714 The American Century: Literature since 1945So, when Snow White writes a poem, the seven men who live with her have no doubt
as to its theme. “The theme is loss, we take it,” they ask caustically. Her reply is simple:
“I have not been able to imagine anything better.”
Of John Hawkes’s 1961 novel, The Lime Twig, his fellow novelist Flannery
O’Connor has observed that “You suffer it like a dream. It seems to be something
that is happening to you, that you wait to escape from but can’t.” That is true of all
his fiction. His nominal subjects range far and wide – many of them, he has said,
acquired from the newspapers or from other writers. So, for instance, The Cannibal
(1949) explores the horrors of devastation in postwar Germany. The Lime Twig
presents the psychopathic effects on a man of life during and after the blitz on
London. Travesty (1967) is the monologue of a Frenchman that serves as a suicide
note while he prepares to kill his daughter, his friend, and himself. Virginia (1982)
concerns a girl who has experienced two previous lives in France, both marked by
strange sexual experience. Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985) is about a boy
confronted with hunting and sexuality during a trip to Alaska. And The Frog (1996)
tells of a boy with a real or imagined frog in his stomach. What characterizes all these
and his other novels, however, is the vision of a dreamscape fractured by an appalling,
yet almost ritualized violence. Hawkes has said that he wanted, from the first, to
create, “a totally new and necessary fictional landscape.” “My writing depends on
absolute detachment,” he has explained, “and the unfamiliar or invented landscape
helps me to achieve and maintain that detachment ... I want to try to create a world,
not represent one.” What he is after is objectification, not representation. As Hawkes
puts it, his aim is “to objectify” the terrifying similarity between the unconscious
desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world,” so as to
achieve “a formalizing of our deepest urgencies.” His characters come and go across
his frozen landscapes as if caught in a strange sort of repetition compulsion. They
are not so much imitations of life as figures from an exhibition, waxwork curios
from some subliminal house of horror. And the violence they inevitably encounter
is as vivid and distant as violence seen through soundproof glass. In The Cannibal
the primary act of violent negation is signaled by the controlling metaphor of the
book, which also gives it its title. Although the main setting is Germany after the war,
it reaches back to 1914 and forward to a future repetition of Nazi control, which will
return the entire nation to an insane asylum. The dominant presence, and narrator,
is Zizendorf, the leader of the Nazis. Set in contrast to him is a young girl, Selvaggia,
who stands at a window, in innocent, impotent terror, watching the evil that men do.
By the end, she is “wild-eyed from watching the night and the birth of the Nation.”
Zizendorf orders her to draw the blinds and sleep. The last sentence of the book
gives us her response: “She did as she was told.” The return to an evidently endless
sleep, a nightmare of violent repression, seems inevitable, since there is no intimation,
in this or any other book by Hawkes, that things can change or get better. Just as
character and setting appear paralyzed, so events are peculiarly without progressions.
Hawkes so rearranges the fractured elements in his fictive picture that the temporal
dimension drains away into a spatial patterning of detail. And he so contrives his
prose into complex sequences of baroque fragments that the reader too is held back,GGray_c05.indd 714ray_c 05 .indd 714 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM