BRIAN EVENSON

October 3, 2003

Brian Evenson is the author of seven books of fiction, including The Wavering Knife, Altmann’s Tongue, Father of Lies, Contagion, and Dark Property. He is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship, an O. Henry Prize, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Third Bed, The Southern Review, and a number of other magazines. He teaches in Brown University’s Creative Writing Program, and is a Senior Editor for Conjunctions.

Introduction

   I am so very pleased that our first guest of the Exhibit X fiction series is Brian Evenson, a writer of supple and incisive fictions for whom the idea of fictional language itself is implicated in every event he describes, from the unexpectedly steadfast friendship—the unforeseen intimacy—that can exist between two assassins even as one of them sews up the other’s eyes, to the cool logic that leads to the foreseeably messy death of several cats on a roadside after they’re tossed from a speeding car. Evidently, Evenson does not shy from the grotesque, from violence, in his fiction. As philosopher Alphonso Lingis notes in the introduction to Evenson’s first collection Altmann’s Tongue, 18 of the 26 stories in the collection are about killing people. Yet while violence is often the subject of Evenson’s work, it is not, it should be noted, in any way celebrated. Rather, throughout his six books of fiction—among them, Altmann’s Tongue, Father of Lies, Contagion, the Din of Celestial Birds, and Dark Property—the violent act becomes a critical lens through which the reader is asked, for a time, to perceive the world through an alternate vocabulary: to consider how we understand violence, make meaning of the meaningless act, through the insufficient terms of the language that we do possess. Violence, Evenson notes, is neither as "glitzily evil" or as "chic" as it’s often presented on tv or in film, but "is neutral and blank and indifferent." It is not, in other words, violence itself that is pathologized under an extreme range of experience in his fictions, but the system of logic that is always at work to make irrevocable acts plausible to those that commit them. As if to highlight this potential that always exists under the surface of social mores, Evenson’s language is inventive, swelled by new words such as "spartled" and "thrumble" and "grabbled"—words that have often been spliced together from ones we know or think we know, as if these new expressions have always existed, have been preparing to reveal themselves from out of the shadows. His writing—as equally bleak and eerie as it is "resplendently unsettling," as one reviewer remarked—is a careful weapon through which he delicately excises and excoriates the potential for the unforgivable moment, the irrevocable act, just out of our sightline which, within the space of a breath, turns up beneath our heels. One thing becomes clear in Evenson’s fiction: violence is not separate, it is not "other" to common experience even if we try to set it apart and distance ourselves. One reviewer writes: "In [Evenson’s] troubling accounts of human nature, one will not find that nothing is sacred, but rather that there is an immense holiness in the act of realizing that each individual is contaminated, and that no one is truly contained." It is this double bind in Evenson’s fiction that permits the narrator of the story "Altmann’s Tongue"—after he’s killed both Horst and Altmann and, it would seem, eaten Altmann’s tongue—to speak the language of birds as Horst promised even while "smelling his foul feather and flesh…to stutter, spatter a path through the branches of trees" and spring "fluttering into blank sky." Please welcome Brian Evenson tonight…..