Breaking Realism: An Interview with Brian Evenson, Epistemological Terrorist
By Steve D Owen
Author of fifteen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Fugue State, and the novella Baby Leg, winner of the O. Henry Award for his short story “Two Brothers,” the International Horror Guild Award for his story collection The Wavering Knife, and the ALA/RUSA prize for his novel Last Days, Brian Evenson has quickly become one of the most important American writers of our time. Questioning the epistemology posited by Enlightenment philosophers, Evenson’s oeuvre can be taken as a critique on the traditional values of a realist-dominated American literature. While many of his contemporaries simply assume the possibility of human rationality—endlessly repeating the formulaic (and profitable) clichés of free will and epiphany—Evenson takes the epistemological dilemmas delineated by postmodernism seriously. With a jarring brand of intellectual horror, he explores the problems of human perception, language, and the unconscious, and breaks the artificial boundaries between so-called literary fiction and genre.
Steve: Reading Altmann’s Tongue, my first experience of your work, I knew I’d discovered something unique in the literary world—the dark mystery and humor, the visceral use of language to create startling effects. This was powerful writing that unapologetically shocked with inexplicable violence yet ran deep in its epistemological subtext, that respected genre and employed it to its full intellectual potential. What’s it like to be the inspiration of a whole new generation of writers?
Brian: I don’t know how to answer this exactly. I feel at once flattered and a little afraid, like the next step will be for me to be ritually executed and eaten. It also makes me feel older than I want to feel, but maybe that’s a good thing in that it suggests that I might be too tough and stringy to eat, even ritually.
Steve: Unfortunately, stringiness has never been sufficient reason to escape ritual execution, or eating. But I can promise you that your apostles will attempt to tenderize your flesh before taking their first communion. Fortunately, a mallet solves most spiritual problems.
Brian: We should move on. All this talk of food is making me hungry.
Steve: I see your work holding a broken mirror up to reality. I say “broken” because it seems, in principle, your characters have no logical possibility of accessing an objective reality or truth, Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” They are blocked by perception, language, the unconscious. Do you consider your work a critique of literary realism?
Brian: Broken mirror is a nice way to think about it. I think my work has a lot of the qualities of mimetic fiction but that there are irreconcilable differences that exist between us, and that I’m more interested in the way the reflection is fragmented or compromised than I am in what’s reflected. I suppose my work is partly a critique of literary realism, but I also don’t think all that much about literary realism when I’m writing: a good story interested in doing its own thing by whatever means necessary. I’m very interested in trying to sort through the way that consciousness works and the way that perception works, but also interested in intensely questioning epistemology. I guess I see that as being more part of an embodied philosophical conversation than of a literary conversation. One of the reasons I’m not all that interested in literary realism is that I think it rarely approaches issues or questions that I find all that interesting. The good realistic writers do approach such questions. I’m very fond, for instance, of a couple of William Trevor stories, but I’d also argue that their realism is somewhat beside the point: a story like “Miss Smith” is able to do something remarkable with narrative sympathy and do it in such a way that I don’t much care whether the story is realistic or not.
Steve: Part of what makes your fiction epistemological is the prevalence of enigma. Mysterious names, settings, diction, and inexplicable acts of violence all work to defamiliarize readers from their everyday reality. Why is this an important aspect of your work?
Brian: I think if you’re a writer interested in a skeptical notion of epistemology, one in which you come to feel that nothing can ever be truly or completely known (which is what I very much feel), then defamiliarization becomes an important part of the work. It functions on a number of different levels in my fiction, from the simple disorientations of strange names to a more intense questioning of the basic reality of the situation itself. I think that the basis of my work as a whole is a skepticism about “reality,” though that skepticism is sometimes expressed directly and sometimes is simply integrated into whatever is happening.
Steve: Your work destabilizes the enlightenment notion of free will, problematizing the traditional assumption that reason is absolute. John Gardner famously (or infamously) claimed that writers who deny “that human beings have free will can write nothing of interest. Stripped of free will … human beings cease to be of anything more than scientific and sentimental interest.” What’s your response to this argument?
Brian: I actually do think my characters have free will but, as you say, it’s severely destabilized and often they find themselves unable to act, unable to commit one way or another. And obviously if your notion of the world is something subjective and suspect, it puts severe limitations on free will. I guess, I feel that Gardner’s basically a humanist despite his interest in existentialism, and that I tend much more toward nihilism than he does, though I think there’s room for a productive element in nihilism that Gardner probably would not acknowledge. In the Gardner/Gass debates I much more often come down on the side of Gass.
Steve: Can you elaborate on the productive element of nihilism?
Brian: I mean in the way that some contemporary philosophers, Deleuze for instance, talk about positive desire, about thinking about desire as not being something based on a lack. Nihilism too doesn’t have to be based on a sense of absence or lack or negativity, but can be a kind of intense productive force when embraced head on, when you accept that anything you do is built on nothingness and any sort of subjectivity you have is secondary rather than the primary foundation, one that is founded on a void. Either you worry like hell about the fact that you can’t ever know anything for certain and that the ground below your feet is unstable or you try to avoid thinking about it and develop ethical formations on top of it, or you accept the instability and learn to enjoy it, and even learn to deepen that instability in what you’re writing. I think that’s closer to an absurdist anarchistic impulse than to existentialism.
Steve: I think we can safely call Fugue State deeply psychological. Your novella Baby Leg, as well. However, unlike traditional psychological realism, where insights and epiphanies are assumed possible—the traditional narrative arc where characters find solutions, grow and change—your characters become lost in an in-between space of thought. Do you agree that after Altmann’s Tongue your stories have begun to focus more on an exploration of interiority, albeit poststructural?
Brian: Yes, I think that I’ve become more and more interested in interiority. In Altmann’s Tongue I very deliberately didn’t have much interior space, but as my stories have developed and expanded I think they’ve become more reflective. It’s a weird interiority, one that doesn’t accept very much of what many people take for granted about the mind, but it’s still interiority. Or consciousness at least. But whether consciousness really exists, or how it exists, is a very complicated question. I think there’s an argument about the ways that the mind and the world work that develops over the course of Fugue State, but doesn’t develop straightforwardly—the collection provides more of a texture or a structure than an argument.
Steve: Your style of interiority exploits the problems of either-or thinking to great comic effect. I like to refer to it as a comedy of confusion, or a farce of the in-between, and it seems to reflect rather well your general thesis about consciousness—a kind of anti-Cartesian view of the mind—nothing is ever very clear or distinct. It’s not just perception that fails us, but language and logic, too. Furthermore, faith is an artificial solution, leading only to further complication. Since certainty isn’t a realistic option, your stories seem to suggest the best answer is to accept the unknown, embrace absurdity?
Brian: Yes, everything fails us ultimately. And it’s not just that the best answer is to accept the unknown and embrace absurdity—it’s the only answer: ultimately that’s what dying is, despite what we and our religions like to think. There’s just the question of how long you want to put off acknowledging it, and then the question of whether you can effectively acknowledge it and use it as a model for living that can be in some senses positive rather than negative. I’m very anti-Cartesian, but many of my characters, at least initially, are not.
Steve: Many writers privilege realism as the foundation of good storytelling, authentic literature. They believe it’s wise for new writers to study in realist programs (rather than experimental) in order to provide the fundamentals an innovator may wish to later deviate from. Putting aside the controversial notion of “foundations,” do you believe realism is a necessary, or at least pragmatic, starting point for burgeoning irrealists?
Brian: No, I don’t. I think that’s a false notion that comes to us from the visual arts, where it might be slightly more relevant (but even there I’m suspicious of it). I think realism is a genre and that it can be learned from, but I do not feel it has any more significance than any other large-scale genre. Only if you decide in advance that realism should be privileged will it seem all-important, but I’d also think, if I were a young writer, about what the cultural forces are that are telling me that realism is the most important genre, and about how else they’re trying to funnel my work and my thinking. All my early training, in terms of reading and, before I got to college, in terms of gaining ideas about writing, was in the fantastic (Kafka and Poe on the one hand and Michael Moorcock and Gene Wolfe on the other) and I think that was incredibly useful. Later when I was an undergraduate, the most important writers I read in terms of my development as a writer were probably Samuel Beckett, J.G. Ballard and Donald Barthelme (though there were other people that were also important). I think I could make a convincing but specious argument based on that for the importance of reading writers in college whose last name begins with “B”, and it’d be just about as valid as the argument for the primacy of realism that people tend to make…
Steve: I know quite a few poets and neo-Platonists who would find your B argument quite compelling…
But I think the idea of control here is important. Many young writers today, in my experience, are naïve or apathetic to postmodern notions of ideology. Of how certain cultural forces, as you say, benefit from passing themselves off as natural or absolute. For example, although the epiphany works well functionally—creating a certain brand of narrative movement—the ideology behind the form, both religious and economic, is problematic. In a recent article in The Writer’s Chronicle, “Odds on Ends,” Molly Giles admits quite blatantly the commercial and ideological reasons behind the enduring support for the epiphany (and positive endings, in general):
Fiction is supposed to be, forgive me, less shitty than life. Better than life. It is supposed to make more sense than life. That’s one of the reasons we read, one of the reasons we write. We want to feel we are forgiven and that there is hope, and the ending of choice in today’s fiction is the ending that offers both. Redemption is and always has been a staple of American fiction and—and not to sound too cynical—it is oh-so marketable. A good end—in my family, we’ve always said, “No one comes to a good end”—is supposed to be spiritually uplifting.
Giles’ honesty is quite admirable, but I believe she is more cynical than she thinks. Do you find it shocking to see the profit motive and Redemption posited so easily in the same sentence? Do you think Giles inadvertently sheds light on the reason so many MFA programs are realist in orientation, prescribing the “manual techniques” that you so humorously satirize in “Story Barkers: A Report from the Field?”
Brian: I think one of the banes of fiction is the stylistic trick that works well and remains unquestioned for a whole generation of writers, whether that’s the Modernist epiphany or the slightly uplifted lyrical ending that minimalism offered or whatever. I think it’s good for writers to learn how to write and use certain techniques, but when a writing workshop becomes a forum for turning out not only a certain kind of writer but a certain kind of story, over and over again, it’s very problematic. There’s nothing wrong with epiphany, but nothing right about it either: in some contexts it’ll still work and I still read writers who surprise me by making it work. But it’s something that I think should only be used with a great amount of skepticism on the part of the writer.
Steve: Many of your stories are about people who commit extreme acts of violence. “Gravediggers” comes to mind, as does your novella, Dark Property, and of course, your novel Last Days. The violence your characters commit, although disturbing to the reader, often seems disconnected to them, matter of fact, banal. It seems to function the opposite of the violence found in Flannery O’Connor’s work—in her world violence is a kind of ontological slap in the face that opens up the possibility of epiphany—in your world, violence typically begets more violence, leads only to further dehumanization. It’s a kind of Hobbsian world through Poe’s eyes. Is this your view of the world?
Brian: I’m incredibly skeptical of epiphany as a notion and yes, my view of the world, despite my being a fairly happy person, is that we’re rarely more than a few degrees of separation away from being disposable characters in Lord of the Flies. I do think that violence is something that replicates itself endlessly and dehumanizes us severely in the process, whether we’re the recipient or the inflictor. I think my fiction is also interested in trauma and in how humans respond in extreme situations—extreme situations tend to strip away all the niceties that we use to protect ourselves and allow people to react more nakedly. I haven’t thought extensively about Hobbes being an influence, but certainly I’m sympathetic with his thinking on religion. Poe was a big influence, as was Meryvn Peake, Kafka, Beckett, Cioran, the absurd tradition, etc.
Steve: Depicting acts of violence in a frank and graphic manner is a controversial issue in American literature. At the recent AWP in Denver, a panel of speakers on violence in fiction argued that imagined or implied violence, a minimalist approach to violence, was preferable to a maximalist, ornately detailed style. This view appeared to be motivated by the odd presupposition that there is something inherently immoral, inhuman (anti-humanist) about fictional depictions of graphic violence. Of course, the panel had a hard time explaining the essential morality of Cormac McCarthy’s work, and throwing their hands up at the contradiction, recited the unfortunate cliché: “I know pornography when I see it.” While I appreciate the humanist distaste for violent “pornography,” I also feel a minimalist approach may inadvertently sanitize violence, neuter horrific acts into a more consumable, conservative form. Isn’t there a literary and ethical value in discomforting readers?
Brian: I’ve done both things in my work, had stories that approach violence fairly minimally and had other stories that approach it fairly graphically, and everything in between. Dark Property has some extremely graphic moments, but they’re told in a style so odd that the effect is very strange. My “Gravediggers” is pretty explicit in terms of the way that it describes the main characters trying to force the body into a hole. Some people who like my other work were somewhat put off by that story. Other pieces of mine very deliberately pass over the violence or shorthand it. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do violence, but I do think it’s something that should feel justified or necessary in the context of the piece itself. Otherwise I think the risk is less that it feels pornographic than that it’ll feel boring. I’d say the same about any theme or, really, any element of fiction: for instance, there are some stories I read that benefit from thick, lush description and that I love precisely because of that; other stories only need a suggestion or shorthand of that. Same with character. Same with plot or mood. The rightness or wrongness of such things cannot really can be determined outside of their immediate fictional context, outside of how they work in a different story.
The other thing I’d add specifically to violence—and I’ve talked about this extensively elsewhere so won’t go into it in great detail here—is that the dilemma is a very complicated one. On the one hand there is a profound difference between a representation of violence and actual physical violence; on the other if one is trying to do work that is intensive, as I am, part of the premise of the work is that reading is in some sense an experiential and phenomenal activity and that you can, to some degree, allow a reader to experience a dampened-down version of violence and trauma. If there’s not something at stake for the reader in what’s being represented—as implemented by style, rhythm and all the other ways in which a textual event is conveyed—then what’s the point?
Steve: Your style is often compared to Poe, Bowles, Kafka. How do you view yourself as a writer within the context of American literature, world literature? Who are your biggest influences?
Brian: Kafka and Beckett were probably the most important writers for me, partly because they’re both excellent and partly because I came to both of them at just the right time. Bowles I read pretty late, but very much admired him and I find we seem to have a similar worldview. Poe I read early and I think he was important to me, but not in ways that I realized at the time. Thomas Bernhard was extremely important to me, and still is. But also writers a little farther off the beaten track have been important to me, people like Leonardo Sciascia or Marie Redonnet or Antoine Volodine or Dambudzo Marechera. Also genre writers like Philip Dick and Dashiel Hammett. Peter Straub comes to mind, as does Henry James, Emmanuel Bove, and tons of other people.
I guess I’m much more likely to think of the community of writers as something that exists outside of national boundaries rather than thinking of myself as an American writer. That’s partly because I think that many of my concerns don’t fit well with the dominant trend of American fiction, at least as it’s understood by the New York Times and the establishment, and partly because the writers I feel closest to are often from elsewhere. That’s not to say I don’t admire a lot of American writers currently writing today.
Steve: Who are some of the current American writers you admire?
Brian: Any time I start mentioning American writers I leave someone out by accident, so this is a very provisional list. Cormac McCarthy was very important to me at a particular moment, particularly his novel Outer Dark. I’m always interested in what Shelley Jackson and Kelly Link are doing, as well as people like Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus. There’s a young writer named Brian Conn with one book out, called The Fixed Stars, that I think is amazingly good. Also Blake Butler, Joanna Ruocco, Paul LaFarge, and many, many others.
Steve: While many postmodernists come off as overly experimental or esoteric, you have the unique ability of churning theory into entertaining fiction. How do you make philosophy stimulating rather than abstruse?
Brian: I think it’s because I never start with an abstract idea. I never sit down with the idea that I’m going to use a piece of fiction to convey something theoretical. The fiction is not an illustration of a theoretical idea but rather an embodiment of things that I think about and am obsessed with, with my phobias and fears as well as with my own philosophical and pseudo-philosophical notions of the world. I tend to extrapolate from my own sense of the world and experience, so see the work itself as something that’s affective and intensive, and thus anything that’s theoretical has to be embodied, has to come naturally from the world of the fiction itself. I’d like to think there’s something really at stake in my fiction, and that what’s at stake is far from being academic.
Steve: You create a unique brand of black comedy, blending distinct elements such as horror and farce. Your novel Last Days is an exemplar of this hybrid style—you masterfully weave a journey narrative together with threads of horror, noir, farce, as well as a subtext of religious extremism. Other than demonstrating the literary potential of genre fiction, what are your primary interests in hybridization?
Brian: I think that my mind has more of a tendency toward synthesis than toward categorization, and I think Last Days serves as a pretty good reflection (with cracks) of some of my different reading interests. I do it, I guess, because it feels natural: it’s less a theoretical interest than a mode of working. I’m glad you feel it works well in Last Days. The novella is my favorite form (the short novel’s pretty good, too), and I think that something about the economy of the form in relation to the novel allows for a kind of tight philosophical exploration that you rarely see in the novel and that you don’t have room for in the short story.
Steve: Are certain genres (e.g., horror, noir, the detective story) particularly apt forms for exploring epistemological issues?
Brian: I think (as Brian McHale mentions) detective and mystery fiction already has a natural inclination toward epistemological issues, though most often the destabilizing potential of this isn’t fully tapped except in writers that are operating on the edge of the genre, such as Leonardo Sciascia or Carlo Emilio Gadda or Marie Redonnet. I’ve been playing with the tropes of detective fiction since my first book, which included “The Sanza Affair” and find it an extremely productive forum for epistemological and even ontological issues.
Steve: Peter Straub mentions in the forward of Last Days that a film may be in the works. I would love to see your work brought to the screen. What projects are in discussion or development?
Brian: Things are still possible for a film of Last Days, but my experience with film is that it takes the right combination of luck and fate to make something happen. There are several short films out there: a short film of “Altmann’s Tongue,” two of “Hebe Kills Jarry,” one of “The Father, Unblinking” that’s very nicely and very professionally done, a few others. Someone is working on a screenplay for “An Accounting.” Someone else is doing a treatment for The Open Curtain—what I’ve seen of it so far, I very much like.
Steve: I’m still hoping for a Lynch/Evenson collaboration, but I’ll definitely try to find the short films you’ve mentioned.
Brian: Some are tough to find, but they’re out there. They occasionally pop up on You Tube.
Steve: Thanks for taking the time out for an interview with Flatmancrooked, Brian! It’s been an honor. I can assure you that your fans will be anxiously looking forward to your next collection/novel (any word on your next big release date?). And that we probably won’t try to cannibalize or tenderize you until you’ve passed on, or at least lost the ability to type.
Brian: You’re welcome. I’m working on a novel right now, though it may be a while before it’s done, perhaps a year or two. I’ve got more than half a collection of stories done as well, and some contract work out soon. And I hope it’ll be a while before I lose the ability to tpye tyep type.
