II.
I do not know exactly how Evenson creates these stories, whether he plots them out or works sentence to sentence, discovering the stories as he goes. It may not matter. What I do believe is that it is from his sentences that the most interesting forms of dissociation arise, as the stories seem to progress terribly from one sentence to the other, each sentence unable to do anything but lead inexorably to the next. The experience of reading these sentences is pleasantly exhausting, like climbing up and over an enormous wall only to find another wall beyond. The language often holds the reader at a distance, requiring one appreciate both its aesthetic value and the plot it narrates before continuing.
Consider “Younger,” the first story of the collection, which introduces the fugue state into which most of Evenson’s characters eventually descend. Here, a younger sister attempts to accurately recall a relatively minor childhood event that has since nearly destroyed her life. One morning before school, she and her sister are left home alone unexpectedly by their father, who explains to them two rules that they are to follow: they are to leave for school when the oven timer rings and they are not to open the door for anyone. The rules seem simple to the girls, and after their father leaves, they engage in perhaps the most fanciful play of their childhood. They not only dress themselves as ponies, but also feel as if they have transformed their physical bodies. According to the younger sister, they “were building a whole world up around them, full of things more vivid and slippery than anything the real world could offer.” Their play is made possible, obviously, by the absence of any adults, but the magic ceases with the near-simultaneous happening of two events. The oven timer goes off, signaling that they are to leave for school. Immediately after, the doorbell rings once, twice, freezing the girls in the kitchen, trapping them between the first of their father’s commands and the second:
They waited awhile for the doorbell to ring a third time. When it did not, her older sister whispered Come on. But they had taken only a few steps when they heard not ringing but a hard, loud knock: four sharp, equally spaced blows right in a row. And that stopped them just as much as if someone had yanked back on their bridles.
The moment passes quickly and the knocker leaves, but the terror of the stranger’s knocking at the door violently imprints itself upon the psyche of the younger sister. It is this event that traumatizes her for the rest of her life. Their being alone without their parents, originally a boon to their imaginations, transforms into a curse.
Interestingly, the first sentence of the story tells us of this dissociation, explaining the end result even before we know the cause: “Years later, she was still calling her sister, trying to understand what exactly had happened.” Within two words, Evenson establishes temporal distance, separating the main character from her past, even as she struggles to regain it, to control it, before completely expelling it from her mind in hopes of healing herself:
Even years later, she continued to feel that if only she could understand exactly what had happened, what it all meant, she would see what had gone wrong and could correct it, could, like the older sister, muffle her feelings, begin to feel things less and, in the end, perhaps not feel anything at all.
It is important to note this temporal distance, again mentioned in the phrase “years later,” because the retelling of the event is, despite the third person narrator, from the perspective of the younger sister, and therefore flawed, unclear, fraught with terror, hazy with the passage of time and the alternating cycles of repression and neurosis it has weathered.
Evenson invokes the younger sister’s constant cycling through successful repression and debilitating neurosis by the rhythm of his sentences, which progress through numerous introductory phrases, nonrestrictive phrases, parenthetical phrases, compound predicates, narrative asides, and other syntactical turns, as though the sentences and the thoughts behind them were constantly doubling back upon themselves, revising themselves, each new syntactical complication an attempt to create a pathway towards the relief the younger sister hoped to find. “Younger,” in this sense, represents the tamest dramatization of the fugue state, easing the reader into what will become a remarkable reading experience.
If “Younger” hints at dissociation, then the last story of the collection, titled “The Adjudicator,” maximizes it in all possible ways. In “The Adjudicator,” the narrator and the few surviving remnants of humanity have lived through a “conflagration” and now exist in a post-apocalyptic landscape, farming for sustenance, trading services and goods, and answering to their appointed leader, Rasmus. The narrator begins the story, saying, “We have been some time putting our community back into a semblance of body and shape, and longer still sifting the living from the dead.” The narrator, however, appears apart from both the living and the dead: he is completely hairless, has powerful healing abilities, which he claims to have received after emerging from the fires, and carries with him a violent past. Rasmus and the community tolerate his usefulness (he is handy with a hatchet and a plough), but in many ways he exists on the fringe of the community due to the rumors circulating about his powers. That is, until one day, when Rasmus inexplicably orders him to kill another hairless man named Halber. When the narrator disobeys Rasmus, violence descends upon the town, again rending it apart.
What Evenson has created here is a world separated from its previous version, peopled by men who are mere shadows of their former selves, men easily limbed by the sharp blade of a hatchet. We get a sense of the vast gap between past and present when Rasmus questions the narrator as to his trade, and the narrator responds simply that he is a farmer. But Rasmus asks again, saying he meant before the conflagration. The narrator avoids the question, but later reveals himself to his readers:
I had no former profession. I was dissolute, poisonous to myself in any and all ways. At a certain moment, I reached the point where I would have done anything at all to have what I wanted, and indeed I often did. Many of the particulars have faded or vanished from my memory or been pushed deeper down until they can no longer be felt. There was one person, someone I was, in my own way, deeply in love with, whom I betrayed. Someone else, of a different gender, whose self I stripped away nerve by nerve.
The narrator’s survival of the conflagration represents a dissociative fugue: he has found himself living a new life in a new body with little memory of the past. But like someone in a fugue state, he cannot completely escape reality (in his case, the pain that he has inflicted upon others). It is Rasmus who breaks through the narrator’s defensive amnesia by asking him to murder Halber. The narrator unhappily notes in response, “I felt as if most of my old self had been slowly torn free of the rest of me, and I was not eager to have it pressed back against me again.” He allows Halber to go free, but later that night he is confronted by the noise of Rasmus and his men and the “indifferent, dull sounds of metal slipping into flesh,” as they attack Halber, leaving him to die in a nearby ditch. In retaliation, the narrator sharpens his hatchet yet again.
The voice of the narrator in this story strikes me as emotionless, blunt, speaking the measured language of a man who has “no strong moral objection to murder pure and simple.” It is quite different from the stuttering, nearly frantic language that we saw in “Younger,” and yet in its own way it is also evidence of the narrator’s neurosis. The narrator of “The Adjudicator” uses language to set himself apart, to control conversations, to manipulate the way his story appears. In the above excerpt, we can see how his confession gives weight to the nature of his past actions while, perhaps conveniently, failing to give the gruesome details. Whether or not he truly remembers the particulars hardly matters (though his later actions suggest that he has not forgotten). It’s how he confesses this gap in his memory, with emotional coldness and a lack of concern for those he harmed, that reveals the effort he has spent to distance himself from his former self.
And yet what is surprising about “The Adjudicator” is how Evenson adjusts the language momentarily to reveal that, despite the great amount of control the narrator exerts over the telling of his story, there is a fault in the narrator’s careful construction of his personality, one that leads to his eventually backsliding into violence. The fault is apparent in his continued fascination with the human arm he unearths in his field, one of the many limbs he had previously sown there. The narrator first describes the arm as “blackened,” and then it appears again later in the narrative, having “surged up under the sharp prow of the plough… its palm open in appeal.” The narrator ignores this appeal and quickly buries it before Rasmus and his men approach. But he cannot leave it alone for long:
After they had gone, I dug the arm up again and examined it, trying to determine how long it had been rotting and whether I had been the one to lop it free. In the end, I found myself no closer to an answer than in the beginning. Finally I could think to do nothing but plough it back under again.
We do see the narrator’s obsession with the severed arm, and from that we understand the real consequence of his fugue state: he will eventually emerge from it and become the terrible person he once was. Fittingly, the image of the severed arm reappears at the end of the story, not as a blackened, isolated thing, but as the twin, freshly hacked forearms of the dying Rasmus.