Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "beckett"
The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson (FC2, 2004)
Among the writers we read there are some who entertain us, some we can appreciate but don’t feel any particular affinity with, some we intensely dislike, and some we admire so much we’d like to be them. And then, there is a small category that transcends all the categories above: the writers we are simply in awe of. I had such a feeling when I read Th. Mann, or Maurice Blanchot. And now—reading Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife.
I should say that I didn’t “like” all the stories in this collection—in fact, I disliked some of them because of their violence and cruelty (though this violence makes me think of Georges Bataille, since in many of the stories it’s directed against the first-person narrator—that is, against the author’s alter ego—and is, therefore, a very different kind of violence that the one in, say, Hollywood movies). One could say that the dismembering of the narrator’s body—a leitmotif in many of these stories—is akin to the falling apart of language and its meaning (sorry for the cliché, but it’s hard to put into a language that doesn’t sound ridiculous the experience of reading these stories). Or, one could say exactly the opposite: that in order for language to be born, the writer has to experience a kind of death: “language being the only thing worth living, or dying, over” (from “One Over Twelve”).
Evenson’s descriptions of the various mutilations of the body are, for me, among the most authentic expressions I’ve ever come across of the attempt to capture a lost sacredness of language (again, the word “sacredness” should be taken here in the sense given to it by Bataille or Blanchot). Another author in whose work I felt a similar authenticity is the poet Ghérasim Luca—not by accident are both Luca and Evenson praised by Gilles Deleuze. Evenson doesn’t have Luca’s stammered language—on the contrary, he is a master of the proper word (i.e., of the perfect word in the right place) but there is a pain coming through the page, which can only originate in the author’s body, and which seals the text with an authenticity that refuses to accept any kind of (mimetic) “representation” of the experience.
But there are also stories in this collection that are extremely funny—a dark humor, to be sure—such as “The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette.” In this story, the characters’ names and “relationships” have a Beckettian absurdness; in other stories this absurdness goes even farther, as the “relationships” are stripped of causality and psychology, and the settings are reduced to their essential elements. It is also interesting that this book is written (for the most part) in two voices: one, infused with Beckettian detachment; and another one, very different, impersonating a Christian, alcoholic, government-hater fundamentalist who, obviously, “doesn’t express the author’s point of view.”
I should say that I didn’t “like” all the stories in this collection—in fact, I disliked some of them because of their violence and cruelty (though this violence makes me think of Georges Bataille, since in many of the stories it’s directed against the first-person narrator—that is, against the author’s alter ego—and is, therefore, a very different kind of violence that the one in, say, Hollywood movies). One could say that the dismembering of the narrator’s body—a leitmotif in many of these stories—is akin to the falling apart of language and its meaning (sorry for the cliché, but it’s hard to put into a language that doesn’t sound ridiculous the experience of reading these stories). Or, one could say exactly the opposite: that in order for language to be born, the writer has to experience a kind of death: “language being the only thing worth living, or dying, over” (from “One Over Twelve”).
Evenson’s descriptions of the various mutilations of the body are, for me, among the most authentic expressions I’ve ever come across of the attempt to capture a lost sacredness of language (again, the word “sacredness” should be taken here in the sense given to it by Bataille or Blanchot). Another author in whose work I felt a similar authenticity is the poet Ghérasim Luca—not by accident are both Luca and Evenson praised by Gilles Deleuze. Evenson doesn’t have Luca’s stammered language—on the contrary, he is a master of the proper word (i.e., of the perfect word in the right place) but there is a pain coming through the page, which can only originate in the author’s body, and which seals the text with an authenticity that refuses to accept any kind of (mimetic) “representation” of the experience.
But there are also stories in this collection that are extremely funny—a dark humor, to be sure—such as “The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiquette.” In this story, the characters’ names and “relationships” have a Beckettian absurdness; in other stories this absurdness goes even farther, as the “relationships” are stripped of causality and psychology, and the settings are reduced to their essential elements. It is also interesting that this book is written (for the most part) in two voices: one, infused with Beckettian detachment; and another one, very different, impersonating a Christian, alcoholic, government-hater fundamentalist who, obviously, “doesn’t express the author’s point of view.”
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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