Fourth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State is ‘An Accounting,’ which originally appeared in Paraspheres, and was reprinted in Best American Fantasy and The Apocalypse Reader.
‘An Accounting’ is a particularly interesting story to discuss for its devices initially for how it is one of the great counterexamples for the all too common ‘creative writing’ trap of, “Show, don’t tell.” Were I going to teach a class in which destroying the myths such logic was forefront, as it likely should be, ‘An Accounting’ makes for a fantastic specimen, in that not only does it succeed (and succeed quite powerfully) while in a telling mode, it also dually (a) like many other telling stories, could not be told via showing, and (b), in a way quite different than many tellings, appears quite often to be showing the whole time.
In the same mode of a great deal of Evenson’s work, the narrator of ‘An Accounting’ is not simply an ‘unreliable narrator,’ in that you are fully sure and surely full that at times this speaker bends the truth, sometimes to break, causing a kind of distance between the narrator and the reader that in many kinds of storytelling, therein creates delight. The narrator here, though, again like many of Evenson’s narrators, is not simply ‘unreliable,’ but more aptly, we have no idea what to believe.
This state of disbelief, herein, goes further in that it is revealed slowly in the story, beginning to make itself evident not via outright shady claims that in usual ‘unreliable’ situations would tip the hat, saying, “Ah, this man is tricky.”
Instead, via the narrator’s telling of what we slowly begin to accrue is simply his version of the story (a version which, within the text, we have no alternative to), we are carried via the narrator’s own plaintive logics and self-renderings, along with him in what, specifically for ‘An Accounting’ is his written testimonial to defend himself against an accused wrongdoing (again, much like one of my favorite Evenson twistings ‘The Installation’).
From the first paragraph of ‘An Accounting’ we follow our narrator’s recitation of a series events of, as the opening sentence calls it “how I became a Midwestern Jesus and the subsequent disastrous events thereby accruing,” a scenario which invokes for the first time in this collection not only Evenson’s bizarre evocations of religion, but also his penchant for the destroyed terrain, and the thriving of the lives that on that kind of terrain might remain (two subjects well explored in Evenson’s library, though never, somehow, in a way that sounds repeated).
The narrator’s interior logic, then, acts almost as its own character in the story⎯a screen between the narrator’s telling and what might have actually happened, the presence of which is where the true magic is awakened, taking the text from simply a rerendering of what is already on its face a highly unusual story (and, if shown rather than told could probably still work out as something worth reading), and into a text of consciousness.
The showing, then, is in the telling⎯done here in sweeping summations of minute moments used for their repercussion and not their stance. To the point that, again, as has occurred in Fugue State previously with ‘A Pursuit,’ we are so encaged by the narrator’s forthcoming tone and manner of posing among his words, that in his subtle shifts and indirect postulations that characterize the exit of the text, we are not only surprised, but we are left not knowing at all how to feel. The doors are open, and the lights are blinking, in a sense, instead of just another closed, weird room where we can put that narration child to bed.
The result is ever much more chilling, and more memorable, and palpable all through the blood⎯which is why Evenson’s texts are the kind that stay clung in a reader’s head long after, not only for what he’s said, but how he’s said it, and what he’s had the magic to make your mind say for him.
(Blake Butler is the author of EVER (Calamari Press 09) and Scorch Atlas (forthcoming from Featherproof Books). His work has been published in Ninth Letter, Fence, Unsaid, New York Tyrant, Willow Springs, etc. He lives in Atlanta.
To read his other reviews of each story in Fugue State, visit his blog: Gilles Deleuze Committed Suicide and So Will Dr Phil.
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