The Art of Cruelty Read online

  In this scandalous document known as the New Testament, one of the major symbols of the cleavage brought about by Christ is that of his sword. As Jesus says in an infamous and hotly contested line (Matthew 10:34), “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Christ makes good on this promise in the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, in which he returns as a warrior riding a white horse, a sword in his mouth, ready to cleave the righteous from the wicked, and cast the wicked into the pit of hell. This cleavage has also been forecast in Matthew, in the so-called parable of the weeds, in which Christ tells of the day on which the weeds (i.e., evil and its doers) will be severed from the wheat (i.e., the righteous), and the weeds thrown “into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

  Whether Christ’s sword is best understood metaphorically, or whether it is to be taken as a literal instrument of violence to be employed in a holy war, has been the subject of much sermonizing and debate. History provides a clear abundance of the latter; as Dillard writes, with profound understatement, “What a pity that so hard on the heels of Christ come the Christians.”

  But before we harangue the Bible for this dangerous-seeming slippage between the metaphorical and the literal, we might note that the figure of the sword occupies a similar, pivotal place in Zen Buddhism, where it has given rise to similar concerns and questions. Daisetz T. Suzuki discusses the matter in some length in an essay titled “Zen and Swordsmanship,” which aims to explain the kinship between the art of swordsmanship (as practiced by samurai) and the figure of the sword in Zen. “The sword is generally associated with killing, and most of us wonder how it can come into connection with Zen, which is a school of Buddhism teaching the gospel of love and mercy,” Suzuki writes. In explanation, Suzuki lays out the many differences between “the sword that kills” and “the sword that gives life,” arguing that the latter is the one most appropriately associated with Zen. In a synchronic move, Suzuki suggests that this latter is “the kind of sword that Christ is said to have brought among us.” Suzuki makes clear, however, that the sword that gives life is “not meant just for bringing the peace mawkishly cherished by sentimentalists.” The sword of life, in other words, does not shrink from slaying its enemies when the time is right, on which occasion the sword “performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy.” No room for idiot compassion here.

  But what about the sword that brings not justice, but knowledge? This sword appears throughout the New Testament as well, most often as a figure for the word of God, which slices clear through to the soul. See, for example, Ephesians 6:17, “And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” or Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intent of the heart.” In Mahayana Buddhism, the figure of the sword symbolizes neither justice nor knowledge per se, but rather wisdom (in Sanskrit, prajna). The sword of prajna is double-edged, in order to slice through all dualities, as well as the ego that purports to house them. In Buddhist iconography, the figure for prajna is the Bodhisattva Manjushri, who is most often depicted with a flaming sword in one hand and a sutra in the other.

  Manjushri’s flaming sword does not cleave weed from wheat, nor does it communicate the commandments of any God. Rather, its medium is its message. Its task is to keep slicing through all the ways in which we attempt to hold onto a sense of solid ground, all the ways in which we resist the fundamental impermanence of all things. The cutting itself—the practice of paring down, of becoming clearer and clearer, of hacking away at the ground under our feet not once, not twice, but always—is the practice of wisdom itself. If prajna brings one closer to anything, it is to shunyata (fundamental emptiness, or void).

  As one might imagine, this type of cutting offers little to no reassurance. As Buddhist teacher Judy Lief puts it, “You could view all this as a bit of a warning: as soon as you enter the Buddhist path and start practicing meditation and studying the dharma, you are picking up this sword of prajna. Now that you have this sharp thing, this sword that skewers and cuts through ego trips of all sorts, you have to deal with it. . . . there’s nothing left over, just this sword, slicing and slicing. . . . You’re left nowhere, more or less.”

  The temptation to pair this intense penetration with “getting somewhere”—to justice, say, or revelation—can be as intense as it is self-defeating. Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” offers an exceptionally dismal and enjoyable satire of this affliction. The story circulates around an officer, an explorer, a condemned man, and an “apparatus,” the latter being a torture device whose needles, collectively termed “the Harrow,” inscribe the words of “whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed” on his condemned body. The Harrow begins by writing on the surface of the flesh, but over the course of twelve hours, it penetrates deeper and deeper into the body of the condemned, which is flipped over and over on a bed of cotton, so as to keep providing the Harrow with fresh parts of body to penetrate. Eventually, the Harrow pierces all the way through, and the prisoner perishes.

  As the officer explains to the reticent but appalled explorer (who serves as a sort of stand-in for the reader, who is learning alongside him—to her horror—about the workings of the killing machine), “The first six hours the condemned man stays alive almost as before, he suffers only pain. After two hours the felt gag is taken away, for he has no longer strength to scream. . . . But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there, it radiates. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription. . . . To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs six hours to accomplish it. By that time the Harrow has pierced him quite through and casts him into the pit, where he pitches down upon the blood and water and the cotton wool.” The officer’s speech reveals him to be quite mad, not only on account of his logorrheic, obsessive devotion to this antiquated, sadistic ritual, but also due to his almost mystical conviction that there is no reason to tell a condemned man what his sentence is, nor what crime he committed, nor even that he’s been sentenced at all. “There would be no point in telling him,” he asserts. “He’ll learn it on his body.”

  As the story unfolds, this assertion—along with the officer’s conviction that the apparatus brings a glorious and profound Enlightenment to torturer, tortured, and spectator alike—are revealed as the cruel shams that they are. First of all, the prisoner does not speak the language everyone else is speaking (French), and he pre-sents throughout as a sort of cavorting idiot unlikely to understand any linguistic inscription offered by this motley crew, be it drilled into his body or not. Next, after the explorer tells the officer that he does not approve of the apparatus, and that he plans on sharing his disapproval with the powers-that-be in order to shut it down, the officer decides to exchange places with the condemned man, rather than survive into an era in which the apparatus is no longer used. The commandment that the officer programs into the Harrow to inscribe on his body is “BE JUST”: a typical Kafka koan on which one could meditate for weeks, if not years, without coming to a conclusive interpretation.

  Rather than being ceremoniously martyred, however, the officer is quickly mauled by the machine, which malfunctions terribly. “The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles. The explorer wanted to do something, if possible, to bring the whole machine to a standstill, for this was no exquisite torture such as the officer desired, this was plain murder.” When the explorer finally manages to pry the officer off the spikes, he looks into the face of the corpse, and sees “no sign . . . of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not
found.” This being Kafka, it’s unclear whether the official might have reached the beatific state he so desired and admired had his machine not malfunctioned. The ambiguity manages to savage the idea of achieving redemption or justice through radical, tortuous penetration, while also preserving—via the fanatical, unwavering conviction of the officer—an ardent portrait of the temptation to keep on trying.

  If one removes “In the Penal Colony” from its crime-and-punishment context, one can see that the temptation just described—and its frustration—also serves as an allegory, however inscrutable, for writing itself. It was Kafka, after all, who wrote in a now-famous letter that “we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?. . .What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Bite, sting, blow, hit, banish, hack: the terms echo those used by F. T. Marinetti, Ionesco, and a host of other modernists. Young Samuel Beckett, writing in Kafka’s wake, had similar ambitions (though he took a more sculptural approach): “To bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today,” he wrote in a 1937 letter to his friend, Axel Kaun.

  I, too, have often wondered whether there exists a greater pleasure than the feeling—however brief or illusory—that by writing, one is in fact incinerating layers of crap rather than tossing more of it onto the landfill. This can be a difficult feeling to achieve when the medium is language. One cannot simply offer up a white page and a stopwatch and produce the illuminating, cleansing effect of “silence,” as John Cage did in 4'33''. Nor can you easily do what artist Gordon Matta-Clark did: take out the BB gun, the handsaw, the chainsaw, the knife, and start making “core cuts” in the structures that surround us, in order to startle us into seeing new vistas or patterns of light. Each time I show a slide of Matta-Clark’s “core cut” of an abandoned building at the Hudson River Piers—an enormous half-moon which he sliced, with great difficulty and outrageous illegality, out of the corrugated tin wall of a mammoth industrial building on New York City’s West Side in 1975—my students typically gasp, then erupt in laughter. That is how exciting and relieving the sensation of space transgressed and revealed can be.

  But how to produce such an effect with words? They seem so small, compared to a sliced wall. Nor is it immediately obvious what remains when words have done their work of boring, of clearing.

  No one suffered from this dilemma as acutely as Artaud. The longer he lived, the more fiercely Artaud longed for a form of expression that would constitute “no works, no language, no words, no mind, nothing,” only “a fine Nerve Meter.” The closer he got to becoming this “Nerve Meter,” the more his life and work came to be seen, even by his most fervent admirers, as failures; his written body of work, a trail of fragmentary turds. “Talking, talking, talking, Artaud expresses the most ardent revulsion against talk,” observed Sontag. To call this situation a contradiction brings us no closer to understanding Artaud’s very real and very urgent predicament, which is the paradoxical predicament of any human who feels the need to awl through the strata of shit that so often seem not to obscure our world but to be our world, and who comes to feel that to do so, one must create.

  The closest Artaud may have come to “cutting to the core”—or at least, the closest I have come through him—is his 1947 radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which was commissioned by French radio but banned on the eve of its broadcast. When I first heard this recording, I did not understand the French, but I knew instantly that this was the voice of a madman living in a universe in which the concepts of “irony” and “sincerity” need not apply. His voice ate through such concepts like bile. His growls, whispers, and screeches seemed to be boring holes into something, but not language, as his voice seemed to have departed from the realm of language entirely. “No one knows how to scream anymore in Europe,” he wrote in The Theater and Its Double. “People in the theater who can do nothing but talk and who have forgotten that they had a body have also forgotten the use of their throats.” To Have Done with the Judgment of God, performed within a year of Artaud’s death, is all throat, all body.

  Years later, when I read a translation of the transcript, I finally learned what Artaud had been saying. He had been saying to be someone, one must have a BONE, not be afraid to show the bone, and to lose the meat in the process. He had asked, Is God a being? To which he answered, If he is one, he is shit. He had asked, Do you know precisely what is meant by cruelty? To which he answered, Offhand, I don’t.

  OF THE fiction writers working today, Evenson seems to have taken on this predicament most explicitly, and to inhabit it most relentlessly. “Writing for me is about moving through obstacles and establishing a trajectory inward, moving by way of intensities into more and more unsettling and revealing territory,” he says, in echo of Kafka and Beckett both. “Anything that blocks the path you must cut through, including religion, including yourself.” A harsh journey, this—one characterized, again, by hacking, by macheting one’s way through the bush.

  As with Artaud, this endless cutting can paradoxically leave quite a trail—which may explain why Evenson has published nine books of fiction, two chapbooks, and six works of translation since 1996. It may also explain why his stories offer an astonishingly long and varied catalogue of discomfiting excisions and penetrations: 2004’s The Wavering Knife, for example, offers bullets fired into brains, teeth pulled out with pliers, eyes gouged out, syringes plunged into arms, flesh slit, stuffed, and sewn shut, body cavities sawed apart, and so on; Altmann’s Tongue offers more, and in some cases, worse.

  Unlike some writers whose work depends heavily on the visceral shock of ultraviolence (see Chuck Palahniuk, for example, author of Fight Club, who proudly keeps track of the number of faintings that have transpired at his public readings), Evenson is an intellectual, even conceptual, writer who is ready and willing to theorize about his work. Speaking of Altmann’s Tongue, he describes the relationship between violence and religion as follows: “In positing a world beyond this world—a God, a transcendent heaven, moral absolutes—religion does violence to the present world. On a level of content, Altmann’s Tongue insists that violence is meaningless and that justification of violence, controlled or not, is ultimately futile. Instead of doing violence to this world by positing transcendents, Altmann’s Tongue does violence to the transcendents by refusing to acknowledge anything beyond this world, but offering characters who cannot even imagine the existence of a beyond.”

  Evenson knows, however, that as a writer, he’s up against a sort of wall, insofar as language, like religion, “does violence to the immanent world by forcing the objects of that world to be understood in terms of generalities, by stripping them of their specificities and categorizing them.” Language, in this version of events, accomplishes this feat by the simple act of naming, of representing—that is, when I say apple, I can no longer produce for you this specific apple, right here in front of me, even if that is what I meant to indicate; I must now rely on the constellation of letters that spells the term “apple,” which must serve as a stand-in for the thing itself.

  The fact that language cannot shed its representational function—or, at least, that it cannot play around with it in the same ways that, say, painting or sculpture can—has provoked strong feeling in many writers. At its most common and benign, the feeling is one of longing, as epitomized by poet Jack Spicer in After Lorca: “I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper.” For others—such as Ev
enson—the feeling is more intense: he claims that linguistic representation does violence to the immanent world. Here, representation itself becomes a sort of villainous scythe, come to cleave world from word.

  As Wittgenstein makes clear in the opening pages of Philosophical Investigations, there are many other ways to understand the functioning of language—ways that are not based on this Adamic naming, this dichotomy of signifier and signified. (Wittgenstein’s famed notion of a “language game” comes out of this conviction: that before we generalize about what language is or what language does, we need to look at particular instances of its use, and ask what game is being played.) Despite the difference in their philosophical approaches, however, Wittgenstein and Evenson have one thing in common: both take imprecision as their enemy, and hope to counter its effects by using language as precisely as possible.

  In Evenson’s case, this urge sometimes comes off as a desire to fight fire with fire. For what lands Evenson’s work in the genre of horror—and, at times, in the arena of camp—is that he gets so literal about this task: his writing doesn’t just evoke the precision of slicing or cutting; his characters actually perform the deeds. When this literalness works, the work carries both visceral punch and intellectual heft. When it falls short, either the violence or the concept behind it seems suddenly naked, paltry, wrong. It is, in short, a gamble.

  Often, as in the story “The Ex-Father,” from The Wavering Knife, this gamble pays off tremendously. The first cut of “The Ex-Father” arrives after a foreboding but quiet opening, in which we are introduced to two young girls whose mother has recently suicided, and who are now residing with their remote father from whom they were previously estranged. After a series of blurry linguistic euphemisms offered by a visiting churchman about their mother’s “passing on,” we receive this sharp revelation: “Nobody knew that the oldest girl knew that by her own hand did not mean pills or exhaust fumes or anything like that, but that while they were at school the mother had taken a serrated knife and tried to hack her own head off with it. She had not managed to get the head off but had gotten pretty far, and the oldest girl had gone to Church herself for enough years to know that nobody who wanted to cut their head off as bad as that was going anywhere near heaven.” Not just a knife, but a serrated knife. Not just a fact, but a fact held by a small girl, a mother’s daughter, who alone witnessed the immediate aftermath of this horrific, if unbelievable, sawing. The rest of “The Ex-Father” is taken up with the older daughter’s management of her burden.