John Hawkes: When a writer's voice breaks once again

On the contrast between John Hawke's early and middle phases and what they reveal about his work

As I recently started reading Blood Oranges, a novel belonging to the annals of mid 70s first person narrative phase of the postmodern writer John Hawkes, a work that is characteristically lyrical, moody and obtuse at critical junctions of a narrative that is already fractured chronologically, I started to wonder what it was that drew certain writers and artists to wield their vivid imagination for the surreal and grotesque to techniques more readily classified as abstract formalism. Case in point, you can compare the formalistic scaffolding of first-person narrator that Hawkes adopted in the 60s starting with the bucolic farce Second Skin to the surreal and abstract impressionism lacing his fabulist parody of the Western, The Beetle Leg (1951) an early work in Hawkes’ career that divides readers on both sides of Hawkes’ readership into reevaluating his work.

The plot or whatever can be pieced of it (Hawkes doesn’t really consider delineation of plot a priority in his fiction treating events mostly as libretto to set his lyrical meter to) that runs through The Beetle Leg is that of a ramshackle Southwest valley town named Government City which exists liminal in the specter of a dam collapse that claimed the life of citizen and worker Fred Lampson. Fred’s brother Luke gets embroiled up into a ad-hoc posse that the local sheriff assembles to curb a biker gang terrorizing. This posse of a lurching quack, a returning city-rat and the local stooge eventually chases down the biker gang and ambushes them in a gunfight whose outcome is left ambiguous at the end of the novel which Hawkes instead chooses to end on a couple of footnotes left by the medicine man, also revealed to be Luke’s father (IKR) .

Using this barest of genre scaffolding, a staple of traditional literary western dramas Hawkes hangs a litany of the most knotty, modal prose that the Gothic tradition had seen this side of Faulkner that leers and percolates with a diffusion of meaning that can be inferred by the reader into a miasma of expressionistic effects. Gone are any traditional markers of original sin, repressed sexuality or depravity. Depravity here is of the distinctly pagan kind. Instead Hawkes’ desolate landscape is seeped in what can only be described as an infertile purgatory of a wasteland populated by revenants doomed to haunt these American valleys with their desperate attempts to create meaning in an effusive world where suffering is the only Real scripture. We are treated to fractured micro points-of-views of inert Jesus’ figures, references to putrescent fertility myths, shell shocked widows, obsessive compulsive longing and a topography shadowed by the impending rise of a lust for industry servile not to Moloch but Thanatos. A young Thomas Pynchon would pluck out Hawkes as an early inspiration and one can see this psychosexual charting, this Hawkesian undersong in Pynchon’s polyphonic works, that elegizes this gyre of Thanatos that the War had pushed the collective psyche of the West into. Pynchon’s swingers and drifters are just the Menippean counterparts of Hawke’s ghastly specters here and in The Cannibal (1939). “The living can assist the imagination of the dead”, as Yeats would say. One can even trace a sort of bustling schizophrenia inherent in the form itself that Pynchon would later weave into full on paranoid super coherence but that Hawkes would strip down into a praxis that would emerge out of the assemblage of first-person voices.

Here, Hawkes continuously splatters key imagery in impressionistic strokes throughout the obfuscated prose, illuminating certain locus of themes in the murky narrative. Repeatedly, the sheriff interpellates events onto astrological models , the boundary between that of the inside or outside is violated, decrepit dams shore up effluvium and sewage , characters hurl themselves into obsessive-compulsive explosions of lust-venereal and bloody, conflict, recklessness, devotion as if entranced by the ritualistic aspects of these hollowed ideals, long emptied of their creative sparks. Even the supposed, antagonists described as “creatures made of leather with malevolent, overflowing eyes sporting drilled orifices and bulging snouts” are hardly the barbaric plague that the these gilded lawmen can vanquish, they are merely vandalizing bikers brooding themselves in this wasteland that is bereft of any conflict that they can leech off of. As such, the final translucently described showdown that would rouse blood in a typical western, seems like a convulsive explosion of meaningless violence, destroying drifters on both sides of the law.

But all this talk of elusive meaning paints the picture of Hawkes as an nihilistic bawler, an poetic pallbearer elegizing the fall of some aesthetic Arcadian ideal in a post-Wasteland literary landscape but that would err on the side of dialectizing. Hawke’s vision but goes for a deeper, almost Beckettian sense of irony that is is inextricably supplementing the ambiguity of his work. It is this metered irony that to realize itself fully gets transformed into the tragic lyricism of the work that he would start with the Second Skin.

The Second Skin, written in 1964, is a telescopic memoir( erroneously surmised by some as apologia pro vita sua) of sorts of Skipper, a retired navy lieutenant (repeatedly described as a sort of Pan figure) who, after the tragic demise of his daughter Cassandra’s husband (later revealed to be gay), lives as a shepherd in a north-Atlantic island amongst a bunch of indigenous people working as an inseminator for their cattle and a make-shift shepherd. The story unfolds in a series of a cut-ups from his life, told typically out of order by Skipper, charting the various tragedies that have populated his life, in many incidents of fatalistic deaths and/or losses , starting from his undertaker father’s suicide in his childhood, to the failure of his daughter’s marriage to the tragic, looming death that awaits Cassandra at the end of this narrative. Twinned with it’s successor The Blood Oranges, Second Skin marks a rather stark shift in the structure of Hawkes work . Here the voice , condensed to one point-of-view gains a sort of a modal-orchestration flowing in motifs and leitmotifs of repetitions, obsessions and fugues that overlap over each other. Hawke’s narratives have always been centered around story tellers; self-raconteuring or somnambulistic voices that have latched onto compulsive myth-making as a form of coping, but in these works what arises is a form of Scheherazadian ballad of prose. A voice that gushes in a series of hyperventilated gasps and mellow breaths, weaving a yarn that sutures the tragic fabric of events sprinkled across the space-time of a life lived through pain of into a tapestry of words that wants to redeem, transubstantiate this life-blood into higher work of art redeemed by sophistication. Skipper is in many ways, the heralder of doom for many of the specters haunting this novel, but he (schizophrenically, one might say) reorders all these incidents, these quilting points where brute blood coagulates into a kintsuki cup which can hold the romantic notions of Eros and Dionysian idyll that all these character voices proselytize.

The achievement of Hawkes in these later works, is the grand undersong that breaks through, which forks and curves around the rustic dialectic of festering Eros and automatized Thanatos, a Teutonic irony, a restless narrativizing melody that breaks through but never breaks down. The Real’s shadow of draining time, of the monotonous rhythm of Chronos marching drums, of the various slings and arrows that time rippled off towards us rears its ugly head through the broken stained windows of Hawke’s prose, but these pathetic yet cadent voices, glow with the pensive, scary devotion like one of Rilke’s angels , holding this drowning rhythm at bay, laughing and dreaming, in the endless circular play of language and narrative, of Kairos beaming a dusty smile through the broken slopes of the steeples , of desire set free from the cycles of acrid decay. Hah. So much for his avant-garde pyrotechnics, Hawkes concerns still find a worthy place in a tradition as old as Ovid through Shakespeare through the Sturm-and-Drang, transcribing man’s adamance against time.