Altmann's Tongue By Brian Evenson Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1994. 239 pages. ISBN: 0-67942-912-3 Suggested retail price: $22.00 (US)
Reviewed by: Michael Austin

Well, I for one am dying to talk about Brian Evenson and his book, Altmann's Tongue which I just finished reading, courtesy of fellow listmember (and Santa Barbara University Ward Member) Eric Hirschmann, who, months ago, had the foresight to use his Inter Library Loan privileges to order the only copy of the book in the UC library system. Though I have not officially contracted to review the book or anything, I do have a few thoughts about it (and the surrounding bruhaha) that I would like to post. Call it an unofficial review.

First off, I would have to agree with others who have read the book in stating that it contains some of the most violent images that I have ever encountered in literature: in the 27 stories and one novella that constitute this collection, we are introduced to a stepson who kills his stepfather by shoving bees down his throat, a father who drives his daughter to suicide by tormenting her with evidence of his having abused her as a child, and a host of characters who wound, kill, and maim each other for what appear to be very flimsy reasons -- or for no reason whatsoever. I would highly reccommend that anyone who is disturbed by graphic scenes of violence and evil simply not read Altmann's Tongue. This is not a book for everyone.

However, I would also stop far short from condemning the book completely because of this violent content. In my opinion, committing violence is generally an immoral thing, but writing about violence can often be a very moral thing. When I encounter any text that contains violent imagery I generally ask myself two questions: 1) Is the violence gratuitous to what appears to be the central purpose of the story, or is it absolutely essential to this purpose; and 2) does the text (the author, the"implied author," the "author function," or whatever catchy critical phrase one wants to use) accept the violence or condemn it. Generally speaking, I think thzat any text that supports or encourages violence (say, a Rambo movie or a Mickey Spillane novel) should be considered morally problematic. However, some of the greatest authors in our language -- from Shakespeare, to Faulkner, to Nabokov -- have written works that depict great violence and cruelty, not because they advocate such behavior, but because they wanted to show us how violence works from the inside, so that we would recognize the impulse when we started to feel it ourself.

So, how does Altmann's Tongue stack up? On the first count, it does very well. I don't think that even the least sophisticated reader of Evenson's book could call the violence "gratuitous" or argue that his stories would have been just as good without it. In most cases, the violence IS the story. Take it away, and there is nothing. Whatever one may think of Evenson's purpose in writing the stories in this volume, I think that we must all agree that scenes of violence, cruelty, and barbarism are essential to that purpose.

Any moral evaluation of this collection, then, requires that we first try to decipher the purpose of the stories, and, as any literary critic knows, that is never an easy task, nor is it one that will produce any kind of agreement or consensus in any group larger than one. However, I think it is fair to assume, at least for the sake of argument, that Brian Evanson is not an inhuman monster who actually advocates the kinds of barbarity that he writes about (I met Brian once in the hall of the English Department at BYU, and he seemed like a reasonably nice fellow). If this is indeed the case, then we can safely assume that his purpose in writing these stories is something other than to try to win converts to some kind of strange, evil blood cult.

So what might that purpose be? The violence in Altmann's Tongue is different than the violence that I have encountered in any other text i have ever read. Some works support and glorify violece. Others reject it and show how devastating it can be. In Altmann's Tongue, however, the violence is portrayed as neither beneficial nor disastrous: is it portrayed as inevitable. According to the peculiar logic of the characters that inhabit Evanson's moral universe, violent, terrible acts simply occur because they have to occur; that is how things work, no questions asked.

In the title story, for example, a narrator, after having killed two people, ponders over the fact that there are only two kind sof people in the world: those who should be killed at once, and those who one "should perhaps kill, perhaps not" (13). These ruminations occupy most of this very short story, until the narrator simply flies away (Evanson's use of a very Latin-American type of magical realizm is a subject for another post). In the story "Killing Cats," the narrator agrees to help his neighbor kill their cats. No reasons are given, nor do any need to be. If we are reading closely enough to understand Evanson's world, we know by now that violent actions never need a reason. They are as natural as breathing. in what was, to me, one of the most terrifying stories of the collection, "Hebe Kills Jerry," one character tortures and kills his friend, again, for no reason other than that, in this world, that is what people do. At one point during the torture, Hebe says, "You've been exceptionally patient throughout this whole affair," and Jerry replies simply, "What are friends for" (113).

The question at the center of the book, then, is "how does a society get to such a point that violence seems inevitable?" How can a community descend so far that they become, in the words of Julia Kristeva that Evenson uses as an epigraph, "more and more incisive, precise, eschewing seduction in favor of cruelty. . . ." Such a question brings up an obvious parallel to the Holocaust, with the efficient Nazi's exterminating Jews as part of the day's work, and Evenson makes this parallel explicit in the short-short story (about half a page) "The Abbreviated and Tragical History of the Auschwitz Barber." In the few words that consititute this story, we are introduced to a barber from Auschwitz who claims to be no barber at all, but a Bolivian businessman named Altmann. In this very complex story, Evanson ties the questions that he is asking to the questions that many of our greatest writers have been asking since the Holocaust: how can fundamentally rational people become so desensitized to violence tht they commit horrible acts as part of a daily routine? What, if any, is the connection between logic, precision, rationality, and violence?

Anyone who reads Altmann's Tongue will be profoundly disturbed by its images. But I believe that, ultimately, this is what the author wants. Beneath the moral world of the book -- where terrible violence is normal and routine -- lies the moral universe that the author seems, at least to me -- to be advocating: a universe where violence is still an outrage and where cruelty is to be despised. Evenson wants to disturb us, and, I think, he wants to disturb us even further by showing us how far he has to go to disturb us with violence in a world where graphic violence already IS an everyday occurance. By showing us a world where detached, morally distant people commit inevitable acts of violence, what Evanson seems to be saying is that violence becomes inevitable whenever we allow ourslves to become detached from the consequences of our actions and the moral responsibility of the systems that we support.

Regards,

Mike