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Brian Evenson's most recent book is Father of Lies (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998; to order, please go here), a novelistic critique of religious corruption. He is also the author of three collections of short fiction, Prophets and Brothers (1997), The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) and Altmann's Tongue (Knopf 1994). After publishing Altmann's Tongue while a professor at Brigham Young University, he was asked to discontinue publishing fiction or risk his status both in the university and in the Mormon Church. Evenson is currently a professor of creative writing and critical theory at Oklahoma State University. He is the recipient of a 1995 NEA Fellowship and a 1998 O. Henry Award. |
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To render a violent act in language is not at all the same as committing a violent act. The writing itself is not violent, but rather precise, measured, controlled, in the grip of certain arbitrary but self-consistent rules. Only rarely does real violence become endowed with aesthetic qualities. Like religion, language does violence to the immanent world by forcing the objects of that world to be understood in terms of generalities, by stripping them of their specificities and categorizing them. And this sort of violence is in everything. He grabbed the boy's mouth, opened it and tried to look in, stretching the jaws apart until the boy began to cry, his tonsils throbbing. Fochs saw his crying as an admission of guilt.
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Chapbook Selections:
The Evanescence of Marion le Goff
Job Eats Them Raw, with the Dogs
Copyright
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