Rerun: No More Teenagekicks presents ... Brian Evenson Day (orig. 03/29/08)

Q. I may be on shaky ground here, since this is no doubt an eminently deconstructable notion, but a good deal of your fiction could be divided as follows: works such as "Father of Lies" and "The Open Curtain" in which there is a relatively stable, "real world" that readers have reference to, with a primary character dipping in and out of psychosis; and other works such as "Dark Property," "Brotherhood of Mutilation," and many of your stories -- at the extreme, "Job Eats Them Raw, With the Dogs: An Undoing," which documents the comic peregrinations of a skeleton - in which the world itself is, as it were, gripped by psychosis, and there's no stable "outside" to which the reader has reference. Could you talk about the different challenges in writing in these two modes? And since two of your three novels (indeed, the longer two) utilize the former structure, to what extent can the purely psychotic structure be sustained in extended works?

A. There do seem to be at least two distinct modes that my work fits into. One, as you mention, begins with a mimetic/realist base that becomes eroded by the perceptions of a character as the book progresses, in which the fantastic element can often be seen as a perceptual error that's allowed to grow into psychosis. At some level it's about a tension or contrast between two different worlds, both of which I'd say are real, but one is real for everybody and the other is real for only a select few. The other mode isn't interested so much in a contrast between different worlds and perceptions as it is in making or building a world entirely its own with differently logical and physical structures than our world: elaborating a plausible but utterly mad religion in "The Brotherhood of Mutilation," creating an insular and impossible anthropology in "The Progenitor", or creating worlds in which people keep moving after they're dead in "Dark Property" or "Job Eats Them Raw..."

----I think in the first case the challenge is keeping a tension or balance that's interesting and then figuring out at what points or places to let a kind of blurring or bleeding occur. In "Father of Lies" this is pretty straightforward, which gives the reader a certain amount of protection from what Fochs is doing and experiencing. With "The Open Curtain" I wanted to the reader to feel that their own consciousness was beginning to come asunder but it took me a long time, about six years, to figure out how to do that. The model working there is a lot more complicated in that you have three different levels of reality and delusion. You have Rudd's view of the world in which we find Lael, who may or may not exist, and which is punctured by blackouts and a sense of slipping into another reality. You have Lyndi's view of the world, which seems more stable that Rudd's but is still somewhat haunted by visions of the dead. And you have the final section's vision of the world which takes the tensions of the other sections, doubles them, and then leaves the reader to face them. I wrote about eight very different versions of the ending (including one in which they go to Mexico and end up in a room whose walls are covered with extracted teeth) before I figured out how to do it.

----With the other mode, I think it's a question of developing the logic and mood of an independent world and then seeing where it'll take you and being willing to let go of control enough to let things take form. With "Job" things started with the title, the absurdity of it, but I no longer know where that came from. There was also an interest in mixing different speech genres--which is something that goes on in life all the time but goes on differently there. With "The Brotherhood of Mutilation," the religion elaborated itself slowly and in ways that really surprised me and kind of, to be frank, terrified me. I think it's a great mode for a novella-length piece (such as "Brotherhood" or "Dark Property"). I'd like to think a purely psychotic structure, as you say, could be done in a longer work, but haven't yet moved in that direction. I think something like Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren" does it over a long stretch, but that's the only thing that comes immediately to mind.


Q.You have a joint PHD in critical theory and English; Deleuze blurbed you; you use epigraphs from Hegel, Heidegger, Kristeva, etc. To what extent is it possible and/or desirable to translate theory into fiction? It strikes me that it's easier going the other direction -- Deleuze can apply concepts from Anti-Oedipus to a reading of Kafka, but trying to write a novel based on Anti-Oedipus is a different animal altogether. I remember listening to a German electronic album in which the artist insisted in his liner notes that it was based on “A Thousand Plateaus.” Me, I didn't quite hear it.

A. I think theory is something that informs my vision of the world, but it's pretty digested at this point. It's part of a larger conversation of ideas that I'd like to think I'm involved in, and I find myself interested in theory and responding to it but not trying to prove or disprove it with my fiction. Deleuze and Guattari have been very important to me in terms of allowing me to think about my work as a kind of series of different kinds of spatial movements, as well as in other ways, but I never sit down and think "I'm going to write a Deleuzian novel." I don't really think you can begin with theory; for me as a writer theory has to be absorbed. I'm very much a gourmand about influences: I think you should read as much as possible and read as many different sorts of things as possible and then let it subside and then see how it bubbles up. At the same time, there are certain epistemological and ontological dilemmas that swarm through my fiction, probably because I don't think that philosophically they're resolved enough for me. But rather than resolving them, I find my fiction seems rather to crystallize their problematic nature. I suppose the most prominent thing I take from critical theory is a set of ideas about language that do play out in my work, particularly in a story like "The Polygamy of Language" but they play out in really odd and funny ways.


Q.The Deleuze blurb is very funny, by the way, not at all an American- style blurb (you know the type: "A rare and enchanting web of dreams!" "Best book of the Common Era!"). Instead he says, "Altmann's Tongue strikes me as powerful, by reason of the mode of the language and the unusual style, by reason of the violence and force of the words.. I admire this book." Highly reasoned, slightly attenuated; all in all, pretty damn amazing. How did it come about?

A. The blurb is cheating just a little bit. I sent Deleuze my first book, "Altmann's Tongue," and we exchanged several letters before he died. The blurb is a passage from one of those letters in response to the book. He'd said he'd try to write a more formal blurb but then, for various reasons having to do with his failing health, killed himself.


Q.In the title story of "The Wavering Knife," the narrator is compelled to find an image that would be a "unifier and hinge-piece" in his interpretation of a dead philosopher's work. His quest leads to madness, cross-dressing, and what a competent DA might choose to prosecute as murder in the second degree. So, apart from all the Mormon troubles, how have you enjoyed academia?

A. One of the ways I probably prevent myself from getting too caught up in theoretical or philosophical issues when I'm writing is by attending carefully to odd details in the prose. So, in the four word passage you quote above I remember spending a long time thinking about whether to use a hyphen in "hinge-piece." I'm very glad I used the hyphen--it does all sorts of things in relation to the piece as a whole, and a piece lives or dies based on such minute decisions.

----Which probably means I'm a little more like the narrator of "The Wavering Knife" than I'd like to think....

----Academia is more or less okay, at least the teaching part of it. It lets me be paid to do something I'd do anyway, which is to read and talk about books. It doesn't always give me enough time to write, but very little would. Right now I'm chair of my department, which I really don't like at all; it's soul-deadening work and very frustrating. Worst of all, I'm reasonably good at it, so my colleagues want me to keep doing it. Faced with the prospect of going to another administrative meeting, madness, cross-dressing, and second degree murder strike me as pretty appealing alternative.


Q."The Wavering Knife" strikes me as having something to do with Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet" -- both stories document futile quests to find a unifying image for an author's oeuvre. According to Google, James isn't a name that every really gets paired with yours -- Beckett, Artaud, the nouveau romain, these are the guys we hear about. But throughout both your work and James' one finds stories driven by a structuring lack that leads to what we might call a kind of interpretive vertigo (c.f. in James, "the Aspern Papers," "The Real Thing," "The Jolly Corner," etc.) To what extent was he an influence?

A. I've always loved James' work, and you're perceptive to think of him in relation to my work--I find it very flattering. There's a certain kind of Jamesian sentence that operates in some of my denser stories and I very much love his stories in particular. Speaking of names, the last names in "The Figure in the Carpet" (Corvick/Verecker), which seem to me basically versions of another absent name, are very connected to the way I chose my own names, and I like their sounds very much. James is conscious of every nuance, every sound, and at his best gets at astonishing things and I'm consistently impressed by him. He's a subterranean but very profound influence on me.


Q.Your novella, "The Brotherhood of Mutilation," is a detective story set in the compound of a secret amputation cult ("self-cauterizer" becomes a faddish catch phrase there). Many of your works involve extreme violence to the body. What brings your back so often to cutting people up? Do you have any favorite amputation-centric works of fiction?

A. The best amputation-centric book is Herman Ungar's "The Maimed." It's really excellent, and very bleak, one of my favorite books. I'm not surewhat my interest is in cutting bodies up, but it seems to happen a lot in my fiction. I think it's there for different reasons and evolves from story to story. In "The Polygamy of Language" it's related to parsing language. In "Dark Property" it's a desperate way of just trying to make it impossible for a body to rise again from the dead, which probably is rooted in my fear that life might continue after death. In "The Brotherhood of Mutilation" it becomes a kind of expression of faith and is based firmly on the biblical notion of cutting of your right hand if it offends thee. It's probably that in "Two Brothers" as well, in a slightly different way. And at its basis is the subject/object problem. I think there's also an odd notion of intimacy or longing for intimacy sometimes bound up in it, probably best expressed by the simulated ending of the "The Ex-Father." I think Dennis Cooper has written very cogently about all these issues and about the complexity of response in the face of extreme situations.


Q.I saw on your website that The Open Curtain has been translated into French and Italian. Have you sold translations of any of your other works?

A. I've sold French translations of The Brotherhood of Mutilation (coming out this Fall) and Contagion (out about two years ago). I've had a few stories translated here and there into other languages, but no other book-length projects as of yet.


Q.In terms of language barriers, "Dark Property" must present some pretty severe difficulties for non-native speakers or translators. Much of it is written in archaic English, or a sort of invented- archaic that can't be found in the OED. (I count 88 words I put on my new vocab list from that one, such as "spartle," "coiton," "squin," "flitch," "crub," "turbate" -- which is more new words than any book I've read this side of Infinite Jest. And page-count wise, you book is about 11% as long as DFWs.) Can you talk about that language a little? Do you see yourself going back to a similar voice in the future?

A. I started writing that book when I was working on a degree in 18th century literature and reading a lot of obscure primary texts. I kept coming across words that I didn't know and which, if they appeared in the OED at all, appeared as variants for other words that had pushed them out of the language. I became very interested in the way words drop out of the language and "die" and started to write the book as a means of giving these words life again. That interest in words became a kind of mirror that I began to see a kind of plot develop in, so the content of the story came fairly directly out of that notion of resurrecting words and transferring it to bodies. The reason most of the language is so relatively spare is so as to give the oddest words space to breathe, to make it so you might be able to figure them out from context. But yes, I can't imagine what it'd be like to try to translate it.

----I really like that voice and that book; I felt that I was simultaneously inventing a world and reinventing language when I wrote it. That said, it was an incredibly difficult book to write. I worked on it in the attic of the house I had at the time, which was poorly insulated. I'd sit up there and listen to the wind whistling through the walls late at night, and I'd only work on the book when I was close to the point of exhaustion, when some of these words I'd read once several years before would suddenly start to appear. Sometimes I'd look up a word but mostly I'd let something come or invent something plausible according to various strategies. I also spent a lot of time reading sentences aloud, trying to figure out if I could get away with a sentence like "The heel of his hand and the hizzen of his boot had gone thick with blood." For a long time I had good chunks of the book memorized. I think the conditions would have to be just right for me to enter a similar space again.

----This is going to sound a little crazy, but one of the impetuses for writing the book came in reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which I like very much, and seeing him use the word "sprent" twice in the same way, both times connected to the sprinkled look of the stars in the sky. This struck me as problematic. I'd just been reading Spenser's "The Fairie Queen" where "sprent" appears in a very different way: "Then all the ground with purple bloud was sprent." And also had come across the word somewhere else, I no longer remember where, as having to do with breaking something out, and learned from the OED that it could mean to spring forward. It was a very rich word, very fluid; I was grateful to McCarthy for using it again but felt the word deserved better than to be used twice in the same way. So, I probably owe "Dark Property" to that one word, sprent.


Q. You have at least a couple stories that are influenced by Thomas Bernhard. In "Internal," you take the basics of Bernhard's "Frost" (a doctor sends an internist to another place to observe the doctor's peculiar brother), then dramatically change the focus (your version examines linguistic problems, in particular the absurdity of psychological taxonomies, whereas Bernhard is more concerned with the process of creating one of his archetypal mad ranters). I was curious how often you model stories on the bones of another that closely? What does it give you, as a writer? And finally, are there any such models you've started to make use of only to find that you were working a dead end, you couldn't finish?

A. I'd read "Frost" in French translation in the mid-1990s and found that it started other things squirming in my head. I do sometimes respond fairly to work by others. That's particularly true when I'm reading something I really like and I find myself projecting past the story, writing in my head where the story could go, and then the story goes somewhere else. With "Frost," there was a point very early on where Bernhard moved toward concerns that were specifically his but where I realized that I could have moved just as well in another direction. So that's what I did. I was reading at the time a Danish book from the 1960s that I'd stumbled across about Posturography (which later became Posturology: c.f. http://pmgagey.club.fr/home-a.htm) and that ended up being key as well.

----I'm only interested in doing that sort of modelling if it'll will a) get the original story to a different place and b) allow my own work to move in different ways than it otherwise might. There's a kind of unleashing of some sort that has to go on for me to stay interested. The ideal for that is something like Carmelo Bene's 'adaptations' of Shakespeare that really end up getting to a very weird, very different place.

----"By Halves" is a response to a Bernhard piece as well, but with many of the things that interest Bernhard cut out. "The Sanza Affair" is a cross-pollination of a set of techniques from Bernhard and the Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia, just as a way of seeing what would happen if they were brought together in a kind of unholy union. I've got a few stories that are modeled on songs and a few others modeled on early modern texts. I really like to read, and read a lot, and tend to think of writing as something that participates in a conversation, which means my stories and books are always talking to other books and other genres.


Q.A number of your stories, starting with the very first one in Altmann's Tongue, end the instant before a likely act of violence -- the knife or the gun is raised, the condemned man about to hang. What appeals to you about this type of ending?

A. I like thinking about what leads people up to a moment of dilemma, the kind of progression that leads us to situations that are devastatingly difficult. I also very much like what it does to the reader, the way it leaves the reader suspended between awful possibilities, the way it allows the story to go on eating away at the reader afterward. The virtuality of that impending violence, in combination with the words and with the reader, ends up creating a very different kind of circuit than if the act had been carried through in one way or another.

----Also, someone probably drew Freytag's Pyramid on the board for me one too many times in high school. I was told so many times that any good story followed that Freytagian structure (Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denoument) that I had decided by the time I was in college that I wanted to write _anything but_ that sort of story. So I began to experiment with what I could do without certain elements of traditional story form. That "doing without", as an act of subtraction or amputation, was very important to me.

----It's hard to understand now (anticipating a little the next question here) the impact that Carver and minimalism in general had on my generation of writers. Many of us were looking for alternatives to traditional story form. There'd been, of course, the metafictionalists, who I also liked, but generally their way of approaching things was by expansion, by taking a traditional form and overloading it, and that traditional form was still, at least for most of them, at the heart of their work. They were obsessed with traditional forms, with myths, etc., and attempted to use those forms against themselves, so it was like they were hauling the history of literature along with them. There are exceptions to that, of course--William Gass's "The Pedersen Kid" anticipated a kind of interest in philosophical lessness as did certain of Robert Coover's "Seven Exemplary Fictions." But, generally speaking, the so-called literary field at the moment I was growing up artistically had expansive maximalist metafiction on the one hand and 1950s-style traditional relationship stories on the other hand.

----What made those first two Carver books exciting for us at that moment was their willingness to do without certain things; they challenged traditional literature in ways that I hadn't really seen before. Of course, later I realized that there were people like James Purdy who, in his stories, had already blazed a trail, but at the time it felt very fresh, very new. I still remember the first Carver story I read, which was "Nobody Said Anything." At first I hated it because of what it did to me and how it didn't fit into my notion of story, but I very quickly grew to admire. He was simply not taking advantage of certain effects--getting rid of dialogue tags, using repetition like a hammer, flattening out the language, doing away with interior mental space, limiting flashbacks and time shifts--and that active denial allowed different things to come out. He was also sometimes truncating things--take for instance the ending of "Tell the Women We're Going" which gathers an incredible amount of the story into the final short paragraph in a way that completely wrecks traditional narrative form--the act of violence becomes replicated in a kind of formal act. What minimalism at its best taught writers like me was how not to take the elements of the story for granted and how to be actively curious about what might happen when you began to depart, sometimes in very subtle ways, from traditional narrative structure. Minimalism at its worse, though, was too easy to imitate and led to a kind of formula that was probably even less interesting than unthought usage of traditional structures. I think the literary landscape has changed enough that it's almost possible to make sense, or even remember, the impact those stories had then; if you're reading Carver today, they're not, in a sense, the same stories. Instead they're now part of the tradition to be fought against.

----And of course this is all complicated by revelations about the degree to which Gordon Lish edited Carver. I guess my feeling about that is that those stories that were important to me as a young writer wouldn't have had had much of an effect on me if they'd been published in the non-Lish edited form. In fact, having looked over the early versions of those stories in the Lilly Library archives, I don't think they would have had any impact on me at all.


Q.Speaking of Carver, your name pops up every couple years when another story is published questioning how much credit Raymond Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, deserves for Carver's first books (you're quoted in the Times Online last year saying "“One can argue with the extent of Lish’s revisions but the majority of the unedited stories can only damage Carver’s reputation if published in their original form.") How did you get caught up in that imbroglio? What's the latest, esp. in terms of the potential publication of the draft version of "What We Talk About..."?

A. When the Lilly Library first bought Lish's archives I applied for a grant to study them, and received it. So I spent two weeks going through largely unsorted boxes of materials, looking very closely at Carver's originals, Lish's marks and the revisions. I looked closely at correspondence as well. I also looked at revisions he'd done of other writers--Barry Hannah's "Ray" for instance, or Mary Robison's work. Afterward, I wrote a long article on his revision of Carver which I'd shared with someone putting together a volume of essays on Carver. We were talking about the article, with him considering it for his volume (though it still needed some revision), when Tess Gallagher heard about what I was doing and had her lawyer threaten me with a suit if I published the article. I tried to communicate with her, without much success. Since it was a kind of side project for me, I let it go. When New York Times Magazine decided to do something, Dan Max contacted me and I sent him my article and research to give him a sense of what was in the Lilly Library and whether it was worth pursuing. He went on to explore everything in depth and it person and drew his own conclusions, but also mentioned me in his article. Ever since then, whenever the subject comes up in the press, someone contacts me to see what I think.

----I think, as I've said publicly, that the draft version of "What We Talk About..." is not a fraction as interesting as the later, edited version. I don't think it's a good idea to publish it, that it will dilute Carver's reputation. The worst of the draft stories read like strong student work. I also think If it's going to be done, I think it should be done by a university press and with a scholarly apparatus that looks closely at the differences and thinks about them seriously.


Q.The mythology of the American West is central to your work. To what extent were such archetypes part of your upbringing as a Mormon in Utah? What were your favorite Westerns as a child? And now?

A. I only started to write about the West once I moved away from Utah, when I could have a perspective on the place. While I was in Utah, I only seemed to write work that was set in Europe, if it had a setting at all. Now I seem to go back and forth between the West, more distant locales, and imaginary places. I do think that attitudes from the West are very important both to my work and to myself as a person, that I was very much formed by growing up in the West, by Utah. And of course Mormonism is a very Western religion.

----I didn't really watch Westerns as a child--I was more interested in watching films that would take me out of my current locale; I was part of a Democratic family living in very Republican Utah, so always felt semi-alienated from the culture around me. By now I've seen a fair number of Westerns, lots of John Ford and Howard Hawkes movies in particular since my partner likes them. I like them too but I'm not drawn toward them nearly as much as I am to other sorts of movies, such as certain noirs and things like Fritz Lang's The Testament of Doctor Mabuse.


Q.Read any good books lately?

A. I just read Herman Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" and liked two of the three sections a lot. And Joe Hill's "Twentieth Century Ghosts," which is very nice. I've been reading a lot of Muriel Spark lately who I really like, also Darcy Steinke's "Jesus Saves" and a collection of Daniil Kharms' writing. There are probably a few other things I'm forgetting.


Q.In your afterword to the paperback of Altmann's Tongue, written in 2002, you talk about your experience as bishopric counselor in the Mormon church. And you say that in your religious counseling, you sometimes felt you played the part of a Lacanian analyst, silent, a reflector to allow people to see themselves, or, what was more often the case, to "begin the process of constructing a self to see." This is related to your depiction of violence. You said in the same afterward you want your writing to present violence as "neutral and blank and indifferent." And elsewhere you responded to critics who find your writing monstrous, that "what [readers] really fear is what they see of themselves in the stories." Do you still feel this way? Has your work since then pursued any objectives that might be incompatible with said indifference?

A. I feel very distant from that other existence, with my life having gone through a lot of changes since and my having left the Mormon church in the meantime. But yes, that notion of blankness and neutrality is something I'm still interested in. I think some of my more recent work (particularly the stories about young girls abandoned by adults, such as "The Ex-Father") has started to position the reader differently and to bring a different kind of emotional resonance to bear. The idea of story as reflector is still there but it's no longer so reflective--if it's a mirror, it's a mirror that is veined and scratched and foxed. And that can bend and cast light oddly as well. I've become, in more recent work, very interested in the process of telling a story and in the relationship of a storyteller to an imagined or real audience. That's something I've always been somewhat interested in--it comes up in "Altmann's Tongue" in the story "The Munich Window" for instance--but it's taken a more prominent role in my next book of stories (not out until 2009) while some of the other issues have taken a back seat. I've been also reading a lot more phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty in particular, so have been thinking a lot more explicitly about issues of perception and its relationship both to consciousness and the body. That's probably most visible in the ways I choose to describe things.


Q.A quote from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts: "The status of the unconscious, which, as I have shown, is so fragile on the ontic plane, is ethical." I wonder if this applies to work such as yours, so profoundly regulated by the unconscious, and in which the ontic plane is indeed a pretty damn shaky place to be. In your Storyquarterly interview with Ben Marcus some years ago, when you came to the question of ethics, you said, essentially, that people shouldn't confuse a murder in a book with one in real life. Which jibes well enough with the Lacan quote. But if writing is an ethical act, what does such an ethics consist of? What is ethical writing?

A. I'm afraid the question of what ethical writing is has become less rather than more clear to me as time has gone on. In terms of the other issues, I've always been skeptical of the notion of the unconscious, even though it's hard to formulate any sort of viable alternative. I think I see consciousness as a kind of membrane between the chaos inside and the chaos outside and as such more of an interface than something inhabited. It's something that allows us to position one chaos in relation to the other and filter them, but I think that if I'm anything at all I'm that inner chaos rather than the means of processing it, and the very means of processing it leads to a misunderstanding about who or what we are. And yet I wouldn't think about that inner chaos as being the unconscious exactly--it's not structured in the way the unconscious claims to be, or if it is it is only secondarily. Being human is a misunderstanding, but it's a misunderstanding that we can't do without. But that's not it either, exactly. The problem comes in using consciousness to think about consciousness, but it's very difficulty to get around that as well--though there might be a way to get somewhere by performing a short-circuit, which is what I think someone like Artaud or (in a very different way) Deleuze attempts to do.

----In terms of ethics, I've stopped worrying about whether my writing will be perceived as ethical and have become more focused on whether I am willing to take responsibility for it, whether it is ethical or not. I was very lucky, in a way, to have people object very vehemently to my work very early on, and to have been in danger of losing my job over my writing. What that made be feel was that my writing actually mattered enough that people might try to punish me for it. Which in turn made me feel like I had to be willing to stand behind what I wrote in a serious way or simply not write at all. It's a terrible thing to say, but I would give up nearly anything for my writing, and have in fact had to give up a fair amount at different times, including a religion, including a marriage. Which probably ultimately makes me a little less human, a little more difficult to live with but, hopefully, it brings something transformative to the page as well.



Some of Evenson's writing available on the Internet: