Hawkes Landscapes

The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
A Newly Envisioned World: Fictional Landscapes of John Hawkes Author(s): Carol A. MacCurdy Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 318-335 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208348 . Accessed: 16/12/2013 12:51
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A NEWLY ENVISIONED WORLD: FICTIONAL LANDSCAPES OF JOHN HAWKES Carol A. MacCurdy
The verbal "pictures" in John Hawkes's novels are unforgettable, provocative visions that have perhaps more impact on the reader than any other element in Hawkes's fiction. Descriptions of a slumbering insane asylum, an arid desert inhabited by giant snakes, an abandoned lighthouse amidst sharp, black rocks, a lyrical Illyria of no seasons, an anchorless, drifting ocean liner, and a car streakingtoward destruction are all powerful images that dominate such other fictional elements as plot, character, or theme. Rather than exploring a subject or pursuing the location of "truth," Hawkes wishes to enthrall, capture, and enchant the readerwith the intensity of his vision. He chooses not to offer an accurate representationof an independent, pre-existing reality but insists on the creation of, in his words, "a totally new and necessary fictional landscape or visionary world" ("Interview" with Enck 141). As Hawkes explains in his interview with John Enck, his novels originate with pictorial "flickeringsin the imagination," not with "substantial narrativematerialsor even with particularcharacters."He continues: "In each case what appealed to me was a landscape or world, and in each case I began with something immediately and intensely visual- a room, a few figures, an object, something prompted by the initial idea and then literally seen, like the visual images that come to us just before sleep" (148). This comment suggests that one key to Hawkes's image-making is his ability to tap the dream-energyresiding in his unconscious mind; he himself admits that his work is "saturated with unconscious content" ("Hawkes and Barth" 32). Familiar locales would crowd and inhibit his imagination, he feels, because they require a semblance of the representationhe eschews and would offer, moreover, what he regards as autobiographical entrapments. He
Contemporary Literature XXVII, 3 0010-7484/86/0003-0318 $1.50/0
?1986 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
explains to John Enck, "my writing depends on absolute detachment, and the unfamiliaror invented landscape helps me to achieve and maintain this detachment"(154). Fictional landscapes are thus at the center of his fiction because they serve not only his writing process but also his artistic raison d'etre. Taking cues from Hawkes's many comments on the subject, most critics have noted Hawkes's handling of landscape and have analyzed it in light of his style, narrative experiments, or structural concerns.' Hawkes's worlds often get lost in the analysis of the artistic process; the critical articles primarily focus on the role of the artist and his imagination, not on the final creative product-the fictional world. Hawkes's landscapes are art objects; they are thoroughly, self-consciously fictional, self-contained artifice, tableau. These worlds are the end result of the creativeprocess, the repositoryof Hawkes'sunconscious, as well as the source of his writing. What has not been well understood is their essentiality to Hawkes's aesthetic and their development in technique and focus. Hawkes's imaginary worlds have evolved since he first published in 1949, and these changes reflect the four distinct phases in his literary career: 1) the use of visionary landscape tied to specific locales; 2) the use of landscape projected out of first-person perspectives; 3) the use of landscape totally contained by psyches; and 4) the return- with a difference- of the visionary historical landscapes found in phase one. A study of Hawkes's fictional landscapes demonstrates his continual development as a writer and also clarifies his evolving world view. Hawkes's insistence on constructing private landscapes results in early works of "nearlypure vision" ("Interview"with Enck 149). Any reader of "Charivari," The Cannibal (1949), The Beetle Leg (1951), The Owl (1954), The Goose on the Grave (1954), or The Lime Twig (1961) will attest to their visual brilliance as well as their difficult narrative. Little sense of plot progression emerges; instead one finds stunning set pieces that dazzle the imagination while disorienting one's perceptions. These absolute visions produce surrealistic, dreamlike effects. Each work has, however, or seems to have, an actual locale for a setting: "Charivari,"England; The Cannibal, postwar Germany; The Beetle Leg, the American West; The Owl, medieval Italy; The
'Tanner suggests that a relationship exists between Hawkes's style and his use of landscape (204-5); Kuehl discusses the role landscape plays in the structure of the novels (xi).
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Goose on the Grave, postwar Italy; and The Lime Twig, postwar England. Although the reader may point to a place on the map where each book is set, the factual identification will be of little comfort. Hawkes himself refers to these locales as his "'mythic' England, Gerwith Enck 154). Some recogmany, Italy, American west" ("Interview" nizable features of these places exist, but Hawkes underminesany sense of familiarity by distorting the surface reality. In "Charivari"a cat talks to a seamstress; marauding dogs board a passenger train and become paying customers in The Cannibal; and a giant desert snake strikes out the headlight of a vacationing family's station wagon in
The Beetle Leg.

War dominates the landscape of Hawkes's novels between 1949 and 1964. Set in post-WorldWar II England, Germany, and Italy, these locales seem standard World War II fare, yet Hawkes's hallucinated vision makes the desolate backgrounds not places but nightmares. Rid of most signs of civilization, the primitive landscapes seem timeless reminders of war's horrors, a world void of reason and doomed to annihilation. In The Cannibal Hawkes bestows upon Germany a completely fictional, nonexistent town, Spitzen-on-the-Dein, a setting that epitomizes his warscapes, especially those in The Owl and The Goose on the Grave. Spitzen-on-the-Dein, "shriveled in structure and as decomposed as an ox tongue black with ants" (Cannibal 8), is a debrisridden village stripped of any civilizing influence. Using the metaphor of a vulture or carrion bird, Hawkes pictures the town as a giant slumbering fowl: "The town, roosting on charred earth, no longer ancient, .. gorged itself on straggling beggars and remained gaunt beneath S. an evil cloaked moon" (7). This fatalistic picture suggests inevitable human extinction, as do most of Hawkes's early war-ravaged landscapes. All of Hawkes's fictions from "Charivari"to The Lime Twig, whether or not they are war-related, present such apocalyptic landscapes bereft of life-sustaining energies. Tony Tanner suggests that Hawkes's "landscapesof desolation and decline ... point to the progress of entropy quite as graphically as the landscapes of Burroughs and Pynchon" (203). Indeed, each setting in the early work conveys .nothing but waste and death. In The Cannibal nature itself has become mutant or exhausted; this wasteland yields only "twistedstunted trees" (37), "bleached plants" (6), acidic earth that burns human flesh, and cows that scratch for food with hare's teeth. In such a desiccated landscape man likewise is depraved, as illustrated by the Duke's eating of the young boy. Entropic landscapes underscore not only man's fall
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from innocence but, more important, his plunge into nightmare. For example, in The Beetle Leg, Gov City and its inhabitants live in the shadow of obliteration as the manmade dam drifts forward, promising again the Great Slide. Instead of being tamed, the American frontier is hostilely swallowing up impotent cowboys. In The Owl, the medieval town, Sasso Fetore, meaning "Tomb Stench," is a barren fortress of violence, sterility, and death. In The Goose on the Grave, a grim, war-scarredItaly leaves an orphan exposed to the degeneracies of failing Western culture. Clearly, the terrain of a world in shambles, with such breaches of nature and violations of humanity, comments on the condition of modern man. These ominous settings not only suggest the state of their inhabitants but also dominate them. Environmentcontrols and circumscribes human action. In The Cannibal the characters seem doomed to recapitulate the history of their war-ravaged world. In The Owl the townspeople of Sasso Fetore are subject to the Owl's inhuman demands just as their town is dominated by his iron fortress. In The Beetle Leg the great silent desert renders minuscule the clustered human communities. And in The Lime TwigMichael and MargaretBanks, children of war and lodgers of Dreary Station, seem destined to collapse with the dreams of a lost generation. Imprisonedby such hostile landscapes, people become aimless creatures somnambulating across a geography that determines their behavior. Even the social institutions created to give order inevitably contribute to the general collapse. All the institutions in The Cannibal- the asylum, University, and nunnery - are doomed to failure. Their commitment to the preservation of social order ensures ruin because in this world the apparent order is war. Rather than impeding the surrounding world's decline through the imposition of controls, the existing social institutions accelerateit. Any effort to control chaos promotes only an entropic decline into deathly uniformity and stasis. Both modern man and his environment, therefore, promote entropy, which, according to the second law of thermodynamics, results in an ultimate state of inert uniformity. Neither nature nor man is benign and ordered; an incipient chaos rages in both. Because both man and his environment are identified with the potential for destruction, no clash between life-sustaining and deathoriented impulses occurs. Humanity is just as corrupt as the surrounding world. No one can stop the Red Devils or the Great Slide. Dominated by hostile landscapes until they become part of them, the characters become identified with the very world in which they live. Such
an identification or correspondence between external nature and human
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nature characterizes Hawkes's early novels. All private and public worlds collapse; all energies are inverted, resultingin death or destruction, not love, renewal, or fulfillment. Given this negation and emphasis on death, the early works offer no conflict between the forces of life and death. At this point in his careerHawkes speaks of "thelatency of destructive force" instead of "the possibility of life-force" ("Interview" with Graham 451). As a result, characters appear flat, the narrative remains impersonal, the structure is circular, the images are death-ridden, and the settings are imprisoning. A tensionless, inert universe reigns. Largely deterministic, these dark hallucinatory landscapes suggest Hawkes's early world view. Beginning in 1964, Hawkes's emphasis changes. Rather than concentrating on the depiction of a dark, powerful world, he begins to stress modern man's reaction to chaos. Trapped in a wasteland, isolated, full of anxiety, and unable to communicate, man falls back upon himself. Because his external environment is not congenial to the self, he marks off the "inner" world from the "outer" world and turns inward. Starting with Second Skin, Hawkes demonstrates the change by using a first-person point of view. This shift in narration affects the presentation of landscape and signals a new direction in Hawkes's fiction. The earlier works' sense of stasis and impersonality gives way to subjective fictions with a dramatic form. The storyteller impelled by private needs takes his own personal history, decomposes it, and puts it back together. His mind becomes an active shaper of his world, resulting in novels that reflect the dynamics of the fiction-making process. According to Tony Tanner, Second Skin marks an advance in Hawkes's work because it offers "less of the stasis of landscape and more of the motion of narrative" (218). Instead of presenting dark, authoritarian worlds, Hawkes offers settings that serve the narrators' storytelling by dramatizing their struggle with life and death. The "plot"of Second Skin and The Blood Oranges consists of the narrators' creating lyrical landscapes in sensuous detail to offset the world's threatening forces; settings are not solely besotted with the forces of death. Discussing Second Skin, Hawkes acknowledges for "the first time, I think, in my fiction that there is something affirmative. ... I got very much involved in the life-force versus death" ("Interview"with Graham 459). The resulting tension between these two primal forces changes the topography of the novels after The Lime Twig as Hawkes increasingly structures
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his novels through the use of two contrasting settings. In Second Skin two islands dramatizeantitheticalexperiences.Writinghis memoir from a floating tropical island bathed in sunlight and lushness, Skipperseeks refuge from a jagged, barren island off the coast of Maine. Even in the magical country of Illyriawhere Cyril pursues his love idyll, Hugh's dark dungeon of death awaits. In Death, Sleep & the Traveler,Allert's mind moves from his hot, sunny sea voyage in the South to a frigid, snowbound chateau in the North. In these later works Hawkes's settings express structural importance as they dramatize the narrator's struggle with Eros and Thanatos. In order to convey this inner conflict through the novel's landscape, Hawkes uses purely imaginative settings. Searchers with maps will not locate Skipper's floating island or Cyril's mythical Illyria of no seasons; likewise, Allert'swhereaboutsare unknown. Skipper, Cyril, Allert, and Papa create their territories. Because of their destructive pasts and their inability to make sense of the surrounding confusion, the narratorsconcentrate the enormities of their existence, consciously shape them into a manageable environment, and transform the brute chaos into a fictional but consciously patterned world. Leaving the death-haunted, "black island in the Atlantic," Skipper imaginatively constructs his "sun-dippedwandering island"(Skin 48), freeing it from geographical restraints and himself from the pains of his past. Similarly, Cyril brings Illyria into being in response to the question asked in the epigraph (from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier): "Is there then any terrestrialparadise where, amidst the whispering of the oliveleaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?" (Oranges epigraph). The memoirs of these first-person narrators are fictional projections of both mythical worlds and identities desperately trying to regain a sense of self. Stimulated by a fear of hostile forces as well as a desire for a serene, pleasurable existence, Skipper and Cyril creatively resist the excruciations of life and actively produce a reality that is consistent with their psychological and creative needs. Their fictional landscapes thus offer them self-preservation, aesthetic satisfaction, and freedom - the freedom to create a world and an identity to their liking. Skipper can be an artificial inseminator of cows, and Cyril can be a sex-singer in Illyria. As Hawkes says to John Kuehl, "whatwe all want to do ... is to create our own worlds in our own voice" (qtd. in Kuehl 157). Hawkes's first-person narratorsproduce their fictional landscapes primarilyout of a pastoral impulse. Like many American heroes, these
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characters withdraw from society with its deterministic limitations, guilts, anxieties, and enslavement to time. Rejecting society's boundaries and the burden of history, the mythical American hero journeys into a domain where an unspoiled beauty offers psychic renewal. Hawkes's characters share the same desire for security, repose, freedom from the flux of time, and the opportunity for a spontaneous, instinctual life. However much they may yearn for an unbounded, timeless world, such an idyllic pastoral setting is unavailable in the contemporary world. The American fables of the redemptive journey into the wilderness told by Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway now arouse mere nostalgia. In his study of 1960s fiction, Raymond Olderman suggests that the "old theme of the American Adam aspiring to move ever forward in time and space unencumbered by memory of guilt or reflection on human limitation is certainly unavailable to the guilt-ridden psyche of modern man" (9). Even though the inherited symbol of a pastoral retreat or an American Eden may evoke an ironic response, the urge for a world remote from history, where nature and art are held in balance, still exists. For Hawkes, however, the possibility for the establishment of such a pastoral ideal is through the aesthetic imagination. The landscapes themselves hold the opposing forces of life and death; it is therefore up to the narrators to create a fictive order. In essence, the narrator's creation of a fictional landscape has become the surrogate for a pastoral ideal, for within this self-created world paradoxes can be aestheticized and therefore made tolerable. In the realm of supreme fiction man can escape the flux of time and the dualism between internal and external reality. Hawkes's narrators thus attempt to become Adamic heroes in the garden of their memoirs. In Second Skin, Skipper's memories of a past filled with death and violence make up much of his "naked history." His early childhood lived out at his father's mortuary, his wartime experiences, and his stay on the infernal black island, site of Cassandra's suicide, all suggest a world dominated by death. In many ways this fictional world remains as death-orientedas the earliernovels, for the cruel landscapes formed by Skipper's imagination compose most of the novel's structure. Until Skipper reaches his unnamed wandering island, the landscapes he travels harbor nothing but inexplicable malice. The affirmation in the novel comes not from Skipper's environment but from his redemptiveimagination. Experiencingboth psychic extremes- of Eros and Thanatos, as illustrated by the two alternating islands - Skipper chooses life over death in an act of creative will. Even though death
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exists on his peaceful island in the form of a cemetery, he illuminates the dark graveyard with candles to produce an "artificial day" (208) and "to have a fete with the dead" (206). Not denying the presence of death, he creatively resists it and instills life (creative passion) into the resistant forces of nature. Likewise, the narratorof The Blood Oranges,Cyril, tries to restore his shredding tapestry of love from his pastoral retreat of Illyria. Choosing the seacoast of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night as his locale, Hawkes signals the reader that Cyril's country resides in his imagination, like Skipper's floating island. According to Hawkes, Illyria "actually consists of an arid landscape" that Cyril transforms into his own erotic idyll. In his interview with Robert Scholes, Hawkes explains that Cyril "is simply trying to designate the power, beauty, fulfillment, the possibility that is evident in any actual scene we exist in. . . . Illyria doesn't exist unless you bring it into being" ("Conversation" 203). Skipper's and Cyril's pastoral worlds are not restricted to a terrestrial landscape but spring from their imaginative vitality; the two narrators vigorously pursue the creative act. The fictional landscapes of Second Skin and The Blood Oranges consist of the narrator's interior world where the restrictions of time and space are nonexistent, where the imagination reigns freely, and where the pleasureprincipleis enshrined. According to Leo Marx, the "usual setting of pastorals"has been a "never-neverland" (47); in keeping with this tradition, Hawkes sets his later novels in the "never-never land" of the psyche. Nature, the destination of the pastoral journey, is no longer restricted in meaning to terrestrial landscape but can be defined as the vitality of unconscious experience. Following Second Skin, each succeeding novel in Hawkes's triad-The Blood Oranges (1971), Death, Sleep & the Traveler(1974), Travesty(1976)- goes a step further in banishing the rational external world to concentrate on the interior journey into the psyche. Hawkes's narrators reflect this process of reduction; external landmarks and events become increasingly removed from the novel's world. In the triad, Hawkes reduces landscape to private, solipsistic underworldsdominated by the narrator'sunconscious needs and fears. Whereas Skipper consciously uses his imagination in a redemptive act of creativity, the other narrators increasingly pursue a destructive course. In The Blood Oranges Cyril wreaks havoc on his terrestrial paradise by attempting to force others into his tapestry of love. In Death, Sleep & the TravelerAllert floats in his anchorless ship on his
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own psychic waters until he is so remote, detached, and obsessed that he exists solely in his dreams. And in TravestyPapa confines himself to the interior of his car as he speeds toward suicide and murder. As Hawkes charts the narrator'sinner migration, the destination becomes increasingly ambivalent, for the unconscious simultaneously offers freedom and annihilation. The characters' complete isolation in their own inner landscapes emphasizes the danger of such imprisonment. Like characters in the early novels, they too are imprisoned by their environments. The difference is that they are ensnared by projects of their own making. No longer casualties of outer forces, they have become victims of their own internalization- victims of their own psyche. The artisticimagination when impelled by a disturbed psyche can shape a diminished or nightmarish world rather than a coherent one. According to Frank Lentricchia, "the telling sign of such self-destructive consciousness is its monolithic, absolutizing character" where "single vision reigns" (157). Only in Skipper's Second Skin do the conflicting forces of life and death coexist. This healthful reconciliation results from the creative mind's ability to transform the unintelligible into a fictive order. In contrast to Skipper's "naked history," Cyril's tapestry, which is also an artistic design, is in shreds; Illyria is coming apart at the seams because of Cyril's singleness of vision. Ironically, his tapestry, rather than weaving together the opposing threads, unravels to reveal the polarityin his pastoral scene. When Hugh, an alien to Illyria, comes over the mountains and brings with him the repressive forces of civilization, Cyril is unable to incorporate Hugh's "alien myth" into Illyria. Hawkes suggests that Hugh is not the only character guilty of subverting life into a rigid order. Cyril's effort to raise sexual activity - a natural process- to an art form promotes disaster. Although his sexual theorizing is an attempt to compose the merging paradoxes, no erotic harmony results. Insistent on the supremacy of his vision, Cyril fails to balance the paradoxes of Eros and Thanatos. The Blood Oranges therefore remains Cyril's version of a failed pastoral. Another narrator who struggles to create a world that will sustain his imagination is Allert in Death, Sleep & the Traveler;his imagination, however, leads him to demons. As an artist, Allert's aesthetic achievement lies solely in the creation of his dreams, but no lyrical affirmation resides in his nightmares. Allert's descent into his psyche is enacted on a large scale when he takes an uncharted ocean cruise. The novel consists of his interior journey into the oceanic depths of his unconscious and his subsequent effort to aestheticize the emerg-
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ing terror. The narrator's location is unidentified; his detached voice speaks from a void, suggesting his isolation, deprivation, and possible madness. The story he tells alternates between two fictional landscapes- one the frigid northern world where Allert, Peter, and his wife Ursula form a menage a trois, and the other a southern world of sun and sea where he journeys with Ariane and Olaf. Hawkes once again uses antithetical settings, but unlike the opposing islands in Second Skin, representative of Eros and Thanatos, these two landscapes contain both sex and death and ultimately make them synonymous. The northern scene that best illustrates Allert's equation of sex and death takes place in Peter's sauna. In contrast to the frigid air outside, the sauna's intense "heatwas high enough to stimulate visions, to bring death." When Ursula arouses Allert with her "oral passion," he descends further into "the timeless heat" (Death 22) until he fears death. Later Peter does die in the sauna, where the three of them lie "as if in a dream, naked and white and at our ease" (169). A corresponding scene occurs in the southern hemispherewhen Allert, Ariane, and Olaf go to an island of nudists. The intensity of the island's blinding sun and the glaring white beach decompose all colors and make "the island landscape a brilliant unreality"(102). So searing is the heat that Allert suggests it could "bake alive infant tortoises" (101); indeed it does become poisonous to Olaf, who shrinks from dehydration and sunburn, while Allert and Ariane make love on the beach. These lovers thrive in the island's searing landscape of "unreality"that is unsuited to all other life. Reminiscent of the sauna episode, this "frightening white scene" of heat, water, and sexuality also has deathly undertones and suggests Allert's attraction to landscapes of sex and death. Although his sea voyage takes him from his frozen northern world, it ironically brings him to an inverted world of sun, heat, and ocean that also denies regeneration. Like other figures in American romance who journey into their psychic wilderness in pursuit of their dreams, Allert also investigates the font of his dreams and risks the dangers of annihilation. Whereas Walden, Moby-Dick, and Huckleberry Finn offer a chance of temporary returnto pastoral simplicity, Allert remains exiled in his dreamworld. Psychic renewal is possible only when the exile is impermanent. Allert remains an aimless travelerwho drifts between two worlds. Unlike Skipper, he does not trade one world for another or, like Cyril, attempt a faltering reconciliation between the two. Hawkes implies that Allert's voyage has led him not to freedom and a world of total possibility but to denial of life. His pursuit of his imagination brings
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destruction. While on board the ship, Allert kills Ariane by dropping her into the ocean and then kills himself by remaininglost in the waters of his psyche. Death, Sleep & the Traveler, according to Hawkes, "mixesthe night sea journey with a real descent into the realm of death; the narrator is accused of murder and suffers his own psychic death" (qtd. in Yarborough73). Allert, nevertheless, refuses to admit his culpability. His final words are "I am not guilty." Claiming innocence with these last words, he denies not only his guilt as a murderer but also his guilt as an artist. Whereas Allert refuses to admit that his pursuit of artistic illusion has reaped devastation, Papa, the narrator of Travesty, consciously chooses death over life. He makes death his chosen art form. Delivering an uninterrupted monologue on the aesthetics of death, Papa careens through the night, hell-bent on suicide. Hawkes reduces the novel's landscape to the confines of the car, making it synonymous with the narrator'smind; the ride itself suggests another interior journey into the imagination, like Allert's ocean voyage. Yet a difference remains. Allert floats on his psychic waters, and as he heads for oblivion, he takes notes. Papa, on the other hand, is at the steering wheel, directing imminent destruction. Rather than merely drifting to inevitable annihilation, Papa argues for the conscious design of death, a planned execution, not a "submissionto an oblivion"(Travesty 57). For him death is an artistic experience to be immortalized in the landscape of the novel. For him the ultimate artistic experience is the creation of death - a final union of paradoxes where creator and creation are one. This fatal design is the perfect composition, a "tableau of chaos" (59). Just as Skipper values his occupation as artificial inseminator, Cyril, his tapestry, and Allert, his dreams, Papa likewise values artifice over reality. When he rages toward the final purity of creation, he seeks illusion over the raw material of life. His pursuit of death is, therefore, not only an imposition of form on chaos, but also a creation of something outside of life: "thatnothing is more important than the existence of what does not exist; that I would rather see two shadows flickering inside the head than all your flaming sunrises set end to end. There you have it, the theory to which I hold as does the wasp to his dart" (57). Although a comic exaggeration of artistic pursuit, Papa's statement nevertheless espouses Hawkes's belief in the artist's need to defy the world around him and "to create from the imagination a totally new and necessaryfictional landscapeor visionary world" ("Interview"with Enck 141). This dictum is echoed in Papa's
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italicized words: "Imagined life is more exhilarating than remembered life" (127). This belief, which all Hawkes's narrators hold, explains their monomaniacal insistence on the artistic act that inevitably leads them into their own psychic underworlds. Like Narcissus's plunge into the waters of his own reflection, Papa's car ride is a metaphor for the absolute artistic experience. Hawkes suggests that such a romantic endeavor must be fatal. The artist-figures in the triad are victimized by their own radical pursuit of freedom as it resides in the creative imagination and by their rebellion against life's limitations. The inherent irony, of course, is that in combatting death (stasis) art leads to the same inevitable result. As Papa says in his closing words, "there shall be no survivors. None" (128). Travestythus ends with the final fictional landscape-the destructive vitality of man's psyche. Because Travestypresses landscape to the lowest limits of psychic isolation, some critics suggest that Hawkes has nowhere to go-no other worlds to explore. John Graham, for example, says: "In Travesty the progression into an isolated world of language goes so far that, without a new start, Hawkes may next offer a blank page" (49). The Passion Artist (1979) and Virginie: Her Two Lives (1982) mark Hawkes's "new start." Published by Harper and Row, instead of New Directions, and written for a larger audience, these two novels are his most accessible to date. Rather than reducing the fictional world to the confines of his narrator's interior landscape, Hawkes opens up his last two fictions by presenting a character in an external world. With The Passion Artist Hawkes returns to the distancing of a thirdperson narrator and to a landscape set in a European location. Although Virginie:Her Two Lives has a first-person narrator, she is an eleven-year-oldgirl who functions mainly as an innocent companion to the novel's central artist-figures, Seigneur and Bocage. Not a direct participant, Virginie offers some distance on the proceedings. Besides this change in narrator, the novel also takes place in a specific locale Paris and the countryside of France. With both these novels Hawkes returns to landscapes tied to verifiable settings, as was true of his early fiction. The world expressedin The Passion Artist in many ways resembles Hawkes's early fictional landscapes, but with a difference. In The Cannibal, The Goose on the Grave, The Owl, and The Lime Twig, the violence of war, the repressionof social institutions, and the sterility
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of sex all combine to present a damning portrait of the modern world. The Passion Artist evokes a similar world view. Like Spitzen-on-theDein, the "city without a name" (Passion 181) embodies the sterility of modern civilization with its gray buildings, desolate parks, and preponderance of institutions. Such a portrait of society is a given in Hawkes's work, but his artistic energy no longer seems engaged in conveying this bleak world's chaos; his emphasis has changed. Rather than offering surrealistic descriptions of a decomposing world, as he does in his early fiction, Hawkes suggests this town's minimalism in his prose: the city in which he lived was withouttrees, withoutnationalmonuments, withoutponds or flower gardens,withouteven a single buildingto attract visitorsfrom other partsof the world. It was a small bleak city consisting and unfinished almostentirelyof cheaplybuiltconcretedwellings apartment houses. It was a city withoutinterest,withoutpride,withoutefficiency.(11) In this description Hawkes's language reflects the listlessness of the static landscape instead of countering it with a Dionysian form of verbal energy. In The Passion Artist Hawkes is not content with just presenting landscapes of apocalypse and doom. In a 1979 interview he implies that his fictional worlds have developed. Referring to the anonymous European city in The Passion Artist, he says, "We are archaeologically on top of the buried city of Spitzen-on-the-Dein, and ironically, the new world is bleaker, deader than the world of The Cannibal" (Radical 185). In the novel he writes: of deathand agony;the pathsof the Herewas the outcomeof the centuries of and holocaustshad invented dreamers minds ended here; palaces great in its And what was this daily life the validityof recity, denying nothing. cordedhistory,if not the very domainof the humanpsyche?The irony of orderexistingonly in desolationand discomfortwas a satisfactionbeyond imagining.(11-12) The human negation illustrated by the unnamed city's sterility is not tied to war and irrational violence, as in the earlier fiction, but to the repression of the "domain of the psyche." True, the conflict between authoritarian, life-denying order and creative irrationality has permeated all of Hawkes's works and been evidenced in the novels' landscapes. In the early fiction the conflict is characterizedby entropic
landscapes wrecked by war and in the later fiction by landscapes more
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and more disordered by the destructiveness of the narrator's own psyche. With The Passion Artist, however, Hawkes brings together these two domains - by presenting both a civilization in collapse and an interior excavation into the psyche. The Passion Artist focuses on sexual repression as the source of a culture's authoritarianism and man's enslavement to a life bereft of imagination. Dominating the entire city's landscape is a woman's prison, La Violaine, a symbol epitomizing the sexual deprivation of modern civilization. The incarceration of women characterizes this society. Konrad Vost, the middle-aged protagonist, parallels his deficient surroundings with his rigid self-control and sexual celibacy. When a prison riot at La Violaine breaks out, Vost and other male volunteers enter the prison to quell the riot but instead participate in it. Hawkes suggests through this eruption the dangers of confining not only unruly sexuality but also all disruptive needs lodged in the unconscious. La Violaine, like Hugh's dungeon, is emblematicof man's culturally repressedunconscious ("the domain of the psyche"). Similar to other gothic enclosuresthat confine nightmares,the prison embodies Vost's worst fears as well as his only chance of tapping life's mysteries. At this point The Passion Artist is reminiscent of Hawkes's other post-1964 fiction. Although not filtered through a first-person narrator, the landscape becomes internalized and Hawkes mirrors Vost's "disordering": "the prison had exploded, so to speak; interior and exterior life were assuming a single shape"(74). His "disordering" takes place in two locales: inside the city's prison itself and in an old stable in an outlying marsh. Playing on the age-old distinction between the "city"and the "country," Hawkes dichotomizes the forces of civilization and nature, illustratingthe central conflict between repressiveconsciousness and the irrational, imaginativeunconscious. The dichotomy between "city"and "country"is also clear in Virginie:Her Two Lives, with the presentation of Paris in 1945 as opposed to the rural French countryside of 1740. Even though a character does not travel from one experience to another, in this novel Hawkes juxtaposes the city and rural settings to dramatize the conflict. Like Allert's voyage and Papa's ride, Vost'strip from city to marsh is a journey into the interiors of self. The turn inward is immediately characterized by the squalid nature of the landscape itself and by the return of Hawkes's visionary use of language: off to his right lay a geometricarrangement of wet stones whereprimitive buildings,long since dissolved,had shelteredboth men and animals.More
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fence posts, the rottenribs and backboneof a small boat, brightlycolored marshplantsfesteringin socketsof ice, the fragmentsof a shattered aqueduct grayand drippingwheremomentsbeforetherehad been only flatness or underground thatrevealed andemptiness, discolorations quicksand abrupt of flashingmirrors,the strongcold salty rivers:it was all an agglomeration and of human air was impossiblyheavywith the smellof humanexcrement underthe ferns, behindpiles of bodiesarmedand booted and decomposing rocks, in the depths of the wells. (The Passion Artist 85) Like the entropic decay of The Cannibal's landscape, this marsh actively decomposes all signs of life and "was in itself a morgue" (99). Walking deeper into its dark formlessness, Vost finds a stone enclosure of "wet rocks" and "slimy roughness." Womblike in its warmth, yet repulsive in its filth, this obviously sexual symbol is nature's analogue to civilization's prison. A recurrentsymbol in Hawkes's fiction, this chamber of sex and death subjects the character to unexplored psychic terrors(just as the lighthouse does in Second Skin, the dungeon in The Blood Oranges, and the ocean liner in Death, Sleep & the Traveler). Likewise, the entirety of Virginie:Her Two Lives takes place in such disordering interiors. The novel alternates between a low-rent flophouse in postwar Paris and a castle of erotic decadence set in the French countryside of 1740. Within either one of these interiors lies the possibility of the ultimate in both sexual expression and complete degradation. In the Paris salon five trollops in various stages of undress cavort with a tattooed boxer and an old man, under the behest of Bocage, a greasy cab driver. Although the group frolics congenially, the atmosphere is deathly because of the mute presence of Maman. Upstairs the "bedridden effigy" of Maman lies paralyzed in a dark, camphorous bedroom. In the countryside chateau of 1740 five French beauties live in the elegant simplicity of a castle with stone corridors, vaulted windows, and courtyards and in the pastoral beauty of shepherds'huts, haystacks, and poplars. Yet within this ruraltableau, which Virginie describes as "the very domain of my purity" (Virginie 50), Seigneuroversees acts of bestiality and self-abasement. The landscapes themselves, whether plebian or aristocratic, as well as the experiences within them suggest paradoxical extremes- of terror and freedom and relate to the epigraph by Heide Ziegler: "beauty is paradox." Captives of these dark interiors, Vost and Virginie, like all of Hawkes's characters, are caught in nightmares of sex and violence. Whether external microcosms of an entropic modern world or internal
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representations of a narrator's psyche, all of Hawkes's landscapes imprison the characters. In The Passion Artist Hawkes externalizes the imprisonment as a symbol not only of a repressive world's confinement of the individual spirit but also of the individual's enslavement to his own submerged unconscious. After Vost's journey into the marsh, it is therefore fitting that he is brought back to prison. His release, ironically, comes from imprisonment. By being held captive in the darkness of his own interior, Vost is forced to experience the ambivalences present in the unconscious - the terror and the freedom. For the first time in Hawkes's fiction the paradoxes evident in the landscape, to which the main characteris subjected, are ultimately transcended. Not an artist-figure like Skipper who transforms one world into another, Vost reconciles the ambivalences in his unconscious. Freed from the imprisonment of self, he achieves the ultimate artistic experience through sex (not death), the "willed erotic union" of the self and the other, the creator and the creation, and thus achieves momentarily what all of Hawkes's first-person narrators try to create in their fictional landscapes. Unlike Allert, who merely dreams it, or Papa, who aesthetically designs it, Vost not only confronts but attains the actual experience. The possibility of achieving such freedom exists in Hawkes's world, both in The Passion Artist and Virginie:Her Two Lives. Hawkes explains in his interview with Robert Scholes: or terroristic universe my fiction is generallyan evocationof the nightmare in whichsexualityis destroyedby law, by dictum,by humanperversity, by contraption, and it is this destructionof human sexuality which I have attemptedto portrayand confront in orderto be true to humanfear and to humanruthlessness,but also in part to evoke its opposite, the moment of freedom from constriction,constraint,death. ("Conversation" 207) The cost of such freedom is great. In Hawkes's world authoritarian order and erotic vitality inevitably collide in violent disruption. Vost is shot as he emerges from the prison gates, and Virginie perishes in flames. On the other side of completely integrated psychic experience is annihilation. Thus Vost achieves "his final irony" and in death discovers "for himself what it was to be nothing" (The Passion Artist 184). Virginie also is destroyed after finally consummating her relationship with her creator-father. As the Beckett epigraph suggests, "Birth was the death of her." In the Paris sequence her Maman sets fire to their abode, and in the other sequence Virginiejoins her creator
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(Seigneur) being burned at the stake. The novel begins and ends with apocalyptic flames. Despite the paradoxical extremes present in Hawkes's fictional landscapes, they ultimately all move toward death - whether it is the destruction inherent in a repressive world or in an irrational mind. The triad shows the dangerof tapping the irrational;The Passion Artist shows the danger of denying it. Believing in the necessity of pursuing demons in order to exorcise hidden fears responsible for the external world's bleakness, Hawkes follows his characters into their inner recesses. From these interior journeys into man's psyche have emerged lush landscapes of exotic sexuality and lyricism as well as the darkest, most horrific nightmaresimaginable. These emergingambiguitiescome from Hawkes's own plumbing of his unconscious, from which spring his visions. In an article, Hawkes writes: "my own imagination is a kind of hall of 'whippers' in which the materials of the unconscious are beaten, transformed into fictional landscape itself" ("Opera and Skin" 20). Hawkes probes his unconscious not only to stimulate his own artisticvisions but also to expresshis belief that from this pursuitcomes balance. Only by excavating the interior depths where the irrational, imaginative, and erotic lie can man ever achieve harmony. Not denying the significance of sanity or rationalism, Hawkes pursuesunreason, which is too often denied, in an effort to forge a union: "Yes,of course sanity is important. But basic harmony, serenity, and a rational equilibrium can be achieved only out of a workshop of the irrational"("A Trap" 179). Always interestedin pursuingthe nightmare,in assaultingthe conventional world, and in creating what did not exist before, Hawkes uses the device of fictional landscape so necessary to his creative vision as well as his aesthetic. Explaining his travels down the dark tunnel from which emerge his singular works of brutality and beauty, he writes: "For me the writer should always serve as his own angleworm - and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of the blackness, the better" ("Notes" 788). Hawkes makes no promises about what will be retrieved from these depths, but the resulting landscapes testify to his unremittingly creative vision. University of Southwestern Louisiana
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WORKS CITED Graham, John. Postscript to "On The Cannibal."A John Hawkes Symposium: Design and Debris. Eds. Anthony C. Santore and Michael N. Pocalyko. Insights 1: Working Papers in Contemporary Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1977. Hawkes, John. The Blood Oranges. New York: New Directions, 1971. The Cannibal. New York: New Directions, 1949. .-. "A Conversation on The Blood Oranges." With Robert Scholes. Novel 5 .-. (1972): 197-207. Death, Sleep & the Traveler. New York: New Directions, 1974. .-. -. "John Hawkes: An Interview." With John Enck. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6 (1965): 141-55. -. "John Hawkes on His Novels: An Interview with John Graham." Massachusetts Review 7 (1966): 449-61. "Notes on the Wild Goose Chase." Massachusetts Review 3 (1962): 784-88. .-. "The Floating Opera and Second Skin." Mosaic 8 (1974): 17-28. .-. The Passion Artist. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. .-. The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition:Interviews with English .-. and American Novelists. Interview with Heide Ziegler. Eds. Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby. London: Junction Books, 1982. 169-87. -. "Interview." With John Kuehl. Kuehl 155-83. Second Skin. New York: New Directions, 1964. .-. "A Trap to Catch Little Birds With." Interview with Anthony C. Santore .-. and Michael Pocalyko. A John Hawkes Symposium: Design and Debris. Eds. Anthony C. Santore and Michael Pocalyko. Insights 1: Working Papers in Contemporary Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1977. 165-84. Travesty. New York: New Directions, 1976. .-. Virginie: Her Two Lives. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. "-. Hawkes, John, and John Barth. "Hawkesand Barth TalkAbout Fiction." Ed. Thomas LeClair. The New York Times Book Review 1 April 1979: 7, 31-33. Kuehl, John. John Hawkes and the Craft of Conflict. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1975. Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1975. Marx, Leo. TheMachine in the Garden: Technologyand the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the WasteLand: A Study of the American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972. Tanner, Tony. City of Words:American Fiction 1950-1970. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Yarborough, Richard. "Hawkes' Second Skin." Mosaic 8 (1974): 65-75.
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Hawkes Landscapes

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The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

A NEWLY ENVISIONED WORLD: FICTIONAL LANDSCAPES OF JOHN HAWKES Carol A. MacCurdy

?1986 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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