Brian Evenson: 'Denarration....you're told something and then it's removed'

The Horror Is What We Don’t Yet Know (and Maybe Never Will): Brian Evenson Interviewed by Rob Goyanes, BOMB Magazine, Jun 25, 2019

One of his books is "Last Days, about an amputee cult who captures an unwitting messiah."

From the interview:

RG
You use repetition, in terms of wording and syntax, to create an unsettling effect. What other devices do you consciously employ to produce this?

BE
Most of my work in revision is about sound and rhythm, trying to figure out what is going to really serve the story. I'm working with those things to try to manipulate the reader. A lot of my work uses a process of “denarration”, by which I mean it presents something, narrates it as if it’s real, then it takes it away. A lot of things are qualified or taken away or compromised, or you're told something and then it's removed. That is a big part of the unsettling effect, of destabilizing the story’s world.

Evenson continues:

"So much fiction has this idea: there's a character, they confront something, they change, and then they're different people. If you're around humans for long enough, you realize that that's the exception rather than the rule. It so rarely happens that people actually change in a meaningful way. I've always been a little skeptical of character development, but then what do you do with fiction? My sense is that maybe it’s about conveying mental states and changing the reader. That, to me, is more important than conveying some kind of change in a character in a world that doesn't look like our world."

This reminds me of what William Maxwell enjoyed in novels (1955)

William Maxwell, in a 1955 speech at Smith College, said: "These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it." (see: The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine. Reprinted in LitHub, January 24, 2024.)

The reader stays to find out whether "there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had." The characters don't know something because "they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you." You're introduced to a character, and "you have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands..." Or: "A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in." Or the narrator "has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront." Or the writer gives special voice, attitude: "A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s." And "the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up." Trust: "If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. ...you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)" As in "the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. ... As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end." Timing: "a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos."

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