Fugue StateBrian Evenson Coffee House Press |
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Reviewed by Ryan Call
I.
In seeking entry to the stories of Brian Evenson, readers have invoked the names of a variety of significant authors, including Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Others have considered genre, have spoken of horror and mystery and detective fiction, noting Evenson’s uncanny ability to bend these distinctions to his will. Still others have focused upon Evenson’s careful, scalpelar use of language, how he neatly manages to cut away the fascia of normal life to expose its most brutal and frightening parts. As evidence, consider the original jacket copy of Altmann’s Tongue, Evenson’s first collection, which states, “In Evenson’s world, all moral and all social categories dissolve. Only diction and syntax count–and they count only insofar as they might succeed in freeing utterance to enact itself at its most cruel.” Given Evenson’s tendency to write of graphic, messy violence, his painstakingly rendered sentences are almost surprising for their neatness.
I am familiar with these previous points of entry, but I also appreciate how a phrase within a text flares upon the brain, how that in turn leads to a string of connections that influence the reader’s experience of the text. In Fugue State, Evenson’s latest collection, the phrase that seemed to finally make cohesive my reading experience, to at last offer me one way into the book, arrived during the opening sentence of the titular story:
I had, Bentham claimed, fallen into a sort of fugue state, in which the world moved past me more and more rapidly, a kind of blur englobing me at every instant.
I do not mean to suggest that I had failed to enjoy the stories before that moment, but that a click happened in my thinking about the book as a whole: I realized that I did not completely understand the term “fugue state.” I had simply overlooked its importance, having felt satisfied with my vague, incorrectly contextualized definition: a fugue state reminded me of fog, of overcast weather, for some reason.
Evenson’s Fugue State shares its name with that of a mental disorder called Dissociative Fugue, formerly known as Psychogenic Fugue, the sufferers of which fall into a temporary state that often sends them wandering about unaware of their personal identities. According to the DSM-IV, diagnostic criteria for this condition include the following:
A. The predominant disturbance is sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one’s customary place of work, with the inability to recall one’s past.
B. Confusion about personal identity or assumption of a new identity (partial or complete).
C. The disturbance does not occur exclusively during the course of Dissociative Identity Disorder and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., temporal lobe epilepsy).
D. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Given the nature of the nineteen stories in the collection, I find it hard to avoid holding them against this diagnostic template, a confession that brings me at last to my disclaimer: any further discussion of Dissociative Fugue, neurosis, amnesia, and so on, is meant only to reconnect to the above initial point of entry. I do not want to contend that Evenson set out to write a collection that follows neatly the prescription of a psychology textbook, but instead I want to show that the stories in Fugue State fictionalize many kinds of dissociation going far beyond the merely clinical: a father’s mental disease destroys his ability to speak, causing him to realize that “language was starting to slip in his mouth”; an ambassador of sorts wanders through a post-apocalyptic landscape, his teachings unintentionally giving rise to cannibalism; another father, having divorced his wife, slowly withdraws from his daughters’ lives; a sculptor impassively renders into a blurry pencil sketch the ever-shifting lines of his dying wife’s face; a man, having murdered his mentor, finds passage aboard a freighter populated by the dead. The internal struggles of Evenson’s characters often lead to violent, erratic, and dysfunctional behavior, though they are just as often cast into equally terrifying situations by forces beyond their control. They trade places with one another, change personalities, forget their identities. They struggle to communicate with others, to find their place in the normal world, to deny the inevitability of their death. These are stories in which personal neurosis cleaves through one’s identity as easily as a hatchet through bone, and Evenson is just the man to put such experiences into language.