John Hawkes provides an excellent opportunity for such an inquiry, for several
reasons. Discovered by Albert Guerard in 1947 and vigorously promoted by him
in the years that followed, Hawkes was the first American "post-modern" author
to gain notoriety.[1] Writers of Hawkes's
generation were, in turn, the first in this country to spend their entire
creative lives in the academy: they have used that position with unprecedented
success to shape and control critical reception, especially through the
mechanism of the interview. At the same time, as Guerard's influence on Hawkes
demonstrates, criticism can shape a writer's understanding of what is
important in his or her creative work.
There are two places to look for evidence of the kind of influence I am
discussing: in the author's work and in representations of that work, either
by the author or by the critics. In what follows, I will look at a short story
by Hawkes which encodes a drama of authorial influence on critical reading,
and along with it I will consider a critical essay on the story which enacts
the part scripted for the reader in that drama. Thereafter, I will take a
broader sampling of Hawkes's critical fortunes, with an eye not only to the
migration of descriptive language from author to critic, via the interview,[2] but also to the genesis of that language
in the writing of Hawkes's earliest and most influential critic, Albert
Guerard.
The story and the critical reading I start with were both published in a 1988
anthology called Facing Texts: Encounters Between Contemporary Writers and
Critics, edited by Heide Ziegler. This volume deserves comment in its own
right, as an emblem of post-modern literary practice. The title of the
anthology refers to the fact that it pairs creative texts by prominent
first-generation post-modern authors with critical essays on those texts; what
makes the volume emblematic is that the critics were in most cases hand-picked
by the authors themselves. In fact, as her preface informs us, Ziegler herself
was picked by one of those authors: Facing Texts originated in a
suggestion made by William Gass to an editor at Duke University Press, that
Ziegler should edit a collection of contemporary American fiction. Ziegler
says that, when the project was proposed to her,
. . . if possible, the pieces offered by the authors should indeed be
hitherto unpublished so as to give the critics a sense of the exclusiveness,
even privacy of their work and thus convey to them the impression of a close
encounter with the respective author. . . . [and] the authors should choose their
own critics in order to ensure that the close encounter I had in mind would
not, unintentionally, be hostile, and thus destroy the possibility of mutual
ideal readership. (ix)[3]
"The Equestrienne" is a portion of Hawkes's 1985 novella Innocence in
Extremis, which is, in turn, an outtake from a novel, Adventures in the
Alaskan Skin Trade. A large part of the novel is devoted to relating the
misadventures of "Uncle Jake," as recalled by his daughter; relative to that
story, Innocence in Extremis is an extended flashback, to a time when
Uncle Jake, as a boy, visited his ancestral home in France with his father and
family. "The Equestrienne" is one of the three set pieces that make up the
novella, but it has been published here without introduction or reference to
the context in which it was developed, and it can be read as a free-standing,
very short story.[4]
In "The Equestrienne," Uncle Jake's French grandfather (referred to
exclusively as "the Old Gentleman") stages an exhibition of dressage, on what
we are told is one of several "occasions deemed by the Old Gentleman to be
specially enjoyable to his assembly of delighted guests" (216). In this, the
first of those (three) occasions and the only one presented here, a young
cousin of Uncle Jake's performs for an audience consisting of the visitors
(including Uncle Jake), members of the household, and some neighbors, all
seated in rows of plush Empire chairs arranged in a courtyard of the family
chateau. The girl and her horse are the center of attention, but the
performance itself is the medium for an interaction between the audience and
the Old Gentleman.
In this case, the audience in the tale clearly stands for the audience
of the tale, and almost from its opening lines the text signals the
effect it wants to achieve -- most notably in the modifiers that cluster
around descriptions of the represented audience. As an example, take the
passage just quoted: "the days of harmony and pleasure were further enhanced
by certain occasions deemed by the Old Gentleman to be specially enjoyable to
his assembly of delighted guests." It is the narrator who tells us that days
already harmonious and pleasurable were "enhanced" by what is about to be
related; and while we might be privy to some delusion in the Old Gentleman
when we are told that he "deemed" his entertainment "to be specially
enjoyable" to his guests, any distance between his objective and their
reaction is collapsed in the very same sentence, when we learn that they are
in fact "delighted." Each detail of the performance is similarly described
and received. "The gilded frames and red plush cushions of the chairs shone
in the agreeable light and . . . moved everyone to exclamations of surprise
and keen anticipation." In the world of the text as we are given it, the light
is "agreeable," and the audience is unanimous in its expression of "surprise
and keen anticipation." Throughout the tale, the reactions of the audience
consistently confirm what the narration announces. "Through the gateway rode a
young girl on a small and shapely dappled gray horse. Here was a sight to win
them all and audibly they sighed and visibly they leaned forward. . . . [an]
already grateful audience" (216).
There is no point in piling up further examples; suffice it to say that this
high pitch of appreciation is insistently sustained, the only two discordant
notes resolving into it almost immediately. In the first of these,
contemplating his cousin, Uncle Jake thinks "with shame. . . of himself and
his shaggy and dumpy pony" (218). In the second, shortly thereafter, his
mother whispers to him: "mark my words, dear boy. That child is dangerous."
These are important moments, but the importance lies not so much in any pall
they cast over the performance as in the evidence they give of its
irresistible charm. Uncle Jake's insecurity and his mother's mistrust soon
give way to the universal sentiment: Uncle Jake realizes that "he wanted to
become [his cousin] and take her splendid place on the gray horse," and even
his mother admits, "'she is a beautiful little rider, Jake. You might try to
ride as well as she does. It would please your father'" (219).
In her essay on the story, Christine Laniel remarks that "The Equestrienne"
"focuses on one of the most pervasive metaphors in Hawkes's works, which he
analyzes as essential to his fiction writing when he refers to 'horsemanship
as an art'" (221-22). Specifically, Laniel is suggesting that Hawkes offers
dressage as a metaphor for the artistic use of language. That much can easily
be read between the lines from which she quotes, but taken in full these lines
also suggest that the same metaphor might be extended to include an
association of other kinds of horsemanship with other ways of using language
-- after all, the audience is composed of equestrians:
But for Laniel at least, the "alluring fascination" (222) of "The
Equestrienne" survives in its strategy of "seduction, which implies the
obliteration of reality and its transfiguration into pure appearance"(226).
That is, although she acknowledges that the story reads its own moral, she
still finds Hawkes's presentation of "the artificial" fascinating, because it
undertakes "the willful deterioration of language as the vehicle of meaning."
This deterioration is said to take place in a series of puns and paradoxes
(sister-sinister, mastery-fragility, innocence-corruption, and so
forth) and in sentences like the following (which explains the effect of the
Old Gentleman's having positioned the girl sidesaddle on her horse, with her
legs away from the audience): "The fact that she appeared to have no legs was
to the entire ensemble as was the white ribbon affixed to her hat: the
incongruity without which the congruous whole could not have achieved such
perfection" (217). In this sentence, Laniel says,
Laniel also tries to restore some ambiguity to the story by arguing that
Hawkes's "rhetoric of seduction" is always "reversed into derision, as an
insidious vein of self-parody gradually penetrates the text" (222). As she
sees it,
In general, the significant gap in Hawkes's work is not between appearance and
reality but between the serious and the parodic elements that constitute his
fiction: the uneasiness of his texts is that while his self-parody seems
deliberate, it doesn't ground or control the seriousness with which he
presents his primary material. Since the critic is bound to make statements
about the text, and since making those statements usually involves taking a
position relative to the text by offering a reading, critics have often
resolved this conflict in the text by going too far in one direction or the
other -- either affirming the response offered by the text (the more common
tactic) or overstating the control exercised by the parodic element. Laniel's
piece is unusual in that it does the latter, but in order to make this case
she has to read beyond the immediate text. By so doing, she is in effect
submitting "The Equestrienne" to the control of a self-parody which develops
across other, broader contexts. This move begs the question of whether the parodic strain controls the larger contexts from which she abstracts it.
In fact, I would argue, it does not -- the uneasiness simply reasserts itself
when we look at Innocence in Extremis or Adventures in the Alaskan
Skin Trade as texts in their own right.
The significance of Hawkes's unstable self-parody, both with regard to its
presence in his other fiction and its absence in the present case, is bound up
with the problem of the audience and its response. In order to avoid the
problem Laniel has with contextualization, let us look briefly at a discrete
work, Travesty, written by Hawkes in the early 1970s.
Travesty is the monologue of a man who intends to crash the car in
which he, his daughter, and an existentialist poet (the lover of both his wife
and daughter) are traveling. Papa, the driver, denies being jealous or having
any murderous motive; instead, he tells Henri (the poet) that his plan is to
create an "accident" so inexplicable that their deaths will have to be
understood as the deliberate execution of an abstract design. Henri is
apparently nonplused, since Papa reproaches him for his failure to appreciate
the beauty of the thing: "Tonight of all nights why can't you give me one
moment of genuine response? Without it, as I have said, our expedition is as
wasteful as everything else" (82). The response Papa wants from Henri is
specifically an aesthetic one, and he sees it as a mark of Henri's artistic
insincerity that he is not able to provide it. But, as the reader well
understands, the detachment from self-interest which such a response would
require is too much to expect, even from an existentialist.
As a monologist, Papa necessarily speaks for Henri, and in a similar way
Hawkes, as a writer, speaks for the reader. His conceit is auto-destructive,
but self-parody -- a pre-emptive mode of discourse -- is by definition both
exclusive of and also highly attentive to the audience. The element of
self-parody in Travesty asserts itself as the difference between the
supposed reality of death within the fiction and the reality of death supposed
which is the fiction -- Hawkes, in other words, is Henri if he is anyone in
this story. But as this equation suggests, the parody does not extend to Papa,
and much of what he says is seriously intended, not least his confessed need
for a response:
Self-parody, this suggests, is more than an attempt to forestall a feared lack
of response (or an undesirable response); it may also become a way to avoid
"committing a final and irrevocable [speech] act." On one level, Hawkes is
deadly serious about everything that Papa says; on another, he implicitly
denies responsibility for the ideas Papa expresses. At both levels, he
precludes response -- within the narrative through the technique of monologue,
without it through the technique of self-parody. The effect on the reader is,
as Laniel says, often baffling: the proffered position is clearly untenable,
and yet the parody does not enable an alternate response because it equally
clearly does not control the text.
The instability I have been describing might also be regarded as a side effect
of characterization. Hawkes is fond of creating figures of the artist, but
these figures never completely fill the role in which they are cast; most
often they are people who have the sensibility of the artist but who do not
actually create art. Cyril in The Blood Oranges, Papa in
Travesty, Uncle Jake in Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade are
all men whose medium is action, not language, and who do not pretend to
present the fiction in which their artistry is conveyed to the reader. In
Travesty, the distinction would seem to be mooted when narration is
placed entirely in the hands of "the man who disciplines the child, carves the
roast" (44) -- but in fact it persists, since Papa's "creation," the actual
crash, cannot be presented within the narrative structure Hawkes has set up
and so is not presented at all. In other words, although Hawkes's novella
develops in the space between the disclosure and the enactment of Papa's
intentions, the aesthetic Hawkes has embodied in those intentions can be
expressed only in words, never in action -- hence the equation of Hawkes with
Henri. Seeking to evade both the irrevocable commitment of unfeigned statement
and the fear of no response, Hawkes has adopted a narrative perspective that
results in a fiction which implies but does not constitute the realization of
an aesthetic.
If the conflict between a desire to present this aesthetic and the fear that
it will be rejected is settled in Travesty by giving the narrative over
entirely to statement, in "The Equestrienne" Hawkes experiments with the
opposite solution, usurping the response of his audience. Rather than
seducing the reader, this makes her superfluous: hence Laniel's frustration at
trying to present a reading of the story as given -- something that her
recourse to other texts demonstrates she is ultimately unable to do. And like
response, the absence of a controlling intelligence is dislocated in "The
Equestrienne" from a metatextual position to a thematic one: "All at once and
above the dainty clatter of the hooves, they heard the loud and charming
tinkling of a music box. Heads turned, a new and livelier surprise possessed
the audience, the fact that they could not discover the source of the music,
which was the essence of artificiality, added greatly to the effect" (219).But
even within the story, this absence proves to be more apparent than real: at
the end of the girl's exhibition,
The nature of Hawkes's dilemma and the variety of his attempts to resolve it
are characteristically post-modern, in that they demonstrate a very real need
to assert critical control over the text, combined with a desire that the
reader should be persuaded to a particular aesthetic position. Such desires
are not peculiar to post-modern authors, of course: Henry James once admitted
to dreaming, "in wanton moods, . . . of some Paradise (for art) where the
direct appeal to the intelligence might be legalized" (296). Late in his life,
James made that appeal to future readers in his prefaces to the New York
edition of his works, but he might well have envied the post-modern author,
who can address the contemporary reader through the mechanism of the
interview.
Hawkes's inclination to avail himself of opportunities to discuss his work has
resulted in quite a substantial body of interviews.[5] In these interviews, Hawkes propounds his aesthetic
program, characterizes his fiction, and explains his intentions in specific
novels; the images and analogies he uses migrate visibly from the interviews
to the criticism and reappear in the questions posed by subsequent
interviewers. In this way, the language of Hawkes's self-descriptions comes to
dominate the critical reception of his work, functioning -- to borrow an idea
from Kenneth Burke -- as a "terministic screen."[6] Hawkes's career also demonstrates, however, the
influence of critics on authors: although the authority of this particular
terministic screen is derived from Hawkes via the interview, Hawkes himself
seems to have derived many of its component terms from Albert Guerard's early
analyses of his work.
Hawkes has often acknowledged his debt to Guerard, but to fully understand the
nature of that debt we need to know something about the history of the
relationship between these two men. Hawkes was not much of a student when he
came to Harvard: the semester before he left for the war, he had flunked
out.[7] His career as a writer started
in Guerard's fiction writing class at Harvard, which he took after returning
from service in the Ambulance Corps during World War II. At that time, he had
just started working on his first piece of fiction, the novella
Charivari, and though manifestly talented, he lacked experience both as
a writer and as a reader of modern fiction. Prior to 1947, he had written only
some juvenile verse, which he submitted to qualify for Guerard's class; during
that class (for which he wrote The Cannibal,), Hawkes's "reading of
modern experimental literature was largely confined to poetry," according to
Guerard (Introduction xn). In a recent interview, Hawkes recalled that when
they first met, "Guerard . . . was probably in his early thirties, but to me
he was an awesome figure. He was quite formidable, quite authoritarian,
extremely knowledgeable, a novelist himself, and he had so suddenly and
abruptly praised my fiction at the outset in such a way as to give me real
confidence" ("Life" 112). Obviously, in the course of this long friendship
Hawkes has had many occasions to express his ideas about fiction, and it is
likely that Guerard's published criticism of Hawkes reflects those ideas to
some extent. We may even grant that, as Guerard has faded from the forefront
of contemporary criticism, and as Hawkes has become firmly established as one
of the major talents of his generation, the balance of power in the
relationship may have shifted somewhat in recent years. But it is nonetheless
clear that Guerard played an influential role in molding Hawkes's
understanding of the value of his own fiction. The nature and extent of that
influence is clear if we compare a few passages from Guerard's early criticism
to Hawkes's subsequent self-evaluations.
It was Guerard who brought Hawkes and James Laughlin together, and when, in
1949, New Directions published Hawkes's first novel (The Cannibal,),
Guerard provided the introduction. This introduction is the earliest critical
analysis of Hawkes's work, and its influence on later Hawkes criticism,
including the author's own, is inestimable. In it, Guerard says that "Terror .
. . can create its own geography" (xiii) and announces, in terms that persist
to this day, that "John Hawkes clearly belongs . . . with the cold immoralists
and pure creators who enter sympathetically into all their characters, the
saved and the damned alike. . . . even the most contaminate have their dreams
of purity which shockingly resemble our own" (xii). Not long thereafter, the
Radcliffe News published Hawkes's first interview, entitled "John
Hawkes, Author, Calls Guerard's Preface Most Helpful Criticism" (March 17,
1950) -- and so it would seem to have been. Guerard's remarks about sympathy
for "the saved and the damned alike" are reflected in Hawkes's earliest
published critical writing (1960), in which he talks about the experimental
novel as displaying "an attitude that rejects sympathy for the ruined members
of our lot, revealing thus the deepest sympathy of all" ("Notes on
Violence").[8] As late as 1979, Hawkes
still describes himself as being "interested in the truest kind of fictive
sympathy, as Albert Guerard, my former teacher and lifelong friend, has put
it. To him the purpose of imaginative fiction is to generate sympathy for the
saved and damned alike" ("Novelist"27).[9]
In his 1949 introduction, Guerard confidently compares Hawkes to William
Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Djuna Barnes (although he predicts that Hawkes
"will move . . . toward realism"), and he concludes -- on a disciplinary note
-- that "How far John Hawkes will go as a writer must obviously depend on how
far he consents to impose some page-by-page and chapter-by-chapter consecutive
understanding on his astonishing creative energy; on how richly he exploits
his ability to achieve truth through distortion; on how well he continues to
uncover and use childhood images and fears" (xv). In an addendum to the
introduction, written for The Cannibal,'s reissue in 1962, Guerard notes
that "the predicted movement toward realism has occurred" but reiterates the
importance of nightmare and "vivifying distortion" in Hawkes's fiction
(xviii). The concepts of distortion and terror, and the paradoxical linkage of
purity and contamination, have since become staples in the discussion of
Hawkes's work: the Hryciw-Wing bibliography lists at least twenty-one essays
with the words "nightmare" or "terror" in the title (beginning with a review
by Guerard in 1961), and countless others have incorporated the same idea into
their arguments.[10]
Guerard's addendum also praises Hawkes for being able "to summon pre-conscious
anxieties and longings, to symbolize oral fantasies and castration fears -- to
shadow forth, in a word, our underground selves" (xviii). In his first essay
in self-explanation, presented at a symposium on fiction at Wesleyan
University in 1962 and published in Massachusetts Review, Hawkes
himself states:
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 on The Wild Goose Chase" 788)
In a 1964 interview, one which has remained among the most often cited, Hawkes
told John Enck: "my aim has always been . . . never to let the reader (or
myself) off the hook, so to speak, never to let him think that the picture is
any less black than it is or that there is any easy way out of the nightmare
of human existence" ("John Hawkes" 145). In 1971, the piece in which the
metaphor originally appeared was reprinted along with Enck's interview in John
Graham's Studies in Second Skin (the dedication to which reads: "For
Albert Guerard, who led the way" -- Graham is another of Guerard's former
students), and in 1975 the image returns in the following exchange with John
Kuehl:
It is perhaps significant that a few pages later, Hawkes remarks: "For me evil
was once a power. Now it's a powerful metaphor" (166).[12]
The "powerful metaphor" of authorship as auto-piscation was also used by
Hawkes the year before to open an influential essay called "Notes on Writing a
Novel," which was first printed in 1973 in the Brown Alumni Monthly,
reprinted the next year in TriQuarterly, and finally revised and
collected in a 1983 volume fittingly entitled In Praise of What
Persists. In that piece, Hawkes relates the following anecdote:
Despite Hawkes's bantering manner (and Guerard's denial), it is obvious that
this relationship was an extremely important one for Hawkes, and his gratitude
seems more than slightly tinged with the anxiety of influence. This is
understandable, in light of the fact that for more than a decade after leaving
Guerard's class, Hawkes submitted each of his novels to Guerard before
publishing it; and in at least one instance, Guerard seems to have exercised
his authority in the form of a veto. As Hawkes tells it, when Guerard read
the manuscript for The Lime Twig, "he sent it back saying 'Jack, this
is deplorable; it's a good idea, but poorly conceived and written, and you'll
have to start over again'" ("Life" 112). After that, it took Hawkes four years
to revise the book, and although Guerard continued to exert a shaping
influence on Hawkes's career, this was the last time he was given a manuscript
for preapproval.
Elsewhere in his dialogue with Guerard, Hawkes says, "just as you controlled
everything else, you are, as a matter of fact, responsible for my fiction
becoming increasingly so-called 'realistic"' (23), but after The Lime
Twig this realism coincided with a new emphasis on the comic and a marked
uneasiness on the part of Hawkes:
With regard not only to Hawkes's stylistic oscillations but also to the
genealogy of his self-understanding, the central issue is the relation of the
artist to the contents of his unconscious mind. In exactly this connection,
Frederick Busch -- one of John Hawkes's earliest and friendliest critics --
recently wondered whether
. . . I go so far as to sorrow over his considerable praise from academics. .
. because I fear that they seek to encourage Hawkes to write what is
"teachable" and teachably "post-Modern."
. . . like every writer who taps his inner imagery, [Hawkes] must determine
when he is to avoid his own urgings and the temptation to use what becomes a
habitual vocabulary of images. (When People Publish 110)
In The Romantic Ideology, Jerome McGann says that there is "[an]
essential difference which separates the journalistic and polemical criticism
whose focus is the present from the scholarly and historical criticism which
operates in the present only by facing (and defining) the past" (2-3). To
date, much of the criticism of post-modern fiction has indeed been polemical
and journalistic and has aimed at reproducing the ideology of the fiction it
discusses. But even though no one at present can claim to have the same
distance from post-modernism as we have from romanticism, it is still possible
to submit post-modern fiction to a criticism that scrutinizes its cultural and
institutional determinants. Indeed, as McGann points out, there are good
reasons for doing so:
Earlier I asserted that the post-modernism of Hawkes and his generation is
continuous with modernism, but here that assertion needs to be qualified.
First-generation post-modernism differs from its predecessor in one crucial
way, namely in being institutionalized. Modernism, for the most part,
rejected the security of the academy in order to take liberties with the
culture; by contrast, post-modernism stands at the embarrassing conjunction of
that modernist heritage of alienation and a practical condition of
institutional respectability and security. The aesthetic similarities between
modernism and post-modernism pale into insignificance next to this situational
difference -- and since the aesthetic features of post-modernism serve
purposes different from those they served under modernism, our advocacy of
those features serves different purposes as well. It may be too late for
authors such as Hawkes to alter their course, but it is by no means too soon
for the criticism of post-modern fiction to put aside polemic in favor of
analysis and begin resisting the urge to cooperate.
According to Michael Koehler, the term "post-modern" was
introduced (in English) in the 1940s by Arnold Toynbee, who used it to
denominate the entire period from 1875 to the present. Koehler says that
Irving Howe may have been the first person to call the literature after
modernism "post-modern," in his 1959 essay "Mass Society and Post-Modern
Fiction." A good deal of the confusion that has accompanied the use of this
term in recent years might be attributed to the failure to acknowledge that
there have already been two generations of the postmodern and that, in many
ways, the two have little in common. For the sake of clarity, I use the
original form of the word (in which the hyphen privileges the modern) to refer
to the first of these two generations, which sees itself as extending the
project of modernism. In "postmodernism," on the other hand, the hyphen has
dropped out and the agglutinated form, in which "post" gets top billing,
implies the emergence of a new entity. This form of the word is increasingly
common, but I would suggest that rather than being applied indiscriminately it
ought to denote specifically that rising generation which conceives of itself
as distinct from and often opposed to modernism. Back
Kenneth Burke's idea of the migration of metaphor is
relevant here: "In general, primitive magic tended to transfer an animistic
perspective to the charting of physical events. And positivistic science, by
antithesis, leads to an opposite ideal, the transferring of physicalist
perspective to human events. Each is the migration of a metaphor" (Philosophy
147). In the present case, the migration consists in a transfer of an
authorial perspective to the criticism of fiction. Back
The other authors in Ziegler's anthology are Robert
Coover, Guy Davenport, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, Susan
Sontag, Walter Abish, and Joseph McElroy. Back
"The Equestrienne" appears in Facing Texts; Innocence in Extremis was published by Burning Deck in 1985; Adventures in the
Alaskan Skin Trade was published in hardcover by Simon and Schuster in
1985 and then, as part of the Contemporary American Fiction series, in
paperback by Penguin in 1986 Back
According to Carol A. Hryciw-Wing's recent bibliography,
forty-four interviews with Hawkes were published between 1950 and 1985. Back
See Kenneth Burke, "Terministic Screens," chapter 3 of
Language as Symbolic Action. Burke says that "even if any given
terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a
terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must
function also as a deflection of reality" (45). He goes on to elaborate
the point as follows: "Not only does the nature of our terms affect the nature
of our observations, in the sense that the terms direct the attention to one
field rather than to another. Also, many of the 'observations' are but
implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations
are made. In brief, much that we take as observations about 'reality' may
be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of
terms" (46). Back
To my knowledge, the only personal nightmare ever related
by Hawkes (for whom the nightmare has become a trademark) is a recurrent dream
"about not passing courses and not graduating from Harvard, in which case I
would not have been a teacher, et cetera" (Hawkes and Guerard 21). Back
This brief essay and a story are accompanied by Guerard's
"Introduction to the Cambridge Anti-Realists," among which Guerard includes
Hawkes. Back
This interview is accompanied by Guerard's review of
The Passion Artist. Back
Guerard himself, through all four revisions of his entry
on Hawkes in the reference work Contemporary Novelists ( 1972, 1976,
1982, 1986), has continued to praise Hawkes for his use of "childhood terror,
oral fantasies and castration fears, fears of regression and violence,
profound sexual disturbances" (395). Not surprisingly in the 1986 entry
Guerard seems somewhat dissatisfied with Adventures in the Alaskan Skin
Trade, because it contains so few archetypal dreams [which] echo powerful
dreams in the earlier books"; for Guerard, it is only in these echoes that
"the author's true voice is dominant" (397). Back
This piece has not only been reprinted in Graham but
also in Klein and in volume 29 of Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Back
Kuehl publishes this interview as a chapter in his book
on Hawkes -- not an uncommon practice in book-length studies of contemporary
authors. Back
For a full-length discussion of professionalism as an
ideological tool in the administration of culture, see Larson. Back
"The excitement of contemporary studies is that all of its critical
practitioners and most of their subjects are alive and working at the same
time. One work influences another, bringing to the field a spirit of
competition and cooperation that reaches an intensity rarely found in other
disciplines" (x). In these remarks on "contemporary studies," Jerome
Klinkowitz takes for granted that contemporary writers and their critics
belong to one "discipline," the academic discipline of literary study. This
affiliation of criticism and creative writing within a single institutional
framework does indeed compound the influence that critic and author have on
one another's work, as it multiplies the opportunities and the incentives for
cooperation; but rather than simply celebrating this fact, as Klinkowitz does,
we ought to inquire into the consequences of the professional interaction and
practical interdependence of author and critic, particularly as it affects the
creativity of the former and the judgment of the latter.
I immediately recognized that in effect I was being offered the
opportunity to realize one of my pet ideas: to bring together . . .
unpublished pieces by authors as well as critics that would, in a sense, defy
the chronological secondariness of critical interpretation. Such a book would
make the relationship between author and critic an unmediated encounter, with
authors and critics becoming one another's ideal readers.
In Hawkes's case, Ziegler's solicitude is unnecessary: his contribution to
this volume was designed to foster the kind of reading that she desired for
it.
Nearly everyone in that audience rode horseback. Most of them were
fox hunters. Their lives depended on horses. . . . Yet for all of them their
mares and geldings and fillies and stallions were a matter of course like
stones in a brook or birds in the boughs. Most of the horses they bred and
rode were large, rugged, unruly, brutish beasts of great stamina. The horses
raced and hunted, pulled their carriages, carried them ambling through sylvan
woods and took them cantering great distances, but little more. So here in the
Old Gentleman's courtyard the spectacle of the young equestrienne and her gray
horse schooled only in dressage appealed directly to what they knew and to
their own relationships to horse and stable yet gave them all a taste of
equestrian refinement that stirred them to surprise and pleasure. They had
never thought of horsemanship as an art, but here indeed in the dancing horse
they could see full well the refinement of an artist's mind.
(218)
The thrust of this passage, it seems to me, is first to suggest horsemanship
as a figure for the use of language in general, and then to distinguish
between the nonutilitarian "refinement" of its use in fiction and the
practicality of more quotidian language used with an end in mind, as for
example to convey information (in "rugged, unruly, brutish" words "of great
stamina" but no elegance). In this scene "artist" and audience share what
might be called a professional interest in horses, not unlike the professional
interest in language Hawkes shares with his readers; and while it may be the
general reader and not the critical one who takes language as "a matter of
course," even the most perspicacious fox hunters among us are obviously
supposed to be "stirred" to "surprise and pleasure" at Hawkes's demonstration
of verbal dressage. In fact, at the conclusion of the performance the story
explicitly announces the lesson we are to draw from it: "the audience rose to
its feet, still clapping. They exclaimed aloud to each other, while clapping,
and smiles vied with smiles and no one had praise enough for the exhibition
which had taught them all that artificiality not only enhances natural life
but defines it" (220). Hawkes's instruction of the reader is too deliberate to
be unintended and too obvious to ignore, so it must be explained. In Laniel's
analysis, the author at these moments is "forestalling interpretation by
anticipating it. As a consequence, the critic is thwarted in efforts to unveil
supposedly hidden significations, which are obtrusively exposed by the writer
himself"(222). She regards this aspect of the story as a problem only for a
criticism which needs "to unveil supposedly hidden significations"; as we have
seen, though, "The Equestrienne" does more than interpret itself: it so
relentlessly superintends response that it is likely to frustrate any reader,
and not merely a certain sort of critic.
we are made to experience both frustration and supreme
satisfaction, since the expected word is missing and yet is virtually present,
enhanced by the strange, incongruous connections that implicitly suggest it.
By establishing the curious relationship of the logically unrelated, by
uniting the like with the unlike in sudden and unexpected juxtapositions, the
poetic text produces a jarring effect, so that we are left with the notion of
a fundamental vacancy, of a basic lack that is the very essence of aesthetic
pleasure. (228)
Yet the sentence Laniel has chosen not only contains the "missing" word --
"perfection" -- but emphasizes it by placing it in the ultimate position. And
in any case, Hawkes's notion of an "incongruity without which the congruous
whole could not have achieved such perfection" is more plausible as a model
than as an occasion for Laniel's observation that the "jarring effect" brought
about by "the curious relationship of the logically unrelated" results in "a
fundamental vacancy . . . that is the very essence of aesthetic pleasure."
Hawkes's writing cannot function without initiating its own
ironical debunking. The "morality of excess" [Innocence in Extremis 55]
that guides the artist in his work also guides Hawkes in his writing, as
exemplified by the profusion of superlatives and comparatives in the novella
and in all his fiction. But this very excessiveness entails a crescendo, an
escalation into more and more incongruous associations, so that his texts are
relentlessly undermined by their own grotesque redoubling. (235)
Self-parody is indeed an abiding characteristic of Hawkes's writing -- and
often its saving grace -- but though the language we have already quoted from
"The Equestrienne" does suggest an excessiveness that might easily escalate
into self-parody, Laniel herself admits that "during the performance of the
equestrienne the burlesque element is extremely slight" (233). Consequently,
when she makes the argument that this text undermines itself she is forced to
rely entirely on evidence collected from other, later sections of the novella
and from the originary novel. Still, even if there is no parody in "The
Equestrienne," its absence makes it worth discussing.
Let me admit that it was precisely the fear of committing a final
and irrevocable act that plagued my childhood, my youth, my early manhood. . . .
And in those years and as a corollary to my preoccupation with the cut string
I could not repair, the step I could not retrieve, I was also plagued by what
I defined as the fear of no response. . . . If the world did not respond to me
totally, immediately, in leaf, street sign, the expression of strangers, then
I did not exist. . . . But to be recognized in any way was to be given your
selfhood on a plate and to be loved, loved, which is what I most
demanded.(84-85)
the Old Gentleman appeared and as one the audience realized that
though they had all seen him act the impresario and with his raised hand start
the performance, still he had not taken one of the red plush chairs for
himself, had not remained with them in the courtyard, had not been a passive
witness to his granddaughter's exhibition. He was smiling broadly; he was
perspiring; clearly he expected thanks. In all this the truth was evident:
that not only had he himself orchestrated the day, but that it was he who had
taught the girl dressage, and he who had from a little balcony conducted her
performance and determined her every move, and he who had turned the handle of
the music box. Never had the old patrician looked younger or more pleased with
himself. (220)
The Old Gentleman is not "a passive witness" to the presentation; he is its
conductor, and his curtain call might be compared to Hawkes's persistent
assertion of the authorial self in his interviews: in both cases, the creator
remains behind the scenes during the actual performance but reappears
afterward to make sure that its significance is properly understood.
The constructed vision, the excitement of the undersea life of the
inner man, a language appropriate to the delicate malicious knowledge of us
all as poor, forked, corruptible, the feeling of pleasure and pain that comes
when something pure and contemptible lodges in the imagination -- I believe in
the "singular and terrible attraction" of all this.
The image of the fishhook is a more memorable formulation of Guerard's claim
that Hawkes's fiction has the ability to "shadow forth our underground
selves"; certainly it seems, in keeping with the metaphor of which it is a
part, to have set itself deep in Hawkes's vision of his own work.
A scholarly, gifted, deeply good-natured friend once remarked that
"Notes on Writing a Novel" is a deplorably condescending title. . . . At that
moment. . . . I thought of a metaphor with which I'd ended a talk on fiction
ten years ago at Boston College, when I said that "for me, the writer of
fiction should always serve as his own angleworm, and the sharper the barb
with which he fishes himself out of the darkness, the better." But when I
proposed "The Writer as Angleworm" as an alternative, my friend pointed out
that preciousness is worse than condescension. (109)
The "friend" remains unnamed, but it is somehow appropriate that Hawkes has
trouble remembering the genesis of his image, mistaking the Wesleyan venue for
a Boston College one; in an interview given in 1979 and published in 1983, he
makes a similar mistake when Patrick O'Donnell remarks on "the fetus fished
out of the flood in The Beetle Leg." Hawkes responds: "Yes. Thinking
of that image reminds me of an interview with John Graham where I said that
'the writer should be his own angleworm [etc.].'" By this point Hawkes is not
remembering the occasion on which he originally formulated the idea but
misremembering one on which he quoted it -- the interview with Enck, published
in Graham. Hawkes goes on to dwell on the image at some length, demonstrating
that it still informs his understanding of his own work, however vague its
origins:
It's an interesting paradox: separating the artist from the human
personality, the artistic self from the human self, then thinking of the
artist's job as one of catching, capturing, snaring, using a very dangerous
and unpleasant weapon, a hook, knowing that his subject matter is himself or
his own imagination, which he has to find himself and which he catches
ruthlessly. It's a very schizophrenic image, full of dangerous, archetypal
maneuvers in the deepest darkness within us. ("Life" 123)
Hawkes's choice of words is revealing, in that schizophrenia is often linked
to the presence of an overpowering authority figure; we have already seen that
Hawkes initially regarded Guerard as "an awesome figure . . . quite
formidable, quite authoritarian." In a 1971 encounter called "John Hawkes and
Albert Guerard in Dialogue, "Hawkes jokes about that "awesome" authority, but
with an insistence and intensity that belie his tone.
Beginning with Second Skin, I was reluctant and partly
afraid to ask my mentor for his approval of my work. That was the first
manuscript I published without Guerard's pre-reading. I know he likes
Second Skin a great deal. . . . [but] I don't think he likes the next
two novels all that much; my feeling is that he thinks The Blood
Oranges is, in some ways, a falling off. But he liked Travesty a
great deal. . . . The reason that we first went to France was because Guerard,
himself, is partly French. . . . So France was the world that Guerard
represented. ("Life" 113)
If Hawkes was conscious of his comic novels as a
departure from the kind of writing approved of by his mentor, Travesty (a
"French" novel) would seem to have been his gesture of reconciliation. His
next book, The Passion Artist, returned to the earlier style and
setting and was very favorably reviewed by Guerard.
John Hawkes, studying his life, perhaps studies his art as well. .
. . [he] now faces the danger he has faced throughout a distinguished career -
- of tapping his usual psychic resources, of using his usual dreams, of
relying upon his usual metaphors, and therefore of risking the loss of new
language, new fictive worlds.
It is interesting that, in an earlier version of the same essay, Busch's
pessimism was decidedly less pronounced:
In Death, Sleep & The Traveler, Hawkes may be thinking
about who he is as a writer, what he has done, and what he ought to do. He
may, at times, seem to be writing out of a sense of Hawkes. . . . When
Hemingway became a student of Hemingway -- To Have and Have Not, as
compared to its point of origin, "After the Storm," is a good example -- he
failed to measure up to his teacher. While I do not see signs of such a
failure in Death, Sleep & The Traveler, I do see Hawkes as engaged in the
most profound examination of his own writings; and he is daring to risk being
influenced by that seductive writer, John Hawkes. ("Icebergs"
62-63)
Busch's change in tone between 1977 and 1986 suggests that he does feel
Hawkes, with the aid of his academic critics, has seduced himself. I would
want to add only that Hawkes's "sense of Hawkes" has, from the beginning, been
shaped and developed by his most important reader, Guerard. And although
influence here reverses the direction it followed in the case of "The
Equestrienne," in each case the academic context shared by reader and writer
has fostered an extraordinary symbiosis, one which ultimately enervates both
criticism and creativity.
When critics perpetuate and maintain older ideas and attitudes in
continuities and processive traditions they typically serve only the most
reactionary purposes of their societies, though they may not be aware of this;
for the cooptive powers of a vigorous culture like our own are very great. If
such powers and their results are not always to be deplored, cooptation must
always be a process intolerable to critical consciousness, whose first
obligation is to resist incorporation. and whose weapon is analysis. (2)
What was new in 1947 has begun to age, and it is now time to ask what purposes
are served by perpetuating the ideas and attitudes identified with it. The
problem McGann describes is only exacerbated when author and critic are
contemporaries cohabiting in one institution. Under these circumstances, the
material inducements to cooperation may well subvert the independence of both
parties: each is in the position to augment the prestige of the other, but
neither is really in control. As McGann predicts, having been incorporated,
each is controlled by the ideology of the institution that creates and confers
their prestige, and both end up serving the most reactionary purposes of that
institution. Where post-modernism is concerned, the institution is the academy
and the ideology is that of professionalism. Others have pointed out before
now that academic professionalism is itself at the service of larger cultural
mechanisms, and that its most reactionary purpose is to co-opt and sequester
intellectual energies -- whether critical or creative -- so that they do not
disrupt the smooth operation of those mechanisms.[13]
Notes
Works Cited