of our very souls as writers and readers in the constant wash of fundamentalism. We often claim to live in the grey, seeking absolutes. Evenson eschews the absolute, using his writing to seek the grey. We should do as well to follow him. Notes [1] gengli, according to the online Alternative Dictionary, translates in Thai slang as “whore.” In verbalizing this word, the simple transposition of the “l” with an “r” results in gengri, a potato curry dish popular among Western tourists in Bangkok [2] zwischen operates in formal German primarily as a preposition, meaning “among” or “between”; it is also the key delimiter in the idiom zwischen den Zeilen lessen, translated literally as “to read between the lines” [3] This could be interpreted as a jab at famed Watergate ringleader-turned-gun nut and conservative talk radio host G. Gordon Liddy, or Gordon B. Hinckley, current president and “prophet, seer and revelator” of the Utah-based Mormon church. In leaving both of these possibilities lingering in the reader’s mind, Evenson nimbly satirizes both. Works Cited Auster, Paul. City of Glass. New York: Penguin, 1985. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Evenson, Brian. Altmann’s Tongue. Lincoln: Nebraska UP/Bison Books, 2002. --- The Wavering Knife. Tallahassee: Fiction Collective Two, 2004. “Gengli.” The Alternative Thai Dictionary. 22 March 2004.<http://www.notam02.no/~hcholm/ altlang/ht/Thai.html>.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962. Ostling, Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling. Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1999.
White, Curtis. Requiem. Normal: Dalkey Archive, 2001.
“Zwischen.” LEO English-German Dictionary. Informatik der Technischen Universität München. 22 March 2004. <http://dict.leo.org/>.
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