"Her tongue clove to her palette": Painting a Double-Edged Tongue in Brian Evenson's Fiction

Abstract

The tongue of contemporary American writer Brian Evenson did slip and cleave when he wrote “Her tongue clove to her palette” and “Bernt […] found his tongue cleaving to his palette”, respectively in his novel Dark Property(2002) and the short story “Grottor” (2012). By substituting a “palette” for a “palate”, he disfigured his tongue to recall the broad spectrum of sensual possibilities his very musical as well as visual material is endowed with. The violent intrusion of a “palette” in the mouth and in the text makes it possible to brush up and off the art of painting in a work paradoxically so insistent on its desire to break away from mimesis. The double-meaning of “stump” in relation to mutilation and drawing sketches the links between phantom limbs and the remnants of a creative movement – since one cannot radically sever the links with the referent, it must be blurred, even if its ghostly figure comes back, haunting the reader through its painful absence of stability. Its shadow is reflected through these fuzzy lines, the only surviving traces of pictorial and linguistic compositions autonomously decomposing and recomposing themselves.