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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zoob Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 43100 i . 5 74-3177

GLASS, Terrence L., 1946- MYTHS, DREAMS AND REALITY: CYCLES OF EXPERIENCE IN THE NOVELS OF JOHN HAWKES.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, modem

University Microfilms, A Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan i

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. H m s, DREAMS AND REALITY! CYCLES OF EXPERIENCE IN Tdfi NOVELS OF JCHN HAWKES

DISSERTATION

Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio S tate University

By

Terrence L. Glass* B.A., M.A. * • • • •

The Ohio S tate University

1973

Heading Committee! Approved By Dr. John Itusto Dr. Anthony Libby ^ Dr. Daniel Barnes t A/- Adviser Deportment of English AQQWWLEDGMafT

I would lik e to thank Professors John Muste, Anthony Libby and Daniel fiaxnea of the Department of English, Chlo State University, and Professor Lee Brown of the Department of Philosophy* Ohio State Unlver- alty, for their helpful caanents during the preparation of this study.

11 v m

September 8, 19**6 Bom—Dayton, Ohio 1968 ...... B.A., Central State University, W ilberforce, Ohio 1968-1970, 1971-1972 . . . NDEA Title IV Folic*, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

1972 M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1971-2, 1972-1973 Teaching Associate, Deportment of English, The Chlo State University, Columbus, Chlo

FIELDS OF S1UD1

Major Field 1 Modem American and B ritish L ite ra tu re Studies 5n American Literature. Professor Alfred B, Ferguson Studies in Eighteenth Century EngllBh Literature. Professor A. E. W. Maurer Studies in Creative Writing. Professor Hebert Conzonerl Studies in Nineteenth Century English Literature. Professors Richard D. Altlok and Fbrd Stfotmo

i n TAELS OP CQNTSNT9

Bage ACKNOWLEDGMENT...... 1 1 v r a ...... 1 1 1 Chapter CNSi E'TERCDUCTICN...... 1

TOOBiCTBS...... 8

W O. TJffi: CANNIBALi THE FANTASY OF HISTORY . 9

FOOTNOTES...... 7k THHEEi THE BEETLE LBGi THE FANTASY OF TECHNOLOGY...... 75 POOONCTBS...... 135

FOUR. THE LIKE W IG . FANTASY AS GAME. . . . 136 FOOTNOTES...... 185 FIVE 1 SQOCND SKIN AND THE BLOOD ORANGES t THE NAlSATQa A3 EaZAKER, THE NARRATOR. AS DREAM...... 186 FOOTNOTES...... 26k

s i x . ccnojusicn ...... 265

footnotes, ...... 273 LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED...... 27**

I t CHAPTER ONBi INTRODUCTION

"Where all le obscure and unrealised the beat alnilltude la a dream." - - E. M. Fora ter

John Hawkes's novels dramatize a paradoxical kinship between art and life. On the one hand, speaking for the literary tradition available to the contemporary writer, HaWkes says that "the liberating processes of the Imagination uay result in his discovery of characters closely resembling the heroes, benevolent guides, destructive demons, or awe­ inspiring gods that we find In myths, dreams, fantasies, and fa iry tales.HaWkes as artist consistently evokes these anolent Imaginative figures In his fiction, but always In monstrously Ironic ways. His "heroes" characteristically enact mythic or quasl-mythlc quests and ceremonies, Madame Stella Snow In The Gamlbal eats the meal ritually prepared from the Cuke's murderous sacrifice of her nephew, a ll In-the midst of her nation's regeneration of the myth of conquest. Skipper In Second Skin and Cyril In Use Blood Oranges both take part In Ironic regeneration ceremonies. There are also In Hawkes's novels such "benevolent guides"

1 2 as William Hencher and Sybllllne Who take Michael Bonks through the fantasy-fulfilling world of the Golden Bowl In Pie Lime Twig. Or there is cowboy Luke In The Beetle Leg Who heals Camper's son of a snake bite and guides the family out of the desert Into the town where the American Dream Is being enacted, blistered and poisonous and sterile. Or there are such other "benevolent guides" as Skipper and Cyril, narrators of Hawke a'a two most recent novels, who steer the reader through the dreams of their own destructive pasts towards pernicious vindication of themselves. And there are such "destructive demons" as the Red Devils In Pie Bpetlo Leg, or Larry in TJj§ Lime Twig, and such "awe­ inspiring gods" as Hugfc and Cyril In Pie Blood Oranges. But the paradox Is that all these characters, once operating within the dynamics of Hawkes's vision, themselves become artificers acting out battles of the Imagination. And the Imaginative material they are shaping consists of their own lives. They become "awe-inspiring gods" to the trapped substance of their selves. HaWkes In an artistic sense has dreamed his fiction, manipulating various mythic and archetypal patterns into the psyches and aspirations and defeats of his characters. Thereafter, the characters 3 actually begin to dream and to live out their Illusions of themselves. Thus, the artist, granted the miraculous 2 relief that "art deeds not with the real but with the conceivable," has his envisioned novels become the effective result of his Imagination! whereas Hawkes's characters, in creative repetition througi novel after novel, have their lives become the effective results of their Imaginations. We repeatedly confront In Hawkes's novels the character who In attempting to transcend Into Illusion tries to force reality to accompany him on his flights Into fancy. One of the most noticeable recurring Images throughout all of the novels is that of birds, of various types of winged creatures who persistently appear during the characters' trips Into the worlds of their Illusions, Hawkes's characters enact In a cyclic, ritualistic way the eternal tension between Illusion and reality implied In Northrop Frye's definition of the significance of the artistic Impulse i Now If we wish to see this [quest myth] as. a pattern of meaning. * ., we have to start with the workings of the subconscious where the epiphany originates, in other words In the dream. Ihe human cycle of Baking and dreaming corresponds closely to tho natural cycle of light and darkness, and it is perhaps in this corres­ pondence that all Imaginative life begins* The corres­ pondence Is largely an antithesis i it is In dayll&ht that nan Is really In the power of darkness, a prey to frustration and weakness) it is in tho darkness of nature that the "libido" or conquering heroic self awakes. Hence a r t, which Plato called a dream fo r awakened minds, seems to have os it s fin a l cause the resolution of the antithesis, the mingling of the sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide* This is the same goal, of course, that the attempt to combine human and natural power In r itu a l has.3 As literal resolvers of this artistic antithesis, Hawkes's characters repeatedly enact what he himself has termed "the terrifying similarity between the unooneolous desires of the solitary nan and the disruptive needs of the visible world* "k The dream m aterials from which Hawlces has created them (deriving from "that nightly inner Bchlsa between the rational and the absuzd"^), become the materials of their quests. Hawkes's characters constantly become Ironically associated with various myths and archetypal patterns of action th a t serve a s part o f the flabrlo of comic flypaper catching them on their way to the clouds. In The Cannibal. the German earth-mother Stella ends up denying regeneration by eating her own nephew, and the self-sainted Ernst must return from the heavenly "upper world" of his holy honeymoon to die in the aims of a wife who has already abandoned him far her awn myth of Valhalla. In The Beetle Leg, the Puritan- god Sheriff and the mediolne-god Gap Leech become old maid bogus enemies as time crawls away from them both, leaving them irrelevant in their persistent illusions of how to 5 clean up the world. Line StiLS^ protagonists, Michael and Margaret Banks, become so trapped In the destructive rhythms of a world waiting to concretize their dreams that death becomes their only escape from the violent gods that have arisen to meet their llbldlnal invitations* In Second Skin. Skipper mythologizes himself in a ll sorts of lronlo ways, the ultimate effect being that the dream he constructs of him self becomes more clearly in te llig ib le as a nightmare* And in Tho Blood Oranges. Cyril, the self-defined Dionysian god, becomes, like Skipper* so terrible in his lzonio embodiment of the life force that his death-infatuated enemies become perversely attractive. But in spite of this repeating pattern of perversely transcending human deities, the twilight worlds in which Hawkes's characters move back and forth between illusion and reality are so textured as to preclude events of illumination or redemption* Gods and devils suddenly exchange roles* The old devour the young. The innocent cue proven guilty of their own dark wishes. And the "guilty" have merely committed the orlme of being bam with multiple worlds flowing through their blood. This constantly shifting cosmos, In which good and evil are fixed only in myth and long 6 enough to reveal the Impossible reality of dreams, accounts for the frequently disoriented reaction the reader gets frco Hawkes's novels i with so much violence and terror, the need far seme kind of clear "moral" resolution is only that much greater. But If Hawkes provided redemption far his dream-oxperlencers It would be a violation of the very cyclic principle upon which his worlds are created. "Bedeoptlon," within the context of HaWkes*s novels, becomes Just another fancy i the concept itself is derived from one of the oldest human sacrificial myths. And myths In these novels are primarily ominous Ironic shadows, the black undersides of the characters1 cyclic rises a^ilnst the sun. It is Impossible to realistically derive a feeling of "redemption” or of cleansed souls from the existence of these characters. Hawkes's novels become exemplary of Ihab Hassan's sumonaxy of the Individual character In modem fiction. "Hie contemporary self recoils," he writes."from the world, ogalnst Itself. I t has discovered absurdity. • . • Yet. • . its re-coll is one of the resources of Its awareness, a strategy of its w ill."6 Ihe main difference now is that Hawkes's characters exercise their wills within worlds that provide the death they are fleeing, and provide It even at the centers of 7 the dreams it offers as paradoxical refuges from Its own re a lity . The imagination, in Hawkes’s novels, becomes a vehicle by which the characters transcend, not cut of reality, but to the violent centers of its dream-dlsguises. Hie gods of the psyche become telescoped into existence! illusion becomes the playground of reality's darkest impulses. The night is opened up, and its monstrous insides spill across the day. This study of Hawkes's five full-length novels presents readings that try to illuminate their struc­ turing of an eternal tension between what ultimately becomes two realitiesi the factual mode of an existence condemned to mortality, and the powers that come to life in this « existence as a result of the attempt to escape it. 8

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER ON8

^Prota The Personal Voice, edited try A lbert J . Guerard, Kaclin B. Guerard, John Hawkes, Claire Rosenfleld (New York, 196^), quoted in Albert J* Guerard, “Second Slclni Tie L ight and Etale A ffirm ation,H Stud tea in Second Skin, edited by John Graham (Columbus, Ohio, 1971)* 93. ^Northrop Erye, “The Archetypes of Literature," rep rin te d in Myth and Method» Modern Theories o f Fiction, edited by James £• Miller, Jr. (University of Nebraska Press, I960), 158. 3Ib ld ,. 159 . **John Hawkes, "Notes on The Wild Goose Chase." The Kasoachuoetts Review, III (1962), 787* 5lbld. . 786. ^Radical Innocence (New York, 1961), 5* CHAFTEB TWOi THS CANNIBALi 1HE FANTASY CF HISTCBY

TVie Cormlbnl (19^9) t Hawkes's f i r s t novel, presents twentieth century German culture moving rltuallstlcally through the black night of I ts destroyed myth. The novel's subject natter Is derived from actual historical events— specifically, German participation In both world wars. But Its method of working that matter Is essentially surrealistic. A society In mass psychic debt to i t s p ast is seen moving Into and through the tears according to Its own perversely primitive logio. Urns, far example, Just as the tense mix­ ture of violence and authoritarianism becomes an Ironically natural quality of traditional German culture, the same mixture functions as a natural quality in the Illusions of the novel's characters. Human action is defined in terms of cyclical, archetypal patterns, rather than in terms of temporal contingencies, with the novel's tightly Interwoven pattern of events and details emphaslrli^j the recurring nature of man's primitivism. Time Is seen simply as part of a larger thematlo pattern. The novel is divided into three chronological sections ( 19 ^5) which establish

9 10 an Integrated focus whereby a series of lmagistloally developed motifs creates a sense of a violent, authoritarian, primitive reality that soaks through generations. Children either enact the Illusions of parents, or try to counteract them with dreams of their own. What we ordinarily understand as "history"—the orderly, sequential reconstruction of past "real" events Involving "real" people—becomes an artificial construot, replaced by an antl-reallstlo but potentially mare accurate vision of Germany which, in Leslie Fiedler's wards, "we have lived . . . In our viscera and our nerves as a bed dream . . . we cannot really believe."* The novel's Jumbled, schizophrenic narrative and occasional historically-linked fantasies In which the cannibal/characters become transformed into actual historical figures result in a world in which the past haunts the present, the present the past) and both conspire to Insure that the future . . . will know itself also a ghost-ridden ghost as soon as it la bom. In no official document or Journalist's report is the "German problem" rendered so faithfully - In terms of the monstrous unreality which Is Its essence. Constructs like history and time, In The Cannibal, become pieces In an undying cultural organism of which men and women are simply parts. Consciously or unconsciously, they focus ravenously and camera-like on what mythicized pieces 11

of the past remain to memory, habit or impulse. According to Zizendorf, who narrates the two 194-5 sections of the novel, post World War II Germany mist be restored according to the ancient patterns of primeval cchesiveness. The state must literally and figuratively oat its cititons in order to nourish Itself for conquest. The nation must once again enact its dream of itself i an illusion of military conquest that is part of a dramatic cultural cycle that m s enacted in World War II. in World War I. in the war of 1870. and again and again in the primitive past. This coheslveness, this merging of the individual Identity into the group Identity, depends on a brutal rhythm of action that requires a perfection in mechanical devotion to the Ideal—requires, once we have made the necessary transposition of values, the purity of purpose flowing from a dehumanised madness. Our first introduction to this condition takes place in 194-5, when World War I I is over and an American provisional government is in power. Spltzen-on-the-Dein is part of one third of Germany that is under the authority of an American soldier named Lcevey, who Intermittently roars through on his motorcycle. The town is in ruins, 12 and it is in examining the pieces of these ruins that we are led into the fabric of an existence restricted and con­ torted bf mass delusion. Pieces of a revered past loon symbolically about a devastated landscape, broken and giostly, Wieir powerful horses of bony Belgian stock, dull-eyed monsters of old farce, had been caemandcored from the acre farms fo r ammunition trucks, and a l l were gone but one grey beast who cropped up and down the stone s tr e e ts , unowned, nuzzling th e g u tters, (0-9)3 Literal objects present in tho town quickly become port of the fabric of the oppressive historical myth, become comments on the nature of the present's hopelessly entangled, organic relationship to the post. We begin to understand representative, mythic qualities—1"The town . • . no longer ancient, the legs and head lopped from its only horse statue • . (7) —so that the gradual progression into fantasy is marked by naturalness and logic, a consistency of vision, lhe Signalman a t the ra ilro a d sta tio n dreams of 191** while "black men in large hats and capes were painted all over the walls of his station" (8), and shortly, in one o f the novel's typical movements into fantasy, these are replaced by same ghosts who live in an abandoned anny tank and drink from the fetid canal at night* Hie present becomes, to the Ideal-conditioned minds 13 of Its Inhabitants as Hell as to us, a referent to myth* to the Idealized and blurred synbolic life of a former time* When the citizens "spoke of the darkness of the weather, or of the lack of clothes, they were referring to one of the ten Gods of Loss whom they could not trust" (1*0. And the narrative complements th is symbolism of things by creating a symbolism of people. In "Part IVo—1914," when the Ideal pulsates most with premise and life , there occurs a merging of the 1911+ pre-war spirit with the spirit of the primitive ancestors, a coalescence which serves as an ironic framework fo r Zizendorf's la te r attem pt to revive the public spirit In 19**5» A3 tho young, beautiful Stella, golden woman, sang In the Sportsvrelt Bnauhaua. her auilence clapped chuckled, and slowly the undecorated chests slid open, the lights swirled about In the fog, while Stella, arm around the accordion player, sang anythirg a t a l l th a t came to mind. Her ancestors hod run berserk, cloaked themselves in animal skins, carved valorous battles on their shields, and several old men, related thinly in blood from a distant past, had Jumped from a rock In Norway to tholr death in the sea. Stella, with such a history running thickly In her veins, caught her breath and flung herself at the feet of her homed and helmeted kinsmen, while the tavarians schnltzled back and forth in a drunken trio. (1+3) As the blood of the present mingles more and more with primitive history, the initially confusing references to the spirit of tho past become more logical, and we understand the heady but claustrophobic and doomed nature of the envisioned ideal. As Stella sang, the orchestra accompanied her and. "roasted apples fell from the boscm of on oracle, burnt and golden, and gradually the three men grew closer, warm with a ll the taste of a chlvalrlc age" (**7). There la a strong sense that a gllcteningly cold, ancient, burnished and unfertile Ideal Informs the spirit and actions of the present. The primeval, pre-Christian quality of this myth carries over Into the quest of Zlzendorf In 19**5» when he repeatedly spurns potential moral blocks deriving from vestiges of what we would ordinarily understand as "civilization." Waiting to kill Leevey as the first action In carrying out tholr plot to restore the nation’s Identity, "the three of us • . • were primal, unordered, unposted sentries, lounging against the earth without password, rifles or relief" ( 129 )* The contradiction Zlzendorf must deal with (the opposition between this primal, unchecked spirit, this cannibal mentality, and the pure, rigid order deriving from history's regency over the present) represents a fundamental sp lit in the human spirit that, I think, informs the final dream a t the end of the novel, the vision of insane order that completely 15 transposes all "civilized" values. Hie literal past is either in disarray (note the broken letter casings lying around the floor of the newspaper office) or locked away in places like the inside of the old General's incoherent* decomposing head. W lthln the context of the present's quest for the past* the novel's characters, like Stella and her admirers in the beer hall, become representative human beings locked into a particular time and place, but held to the demands of all times and all places. They acquire a kind of mock- heroic stature. Stella's father, the old General, functions as a link to the glorious past for her, or else ho can't function at all. The whole family, acting symbolically as the quest for the myth plays itself to destruction, becomes a symbol of the destructive essence of the catastrophei The family was all dead. The Fbther, the victor, with a cocked hat and pot, had long ago wished her weil. lhe Mother lay in the cold bunker of the street, cinders falling over the rough chin. The Sons, no longer to be with Nanny, hiving no longer spurs to tin k le ag ain st their boots since spurs were always removed before the body was in terred , had never been parted and both lay under the wet surface of the same western road. (101) Beyond the le v e l of the fbm ily, Ba-iamir and Madame Snow, In 19^5. acquire symbolic historical stature as the Crown Prince and Queen Mother, providing a coeilo, iro n ic commentary 16 a t 'both ends of the equation. And the town I ts e lf becomes representative. It Is not precisely located. It is a microcosm, nowhere and anywhere. like the towns Clare and I Mistletoe in Ihe Beetle Leg, or like the mythic islands | In Second Skin or Illyria in The Blood Oranges. But a quality that la exact about it is the rad condition of J Its public mindi a reference to the "outside world" beyond ftnltgen-on-the-Deln leads into a series of analogies between the town and the insane institution on the hill above it. Booming through the town, Balamlr and the other released lnmtes didn't "realize that they were beyond the institution's high trails" (5)l and the townspeople themselve3 a t a dance "were the same long lines of iixnate3 stamping time to the phonograph, dancing la block-llke groups with aims that jrero too long" (33) • i j I t is during "Part Two—191*+" that the national, Ideallt.ad state of mind is most coherent. Then, the young Stella and her song become a method by which the conceived magic of tho past is reincarnated. Stella, "losing one by one those tr a its th a t were h ers, absorbed more and more the tradition that belonged to all" (45). The song embodies the atmosphere that infuses the culture, and the mass state 17 of mind becomes a single, directed e n tity . .Ihe song grabs the people out of themselves and Into the conmunlty of each other (Into, In Zltendarf's later 19^5 terms, the State). In 191^» young Stella Is the "sorceress"—the medium for the cohesion of this Identity, Just as In Parts One and Uiree (19^5) t as old Madame Snow and proprietress of a boarding house In which a ll the members of Zlrendorf *8 new "government" live, she la a plot catalyst for the new, restored cohesion Zlzendarf is forging between the present and the past. Indeed, Madame Snow becomes the figure embodying the whole reality of the mythic existence of the novel. Her hair la "half-white, half-gold," making her the color of the early, metallic glitter and late, barren coldness of the nation, but leaving her out of any mere fertile metaphorlo connections, Madame Snow's destructive yet representative relationship to her civilization suggests that the roots of Its malaise are threaded Internally through a ll of human history and that the world wars are mere Incidents In the pattern of the universal sickness.^ She wars may cause certain horrors we view as distortions, but naturally can not cause themselves. A resid en t of the town fo r twenty years, knowing them a l l more closely than the Mayor, she f e l t the pain mare acutely than he, even with her heart more like 18

stone. Even though there was no P ost, even though no one came or went and they all had lived or died for many centuries, even though there was no wireless, she felt the vastness of ccrarunlty that was like burial, spreading over a ll borders and from family to family, (17) But even though—or perhaps because—these feelings of historical doom become organised within Madame Snow's rep* re8entatlve being, she Is also representative of the dream* driven condition being explored In the novel. That is, she is held off from true insight because of her place In history* "Despite her years she could not find where it had all begun, for she was aristocratic to the end" (17-18). Her own connection to part of the cultural Ideal leads to an Inevitable blindness. Because she has a "cold heart" she can begin to feel the abstraction of a destructive history that Is still going on, but she can not bear the concrete sight of her son when he returns mutilated by the war. Madame Snow's eight ends a t the boundaries of the myth of herself. Thus, she too is victimized by the frequently gruesome parody on the romance of myth th a t permeates the novel. When she accepts the Duke's invitation to a dinner (on the day of the rebellion) that Is made from her murdered nephew, i t is the culmination of a whole se rie s of s a tire s on her role as a kind of quintessential German earth mother. 19

Her father in 191*+ hod been a successful father for her only when he could talk "of sieges and courtships* and emerald lands'* (68)* This dream wish of hers canes Into caricatured relief in 19^5 when the lunatic Balamir, whan Madame Snow shelters In her basement, dreams of a primitive arcadla and "longed to live In a cave" (11). Furthermore, the "upper world" to Which young Stella and Ernst flee far their honeymoon in 191*+ Is as frigidly close to an idealised imitation of the myth of the German people as is possible. But there, the purified coldness of the whole culture Is revealed far the Instinct it truly disguises—the flight ' from the organic cycle to avoid the death, as well as the regeneration, it includes! Tho upper world was superior. In the lower, tufts of grass poked dangerously through the snowi snarling dogs ran under footi the snow turned to rain on the lowest fields, and the isolated huts were grey and sodden. (85) When Cromwell arriv es, ominously rid in g a black horse disguised by snow, he introduces news of conquest and death into the perfect, high atmosphere, and perfection's Pyrrhic essence necessarily acquires its balance. In the "lower world”, where the effects of tradition are more Immediate, and the inherent contradictions thus mare blatant, Gerta can 20 become a soldier's Whore and s till berate the slovenly ruined Henan Snow, asking "'Save you come hone to be rude to a lady?'" (102), This kind of continual Bock-heroic parody in 191^ carries over into Zizendorf1a 19*>5 fervent account of his plot to restore the forms of tradition, when he notices that Ha somber, early, Pentecostal chill" hangs over the town on the day of rebellion, Iha fires of tradition axe about to re-enflane the latest zealous apostles. And while Zizendorf is choosing his new cabinet from the various inhabitants of Madame Snow's boarding house, the narrative fantasizes the crazy Balamlr as tho Kaiser's son, Zizendorf begins "Part Three—105" by telling about the villagers' burning the pits of excrement, but these symbolic cleansing fires, like the Flood in T&e Beetle Leg. merely enhance the ironic texture of a landscape beyond purification. Perhaps Cromwell provides the fin a l perspective on what is happening. As perhaps the purest and most self- conscious of the novel's cannibals, traveling to vrhlchever place will feed him with details of conquest that re-create lines of old order, he locates the spiritual ideal beyond geographical boundaries. He wants in 1 9 1 ^ 21

to view the whole incident that will probably extend fifty years, not as the death of politics or the fall of kings and wives, tut as the loyalty of civilization, to realize that Krupp, perhaps a barbarian, is mare a peg whore history hangs than a fath er who once' spoke of honor. (55) What once might have been free and thinking men become part of a specious strategy to recreate a dream. Within the context of an enduring primitivism, the human spiritual composition responsible for this vision of history runs deep, traverses generations, might be keyed to the two world ware, but is hardly limited to them, The larger quest represents a strategy against death Itself. This search in Thfi. Cannibal for a‘ cohesive, enduring, repeating myth results ultimately in madness, because the primal content of the myth (and of the people who seek it) contradicts the unnatural order needed to attain it. Thus, people who are biologically alive becccno either anlmallzed (i.e., referred back to a more primitive condition), or frozen into artifice-like poses against reality. In any case, there is such stasis and lack of progression that regression becomes, paradoxically, the essential quality of the lifeless ideal. Stella at her mother’s death, for example, turns into a "waxen noncommittal saint," The Ideals which make up the nation's myth of Itself are Juxtaposed 22

Kith Inages that mock that myth as madness. "'Your father was a wonderful brave lov lrg nan,' her mother would say. Dogs baxked and howled • . (71). The final flabrio of extreme psychic contradictions that results is perhaps best symbolised by the IXike, who is virtually a spasm energised by the skeleton and nerves of tradition. Hunting down Jutta's son, he came legitimately by his title , and when he had conoanded three tanks in the second war, was known as a fearless man. A father much older than himself s till stalked far away in Berlin where I had never been, and as hie father would have done, he recognized with taste and profound respect the clear high and stable character of Madame Snow. (2f) Given his participation in these m ilitaristic, traditional q u a litie s which throughout Hawkes's novel become expressed in the cannibal metaphor, of course the Duke will k ill and cook Jutta's little boy. What else Is left for him to do?

XI

The phrase "structured vision," sometimes applied to Hawkes's fiction, is particularly appropriate for defining the narrative technique of The Cannibal. Zizendorf is 23

a narrator in the novel* but not the only one In any traditional sense* He appears openly in Barts One and Three, and not at all in fort Two, vtilch (chronologically, at least) precedes

Mb . Yet Ms point of vies, if we can call it that, is Ironically omniscient* He perceives things he wouldn't likely know, and he makes baldly ironic, symbolic cocments that would otherwise be unlikely as products of his dreaa- drlven reformer's Imagination* lhus freed from the ordinary restrictions of point of view, Hawkea can deal with what Albert J* Guerard calls Hthc peculiarly German conception of a narrator possessed of divine or diabolic omniscience . . . which the characters enter Into or share in occasional moments of intuition."^ Hawkea suddenly, for example, has characters like Stella and Cromwell and Ernst lapse into the rigid, stilted, symbolic patterns of speech of imaginatively conceived historical figures. Stella and Cromwell, riding home in a carriage, become the Archduke and Archduchess Ferdinand, pursued by Emst/Gavrllo Frinclps, the assassin* Literally, Ernst must displace Cromwell to gain Stella i symbolically, Cromwell and S te lla flow with the mythicized blood of the old order, from wMch the aspiring Ernst is rebuffed* Through this narrative device, the events and significance of history a r e concentrated In an Intelligible way Into the consequently mythically significant lives of these representative people. The drama of history Is being enacted In a psychologically (rather than chronologically) Intelligible fashion. This particular historical fantasy concerning the Archduke's assassination occurs In Bart TVfo, but In Bart Three, as Zizendorf is forming his new "government," It is the old Madame Sncm's boarding house that Is its seat, and this "respected old crone" Is honored by him as the "greatest leader of us oil." The fact that Zizendorf is permitted to enter Into the "divine or diabolic omniscience" of the novel's narrative and still participate in this Ironic parallel Is Important, because his apparent knowledge makes no difference. He Is permitted to participate In an integrated vision that is both a moral and an artistic condemnation of his existence. But his fam tic Ideal super­ sedes the irony in which he is swamped. Although he recognizes himself as a "counterfeit • . • made from past respectable devices," (22)he Is completely unable or unulllirg to act in terms of this perception. Bart of his plot involves restoring the newspaper (the Crooked Zeltung) to Its role of official mythologlzer far events contributing to the 25 state's identity. Before the "rebellion," the old letter plates are smashed end lying In disarray about the flo o r of the newspaper office* But as the plot reaches Its fruition* the restored presses chum out Zizendorf's "Indictment of the Allied Antagonists, and Proclamation of the German Liberation" In a shed whitewashed of the sight but not the smell of Kadame Snow's murdered chickens* The fact that this Proclamation gets birth from the press of something called the Crooked Zeltunm might contribute to the re a d e r's Illumination * but not to Zizendorf *s. The aesthetic and moral compromises Inherent In Zizendorf's position must be applied from outside the novel. As the narrator of Burts X and III* he forsakes chronological order for a thematic order that places the Institution riot* the killing of Leevey and Stlntz, and the Buke'o crime a ll near the place where he describes the new nation. But the point Is undoubtedly that he would not see this confluence of violence and restored Identity as Ironic even If we could Interrupt the book and t e l l him about it* One significant effect of Zizendorf's participation In the narrative is that he becomes almost schizophrenic In his perception of reality. He Is literally in the act 26

of trying to assemble his own Identity—and restoring the myth of the German past Is h is way of making a new d efin itio n of his self. In the room with his lover Jutta, he sees not her, but her looking at himself. "I mist leave,* I said. My hand rested on the middle of her backi Z looked a t her kindly. Something about my person could still be called soldat but not the crawling, unshaven soldntto filth of the Italians who wriggled dog-fashion . * . She smelled a breath of tobacco as my cheek touched her forehead for a moment, and I stepped off, no longer recognized, among the grey masqueraders. (35) The connection between the disrupted history of his country and the disrupted continuity of his own personality becomes evident from the almost transparent nature of Zizendorf's uncompleted sexual Identity. have a successful connection with women, he must have an orderly connection with the structured, military-dominated tradition of his country, that Is, to one of the major defining qualities of its history. He quotes from an earlier wartime letter to his sister, where he complains that **I'm having a bad time and cannot seem to get started In enjoying myself. I find the women very hard to get—the release here has broken down all our official routine and rank, and in consequence I do not seem to have anything with which to gain their respect . • (2 3 ) It Is no wonder, then, that Zizendorf plots to restore the nation’s identity when the success and coherence of his 27 own Id en tity la so precariously involved* "Under my arm 1 felt the pistol | in my head faintly heard the shrill music, and dancing with Jutta, I felt as well as Z ever felt" (3*f)* Here, the gun, the music and dance of pre-formed movement—to Zizendorf symbols of a secure balance and historical order—combined with the completely submissive ^utta, a ll flow together to at least lessen the sickness of his alienation* Like the smashed newspaper le tte r s , the de-ihythmed p arts of his identity lie about, waiting for the concerted, historical act to put them back together. As the newspaper editor, he sits "througi every hour of the day thinking of the past" (15)* He recognizes his "need to recreate • ■ • some so rt of pastime sim ilar to my comrades* hab its, a cyclic affection • • •" (23)* But this desire represents no Qnersonian attempt a t sympathetic communion. Rather, it is a strategy, a more narrow political desire designed to start the German clock ticking again. I, Zizendorf, like all men, was similar to her husband who had been captured, but it was something indefinable that made me particularly similar • • , I was different from them all and was better for her than her husband. (33) The others are not leaders* As a leader, Zizendorf oust ignore or suppress all moral values that might threaten the nation's restoration. 28

Historically, of course, the virtue of patriotism has not always been consistent with certain other values, particularly when patriotism has been defined (os it frequently is) as mute, mechanical obedience to the state* To Zizendorf, however, "the honest man is traitor to the State" (171) • In the political and historical context of Zizendorf's values, honesty is evil, because it Implies loyalty to the laws of the oppressor* Criminality is a virtue because of the dialectical necessities inherent In his role as classic revolutionary. This fact, however, does not free Zizendorf from the occasional, subtle curse of dealing with moral problems* He himself has shot the Pastor at the order of the American officer, the memory of which poisons his attempts to recreate a romantic past by thinking of his friend "Jutta's husband, who had been a good fellow, of spring and beerhalls." The sense of a disrupted romantic past becomes associated in h is mind with a disrupted sexuality. The memory of the murdered pastor occasions thoughts of "perfumes and earrings, and the keys th a t would not work, words th a t would not come" (16). The Freudian shadows here complement the determ inistic nature of Zizendorf's dilenma/misslon. But he must shove this guilt away by a 29 fanatic concentration on process—a mania whose most graphic illustration cases when Zizendorf has the Census-Ihker watch while he and Jutta have sex* The absurd Implication seems to be that, should their infrequent and almost pro forma passion result in a child, the official (albeit drunken) people-counter will be there to verify the numerical addition to the forming state* But If moral niceties interfere with Zizendorf'a quest for the past, he resolutely pushes them aside In sp ite of a l l the ironic compromises in his position* "You can ask no nan to give up his civilization, which is his nation.1* He frequently reiterates his contempt for the pernicious uselessness of ethical scruples, particularly after each of his killings* He exhibits no remorse about shooting the Rastor (even though it was done for the hated Americans), saying that It Is the land that is important, not "Gelst" (mind, spirit)* The State is more important than the individual soul. And killing Herr Stints, he remarks that "only the pious, with an inward craving far canmunlon, would bother to crane their necks and strain their souls'* (173)* Probably, he is vainly trying at these points to satisfy some deep inner craving for ultimate 30 freedom from doubt. He la "unnerved" far a minute even In the midst of his cool murder of Stints. So like the Duke, he must concentrate purely on mechanics as he strives for his mad goal. His deliberative mania becomes a strategy against the subverslvely moral aspects of his own humanity. Bren having dispensed ostensibly with pious scruples, however, he can not quite become a complete machine. As he bums the Mayor to death in his own house, his concern Is resolutely with the dynamics of technique i "5he Census-lhker was farced to make several trips back to the newspaper office for mare fu el and his arms and shoulders were sore with the work" (189). But his dream of being a pure operator In service to the State-myth lives behind a wall In his soul sometimes as thin os a membrane. Disposing of the dead Leevey comes at "the worst time of night for odds and ends and order, especially after killing a man and with sleep so near" (166). Thought, somewhat controllable but ultimately not completely avoidable, is his enemy, and particularly threatens to sabotage his realisation of the Ideal Nation. The ordered, authority- and history-conscious myth Zlsendarf tries to recreate Is a living, magnetic fantasy In which the rest of the novel's characters participate* 31

S te lla Snow and her family, E m at, J u tta , Cromwell, Herman Snow, the EUke, Herr Stlntx—while they are a ll to vuryir^j degrees What might be called "realized" characters, s till form patterns In a thematic tapestry that is "seen" by the constructed narrator I mentioned earlier, A vital assumption In this thematic structure is that the past Is real, vitally alive through the present's recreation of its myth. Thus, the sudden historical fantasy by which S te lla and Cromwell In 191*+ become the Archduke and h is w ife, or by which Madame Snow and Bolomlr in 19*+5 become the Queen Mother and Kaiser's sen, is a momentarily concrete expression of a psychological reality, Ihere is little or no sense of any individual, existential freedom* Instead, there are variations within a pattern of instincts, one of which is the present's need to re-enact the past by trans­ forming itself into myth as a futile hedge against mortality, Madame S te lla Snow, a kind of German earth mother, is the very human embodiment of the mythic reality under scrutiny In The Qannlbal. Zizendorf refers to her, in awe, as "the very hangnan, the eater, the greatest leader of us all" (131)* As the ultimate mythic embodiment of German culture, she participates Intimately in the various metaphoric 3 2

patterns of the novel's cannibal motif. Zn an early scene, she "would peer hungrily out" a t "a boy with black peaked martial cap, leather braces and short trousers," then disappear "back to the darkness" (6). In another scene In "Bart Ihree— 19 ^5 »" she suggestively snaps the neck of a chicken, then proceeds to lead the wanen of the town In crashing the rebellion of the lnmtes at the Institution* In the terms of the civilization that Is struggling to be reborn throughout the novel, the State must devour Its cltIrens, feel on them, In order to grow and gain strength. Uhus, Madame &ow Is the natural guest at the Duke's human repast at the end of the novel* She contains the mythic, psychic life of the ration within her being* She Intuits and represents In an almost physical way the condition of the culture* She "felt the vastness of ccmnunlty that was like burial" In "Bart One—19*+5," knowing therefore the ultimate necessity of Zizendorf *s stroke for the resumption of history. As the central figure In both the 191*+ and 19*+5 sections, she provides a sense of continuity for the re-enactment of the old patterns* Stella took to cards, gambling, to singing, and finally back to cards, and In the meantime crossed barbaric swords hung over her head and she swept through Ironclad centuries, a respected crone. ( 1 3 ) 33

Even from a purely chronological perspective, her family roots go a t le a s t book to the war of 1870 1 her incoherent father, the old General and hero from the past, utters random memories about i t as the nation prepares fo r World War I in "Bart TVfO—1914." She becomes port of the motif that directly links her with the royalty of the past and the leaders of the future. Besides the equation of Craswell- Stella-Emst with Archduke-Wlfe-Assassln, which occurs during the ostensibly glorious 191** days of the novel, there la a second historical equation In the 19**5 sections that establishes a more sharply ironic perspective on Otella Snow's role as German Mother. B&Lamlr, temporary escapee traa the war-ravaged lunatic asylum, sees her as royalty. First arriving at her house, "ho carefully looked about the roan of court and puzzled about the oaken whorls above the curtained door and the highness of the spldeiy block celling" (6). By the time of Zizendorf *s announcement of the rebellion, Madame Show is looking with pity a t "the sleeping Kaiser's son" (177), and shortly thereafter Buloair Is awaking "with the sound of the engine In his ears and the aims of the Queen Mother holding him close" (1?9)» Ihe fact that the later fantasy Is generated between on aged Madame Snow and an insane Inmate from the institution is one concent on the nature of what Zlterrtorf Is about* as well as of what Madame Snow represents. But i f Zleendorf's to ta lly compromised position is obvious. Madame Snow's is less soV That she is a "leader" is not in question. Even the Americans instinctively choose her house for their jail and court during the occupation. And after putting down the rebellious lrm tes at the institution, she reflects that "it was the women who really fought .... tile place to strike with the tip of the whip's tail was between the legs" (149). But the fabric of her mythic quality contains seeds of the very death it is an Instinctive defense against,^ Both Zleendorf and Madame Show, for example, ultimate strong leader figures in the novel, ultimate cannibals, choose passive, weak non-leaders for their lovers. Neither Jutta nor Ernst can successfully connect into the historical natlon-nyth being enacted. Thus, there is an ironic union between the ultimate patriots and the failed patriots. Madame Snow, in faot, ends up nursing two men— Ernst and Balamlr—both of whom are feebly irrelevant to the State's mission of reformation. Even as the beautiful young singer in "Bart TWo—1914," 35

Stella's prlmally significant, sexually mythic qualities axe accompanied by a characteristic blindness to, for lack * * of a more precise word, reality. Typically, this blindness takes the form of a flight into the refuge of myth, particularly the myth of her nation's past. The most ordinary human emotions are with her transformed into a frieze-like pose on history. When her mother, struck by a plane falling inexplicably from the sky, lies dead before her In the Btreet, "it was then that she Imagined marble bannisters and the candelabra of several generations before, and saw strange men embarking in ice-covered ships'* (12), The abstraction of the dream of the past becomes a hedge against the uncomfortable dissolution locked in with the present's attempts to recreate history. For Stella, this flight into abstraction is instinctively a pose against death. It is nothing more than the "idea of love" that serves as a patina of civilization over her more basic instinct to at least spiritually abandon her incurably old, dying father in 191** * I t is perhaps this quality that Zizendorf instinctively recognizes and likes in her in 19 ^5 * She seems in touch with a primitive human reality that makes irrelevant some of the incipient scruples that seem to dog Zizendorf. 36

As always, Hawkes's prose skins off the crust of nationalization, letting his poetic imagery sink into the Ideal-bound, life of the novel. In this case, "a half-down birds, caught in the leaves, tried to make themselves heard and far down the hall she could hear Gerta talking to her father Who mss trying to dress." A few lines later, Stella "shoved the half-dozen murmuring b ird s out of reach" (6fe) • And later at the dinner table, "the old man • . . held his head high and rigid so that it trembled, pure white eyes staring and blinking from a skull like a bird's, the whole area behind the thin tissue eaten away and lost" (66), With Ernst, too, Stella is prepared to make him "as happy as her instinct would allow" (59)* and as he lies racked with disease, she characteristically wonders what to do with his body even before he is dead. Mare importantly, though, she withdraws from his spiritual reality. He begins to look like a "stranger" to her ( 115)» "'lust like father*" (116), Similarly, traveling in mythic life at the death of her mother, keeping vigil at the bier, she forsakes actual connection with the reality of her loss for a spiritual connection that will perform, hopefully, a permanent idealizing abstraction an her lossi 37

Bach morning she sat Just as straight, as If she did not know they had prowled all about her during the midnight h airs, beyond the globe of the lamp. She would never see them sailing back, and this most distant visitor, lying in state nearby, asleep day and night, so changed by the assumption of the black role. Be cued waiting to bring her to the land of desire, where her weeping would cover all the h ill above the plain. S te lla 's face became gradually unwashed, her arms grew thin, the fingers stiff, her mouth dry, trying to recall this person's name. Ihe attendants and sudden last visitors perspired. Ihe old woman grew damp as if she fretted. (81) Here Stella rejects death in reality, even to the point of forgetting her mother's name, and transcends Into the death offered by myth, weeping on "the h ill above the plain." Stella's role as regenerative principle, when seen ' In the light of her susceptibility to the ravages of a symbolic Imagination, acquires a distinctively Ironic cast. She Is Just as trapped In her mythic role as Zleendorf Is In his historic role. In winter, the snow fell where she wished, in great dull even flakes, In smooth slig h tly purple walls where f a r In perspective she was held like a candle, warm and bright. In summer, alone, it was she that breathed the Idea of naked moonlight swinning—dlvers together In the phosphorescent breakers, leaves as clothes on the sliver beach—she that breathed the Idea of brownness, smoothness Into every day of June, July, August, who created hair over the shoulder and pollen In the air. (6^) lhe burning candle In the cold, with Its mixture of art, light and transf ormatloa-dissolutlon, Is a suitable statement 38 of her symbolic nature* And focusing on the hair Image for a moment, we can understand her natural, Instinctive, merely human motives i she loves Ernst because "by a forest of young hair" he is "protected from that which is dying" (73)* Her primal, instinctive, grlstle-llke attachment to life accompanies a quick, instinctive, animal-like abandonment of that which is dying. Like many of Hawkes's idealizing characters, she stylizes mortality into farm (l.e*, uses history as myth) as a way of transforming herself into something permanent. In such a way, she becomes p art of the inescapable texture of the novel's life. As young Stella, "the hair nearest her neck was hazel, the rest lemon, and when she walked it was fitfully gliding as if she were already there—there in the mausoleum where he lay in plaster, where rose petals were swept under her prayer" (69)* The terms by which she would become lib erated are merely the terms by which she becomes a captive. The main result of this mythic participation is that Stella can not see herself in the same terms that the novel sees her—which would be the only redemptive possibility. As the nation prepares enthusiastically far World War I and she prepares excitedly far her love affair with Ernst, 1 9 she walks out Into the hot sun, and feeling It aa a burden, wonders how the exotic foreign camibala can bear It* She, whose natural habitat la cold, dark, Ice, snow, who w ill eat her own nephew during the declining days of her life, entertains Idle fantasies about far-off cannibals, oblivious to the domestic version of the aame crime. After this point, It becomes significant that she dismisses these thoughts when distracted by the bustle of war preparations and the house fu ll of people who want to Npay respects to her parents In the bedroom*' (75)—the same people later described as "flies" over her mother's coffin.? The actual, present, de-idealized cannibals, of course, Including Stella Snow, never recognize themselves. In The Beetle Leg, there is a range of apparent oppositions between the Sheriff and Gap Leech that merely blurs the two men's common slavery to the devising of myths against death. A similarly cost range of distinctions occurs In The Cannibal. Between S te lla and her s is te r J u tta , fo r example, we can find a number of oppositions tte t might ordinarily portend some significance If we were searching far a moral "norm" in the novel, for a character or motif suggesting the possibility of some kind of redemption. Jutta la an alien to the national myth, out of the vary hlstaxy/flesh that Stella has embodied* While Stella Is leading the charge on the Institution, Jutta Is busy "tickling the Census-Thker" (ljj4). Madame Snow resents Selvaggia, Jutta's daughter, and of course participates In the meal mode from Jutta's son. The term "nightmare," frequently applied to Hawkea'a fiction, has particular relevance to The Cannibal, because sleep becomes the only p o ten tial escape from the seemingly endless 1945 night of reconstruction* Jutta spends a lo t of time sleeping, whereas Madame Snow is always awake. Madame Snow "wondered what they were doing* this anonymous nation, and fe lt, such an old woman, th a t she would never sleep again" (148). While the sensual Stella busily engages history in 1914, the reclusive Jutta struggles against a bone disease while locked away in a nunnery* Jutta comes to the flesh late In 1945* Indulging d herself "where her sister Stella had entered with daring" (20), For her part, Jutta hates Stella, she fears the cold (a natural to Madame Snow), she is associated with the color black (as contrasted with the snow-white-lee imagery surrounding Stella). But more significantly, Jutta la guilty of weakness. Like Ernie who fails at fencing* she la cast oat of a culture whose 'values require strength and survival of the fittest. Also like Emie, Jutta can not maintain the official lie within her. As she languishes In the convent, "the light was flowing out of the bunker. there was nothing more to do except wait far the final unadmitted Illusion to disappear . . ." (112). She scorns the heroes along die Heldenstrasse. and unlike Stella and Zleendorf distrusts the Duke because she has failed to grasp from her own family the appreciation of "clean standing" and "aristocratic caliber" (21*)—"she failed to understand the German life . . . had never been quite able to allow a love for her country to Intrude within her four walls, had never been loyal ..." (25). She is too conventionally domes tlo In a culture where the State must be home. She has "lore and kindness" for her daughter, emotions quite foreign to the spiritual dynamics of the novel. She alternates between sleeping and washing out a few articles of clothing during the time Zleendorf Is engpged In his historic acts. And even after she sees him returning from the murder of Leevey, she "seemed to have forgotten" where he has been (169)* So Jutta, who sees already In the convent that "life was not miraculous but clear, not right but undeniable" (120), 42 seems a beautiful thematic counterpart to the sister with whan she shares mutual dislike*. But as w ill later happen with the Sheriff and Gap Leech, the counterpoint is too fine and delicate to fit Into the bitter, Jagged reality o f the l i f e o f the norel. Die young J u tta In 1914 has an aversion to "tedious public obligation" and a consequent affinity far the peace of the convent, but only because the nation has not recognised her true leadership abilities. It Is not particularly that she rejects the state myth, but that it has rejected her, Uke Ernst, she wants to connect Into the civilisation's myths, but can not—she Is "the nation's bom leader forlorn In the nunnery" (112). Weakness becomes her devil. Die closeness of her own true values to those of her apparent opposites lies In the fact that sho too admires technique, she too wants to plan a physical outline for her people* She pushes her schoolgirl energy Into architecture, to exact planning of beautiful forms in which to fit the public, but In the family "there was no one to give clear-headed pzaise, no one to admire or respect her diagrams of mechanical exultation • • • her great skill" (111). Die effect is similar to the situation In Die Beetle Leg when i t becanes apparent th a t Cap Leeoh, *♦3 worshipper of the physical, of that which can be seen and measured, becomes Irrelevant to a culture bent cn defining itself Into the cosmos, spiritual and international, but reaches an end that Is Identical for everyone held finally to the earth* In 191^1 then, Jutta finds her woundod definition in the repetitious precision of the convent. Superior takes the place of her family in the unfolding of the mythic pattern. The guilt of her disease is one with the guilt of her weakness as a citizen in the nation's fbmlly. The waters opened at the feet of the girl, Superior opened her warm heart, ready to receive the remnants of another mortal, lhe throat tightened, pulled, and at that moment she heard the General calling, colling fran the great roan of feasting, "Where Is the railroad station, the railroad station?" and he was laughing. ( 1 1 3 ) Even In her life at home, before her parents die, she sleeps "In a cubiole small and lew that might hava belonged to a boarding school or nunnery white and bare" (69)1 her passage in life revolves around an unchanging center that thrives on the surety of guilt, the precision of constriction and control, ^hiking back to Superior, during the height of her sickness, she is defying Gerta, being nasty to her brothers. Hie routine of the convent is nothing more than another metaphor for the exact, unchanging definition of 1* the national self Zizendorf requires in a political context. Jutta listens as "the sisters walked around and around in precise timeless honor of the evening prayer" (106). Her liaison with Zizendorf In 19^5* then, while it provides a ce rtain ironic coranent on h is own need to feed on the weak, is also a natural complement to J u tta ’s seemingly instinctive gravitation towards the strong, sure, grounded- in-myth state of being. All this is consistent with her suddenly stated dislike of Herr Stlntz (who eventually intends to betray Zizendorf), the tuba player who "could, coamit no crime nor act strongly, but could only bring harm" (128)* Thus, the vocabulary of her values, both Implicit and overt, becomes complementary to the vocabulary of rising state consciousness Zizendorf proclaims. I think that the opposition between Stella and Ernst functions in the same way. S te lla chooses a weak, u n fu lfilled lover Just as Zizendorf does. She is drawn Initially to him not for his strength, but for his cowardliness. In the light of Zizendorf *s later characterization of her as the Ultimate leader, the ultimate cannibal, it seems an unlikely match at the very least. But all leaders, of course, need the weak, and in the terms of the novel’s * 5 treatment of the hlstory-State-aa-cannlbal motif, their marriage represents a natural consunmatiai. Like Jufcta, Ernst wants to connect into his country's historical myth, but his weakness prevents him from doing so. After every crisis, he emerges "more under his father's thumb than ever" (50• Thus, like many of HaWkes's characters, Ernst becomes a progressively fading struggler against a p attern of defeat as pervasive as air. Ernst originally tries almost heroically to bo worthy of his nation's past. The dueling scars on his face represent the wounds of his attempts to measure up. His need to become significant within the terms of the culture's mythic definition of itself reaches Its pitch during the historical fantasy In the 191** section. In this context, Ernst Is like Zizendorf in that he oust fu lfill his manhood by fulfilling his quest to enter history. Goaded by his soldierly, patriotic father into pursuing Stella for his lover, he chases the carriage In which Cromwell I s escorting her home. The fabric of his psychology becomes Interwoven with the fabric of his relationship to the myth of his country's history* When he passed the line of statues, each Hero gave him a word to harden his hearti love. Stella. Ernst. 46

lust, tonight, leader, land. He felt that if old Herman ran at his side, he would tell him to get her in the britches. Already the guns were being oiled and the Belgians, not he, would use that Merchant as a target. (^*-5) Ernst's lncantatory litany here coincides with the narrative transformation of the literal scene into an historic one* As Cromwell and S te lla become the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Ernst struggles to achieve participation in history . and thus became a man—he races "to coincide with Prlncip in Sarajevo" (^*), and Stella is the goddess with Whom he would fulfill his dream. In the light of Ernst's pragnatlc use of the Hero words here, there is a certain pleasurable sysnetry in the fact that the character he plays In the drama-fantasy was inspired to his act by pieces of nationalistic propaganda* But Ernst senses his defeat as a particle of the recurring realityi "the past told him the Merchant, or the Baron, or Herman would steal her off to a nest of feathers —before he could speak" (5*0* He lives and breathes in events structured by history. His father both goads and hinders him in his attempts to fight his way into the German tradition. Yet old Herman Snow, in a sense, is in a kind of ironic touch with reality, which possibly represents the real nature of his antagonism to Ernst* He wants Ernst **7

to get Stella like a nan getting any woman, not like a knight pursuing hie goddess queen. And he indignantly stops Ernst In the middle of a vicious fencing bout. This humiliation parallels Ernst's final indignity, when his father seems to grow hams and laugh at him as he tries to enter sainthood on his death bed. Zt is no wonder that, in the historical fantasy, Herman too becomes identified with the Archduke who must die, with the old royalty who must be assassinated in the ritual of history, the father who must be replaced by the son. The fact that Ernst can not make this happen, that he is a victim of a pattern of reversal whereby the old constantly outlast and devour the young, is cruolal to the novel's cannibal motif. ftart of the significance of Ernst's plight lies In the mode he finally chooses to make himself into myth. As a fencer, he is involved In a sport that, like all sport, reduces the pattern of human struggle to a mare or less stylised ritual where the stakes are clear and the responsibility is concrete. She outlines of violence become more discernible. He knows who put the scar on his face, but who is finally responsible for the airplane that falls randomly from the sky onto Stella's mother? In both cases, of course, the 4 8 violence can be seen as the result of a particular style of mind and behavior* of self-defined stance towards history that the culture has chosen for itself. But It is the personal approach to myth that Ernst is concerned with. Dlls fact helps explain his sudden abandon­ ment of the German myth for the Christian myth. At the university, he suffers defeat and symbolic castration at the hands of the Baron* and leaves to th e contempt o f both the Baron and his comrades as they sins the Horst Wessel Lied. At this point* the hero words (love, Stella* eto.) revolve "out of relation" In his mind until finally he reaches "particulars too extreme to comprehend" (59)* Thus farced into a kind of momentary existential alienation* he turns to God on his honeymoon in the ice-covered "upper world" of the mountain retreat. As Is usual in Hawkea'a fiction, the description of this place forces us Into the mythical significance it has In the minds of the characters* and thus In a sense defines us as readers Into the dilemma under artistic treatment. Ernst Is an alien to a culture that is naturally repugnant to the reader, but Hawkes, characteristically, does not allow this fact to generate Ernst Into any kind of operating myth fo r the fceaderla

4 need to transcend what is going on In the novel. Instead, Ernst, sympathetic In failure, hooks onto religion In hie tragicomic private mania far myth, structure, identity, but most of a ll far legitimacy and success for hie escape* And so he reprimands Stella for not having candles and a face of Christ and tears at her mother's bier* Having somehow missed the essence, he craves at least the symbols of transcendence. In his final attempt at transcendence, he becomes progressively more ethereal, more remote from the reality of the culture in the "lower world"* By now his prayers at mealtime were quite audible . . . one of the tables vculd become conscious of an Impersonal, pious mumbling* Busily rearranging the silver and china before him, his brow wrinkled, he talked as if to on old friend* The table would be hushed and uneasy u n til he looked up. The hotel manager, who took th is time of the evening meal to appear before his gathered guests and walk up and down between the rows to interrupt a conversation o r a draught o f wine, was struck dumb with the unnatural monotone, and would cast sig n ifican t glances at Stella. (67-8) Stella touches his hand, but it is "stiff and cold, smooth and pious" (88). Erast begins to collect wooden crucifixes, and like an examining angel at the heavenly gates, "in the morning he would climb to the porch and spend an hour noting carefully who arrived" (88). As he flies higher, he shuts out the complex of symbols romanticised as expressions 50 of the German mythic pasti "He no longer thought of the Baron, or Herman, or the Sportswelt. no longer thought of Stella's singing and particularly did not want to hear her sing" (88). Like the hero-waxds, her song now Is Just a piece of fa ile d magic to him, and thus anathema. In the upper world, he loses the "thread" of the war's "virus" (90) that "keeps a man anchored to his nation" (93) • but it la finally unclear whether his new quest is not merely a mors purified version of the egocenfcrlo nationalism he has Just apparently abandoned. Ernst's forsaking of his country coincides with his gradual estrangement from Stella. His passage from husband to patient Is quicker than Herman's or the old General's. As Is suggested by this comparison, though, he has not lost the war's virus at all. He succumbs to one of the diseases It spawns. But to a degree, he Is In a different mythic drawer than Stella, and the original, primal myth with which she Is in touch. When she first saw him back In the "lower world," she Immediately wanted to be with him In, not Heaven, but V alhalla. S till, Ernst fancies himself free of time and thus of history. The "upper world," with its ubiquitous ice 51 and apparent perfection, leaves him free of reality In a Kay he likes, with the newspapers scattered over the vertical cliffs, the wires colled, cut In the snow. And he prayed at meals, knowing nothing about the collectiv e struggle of the hated Prussian and genius Hun, knowing nothing of the encircling world, the handcuff, the blockade. (93) Ernst is not free or lost at all, though, because the war reaches up to strike him with disease and his own wife will carry him back Into time, to die with his dreams of sainthood shattered by the laughter of his father. So It Is poetic logic th a t the unwelcome Cromwell should suddenly appear In the retreat, bearing enthusiastic news of German victories, telling Ernst "everything he did not want to know" (92) and remarking In an assured tone that up here " 'it's more as if 1 were home*" (92). According to the metaphoric fantasy, Ernst, by taking Stella as his own, has "assassinated" Cromwell. Now, his "victJstf returns to congratulate him on his catch, "the heavy cane close at hand" (9 2 )—compare with the cane the Duke stalks Jutta's son with—and to force him back into the trap of history no one, not even the weak, can escape. In a sense, Ernst Is like both Jutta and Cap Leech. He Is temperamentally distant, at odds with the values of 52 his society. Yet some greater obstacle, sane ultimately finite limitation, prevents him from puncturing the banal sky. He can not transcend* The crucifixes he collects are nothing more than distorted, agonised human images, reflections of himself at his end. In death he can achieve no mare than his father or the Merchant or the old General-* he is nursed and outlasted by Woman* A mere casualty. To Stella, his death throes look like a "toothache” (115), and she realises "that he was a fencer in the clouds, stuck through, finally, with a microscopic flu" ( 1 1 5 )* In withdrawal from his irrelevant attempt to transcend via an alien myth, she believes that her brief flirtation with Christ in the mountains was a "mistake" (11?) • She is mere secure in Valhalla and its attendant mythology. Thus Zltendorf, S te lla , J u tta , Ernst—while they form pattens and clear lines of opposition—all succumb to the recurring human need to transcend, to define their selves in terms of an enduring mythology. The religious- Christian mythology in the novel is no more a successful transcendence than is the myth of German history. Indeed, the two myths are complementary in a la rg e r p attern of destructive idealisation. 53

Hawkes seems to be talking more about a t r a i t of the human condition than about the destructive idlosynciaclee of a particular set of beliefs or values. This possibility seems graphically illu s tra te d in the scene where Ernst dies, dogged at the last minute by his father, old Herman. Ernst, fresh and dying after his conversations with the infinite in the mountains, must new suffer the final visitation of his mortal enemy. His father has been brought to the some room by Gerta in the midst of her "flaming debauch" i He had horns. Terrible, agonizing, deformed short stubs protruding from the wrinkled crown, and the pipes he held in his fiery hands were the pipes of sin. All of the calm of Heaven evaporated and at the last moment, not knowing what it was a ll about, Ernst recognized Old Snow, And in that moment of defense, of hating the devilish return of boisterous heroic Herman, Ernst died without even realizing the long-awaited eventi In that last view of smallness, that last appearance of the intruder, Ernst, with his mouth twisted into dislike, died, and was reprieved from saintliness, lhe old man s till laughed, "Feigning, he's only feign­ ing! » (119^120) But the whole point of th is scene seems to be th a t Homan, while he may be the "devil" to his pathetic sen, is nothing more than another Ernst to the ungloved hand of death that is curling around all life in Tje Cannibal. Gerta changes from lover to nurse for him too, Just as Stella does for

Ernst. Herman, this "red-bearded devil" (119), has his desire for Gerta go "flickering out in spasms of recognition of his foe, the tedded Influenza" ( 119)* The mythic oppositions become nothing maze than snail dramas of the spirit, played out to divert attention from the real enemy. Waiting for Ernst to die, Stella can reflect that "she too lay by Christv and it was a mistake)" ( 11? ), but the only true mistake seems to be the sincere collapse of all rationalized hold on life Itself. Herman, In the glory days fantasized as "ruler of the Sportswelt and surrounding Europe" (51)• reaches, through the war, an end virtually identical to that of his outcast son. The whole religious motif In the novel tends to reinforce the Impression that Christianity will be nothing more than a tolerated second choice to the primary cultural myth as well as a natural galaxy of sensibilities and behaviors harmonious with the crucial aspects of Goman culture. Pastor Hiller (whom the Americans order Zlzendorf to shoot) had changed the gospel to make i t coincide with history during World War II. The Superior of Jutta's convent writes dally letters of protest to the President of the United States. The nunnery is Just as rigid In its fealty to tradition as Is the surrounding culture. The sisters walk "around and around In precise timeless honor of "—not God— but "the evening prayer" (106). In faot, this rltuallstlo Image, th is "revolution o f the humble ring" ( 10?) makes for an Interesting Image of the moving but unchanging nature of human l i f e Hawkes depicts In The Cannibal. The convent, the very citadel of apparent removal fTan the false dreams of the world, becomes In I ts concern with Identity-shattering order virtually indistinguishable from the crucial* values of the state. During her Illness, Jutta imagines that If she lives she will "surely • • • end up a civil official after all, entrusted and farced to take down, patiently, Superior's documents of condemnation" (11*+) • Several Images describe the nunnery In toms of an asylum, and later, the institution In terms of a monastery. With the town of Spltgen-on-the-Deln already a part of this metaphor, the essence of the dream-madness seems to have permeated the entire culture. Even the nuns are cannibals, "feeding on their words" (112),

m

The effect of this mrcotlcolly preoccupying condition 36 is that human values become reversed in a manner similar - to Zleendorf'a reversal of moral values. The normal condition of the human being, especially In the more drastic 19^5 sections, is that of a schisophrenic, mechanical creature of habit. The fanatic concentration on the past produces a not unexpected resulti the distinction between human and animal becomes more tenuous. Kan as the twentieth century is dying to understand him—Enlightened man—becomes an artificial, Irrelevant concept. Through a whole range of metaphoric devices, Hawkes creates a man who Is a creature of a few basic instincts, a man who, when finally driven to a wall between his shriveled identity and his need to reach beyorel himself a t all costs to expand it, will devour his fellows. Given the novel's assumption that there are various degrees of cannibalism, and that Western man's narrow, rationalised definition of that term is a self-serving fantasy, we cen appreciate the deterministic plight of the culture In a new light. The people become animals as victims of their conditioned obsessions. Moreover, Hawkes's severely neutral point of view casts both victim and victlmlrer into a leveling twilight. Fleeing the Cuke, Jutta's son first 57 becomes identified with a piece of animal flesh hanging in the village meat market, then Havers In and out of a fox metaphor as the supremely struggling Duke, who is "not quite able to visualize the kill" ( 2U), methodically tracks him down. During the murder, then, the boy fin a lly "becomes" a fox within the constrictions of the narrative point of view, trapping both the Duke and the reader within a world of uncomfortably transformed values. Only occasional references to a button or Jacket permit the violated human being to strive at the edge of—is it the Duke's or our own?—conscious­ ness. Ihis incident between the Duke and the "fox" is one Isolated image from a larger pattern in which all life is anlmalized. The v illag e , to Balamlr, seems lik e an "abandoned honeycomb" ( 185), and e a rlie r in the narrative i s "as decomposed as an ox tongue black with ants" ( 6). Both the dying General and the dying Ernst are compared to birds (conjuring up associations similar to those of the bird shell boat in The Beetle Leg) , and both re a l and hum n-style dogs abound throughout the novel. The literal dogs seem to become associated with death as they hound the train carrying Ernst and Stella from the perfect "upper world" back to the death-ridden "lower world." And on the same page that we find that 58

"the dogs had beaten them to the destination)" there axe "bands of children" stealing brass buttons and Insignia from the returning soldiers* After the Fbmlly she has nursed disintegrates, Gerta Joins the people on the streets* "for she had survived and hunted now with the pack" ( 101). Ihe soldiers themselves, mutilated victims of the war, meet the train "with blistering paws" (102), and the pervasive anlm alizatlon becomes associated with the primal, exo-Christlsn m otif. Ihe vandals, with tunics itching on bare chests, with packs paining and eyes red, with rifles still riding strapped to packs, searched, pawed over the dust, sat leaning against the rafters and waited. (101) Soldiers and civilians alike fall back and down into rigid, moving forms. Both Bolamlr and Herman Snow make "scratching" noises trying to get Inside various doors. I mentioned above the novel's assumption that there are different kinds of cannibalism. Ihe wide range of both overt and Implied cannibal Images in ihe novel suggests that the one act of literal cannibalism has many variations, sane spiritual and some physical, and that cannibalism in all its forms is a logical expression of a culture as possessed by myth as this one. Madame Snow herself, as 5?

I have mentioned, is intimately involved in the motif in her role as the mythic, embodied expression of the culture's dreams about itself. There are frequent images which suggest that cannibalism is typified by the old's devouring of the young, which is an analogue far the past's relationship to the present. One example of this occurs at the family dinner table when Stella is reminded of Ernie as she watches "heaps of quivering Jelly" slip through her father's hands ( 67). This kind of association proceeds through complementary echoes In' the language. In one scene, we see the invalid old General's "fine Roman nose twitching with excitement" (73), while later the IXike leaves the place where he has murdered Jutta's son, "his long Hapsburg legs working with excitement" (162), Hawkes frequently uses startling juxtapositions to suggest the nature of the cannibalistic state of mind as well as to expand the significance of the Duke's crime» A few months after the death of Ernst, Stella gave birth to her fragile son, and while she was still on the bearing bed, Gerta and Herman took the child fraa her, carried it and kept it, down in the first-floor dark pleasure room where they had failed together that first night. Food became more scarce, and Stella never forgave the old woman for the stolen son. Hearing the dogs howling around the station at the port of entry to the grave, she thought, once more, of singing* The Christ carving had disappeared. (122) Here the kernel of a cannibalistic soul lives at the center 60

of the other associations—-the train station as the dividing point between the upper and lower worlds, the dogs as harbingers of death, the city as a grave, the song as the only mythic handle on what Is an Increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable reality. This passage illustrates the characteristic drenching of HaWkes 's language in a whole web of relevant motifs. Motivation, both personal and historic, is so tangled that it Is purposefully difficult to separate into artificial lin e s . Cromwell has digested the dream of h isto ric a l conquest w ithin a cosmic, in ternational framework) he exhibits the culture's cannibalistic obsession on a more purified, spiritual level, abandoning his native England far Germany, there to feed on the transplanted spirit of world conquest, devouring the facts of the war with the methodical precision of a true, insane native. On the corporate level, the village is said to have "gorged itself on straggling beggars" ( 7). Indeed, the Whole culture, in its quest to return itself Into the destructive, clockwork patterns of its own history. Is actually driving itself Into the cannibalistic mouth of time. Stella's father, the old General who provides a fla il but rigid continuity between the nineteenth and 61 twentieth century versions of the struggle far greatness, nutters Incoherent words of heroic encouragement a t the beginning of World War I even as part of his head Is "eaten away." There are several other examples, tut these, Z think, illustrate the major patterns of the motif as it relates to the overall struggle for Identity I have been discussing. Once life is reduced to mere movement, any assumptions about man's "freedom" become irrelevant. The cast of Hawkes's vision continually drives a wedge between flesh and spirit, be­ tween the conscious, intellectual powers by which we distinguish ourselves from lower farms of life and the more or less pre-determlned (including Freudian) elements of our beings. Throughout the novel Hawkes'e language frequently reaches particulars "too extreme to comprehend," approximating an awesome fragmentation of existence resulting from a culture's mad pursuit of the ideal dream of its past. The drunken Census-Tfeker listens to Zlzendorf and Jutta have phsyical relations ("make love" is too strong a term) "with his soul dissociated from the actual room" ( 2 0)* The fact that so much of this dissociation depends on the nature of the characters' relationship to history suggests that the lack of a viable, productive north shatters not only community, but personal Identity as well. This massive disruption In spiritual continuity can produce situations like the scene in which Jutta and Zlzendorf, who need "in a skinned momentary manner, th is vague ordeal” ( 21), go through the motions of sex while. In random domestic Juxtaposition, "the floor was swept clean for the children.'1 l a te r In the night, while Zlzendorf plots to k ill Leevey and while her son is fa ta lly losing h is chase w ith the Duke, J u tta rises up out of her sleep to wash a few articles of clothing, completely dissociated, that is, from the dream's re-enactment. Domestic gestures within such a context become tragicomic and absurd. The controlling reality of madness is sometimes pathetically, sometimes comically split open by isolated acts of "normality"—themselves cade abnormal by our feelings about what the characters should really be doing at this point. The old habits are all that remain of the old Identity, and the old Identity is a ll there Is, The Census-Thker, it is said, "had stature only through responsibilities that had gone" (23). Tradition is the source of the inconsistent but preferred flow of blood. Even In the seemingly glorious days of 191**, when 63

conquests am plenty and Stella Is young, there Is an Implied separation between the mechanics and the spirit of life. There la no rhythm, no continuity. It Is finally Stella*s voice, a detectable product of her throat, that is putting out the notes of the song in the Sportswelt. the same song that grows metaphorically into a kind of ritual, stylised incantation evocative of the magical sureness of history. But Hawkes '8 description denies it any of the romantic pre­ tension its hearers give it, disallowing any concentrated harmony between a r t and dream. Technique i s the llm iti "Then she found It simple, found that her throat opened and her head could turn and smile, that she could move about and thrust Into her shoulders the charm of the song" (41-2). This is a performance, an artificial thrust against reality. There is a strong sense that all the characters, like Stella, are performers. Madame Snow's son returns crippled and deformed from the war and takes up residence In the abandoned movie theater, Operating the projector fo r a non-existent audience. The Duke catches Jutta's son on the stage, and the only reaction Madame Snow's son can manage Is a theatrical insult to the values of the reader-as-audlence i ha has a feeling of unconmon pleasure from the fact that someone is visiting him. Other soldiers return from the front and throw casualty lists and periodicals up on the stage, and listen for the song that no longer comes cut of the Sportswelt. The feeling that the people are all mere actors in an infolding drama is increased by the May they dance. Ih e lr movements become r itu a ls th at pay homage to the primacy of habit. As it will in the later novels, the dance becomes an image by which the characters externalise the mechanical rhythms of psyches in hock to forces that can hardly be articulated. "Figures stepped forwards, back­ wards, caught in a clockwork of custom, a way of moving that was almost forgotten" (30). As Zlzendorf watches this, he disdains the non-Germans Who don't realize the Importance of the "vast honored ideal" that has been swept away. His sudden impulse after killing Leevey to keep the American's watch for himself, on the pretext that it belongs to him as the Leader, is consistent with his mania to force Germany back into the "clockwork of custom" that is history. Within such an atmosphere, when human action Itself becomes a pre-formed sty lized im itation, la nguage follows suit. No longer a vehicle to reflect meaning at the existential edge of experience, no longer a means to embody dynamism, 65

it retreats Into a restrlctively stilted series of recurring patterns, as when Stella tells Cromwell that H,I Hill become, as you wish, your Archduchess for the people'" (55)* Wards decay Into occasional sounds. "It was years since the people had stopped talking" (1*0, a condition based at least partly on feari "they had all the same experience, yet expected an alien ear" (1*0. Even the Intellectual connections made In reading deteriorate. A nurse at the Institution flips the pages of a marine, an act as significant as the pages of a book beating back and forth In the wind. The widespread reduction to mere movement, to play-acting In a fatal quest, makes the people the very victims of the mechanization they need to achieve their goal of restoration of a cohesive Identity* Stella's mother is killed by a plane th a t f a lls because of a mechanical fa ilu re , and Cromwell, tile purified, International dilettante cannibal, Is praised by Zlzendorf In his "Proclamation" as the Instigator of "the Germanic Technological Revolution." I t Is because of him that the myth will be restored with the blood of the present, that "the Teuton hills and forests will design th e ir Native Son" (177)* 3he steel bars through which Rftianrtr and Bastor Miller look out of Madame Snow's basement, 66 the steel loops around the crippled limbs of Madame Snow's son, the tools and Iron wheels and pieces of metal that are melted into bullets, the tins In Zlzendorf's wagon that "cut away" the murdered Herr Stlntz's soul, the lone steel spire that rises above Spltgen-on-the-Deln In lonesome, frozen, phallic definition of the town's static sp irit- all form a large Jail far citizens orphaned fay the loss of their myth, metallically incapable of creating a . life that does not repeat the origins of their dream-obsessed condition. For the purposes of life as it is defined by the constrictions the novel deals with, Zlzendorf *s Judgment la accurate i I thought of it during each day in the newspaper office and thought of it against the oud-banki life is not the remarkable, the precious, or necessary thing we think it is, 2he naked dark pawing of th a t etern al old horse who lingered on through no fault of his own. bereaved and unquiet In the night, told me that, ( 130; Die yellow electric globe shedding light on Zlzendorf and Jutta as they struggle to cash In on a moment's passion seems a more f ittin g refle c tio n of the world resu ltin g from such a condition. Hie frequently suggestive Freudian Images only reinforce the feeling that, while existence In 2 2ft Cannibal is a methodical horror, there is no alternative. It is 67 hard to say whether the distorted sexuality In the novel Is a cause or an effect of the overall condition* Hawkes ' 8 dense language seems to indicate that at this point a circular perspective is a ll we can legitimately maintain* The sexual imagery becomes such an integral part of the fabric of event and association that* like the other motifs* it is p art o f a complex of motivation th a t unfolds ra th e r than happens* Control over action comes from hidden, untouchable parts of the psyche* Ihe strength of a rigid* controlled history becomes associated with sexual vitality. As the p ast drains away* so does the power of manhood. Zlzendorf's complaint about the "keys that would not work" is relevant here. At the same point in the narrative* as Zlzendorf and the Censua-Taker recall the past and lament the fact that there is now no government,, "we both smiled* legs stretched limply before us* smoke rising from saved cigarettes" ( 16). Even in 191^* Stella notices the "black and limpid" olexks In the park* A3 the intermittent violence and listlessness finally cohere into an orderly point of madness at the end of the novel* the symbols of an asserted phallic power enter in to the picture* Both Gnxnwell and the Duke carry canes that intimidate their young victims* and Herr Stints 68 carries a birch stick. Punishment, gender-ossertion and. sadistic control become necessary psychological instruments in any clear, sure habit agxlnst chaos, The whole process by which Ernst and Jutta, and to some extent Stella and Cromwell, become defined v is-a-v is the h isto ric a l myth by the way they are defined vls-a -vlo their fathers, suggests the psychically crippling effect of a past too ascendant. As In the later novels, youth becomes fodder for the Insatiable mythic needs of the old. Images of fertile sexuality become entangled with images of death. In one scene, Stella and her mother go to market with baskets in hand, and a "bald-headed man" flaps his "apron at a plnk-noaed dog." After filling their baskets with melons, they suddenly see the grocer's boy, "red tongue wagging," peering "from behind a hogshead of cheese" (77) • As if the dog-death undertone were not enough, th is bulging morning becomes fu rth er sabotaged when, a few pages later, the old General dies, "the top of his head a brilliant swollen red" (83)* The fecal, sewerlsh smell permeating the town, the frequent allusions to underground pipes and tunnels, the id-like enclosure of Hadome Snow's basement where Balamlr and Bistar Miller at different times peer through steel bar®—a l l estab lish a psychologically charged, atmosphere in which action becomes heavily endowed with Freudian determinism. As Herman Snow haunts his son on his death bed. "the pipes he held in his fiery hands were the pipes of sin” 119 ( ) I and Selraogia, looking for her stalked brother, can not find "any forms crawling along the street among the ends of broken pipe? (137)*

IV

Hawkes's unusual handling of point of view In The Cannibal heightens the feeling that we are being confronted not only with a created work of art, but with a statement that reality Itself Is a contrived mosaic accessible only through examination of Its recognizable effects on their own terms* The fact that Zlzendorf can, as a narrator, participate in ironic perceptions and still do and say what he does, forces us as readers out of some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of human freedom within the context of a world maddened by its illusion of itself* To accept the novel on i t s own terms, we must accept th e presence of a strong spiritual reality informing the novel's 70 literal reality Independent of the characters' conscious ways of viewing themselves. The ghosts who live In the abandoned army tank are real, because they are vestiges of minds—of a state of mind—that struggle to manipulate life into a dream, lb accept the novel on its own terms, we must also abandon our ideas about reason in human action. Our "normal, " educated expectation Is that Zltendarf, having reported what he has, might partake of some of the enlightenment we fancy ourselves as deriving from the observation of his experiences. But the concept of enlightenment is truly irrelevant to the preoccupied condition of Hawkes's world- psyche. Hie term itself, if applied to this as well as Hawkes's other novels, would refer to an essentially artificial. Intellectual condition that is too simple far the kind of morally paralyzing vision Hawkes creates. Any enhanced awareness must be bam outside the novel's confines and must be in the fora of an increased understanding of the complex, cyclical nature of the human condition. I speak here of "the human condition" rather than of "the German condition," because a knowledge of similar patterns of creation In Hawkes's other novels convinces me th a t 'Iha C a n n i b a l can not be dismissed as being concerned n

solely with a single event or even a single culture* The fantasy Insertions In The Cannibal, for example, while they create lines of significance between the novelist's people and actual historical figures related to a specific event, and In that sense "Germanize" the novel's significance, also, I think, attack the reader at the very source of his imagination* By coldly disrupting the inbuilt security inherent In the tensions of what otherwise might be a relatively prosaic, linear narrative, they farce the reader Into a mythical perception of reality that places the archetypal underpinnings of his own identity in Jeopardy. Hawkes, by dealing so openly In mythic patterns, universalizes the significance of his relatively Isolated events. The frequent critical references to some kind of "violation" of the reader are, I think, correct. Rrom a certain perspective, The Cannibal is a retrospective view of an historical catastrophe whose implications extend both ways through time. It is a vision of history frozen momentarily so that we may examine a complexly woven fabric of cause and effect that, while in imagined guise, leaves no doubt of its pretense to truth. But the "freezing" effect enters into the consequent view of human character n

Itself. Within the terms of tills enacted drama, acts of will turn Into acts of Instinct, and by virtue of our par­ ticipation In the defined needs of the characters, we become victims with them In the results of the ensuing vision* While we can sense an essentially artificial removal from the time and place of the scripted event, we can not so easily avoid participation In the various contents of the scripted causes. Zlrendorf says that "you can ask no nan to give up his civilization, which Is his nation." Given the basically objective truth of this statement (in spite of the reductive thinking) • It becomes a Judgment on us a ll as well as his defiant defense of himself In his quest of the Idealised past, lhe national coder he craves conforms to im er psychic needs for ordered, myth-sanctioned Identity whose elements a re n o t In any sense s t r i c t l y German. For w ithin th e J a il of the novel's range of moral possibilities, the human being becomes by definition a cannibal, ftie Individual's need to connect Into the group's identity coincides with the state-myth's readiness to digest Its orderly Inhabitants. Z hope It w ill become clear from my examination of the other novels th a t the sw ift harmony between th is Inner move- 73 ment and the objective, nightmarish "historical** events Hawkes depicts represents an envisioned pattern about human experience and Is an analogue far the recurring cycle In Hawkes*s novels within which his central characters manipulate reality Into the recurring myths of their dreams. FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

^Leslie A. F iedler, Love and Death I n the American Novel (New York, Revised Edition, 1966), 481. 2Ib ld .. 1*91.

3 a 1 1 poge references within the text of ChapterT h o are to The Cannibal. New Directions Puperbook Edition* copyright 19^9. use the word "malaise" with reservation, because it implies something out of the ordinary. Hawkes's structuring of experience is so totally controlled, though, that there is no internal suggestion that this reality is not a vision of truthfully structured elements from our own "normal" experience. If there is a distinction, the reader oust externally apply it, to his ultimate discomfort.

^The Cannibal (New Yorki New D irections Raperbook Edition, W ), xlll7 ^Ihis representative quality in her personality Is similar to the defining fault of tho major characters in The Beetle Leg, who flee from the symbols of mortality into the organic jaws of death. 7 fCompare these flies with the insects that buzz over the carcass of the Duke's victim. g But even Stella's Implied earth-mother sensuality comes in for parody. Her fantasies about cannibals are mixed with loving thoughts of Ernst, so that we get an implied view that this lusty, spontaneous yearner after the primitive is simultaneously a destructive devourer. When she finally does run Into Ernst on the heels of these muslngs, the scene becomes anticlim actlc. They "walked for twenty minutes" and "smelled the berries cultivated by the park authorities, a few beautiful dripping flowers, and passed babies who screeched, dwarfed in the carriage." Then, "feeling at last the approach of twilight," Ernst leaves her, so that Gerta's leering accusations about what S te lla has been up to seem somewhat misplaced. CHAPTER THREE t P E BEETLE LEGi

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In ©32 Beetle Leg (1951)* his second novel, Hawkes shifts his locale from Germany to the United States, tut In several ways these two early navels present similar visions of the drama of a culture's Imposition on reality of Its Illusion of itself. Unlike the later novels, which place more emphasis on individual character development, Die Cannibal and Die Beetle Leg, while filled with individual characters, deal with reality more In terms of the myths certain cultures have of themselves, and the resulting distortions these myths generate in the lives of the individual characters. Both novels, rather than following the individual dream exclusively (as the later works tend to do), present poetically constructed visions of mass, cultural dreams. In The Cannibal. Hawkes dissected Germany's dream of itselfi now, in Pie Beetle Leg, he dissects America's dream of itself, illuminating the qualities of its pose against re a lity .

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The Beetle Leg takes place somewhere In the western part of the United States. Its location In both spiritual and physical reality embeds it within the perennial golden horizon hovering above and finally receding beyond America's western shores. It is a saga, the story of a certain civilization. But Mistletoe, the representative town, Is full of all kinds of poison. There are no prospects that the culture w ill bloom, no hopes expressed through children or the continuation of dreams. The Inhabitants decay openly In both physical and spiritual senses. Reality stabs them to life. Their Illusion of themselves Is doomed, and their doom Is circular, beginning and ending within themselves. People who have come to build a dam populato the towns of Mistletoe and Clare. At the time of the novel, though, construction is stalled and the memory of Mulge Lamps on (killed In an earth slide during the dam's construction) hangs over the place, lending a brooding thematio connection to the frequently disjointed narrative. If there Is any structural principle to the novel, It Is probably this death, for it Is In perceiving its significance to tho dying survivors that we begin to understand the various "why's" of the novel, particularly the varied, often confusing 7 7

sequence of seemingly Isolated events and images. In a 1952 essay dealing with what happens to time In Beetle Leg. Robert Greeley articulated a crucial distinction between time "as frame, as the main means to a coherent order” (i.e.. something to hang the narrative on), and time as simply one more thematic component in the novel—"But put the weight on the other sense, of things shifting, between themselves—and time there to be a qualification among many—it is a release."1. By breaking his narrative into a controlled vision of non-chronological parts, Hawkes frees himself to deal with time in its organic, rather than its abstracted, state. To tell a story chronologically is to establish a certain kind of causality, a certain kind of order that Is itself a comfort because it presents reality in a way with which we are accustomed to confronting it. But in IViq Beetle Leg there is a poetic, psychological order to the narrative that explodes chronology so os to reveal the awesooeness that we label time. Tie man-made hill that stops the water is itself easing "down the rotting shale a beetle's leg each several anniversaries" ( 67-6 8). Urns, the most significant historical act upon nature In the novel becomes v isib ly temporary, subject to a discouraging, 78 throbbing flew that makes man and his work physically irrelevant even in the place he is temporarily pinned to, nils hostility between man and the land works Itself out over a series of organically realized pictures that gradually build up the novel's environment. Hie Mistletoe dam represents man's assault against an earth pulsating to its own rhythm, an attempt to shape nature for his purposes. The people call the water "Old lifeline," and what Is the ostensible purpose of a dam but to preserve and sustain life? But it is still an act of man, and in that sense unnatural, technological, as if the necessities of human life itself were unnatural In this landscape. It is an artificial mountain, and it takes Luke's seeding "badly" (66). They had stripped the topsoil of the basin, picked at the surface and weeds, uncovered the shifting red clay for acres and finally, in the last stages of the project, been stopped at the yellow peakless rise Itself. Not that they had been able to move the mountain into place and rear it foot by foot, but rather they had been unable to tear it down and hsd merely left it, defaced of former c lif f s and ridges, and without a name. (66) In some places in the South you can see mountains that have been sheared off to sand on their sides, with green cropped tree growths left at their tops. Ohey look as if they have been given military haircuts, yet they continue to stand with a kind of sullen, mocked dignity. In The 79

Beetle Leg, nan's attack results In a dam that is "a sarcophagus of mud” ( 67) that seals off the houses and people of a farmer era. It Is a flesh-eating coffin rather than a fresh water source of life. Xt is moving, a process Implying dissolution. What's more, "the same discouraging pulse” is under everything, not Just the dam (68). The earth is Miming. Die image of the moving dam is yet another metaphor of Spengler’s ’'opposition of History and Mature” that lhab Hassan characterizes as a main concern in the modem novel. Man is "fulfilling his destiny in cycles, not In progressions."^ History, in the terms set up In Xhe Beetle Leg, becomes an artificial construct that is both significant and irrelevant. Man tries to impose constructs on both the land and himself—and by extension on his relation to reality. Two images from different parts of tho novel te s tify to th is fa c t. In the f i r s t , Luke Malks in to the town bar Where he asks after Harry Bohn and winds up meeting Camper. Colored lights play over the roost. Revolving slowly, the tasseled lampshade turned the men first red, then blue, and caused dots of color to walk across the brown photograph of the dam over the mirror. The trestle, with snail, erect figures holding tools posed stiffly at ant's length, wrinkled, even under glass, across the wall. ( 9 6) There is the frozen image of stiff men standing in front 60

of their conquest juxtaposed with an Image of the mirror that reveals present reality* And even the "now" has a tenuous presence, as the artificial colors make sport of its reality. The scene establishes a severe temporal pers­ pective within which men build as if they fight. Biey are American Gothic hardhats, and their tools crumble in their hands. Hie dam changes "things," but it really won't change things at all* The second image occurs in the final scene of the novel, as the Sheriff and his boys are wiping out the Red Devils* Hie same curious colors define the nature of the scene, suggesting that the impulse that produced the dam and the Impulse that produced the posse are related, possibly in their origins within an artiflolal illusion as well as in their destructive effects. Now men will purify the land of sex/sin* Flat shells, smoke, recoil filled the truck, one side ablaze with the spitting triple battery, Bohn's cheek was blue and red, a great wattle under the punish­ ment of the gun, his eye steely down the barrel. ( 1 5 7 ) Hie building of the dam, which Interrupts and stagnates the natural flow of water, and the killing of the Red Devils, which amounts to the cowboys' wiping out the image of th e ir own libidos, are both ironic results of the characters' attempts to purify life, to abstract it out of the organic 61

cycle. Both unbroken movement In nature and their own llbldlnal, procreative powers are part of an organic reality that threatens* by i t s process* to elim inate these cowboy-gods from th e ir landscape. The processes of natural movement and cyclic oreatlon and re-creation brought them to this place* but the same processes can remove them. So they fig h t to sustain th e ir s te riliz e d domain. The Beetle Leg, then* deals with men's attempts to abstract themselves so as to be free of the processes o f time. With a depressing and wry redundancy* Hawkes paints the Kays In which they are chained to their bodies. It Is a captivity they can not stand. Skin becomes a frequently humorous point of reference fo r the frig h tfu l evidence of dissolution. The men breed fungus In their shoes (101)* the Sheriff's hand Is capable of infecting the town with disease (^3) * wrd a t several points the men are reduced to animals under similar conditions—Harry Bohn says "'We all got wounds . . . all of us got a share of dlckle bird heads desquamated on the river banks'" (133). And Gap Leech must struggle with a "scabious old cock" to establish some territory to grow old in (151) * The figure of the bettle Itself gets integrated into this organically temporal 82

system of Images. As Luke watches the women come to accompany ha to her wedding, he sees blister beetles on the horses. Ihey Msat on the brass terrets or suddenly still, fell dryly to the ground" (8b), 2 hey do to human skin what the sun or the desert do to life Itself. The desert with Its "cracked grill slabs of earth" ( 1 1 5 ) buries the "human drops sprinkled" on it over time (b$) •

H i Man Sucked Into His Mind

Hawkes lets the brutality of his environment surface to the point where an archetypal struggle develops between it and the men who walk through it. Ihus—and this becomes a recurring pattern In the reality-Illusion tension In a ll the novels—his characters become variously contorted by their efforts to defend themselves against the "outside." Ihe Sheriff Is a ludicrous latter-day Puritan whose Imagination has become tracked into a depresslngly familiar Law-and-Oider syndrome. He has no refined sense of himself as distinct from his role. His person Is the law, the law Is his person, and that is the state of his reality. He has transcended from his Identity as a human being Into hio Identity as a role. Like so many of Hawkes's dream* experiencers, he has drowned in his own Illusions, only to survive and s till walk the earth. His crippling, sometimes leering sexual fear sets the tone far a prototypical kind of male behavior In the novel. It becomes apparent that Order Is his woman, or perhaps more properly his mother. Since real women represent something uncontrollably mysterious, it Is much simpler for him to allow his psyche to reside In the blanketing sureness of steel bars, handcuffs, rifles, and a badge. The jail Is his damp, dark refuge from tho sun-dried desert. As close to the disturbing mysteries o f the womb a s he can come, I t Is a cage where those not liberated back into the dead-end cavities of their own beings—such as the sexually explosive Red Devils—can be contained and watched with fascination. Here "the Sheriff and his friend, allowed owners of the cage” (3 2 ), can get their vicarious thrills. "'She don't change,*" the Sheriff says of his woman made from a machine (3 3 ). "'You'll get It bit off,'" he says to Wade as he sticks his leg through an opening In the bars to kick a sleeping Inmate ( 3 5 )» Moreover, " 'it'll never have to hold no woman. There are other rooms in town for that'" (8 ). The Sheriff messlanically Imprisons anyone caught making love, ccnmlttlng a 'Violation" against his sterile dream, that is, in the bushes of the desert. He reads a horoscope whose stars foretell the death of seeds no matter when they are planted. His campaign against fertility becomes his expression of fear of tho organic Ilf e-processes. Anything that breeds without his permission (i.e., anything that breeds) implies the particular nature of his irrelevance to the continued flew of things. He is the static principle incarnate. In the midst of a vicious, life-draining environment, of a place where making love is a feared but apparently Infrequent crime, the Sheriff's life is ruled by "the indoor gardener's calendar, a timetable of work, failure, and Church holidays" (41). "It is a lawless country," the Sheriff tells us, wearing his handcuffs on his hip (?)• What he should say is that there are two kinds of lawsi his and the country's. TV)? Beetle Leg is like a symphony, in that Hawkes lets the Sheriff establish his theme early, goes on to variations on it, and returns periodically to pick it up. once again. The Sheriff is a parody, of course, so pure and. ridiculous In his devotion to an idea that he could make J . BSgar Hoover sound lik e Wallace Stevens. There are 85

occasional suggestions of the effects of tills ldea-hood on his humanness. Early in the novel, he says, with no particular sense of self-irony, that he has had the Jail key "around my neck the entire fourteen years" ( 8 ) , and that all his shirts have "badge holes through the pocket" ( 6 ), Like the people in Wlnesburg. Ohio, he has latched onto a truth and It has made him grotesque* Occasionally his wounds darken the abyss within the grin of his fate. 111 33l£ Beetle Lea, the jail is the last bastion of protection against both the desert and women. Legality becomes an idea to use against the elements, a refuge. The jail is a place the Sheriff has some control over, so he puts his demons there—the fiendish Red Devils, the explosive, sexually menacing (in a symbolic way only) motorcycle riders who travel at random In packs across the landscape, goading the listless inhabitants. The lronlo nature of the Sheriff's relationship with them suggests one of the major themes of the novel. On the one hand, the Red Devils represent a threat to the bloodless, airless existence the Sheriff is Interested in preserving, ©ley sit in formation on their motorcycles, "the sleek black gas tanks ending In their crotches" (62-3) • An admiring boy notes that 8 6

they"‘had Jewels all over then,'" to which Luke retorts, "'We don't want to hear about it" ' (63)* And as Gamper's wife gets settled In the dormitory, she suddenly sees the goggles and snout of one of them* poking "without sight" toward her "flattened slippery flesh" (53) * But in another sense, the Red Devils are never really an objective threat at all, which is appropriate, since the Sheriff characteristically operates by reacting to the reality created by his imagination. Tne Red Devils are a somewhat comic, dreamlike, albeit wild presence, half way between lncubl and Junior grade Hell's Angels. Luke and the welders ignore them, almost as if they were visible only to the reader and those characters in the book who choose to worry about them. Biey never attack anyone. But the Sheriff is a mother, and it's his Job to worry about anything. During a flashback, he tries to prevent Ka and her wedding party from coming in to town because they don't have a license. later in the novel, he tells Luke and Camper they'll be subject to a fifteen dollar "personal fine" for going onto the waters of the dam. Perhaps the best picture of the Sheriff's zeal comes as he and Wade prepare to set out in their pick-up truck to round up more Devils. Next to the Jail wall is "the 87 fresh row of motorcycles, already entwined with com stalks, webs of dust" ( 1 2 7 )—libldlnal machines already choked into the Sheriff's astrologically-lnsplred garden. The Red Devils acquire their menacing nature not from anything they do or are, but from the way the Sheriff chooses to define them. They become symbolic of the llbldlnal principle, like Iarry in The Lime Twig or Cyril in The Blood Oranges, They ore tho victims of their own significance. Since the law man is the source of order In the West, it is only natural that the Sheriff should have a showdown of sorts. So he confronts Cap Leech, but like many other mythic confrontations in Hawkes's novels, their meeting twists into a non-climax. The initial Imagery of their confrontation suggests that the lines axe clearly drawn, that it will be a classic fight between good and evil. We have already been invited to funnel human and natural chaos through the evangelical mind of the Sheriff, and now comes the devil In the fora of a medicine man, arriving in a red wagon and surrounded by fire. His presence is the occasion for Indians to gather in the street and set off fireworks. The Sheriff remains in his Jail and sends an emissary to bring Cap Leech to the sunmlt. But 8 8 elements In the doctor's background and appearance suggest that there la going to be hell to pay. He Is the "son of a light boned suffragette" ( 3 9 ) • a "blood-letter" (** 0 ), a true demon in a town defined mainly by Its Incipient regression In to d u sti In the heat of the boiling pot stove Gap Leech stood above then, holding by the throat a brown chested boy, the other hand dripping an Instrument of metal. (3 8 ) After the messenger Wade announces his intention, Qap Leech steps "into the flames" of his wagon and slams the door (3 9 )* The wagon Itself is an Insult to the law man and his values. It Is bulletproof, its shutters have been stolen, appropriately enough, from a Victorian mansions In a row of gray false fronts, among a few g ilt lettered windows—a town la id out and staged with a few hundred people on the plains—the red wagon took Its crooked place like a bloody thorn, an Impudent shambles in the midst of cattle houses. It had not been driven to the side but blocked the road. ( 3 7 ) There Is little suspense In the test of who has power. The Sheriff becomes merely another patlent-victlm of Leech's by accidentally doping himself on some of the doctor's ether. The crowd that has gathered must then watch their lawman "stern ly sway, nearly topple" (126). The crack o f fixe visible behind the door of the Jail as the two meet Is more a sign of sorcery than of mortal conflict. In 89 typical mad doctor fashion* Gap Leech has been driven from town to town across the land because he and especially what he represents are feared. He can literally control destinies in a way the rooted natives can not. He "had the power to put them all to sleep, to look at their women i f he wished, to nark th e ir children" (129) • No wonder he becomes the carnival side-show to the crowd outside the Jail. Their peculiar psychic constrictions set loose a grotesque Juxtaposition of Images th at color th e ir hbpes and fears of what might really be inside the red wagon. They mention three things* a g ir l, a two-headed c a lf, and a baby in a mason Jar. Perhaps a ll three exist on the same plane of feared, freak unreality fo r them. Their Puritanism is essentially the same as that of the Sheriff and Luke, merely assuming a more voyeuristic expression* being closer to the tenuous threshold between dream and insanity. Gap Leech is not understood* so he becomes a figure of myth. And it is Leech's apparent refusal to mythologise* at least in the way the natives do it* that makes him an outcast. The Sheriff is a spiritual philosopher, as It were. He wants to impose meaning on re a lity from the sky. But Gap Leech wants to understand the insides of everything 90 on earth. He causes formerly Invisible blood to suddenly appear and cooe out of the body* He Is "the dismantler of everything that flew or walked or burrowed at the base of a tree” (150* His way of perceiving men Is characteristically, even brutally, unromantlcleed. Ihe mysterious, symbol-laden dam moves the distance of "a beetle's leg each several an­ niversaries" (67- 8 ), but the beetle, the shelled, slow-moving, Inscrutable symbol of time, Is to Gap Leech nothing but a frantic Insect for his probing mind* "He czawled Jerkily across the gumwood floor, stethoscope pressed upon the shell of a beetle sweeping hurriedly Its wire legs" ( 122-3 ). He looks at the Sheriff's palm and sees, not a zodlac-llke message about the future, but disease. During the mlddle- of-the-nlgit quest upon the waters of the dam, when Luke and Camper are toying with but avoiding the meaning of their existence, he looks upon Luke as "the little man in thong and dust" twisting "with a human crick" ( 1^K>). His arrival in town is shrouded in a hocus-pocus kind of atmosphere, but he is ultimately a ravlsher of another kind of hocus-pocus. He watches the cowboy Luke light up a cigarette 1 "Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the sk u ll glowed as he cupped h is hands" (139)* Cap 91

Leech snoops past pretension to find a ll necessary significance In the skeleton. Qap Leech Is outside of the Zodiac, outside of the needs and fears burled in the slack water of the dam, outside even o f the myth of the nan burled somewhere in the a r t i f i c i a l mountain whose relics draw homage at the barber shop. So he I s a devil* lik e I t o r no t. "Red lig h t danced on the wheel tops” of his wagon as It went down the main street of Clare towards the Jail (123). He Is a devil to the bogus spiritualization of life. & knows Instinctively that the Sheriff's pose represents the same kind of flight from time as the shaving mug displayed in the barber shop window. Death can not be assuaged In this manner. Just as it can not be uncovered by Ma'e divining rod probing of the desert. It seems as if Hawkes has grounded the points of this relationship in his Imagery. While waiting to see if the Sheriff's truck w ill start for the journey to tho dam and the search far Red Devils. Cap Leech whlstles"softly through his teQth"(127). ftils precise hissing noise In which air leaves the body randomly, tunelessly, is the same kind of noise Hawkes tonally envisions when Ha falls to locate Hulge's thereabouts in the earth. "But he was gene. Die dead whistle In sumner 92 through fixed teeth • • (119)* After the Sheriff's truck does start up, a calf falls from the back of It, making a whistling noise during Its awkward and quick Journey to death on the ground. S till, objectively, Cap Leech Is a chronic healer. In what Is probably the book's most grotesque Ironic twist, we are faced first with an linage of outcast Gap Leech delivering the live Infant Harry Bohn from the v;omb of his dead mother (121), then later with the Incident In which the pure, Sheriff- approved, sterile cowboy Luke pulls a dead Infant from the dam on the end of his fishing pole (131-2). Because he "dared to ertraot the secret of a dead woman, * Gap Leech Is banned from thereafter delivering children (121). But this doesn't bother him, since he Isn't really Interested in pregnancies anywayi th ey 're too functional. A pregnant woman's "only discoloration was fo r a purpose, and Gap Leech believed In the non-usefulness of burst organs» no good could cane of it" (122). So, while he is an unwitting, grinning martyr to life, it is only because of his devotion to power over l i f e 's mechanics. He has roamed the land for thirty years In a "practice among those without chance of recovery, doomed, he felt, to submit" (122). His evangelism 93

focus68 on lost bodies lather than on lost souls. Bie linage of him holding a stethoscope to a beetle's shell Is appropriate for the Kay It expresses his attempt to acquire a physical understanding of the same mysteries the Sheriff explains according to stars. Bodies become Gap Leech's strategy against the void. In one Incident. "In the empty frenzy of a cold n ig h t," he tosses the bones he has used to learn anatomy "across a Khltened plain. But; always In time, he discovered the marble counter, the revolving fan, and Jugs of p ills " (122). So he becomes like the Sheriff, In that he relies ultimately upon the methods of his search when he finds Its object can not take the shape of an answer, late in the book, as he sits In the boat watching the back of Luke's head, he has "a sudden unpleasant clearness of the head, faced with the foundling plainsman" (140), No medical Instruments can comfort him now, as "with brightening eye" he seems to realize the awesome Implications of his brutal vision. As long as skin covers skeleton, there must be a ccranunlty between the two of them. But it Is a community that engenders despair. "Boy." Suddenly he leaned close. He stared at the tufted head that never turned, 9**

at the nape of a soft formed skull the seems of which were not yet grown together, at the lump of ending nerves that was his neck. Man, boy, shard, Gap Leech thought of his eye dilating by Its own design, a mean spring opening with surprise, thought of the red rash that would creep along his arms at night from now forward. Within the brainless cord of spinal fluid there was a murky solid, a floating clot of cheerless recognition. Cap Leech took off his spectacles, wiped, then bent them. He cocked his head, favoring the swelled side of his temple, and In the darkness began to grin through sixty years of accumulated teeth, cut to the gums. Slowly and with the faintest whispering, Gap Leech laughed, his tongue by slight movements pushed and licked each sound, a grim airless ripple so soft as to be hardly heard. (141) This scene reveals Cap Leech to be Luke's real father, a role that In his absence has been taken over by such surrogates as the Sheriff and Harry Bohn. In this mutual "fatherhood" as well as In other ways the Initial opposition between the doctor and the Sheriff becomes coemlcally Irrelevant. This blurring Is particularly significant because It reveals the speciousness of the devil aura that attends Gap Leech In his relationship with the people of Clare, and of the good/evil dichotomy he and the Sheriff are arbitrarily locked Into In the spiritual existence they have Imposed on the landscape. It is not long after their meeting that they become similar, and even exchange symbolic roles. The Sheriff recognizes In Cap Leech "a man concerned even more than himself with noxious growth” (42). Admittedly, 95

the association is slightly Jaded after funneling through the manipulative cosmology of the S heriff, but s t i l l the one has his Zodiac and handcuffs, the other his ether and brown bag. In one of the funniest scenes of the book, the law man drones a lesson In the stars for the bored doctor, thinking, “'lhat will hold him, ain 't a chemical sounds that good to the ear"1 (46). But even though Cup Leech goes through Clare peering “far ahead of the low stars," he is still dressed In “ministerial tie strings" (40), and later, about to pull the Indian girl's tooth, he Is s till prone to look “with serious brows . • . down upon the undecided paths of youth" (146). A potential star lecture Is In that look. But perhaps the most striking parallel between the two curers, and the most disturbing, emerges from a pair of Incidents In which they are metaphorically reduced to fowl. After accidentally sniffing the ether, the Sheriff wobbles around like "an aged guinea hen with shattered cerebellum and aimless walk" (126). After performing his last operation, Chp Leech finds himself In the Lampson bam with a “scabious old cock," and In effect finds himself In a territorial battle with it* Unable to “stand peacefully In the barnyard accepting his eviction by the chicken" ( 151* 2 ), 96

he picks It up (characteristically, to him it Is "the simplest shape, a bag for the Intestines") and tosses it to the horses. I t is described as "this dwarfed image" (151)-— an image perhaps of Leech himself on the threshold of the decomposition of his character, perhaps simply of life oppressed as it is in this novel, The bird imagery here— fowl chained to the barnyard—becomes an ironic coEsnentazy on the failed transcendence of The Beetle Leg*a heroes. This incident presents Qap Leech at the verge of time's fin a l oppression of him. One of h is fin a l images presents him in feminine terms, a device Hawkes frequently uses to parody other male characters in the novel, including Luke and the Sheriff. Having come home to the Lamps on place, he Skips "with old maid agility" into his nightshirt, a ferment "with low white neckline and tremulous drawstrings” ( 1 5 3 )* He settles down to sleep and It seems the barriers of his own self are evaporating. As Cap Leech gradually re-connects his ties to the past, his character grows inward and begins to partake of the constrictions of death. By the end of the novel he has settled into the "My place" sleep of the deserted lampscn cabin. But he affects the place, too. And again 97

the Interplay between him and the Sheriff generates leveling Ironies upon the categories of their initial moral opposition. After the doping incident in the Jail, the Sheriff suddenly becomes associated with the spurious devil Imagery that has previously been reserved for Gap Leech. As they all set off on a comic desert journey, there is some veiled implication that the Sheriff has been seduced, doped into a Satanic league w ith Gap Leech. The medicine man allows his "mod horse" with "deviled ears" to gallop along, "guided ty the Sheriff's lamp," which literally is merely "the red back light of the truck" (128). The patina of mockery over­ lying this metaphoric seduction dramatizes even further the disorienting speciousness of the abstractions the two men pursue. Hawkes might describe this trip as "the burning of the twenty miles" (128), but both men could be a god, or a devil, or neither. The gradual constriction of Gap Leech's character seems associated with his "seeing" of death, including his own, without any intervening rationalization. On the chase Just cited, it is said that he "brought something of clear vision and bitter pills to the fields of broken axles" (129)* Shis "vision" must Include the knowledge 98 of his own progress from an acknowledged fiend to father figure to old maid. When he can no longer dismantle the physicalness In other human beings, his own character seems to disintegrate, a process that In this novel characteristically involves de-mascullnlzatlon far the men. lhe vindictive earth will survive him, who has gone over it as If It did not exist, looking beyond the stars into the Irrelevance of the human body. Cap Leech's entering into the bed of retirement abruptly changes the metaphors that have helped structure his character* Suddenly he is a woman. Hawkes repeatedly uses female imagery In Hie Beetle Leg to reveal inherent contradictions in the kinds of myths his male characters project themselves Into. Ihis de-sexlng process becomes a device for parody of a certain pattern of prototypical American behavior. What could be more common In American mythology than the steely frontier dude, the man of few k words, large deeds, and impeccable purity, the symbol of a new order in the chaotic frontier full of red men, harsh elements and wild beasts. Aside from the Sheriff (cf. the "hen" Image among others), Luke lampson is the most frequent victim in Hawkes's destruction of this hero 99 construct. Unlike Gap Leech, who begins the novel with no home (or, from a different perspective, a t home everywhere), Luke is home on the range. In an early picture of him, he was out on the range all right, but the uncooperative wind "blew sand in his ears and blew the horses' manes the wrong way" (18). We find that he has been spending his time, not preparing for the future, but "sowing flowers, back and forth, on the mile long stretch of his brother's grave" (18), paying homage to a past comically rooted in death across the top of the man-made mountain. He knows when it's time to quit by listening for a factory whistle. He is an obvious misfit, and his pathos is so typical as to need little elaboration. Thus the de-sexlng process. Back at the cabin, he removes his "lady-slze cowboy boots" (20). Footwear becomes the vehicle by which Hawkes returns to th is theme la te r in the novel. Luke meets Camper in a bar, where he is induced almost Immediately to trade his cowboy boots for Camper's yellow sandals. The comically Freudian symbolism is almost overbearing. Luke's initial reluctance (What would he drive h is team of horses with? What would Harry Bohn think? Besides, they are a g ift from the dead Bulge, and in that sense sacred) melts in 100

the face of Camper's simple tu t lrreslstably American argumenti M,But I'm talking about a trade . . .'" (99). What could be more sacred than free enterprise? Itie sandals that Luke puts on his feet, aside from the fact that they are the lesser half of a bad bargain, further subvert the mythical pose of his frontier character* Examining one, he holds It "forth to the dim colored lights meant for the skirt- high dance" (98). Camper boasts th a t he'"loaned them fo r a night to the prettiest woman I ever saw . • (99)* Ihen, as they reminisce about Mulge, Camper talks to Luke "os If to a widow" (100), and Luke himself takes up the refrain In one of several moments of unwitting self-satire« "*He wasn't good for much around the house • • (100).^ In a sense, Luke lampson represents the End. The myth he embodies can receive no concrete or orgahic growth from his existence. In the Sheriff's mind, of course, Luke Is pure because he didn't marry like his older brother. 6 The seeds he plants die. He stays away from women, as when he hides among the horses when a group of desert wives arrive to escort Ha to her wedding. 31s single protest that they can not reach Clare by nightfall Is Irrelevant to the reality of their Journey, and they brush it off. 101

lb him the women are a walking reminder that he will end with himself. He would have liked to have seen Just one face cleansed of the sun and that had not been formed and set Ions ago to the sudden bloody impression of a coffin bone • • • ."I want to see one*" he searched among the tucked and tired wives* "before she's learned to keep shut. And outlive a man." (83) This is the way things are in this world* and Hawkes lets the dyes of this reality sink deep Into the textured fabric of his prose. While hiding among the horses* Luke notices the way the bits* breast collars and cruppers tear at the animal flesh . He remarks to himself th a t they would more properly f it cows. These same horses about to carry and Luke's brother to their wedding "stood like burned men dumbly w aiting fo r cindered clothes to f a l l away" (8^). Luke's mute, vaguely sensed sterility 13 so Integrally a part of the myth his character expresses that it Is hard to define as either a cause or an effect. It seems sufficient if we understand it us a part of the circular nature, not only of Luke, but of the whole physical and spiritual land­ scape that cemprises the novel. At one point he enters the Clare dance hall* and passing by the few old waltrlng couples, goes Into the showers* where he washes, p u rifie s his body with water piped directly from the dam. The sweaty 102 dance Is something he does not know. The pose he does know so well* though, ho maintains even In the privacy of the shower, to the accompaniment of Hawkes's ch aracteristic mixture of ridicule and pltyi Luke washed under his arms, hunching forward to keep his hat and cigarette out of the wild stream* stuck one leg and then the other into the spray and hopped out. shaking* cold* standing on his toes as If he still wore high heels* ne hurried to the stairway* a white bowlegged ranger dressed down to the neck and was dry before the shirt, pants and boots were pulled from the heap. (62) He keeps his defining and would-be protective symbols while undergoing the necessity of the "wild stream." But mare about this "wild stream" later. Of course Luke can only vaguely sense the catastrophe of himself. Hawkes paints the stiff figure of the cowboy Into the mangling Jaws of the earth. Like those of his comrades, Luke's words bite the air. At several points of great emotional pain* his reaction is described as "pinched.H He hooks a dead baby while fishing In the dam, an outrageous s a tire on h is s te r ility (compare with the Image of Gap Leech fishing Harry Bohn "none too soon from the dark hollow" of his dead mother D-21J )~and Luke's baby Is long dead, never born In the new world the man-made Flood has created, so he huddles into his poncho, "casting a pinched eye across 103 the graynesa of the flood" (1 3 2 ). Later, ordered by the Sheriff to fire on the Red Devils, he takes aim "with pinched mouth" ( 1 5 7 ). Ihe recurring word signifies a peculiarly twisted, repressive kind of reaction to events, and it Is not confined to Luke, for it represents a psychic response actually embodied physically In the characters of the novel. It Is as if they are forcibly rooted to the temporal necessities of nature, squeezed between time and Illusion. She welders with whom Lou Gamper has her ambiguous repartee speak of the mythical Hulge "through larynx and nose s till pinched and awed with the knell of the one death" (103)* Ihe expression on the face of Luke's dead mother "was the same that settled on or pinched her when her boys had not come home" (1 1 3 ) ■ And realist Gap Leech settles the doped Sheriff *s fingers "In the pinched cup of the lap" (1 2 5 )* Like the Sheriff and Chp Leech, Luke is a victim chewed not so much by nature as by the various dream-strategles he uses to deal with It, strategies that are Imposed on him and that he can not deal with consciously. He la a naive veteran. He is Luke the healer. He cures the bite of the desert serpent, but remains innocent of knowledge. He can say things like "'One Hundred Acres Grassland ain 't 10** going to turn to dust'" (109) * but he is a cosmic orphan too, as Qap Leech realises, a "little man," a "foundling plainsman" (140) set adrift between a relentlessly silent past and a sabotaged future, "He died," said Luke, "and she died and I ain 't too keen to remember." • • • • "I been alone since then," said Luke. (140) Ih ere Is no room f o r any more feelin g than th is . Time Is so telescoped into the lives of these people that It prevents the Institutionalizing of sentiment. At one point, Luke has a flashback memory of his dead mother. Words, sounds and touches start to Intrude upon his sense of the present. His mother has almost come alive again, "but, by a trick of age, the pupils disappeared and only the Whites remained in the posed head above the smile" (110), Luke can't touch women. Even the memory of hla own mother is choked off by a wall within him that conceals things with the suddenness of a clock whose noise freshly startles. He Is a prototype for a thematic pattern In the novel In which men have contrived the same relationship to women that they have to death. Hattie Lampson would like her sons to "'laze arcund heme. Thke care of their own farmyard, they was told*" (87)* She sees the Impulse 105 that drives her son Mulge to marry Ma as "'warns Inside'" him (87)* She says th a t same women " 'J u s t worn themselves in ,'" that "'wherever them worms come from, that's part the trouble'" (88). Because Pie Beetle Leg has such organically allusive Imagery, and because Hawkes seems so deliberate In the structuring of h is metaphor, i t becomes sig n ifican t when he later describes the "wooden, verralculated wall" of the Lanpson cabin (1^3) • I t a lso seems sig n ifican t that it appears this way as Gap Leech Is settling Into it prior to his one last operation. Death is part of an organic strand that runs through the novel, rising up to thread men Into the earth. The desert and skin linages I mentioned In the Introduction to this chapter are also constantly Integrated Into this theme. People like Luke, the Sheriff, Harry Bohn and Gap Leech grind women into the fear-laden myths they pose against re a lity . While the desert eats the skin of the men, i t functions in brittle harmony with the women. It is not the .women who try to crate the earth Into a dam. The town Itself is called Clare. The women who come to escort Ma to her wedding, and Ma herself, a ll seem to follow deeply embedded instinctual patterns of behavior throughout the 106 scene* All the women come despite the hardship of the desert trip and Luke's words of discouragement, and Ma manipulates everything to be Just right, even to forcing the dying H attie Lampson to come along The world of things suddenly exists for her. She will celebrate "the hidden flower of a nan culled from the desert" (81)* Luke, as I have mentioned, senses the symbolic meaning of the occasion, hiding among the masculinized, mangled horses. He senses trouble In the faot that the arriving women don't have any water, lb him It Is unnatural. But these women are In control. "They backtracked, chewed the sand and made their way over weary, salty miles to see one woman their own age brought to bed" (82). The women are "dry" and that Is their strength In the dry landscape. They are at home, wherever they go, whereas Luke must hide on his own ranch. Hattie Lampson herself Is described as "this last and oldest divulged by the desert," suggesting that she too Is yet another element of nature that sullenly resists and outlasts man, "a stalk snapped upwards from the sand" (85). Certainly In these terms she has a more sturdy survival than a flower, which Is Ha's Image for her husband. After Hattie dies, the survivors prepare to put "tbis aboriginal shape of hers " 10?

Into the ground (11*0 • Meaning In th is book grows out of ways of seeing suggested by the Interplay of Images, Luke would like to see "Just one face cleansed of the sun" ( 8 3 ) because these faces understand the sun. Ma on her wedding day saw the sun's "thin red arms actually wrenched across the back of the earth" and called It "'a bad light*" (79). But once the trip has begun, the Image has shrunk to "the thin red line between her fingers" and Ma sits "high on the first prow • . . the sun softening the wool of her dress" (86). To the men, the women are In a kind of rough but persistent harmony with nature and thus a part of an organic process that Is anathema to them, Qhls distinction expresses another one of Hawkes's oppositions which gradually evaporate as he dismantles all Illusion In the novel. Hawkes cements this distinction between the sexes with a number of suggestions about Its larger spiritual and metaphorical Implications. To continue with the wedding Incident far a moment, Ka tells Hattie that Kulge has "left us both" after he goes off to spend his wedding night with Ihegna, the local do-lt-all, who is, or course, from another country, Iftus Ma martles Into the sisterhood of women, as It were, a range widow like all the rest. When Mulge'a 108 death finalizes her widowhood, she hides the divining rod she uses to try to locate his body near Hattie's known grave. Or to put this sexual distinction into the purely physical terns of Gap Leech's relentlessly disintegrating perception, Leech Is the only nan who has pried into "ducts that were peculiarly looped and unlike the Intestines of either bird or nan" (144). Die nan-bird analogy here Is consistent with the way birds seem to accompany Hawkes's transcending dream-experiencers in all of his novels. Indeed, the women and men are literally shoved off into two different worlds. Ma doesn't eat with Luke or pay attention to the ritual division of night and day. She keeps "her back to the world and her face toward the red range, toward the cartons of matches, the row of pans and long handled forks" (21). She stands "before the stove summer or winter" (65) • She has a relation to time independent of that suggested by the beetle-like movements of the earth under the dam the men have built. Her complaint that "'no one wants to hear what I got to say'" (6 5 ) is an accurate way of putting this unfertile male/female distinction Into her own tern s. And Luke knows, i f only In h is guts, th a t she is right. At the end of the chapter immediately preceding 109 her complaint, he tells a boy In awe of the Red Devils that "*We don't want to hear about i t ,H (63)* This Interesting Juxtaposition Is one of several suggestions that the Red Devilsi a t least to people like the Sheriff* Harry Bohn and Luke* are really the mysterious demons of denied sexuality escaped from the womb. Their filmy, quasi-human, annisexual but s till unrealized existence haunts the would-be purity of the Sheriff's abstraction of life. When they Invade the desultory dance hall, "It was Impossible to tell which were men and which women" (6 3 ). They embody a form of human energy denied by the men's abstracting illusions of them- solves, mushrooming up in surreal form to haunt the dream- ravaged landscape. When one of them spies on Lou Camper, its face suggests a comically primeval but deadly, evil form of mutated sea monster stalking the land. The creature continued to watch. I t was made o f leather. Straps, black buokles and breathing hose filled out a face as small as hers, stripped of hair and bound tig h tly in a llig a to r skin. I t was constructed as a baseball, bound about a small core of rubber. The driving goggles poked up from the shiny cork top and a pair of smoked glasses fastened In the leather gave it malevolent and overflowing eyes. There was a snapped flap of one side that hid an orifice drilled for earphones. Its snout was pressed against the screen, pushing a small bulge Into the room. (53) When Camper returns from his dry fishing trip, he fears 110

that those "amphlblotlc eyes1* might be circling for another look at Lou* his wife (153)* I mention these Images of the Red Devils here to suggest that they function symbolically In the fabric of Hawkes's vision of man/woman in the novel. They are cru cial to an understanding of how Hawkes plays with men who play with self-myths. The Whole chase scene In which the Sheriff and his men hunt down the Red Devils at the end of the novel turns Into a large metaphor In which the legality- fiend cowboys assert their gun-laden potency upon the very images of their disembodied sexuality. The real women are in another world. This is the way the men make love. Wade inserts the "bulging shells, the lumps of explosive wadding" into the rifles (155)* They find oil, evidence of their prey, in "Eve's slimy pool, an unshielded dip of water in the waves of earth that, as far as they could see, appeared to be covered with palm leaves, broad, clay- veined shadows" (15$). They are a f te r the primal source of life, they are out of town now, away from the j&ll, and it's kill or be killed. Suddenly, moving slowly, they catch sight of the Red Devils among "the whorls of milky undergrowth" sitting on "little homed motorcycles" ( 15$)* I ll

These sen ate hopeless schizophrenics. Their women lurk underwater, their Peauod is a pickup truck or a snail shell of a boat with a hole In lti the dam, the dan they have made, Is their seat they catch no fish* let alone a cosmic whale. Only a dead baby comes up on Luke's hook. Their frenzy la to eradicate the unpleasant aspects of reality from the landscape. "Down they came with switching sensitive ears and a mania for scouring the crabbed hiding lands below the dam"—they've already properly altered life Into death Inside the dam—"rucksacks ready for the first bag" ( 1 5 5 )* The painful circularity of their flight from mythologized death to actualized death Is brilliantly realized in this scene* Thus, even as the men try to exorcise their demons, the ironic texture of their actions In this landscape suggests that they are searching for the original woman, for Mother. For death. Mythically, o f course, water is a symbol of fertility and rebirth. Throughout the novel, water is associated, often Ironically, with sex and fertility. The Red Devils (symbols of disembodied sexuality) resemble sea monsters* Ma uses a divining rod to try to re-establish a life-llnk with her lost husband. The women ride to Ma's 112 wedding on the "prow" of a wagon that la their only boat In this sterile land. But the dam is built on top of destroyed history, and in the scene on its stagnant waters, Luke, Gap Leech and Clamper cone upon a ghost-like apparition of Ma on-the other side of the water looking for the true grave of Mulge, There is no rebirth. The men are busy warping the landscape so It will conform to their sterile ideal i the women, left alone, futilely search for death's monuments. The women are part of the destroyed underwater past which the men sail over in their bird-like boat. At one point in the novel Lou Camper plays poker with the other women of Clare, and Hawkes cuts loose with a startllngly amusing and serious image of the wry position of the zeal live women of Clare. Abandoned to themselves, the women play the man's game of poker and Hawkes says the cards are "warped a s i f they had been shuffled under water" (75) • When Hawkes uses the wonan-watervlife-reallty convention he does so, naturally enough* with tongue in cheek. One of the main effects of the novel is to break down the rigid, symbolic structuring of existence that cripples so many of his characters. Wagon wheels and dishpans, for example, acquire distinct female connotations within the novel's metaphoric structure. 113

Then in the te r roc* conversation between Luke and Camper— after they have node their lntlm te trade—Luke acknowledges that he always kept away from the river bed pretty muchi and Oamper reveals that dishpana and wagon wheels are among the objects he remembers being dragged up out of the water when he worked on the dam p ro ject. Something lik e a diBhpen is obvious. But wagon wheels? Hattie Lampson standing beside the wagon wheel before Ha's wedding is "a length of wire colled and motionless In the spokes," The great plnwheel might have ground her cleanly Into the dust and she would have crawled away with skin unbrulsed, with dry pulmonary parts Intact* She and the wheel—Its tapered bars, sanded rays, were longer than her two arms fully spread—looked as If they would, never move againi one, the original means of carrying them from Bocnvllle to the bloody plow handle, the other, that which was originally carried and turned to love In the night's wagon ring around the fire, (85) Circles represent a crucial group of Images In the novel. They function symbolically and typify the organic unity of the book's poetic stru ctu re as well as the Ironic nowhere progress of the characters' dreams. Hattie's significance and the wheel's significance here are closely Interwoven, and their various organic meanings radiate outward Into another circle Just like the spokes. Hattie's almost mechanical freedom from the dust, the wheel's "sanded says," the "bloody 114

plow handle," the "wagon ring around the fire"—a ll reinforce and expand previous and later (tine linearity Is not sacred In the novel) metaphorical growths. They all reinforce the organic c irc u la rity of woman's nature. Other c irc le Images cement the exclusion of the cowboys from this fertility , ha's attempts to get at the grave of Kulge, really to get at Mulge himself, range across the desert night as she drives "at her Interminable circling, picking bitterly and with thin strength at the gates of the tomb" (118). They remain separate of course, Ha being alive and in the cycle of life In spite of herself. It Is no surprise, then, that the Sheriff's jail ambiguously preserves the men "amidst the circles of the desert" (45) • or that Gap Leech draws a circle In the Sheriff's palm and finds disease there that could infect all of Clare. The town already has the Sheriff's real disease. Bed light plays on the wheels of Gap Leech's wagon as he travels to his meeting with the Sheriff.

H it Myths, P atterns, Nothing, Meaning

I have tried to arrive at The Beetle Leg's themes by making patterns of what the characters are and of what U 5

they do in their landscape. If this sounds a little like what we do when we read a poem, i t is no accident. Hawkes has conmented that he is Interested in a form of fiction that makes use of what can be done in a poem. A good poem is a particularly satisfying form of art because it can compactly contain and le t loose both a Yes and a No, and thus approximate the badgered nature of man's godhood. That is What this novel does. Its Isolated moments gradually build and turn into each other in the reader's consciousness. Reality in the novel gradually curves into a circle. As readers we can reply to the characters' apparent answers to existence, but even our answers are questionable. Thus the dramatic purging that we seek and that conies to us in a more traditional novel with comparative ease comes in Hie Beetle Leg, as in Hawke s's other novels, in a gradual, leas dramatic, but perhaps more satisfying way. In a sense, Hawkea lets the reader become a character In his fiction. This happens not Just because of the grotesque nature of such of i t s content. A dead baby on a fis h hook commits an extremely primitive violation against the values of any reader likely to see that image, whatever its symbolic function might be. But besides playing with the reader's 116

emotions, Hawkes plays with his Intellect as well* Vie reader Is a charaoter In the novel partly because Hawkes Is a Cap Leech far the heritage and plied assumptions the reader Is likely to bring to the fiction. Vie parody In the narrative, for example, Is not confined to particular characters, o r even to particularly wooden "types." The Sheriff and his boys want to dean up the West, In fact sake this mania their myth, their chance at lsmartallty. Ignoring the only true way of making themselves last* Thus they are spoofed. But that Is not the end of it* There Is a whole pattern of allusive parody In the novel that provides a satirical perspective on the mythical pretensions, not Just of the characters, but of any reader arriving at the book out of the culture I t i s symbolically mimicking* In a sense. The Beetle Leg is a gigantic removal of man from the Illusions of every pedestal he has ever put himself on* One of the most persistent themes in literature Is that of the quest—the wandering search far spiritual meaning in existence. In American literature the quest has frequently taken place In a Journey onto water, Huckleberry Finn and. Ahab being two of the more famous searchers. But the quest In The Beetle Leg Involves a double-edged satire of meanlr^j- 117 searchers, so that simultaneously we see the folly of the characters' searches and the bitter meaning of their un- romantlclzed existence* Hawkes repeatedly, In The Beetle Lett as well as in his other novels, punctures the balloon of the romanticized existence, I have already mentioned what he does to the male pretensions Inherent In the cowboy mythic tradition. These men Hwere obviously men by the hanging of hat brims and the constant sound of their breathing" (109)* Never mind that their skin falls off with the fungus it breeds, they are men, and they are out to prove it, A most revealing Instance of this "proof" comes when the Sheriff and Wade set out for the desert In their broken down pifcknp truck followed by Cap Leech in h is wagon. Besides having mock devil echoes, the scene is full of quest parody. They emerge from the jail (the Sheriff having Just recovered, apparently, from the ether), but instead of leaping onto horses in true posse fashion, they drag out a truck with a calf Improbably standing in the back of it. Hawkes*s language, loaded lik e a sac f u ll of water, makes a mockery out of the kind of hunt-fish-quest ethic often associated with the Hemingway code, "With weak step" the Sheriff comes out carrying the hunting shotguns, Wade the anmunltlon.^ 118

After these men who never seem to have time to get In bed with a woman are finished admiring the track, they prepare It for Its peculiar mission of lovei A bunched comforter covered the front of the truck— the frail engine, the flapping fenders, the hole of the radlatar^-and dragged on the ground* Wade tare It off, a matador sweep of dirty cotton* * • .It was a truck that carried both man and animal, rear floorboards chopped from the toes of pigs, a truck to be seen at night with a woman's knees down to the running boards . * * . (127) The Sheriff goes to the side of the truck and strokes the calf. "A smell of new milk and oil, manure, and brake drum fluid filled the yard" (12?) • The men refer to the truck as "she." The outrageous associations suggested by the metaphor come vitally close to the spiritual realities of the novel. This scene is the beginning of an Involved quest that culminates, or perhaps climaxes. In the destruction of the Red Devils. Along the way, though, out In the desert night, they come upon Luke, Camper, Harry Bohn and Finn, who are Involved in a little quest of their own, under the guise of a flBhing trip. Both hunting and fishing are activities that conjure up Images of the isolated hero In nature working out his relationship to the universe* The men Join together, and Hawkes's language winks and playfully tiptoes In front of us In mock solemnity* "Seven U9 skirted Mistletoe, raced for the lake" (128). The new recruits cone under the subverslvely metaphoric domination of the scene they have Just Joined* "Qsmper cawed before the patched white head of the calf and the near naked Finn hung his stiff legs over the speeding track" (129)* The comic sexual implications th a t leak from Hawkes's d elib erately ambiguous Images explode the whole pretension of the mock quest. Even an absent Moby Dick gets dragged into their fantasy's grim comedy. But the men are deadly serious* 3hey of course do not articulate what is happening, being caught in the doped, sun-stricken circles of their own madnesses. The moonlight tour of the lake Luke gives Camper fulfills one part of the quest. Hawkes contrives the atmos­ phere of this scene so that it generates a River Styx aura. Ihere are suggestions that the men are at the edge of the filmy, ghostlike underworld. Luke suddenly recognizes Cap Leech as his father, and announces ceremoniously that H,Ba s its in the bow1" (137). Charon? Harry Bohn, who has served as a kind of earthly surrogate father figure to Luke, is instinctively and implacably hostile to Luke's accompanying his real father onto the water. But Luke* 120 who was earlier hesitant to trade his cowboy boots for fear of what Bohn would think, now Instinctively abandons him for this mysterious trip on the lake with his real father. Ironically, of course. Cap Leech has long ago become the father to Harry Bohn's own life. In an "Illegal" aot that was described as a miracle. Furthermore, since Luke's brother Mulge Is the town's ritual Christ figure (an Ironically symbolic son of light, or at least of lamp), the spiritually agnostic Gap Leech Is placed In the wildly unwitting position of playing the role of God the father* In tencs of the novel's (I.e., the people of Clare's) hierarchy of metaphoric figures, then, Cap Leech progresses Ironically from devil to god, and his circle of rounded myth becomes complete, beginning and ending in the mind of the earth. His mythical reality Is just that—a function of the fears of the men around him. But th a t fa c t makes h is own personal quest no less formidable or telling. Along with Camper, Gap Leech and Luke get into the small: boat, which "was Ilka the hollowed body of a bird." Uie symbolic connotations of the bird, as cited by Clrlot, Include the notion of the quest for transcendence by the human soul. What takes place Is a kind of last Judgment. Gap Leech tells Bohn 121 that ho has "'come to no good*" as the boat disappears from share, which serves as an answer to his dictum years earlier to Bohn to be good as he ran off to start life on his own. The Sheriff, Bohn, Wade and the Finn must stand on the shore and listen to the splashing sounds out of the darkness, fearful and feeling "the uncertainty of things afloat" (138). The cosmic travelers are on a bottled up artificial lagoon that reeks of the death attending man's "Improvements," but that also. In traditional mythic terms, holds the answer to the meaning of existence. Revelations of a sort do occur. Camper, o f course, Is so In ten t on recreatin g the Boy Scout myth of his own past that he does nothing but bale water and search for fish of the literal kind. (Of course he finds none. He blames the noise of Gap Leech's cosmlcally bitter laughter for preventing an appearance by this missing symbol of fertility.) Suddenly the lonely figure of Ka appears like a ghost on the far, underworld side of the dam. Wandering In her agony of loss, she Is calling out the name of her dead savior* Luke points her out to Gap Leech as he would a deer or a rare bird. "'There. Don't call to her, she'll scare'" (139)* Momenta later he sums up the stoic wllfullness with which he persists 122

In pinching true knowledge as small as he can* "'He died • . • and she died and I ain 't too keen to remember* . . . I been alone since then. . . .'" (11*0). It is at precisely this point that Cap Leech, devil and god and father, realises that he can't find his thermometer. How can his snail tools far measuring the body find the dimensions in the abyss of this kind of revelation? "He felt In his pockets, nothing, not a gelatin pilli and he ms cold, seated in the bow of a leaky rowboat" (1U0). He must face the implications of his special knowledge. Ken's answers, including his own, are not answers, but positions. Circles of myth rise from the needs of memory then dip into the future of the stagnated man-made sea. What can he do new but perform his last operation, battle a decrepit rooster, then lie down into the homeful bed of sleep? Ha walks around and around forever. Luke wants to forget, pinched between the past and the future. The Sheriff holds neurotically to a book of stars and legality, a man turned inside out only partly, trying to cleanse the earth of all possibility of whole people. Gap Leech, the one character whose myth is directed into "fact," rather than away from it, is subject also to a more bitter revelation* But perhaps he knows his 123

fate In a May the others do not know theirs. Hie returns home to die. The others have stolen his horse and are still out doing things in the desert. The sense Hawkes gives of his characters is that they want to run away from their true, finite selves by improving upon the unyielding, undying land. They are continually a t odds with their undeniable organic Ism, They in s is t on sp iritu a lis in g themselves away from both life and death. Fran this perspective, I think, we can understand the frequent biblical parody embedded in their actions. The dead Mulge has all the trappings of a genuine Christ figure—all the trappings, that is, but none of the substance. His ghostly presence somewhere in the half-made artificial mountain resides like a holy tumor in the mental life of the landscape. He gives an absurd focus and shape to a variety of unclimaxed spiritual dramas. To the dam- building men of Clare and Mistletoe he is the unlikely first saint of the cause. He has died, not that others may live, but that others may continue to build, go on with their "ahoveler'a mission" on the "incomplete mountain" (66), These men have stopped up a once fertile river until it has yielded tiie lr own k ille d past up as a grotesque symbol 12lf of the future. They have gone about their task with the same zeal that the Sheriff has when he cleans out the Bed Devils. The curious blue and red light imagery mentioned earlier is a suggestion of this link. In fact, both events happen suggestively at the same spot in the desert. The men want to change the land, people, themselves into the self-conceived purity of their own romanticized images. As the first martyr to this religion, Mulge rates a nuseun/ church—his shaving utensils are on display at the local barbershop. There for fifty cents his relics can be viewed. Memory of him is a s a tir ic play on what happened to the real Christ's fame. He even rates blasphemyi "Once out of earshot of women, they baited the ghost" (13^)% The welders d o n 't want him to case back fo r fe a r there would be a rio t "'after a ll we mourned"1 (102). They become mock g u ilty Jews. "'Not every town would make as much of him as u s '" (102). Mulge is remembered lik e a prophet. "'In those days you could have followed him down the street*" (103). "And if he stopped, you could have touched him." "If you caught his eye, and if he'd heard your name." (103) Camper recalls far Luke that during his residence In Clare " 'I saw him • . . only I d id n 't know i t was him'" (100). 125

And Lou Gsunper asks the welders, "'Who. • .would know him if they saw him?'" (102). Even though she's talking about her missing husband, the welders hear her as if she's talking about Mulge. Mulge even has a mother who follows him symbolically In death. But Hattie Is not taken bodily Into Heaven» Instead, she Is burled face downward, looking somewhere Into the divine earth where her son holds forth with tbs symbols of the new religion, "embedded In the earth and entangled with a caterpillar, pump engine and a hundred feet of hose" (17), Mulge becomes a C hrist fo r Ma too, A mourning Magdalene, she searches the ground for him with a divining rod. But Instead of an angel In white to show her the empty grave of her risen love, she Is led around by Invisible white mules "at her Interminable circling, picking bitterly and with thin strength at the gates of the tomb" (118). In the gospol of John, the risen Christ appears to the weeping Mazy Magdalene and reassures her that he is not the gardener, that he is Indeed himself, triumph over sin and death. 'Ihe only thing Ma lacks to duplicate this miracle is real life for her bitter dreamt • • .& moaned and nodded as If she had lost him only the day before. "I've le t him pass me by tonight." But, eyes staling at the flat of her apron, face buried In stiff fingers, she could not hear the quiet 126

footfall, the close deliberate opening of the earth, the parting of the weeds. She could not see behind her. (120) Ma can not "see" behind her because she refuses to perceive nothing. She is no closer to her dead husband In death than In life, but she must continually poke at the inanimate myth he represents far her. Unlike the pro* tagonlst In the Easter miracle, she can not "uiseal the earth" (117)* She is an unsuccessful roranticlter. She has "always claimed to be In the picture" of the men standing before their dam that hangs In the bar (96). Holy Mulge'a fate is the same as that of anything elsei he was eaten by the earth* The land* "of i t s own accord and from i t s own weight," opens up and swallows him as he is "shoveled under" (69). He goes down and does not appear again* He exists in the minis of others but that Is their effort, not his* Angela do not sing in the heavens at his death and subsequent resurrection. Instead, according to the recollection of one of the welders, the sound of Mulge'a death was "'like a great animal digesting bran'" (10*0. Ihe metaphoric implications of dawkes's use of the Bible spread throughout the novel, providing an acidic perspective on the various metallic nytha. The ironic 127

fact that Gap Leech functions as both a devil and a god In the novel explains Harry Bohn's hostility to him* For Harry Bohn has been Luke's nythical "father" until the sudden revelation about the actual blood relationship between Qap Leech and Luke. But this fact also explains a few more mocking sim ila ritie s to the Bible. Harry Bohn acquires some divinity of his own. He can claim a miraculous birth (at the hands of "God" Cap Leech), and he also has his apostle friend the Finn, who typically Is too busy to be saved, or to become a fisher of men. "We're out to fish," said Camper and tapped the dismantled rod. "I got shirts to wash, lighting wires to put across the floor, Bohn, with half my fence down, a window lead to hang and plenty of time except you use it a lll" "Finn, you ain 't nearly home yet." (109) Then Luke becomes, as the son o f not one but two god figures, a mythical Chrlst-prophet himself. In this capacity, he utters what has to be one of the greatest lines In American fiction. To the Finn's continued worldly protests, he replies, "'What do you worry for. . .when Harry's with you?'" (109)* He doesn't go on to talk about the lillles of the field or the birds of the air, but he does assure everyone that "'One Hundred Acres Grassland a in 't going to turn to dust'" (109)* What more supernatural comfort 129 could they ask? With so many thelstic pretenders hanging aromd, the novel is close to becoming an ultim ate mockery o f the Promised land north traditionally associated with the settling and r is e of America* In th is land where Everyman is god* a new biblical epic can unfold* Ihe beginning promises fertility» the end breeds decay. Luke catches many fish In the fresh pre-dam waters* but a dead infant in the enclosed pond of progress* We are treated to an "In the beginning. • •" narrative In which the land is settled by hardy pioneers (47-9)» But as is the case throughout the novel, there is a bitter twist as we piece things together. A Flood that covers a ll the landscape serves not to purify, but to k ill and to become the spiritual repository of the resulting human guilt and frustration, the place to which cowboys come with guns to purify the land of sin. The dam becomes an absurd, gigantic womb that preserves everything they want to go back to* Perfection being a form of sterility, the cowboys in The Beetle Leg seem caught in the jaws of their needs to acquire statuesque abstraction. Noah came to rest on the tip of a mountain, ready to begin anew in a purified world. Luke, Gap Leech and Camper come to rest 129 on the roof o f a submerged house, the random symbols of a former life floating around below their leaky boat* They rest on an "artificial sea over cabin, gulch, and bed­ stead" (116)* Tho past they have tried to drown still sticks like an amputated limb up through the brackish result of their mythic efforts. A burning bush was a message to Hoses to lead his people from captivity in their quest for a promised land. But here, in this "little purgatory" (103), it is a hot kernel image in the bed of coals everyone mutt walk on, a reminder to the inhabitants that they are earth fodder i lava and a few skull halves cracked beneath the wheels. Towards dusk a wind from the surface of the sun swept their path and blew against them live, lightly running bunches of gray wire and weed which sang against the sides of the wagons, across the burning bush, caught in tho spokes and harness, stuck like burrs In the horses* manes. (89) Even while they are solid, they are process. In the middle of this inescapable desert, the damed-up water represents "the washed-out garden's open hearth" (1^0)• But a ll this allusiveness, even though it forms consistent patterns, merely enhances the pathos and absurdity of the characters * illusions. Their Mistletoe is named after a plant whose ironic significance further illuminates 130 tho decaying condition of their myth of themselves. Once regarded as supernatural, for its ability to grow without sinking roots Into the earth* the mistletoe was supposed to cure almost every disease and to help women become fertile. The townspeople's Inability to duplicate this magic suggests the pervasive nature of their Illusion of mythic control over nature. The weighty comparisons merely diminish the people* undercut their stylized efforts at nobility. When one of the welders suggests an analogy between the disappearance of Kulge and that of Jonah* another replies* M'Except If it had been a whale, he might have escaped'" (lCft). In The Beetle Leg, death doesn't so much resist as Ignore ovary romantic plot concocted against it. A civilization Is caught suddenly In the funny, slightly obscene act of trying to abstract Itself. Obscenity comes when they try to abstract that which should not be abstracted. Comicality comes from the fact that they fall. Here* clear out In this no man's d esert nowhere near the ocean* Chp Leech can be chasing a rooster In the Iampson bum and come upon a leather whale halter hanging on the wall. The deflating effect is like watching children go through adult motions. The cowboys stand "at the moist edge of a hundred and forty X31 miles of milky Mater" (133) * tu t no Moby Dick shows up to taunt them with mysteries unsolvable. Hawkes allows them to defeat themselves, a more popular and appropriate pastime for the twentieth century.

ivi oamisKW

Hie sterility that characterises the civilisation Hawkes creates In The Beetle Leg—sterility of both thought and act—Is consistently linked with the characters' desires to somehow make things "right" according to their sythio, illusion-ridden understanding of themselves and their land. They want to purify reality* In his last operation, Gap Leech responds to the Indian g irl's "Ink of desire" by resolutely pulling her tooth. Some things are so much cleaner than others. But these people create bogus foils for their cosmic questions. When the cowboys purify the land of devils at the end of the novel, their morally Impassioned bullets fill the air like "rock salt Into the buttocks of cornered apple thieves" (157)• And Luke, last of the purs white cowboys, steely dude par ercellence. partakes of this manhood Initiation rite by first withholding his firs, 132

then, ordered to shoot, by having the mlsloaded rifle blew up In his face. Hawkea sets up false conflicts that play an the reader's cultural assumptions, thus drawing him into the novel's grinding up of man's tendency to give himself cosmic Importance in schemes of created significance* In the case of the apparent opposition between Ka and Luke, for example, as well as the one between the Sheriff and Gap Leech, the apparent conflict obscures the fact that both p artie s are prone to the same flaw, ha goes a f te r Mulge, making of him In death what he was not In l i f e . Luke goes after a certain mold of manhood, and he falls too because it is Just as unreal arxl abstract as death. In his wooden formality he is like Earl In The Day of the Locust, another satire on the American rainbow. Both the Sheriff and Gap Leech also try to fit the world into a mold that can't hold it, even though (or perhaps because) In their first meeting they come on like God and Satan. The Beetle Leg casts man into a mold of dried up dissatisfaction. Seen as a whole In retrospect, the novel takes place as a terrible apparition. The sounds the people make are unnatural, and thus appropriate to their condition. 133

They are like a conversation over household items In a graveyard. Die people form their culture and have their folklore, but they are in a state of severe contraction despite their symbolic outreachlng. Their language is clipped, abbreviated, avoids the soclalnesa of anything but the barest necessities of coranunlcation, and is fre­ quently bitterly understated. And they are in contraction another way, in that they all try to settle into some comfortable refuge from reality. The Sheriff has his jail. Gap Leech has his medical lnstrunents and later "My Place." Luke seeds the landscape in lonely, fruitless gestures. Camper Is a dilettante Boy Scout ransacking the past. They are a living legend, an incarnation of humans who have frozen In the hottest of places, so reversed in their belng3 they even bury their first natural deceased face downward. It is sometimes said that an author creates characters bigger than life. We have many cultural heroes who are bigger than ll f e i Superman, Batman, John Wayne, Matt D illon— the l i s t is long, and th ey 're a l l goodies. Now Andy Warhol even explodes heroes by parodying them. In"Lonesoma Cowboys" one of the gay horsemen urges his comrades to get their horses to go In a straight line so they can clean up the 1 *

West and g e t ready fo r World War I . Hawkes's envisioned scenario creates a similarly telescoped reality. His characters* circumstances become comic reversals of those of their big brothers« with attendant reversals of their supporting myths. 135

FO0DN0D23 TO CHAFIEH THRES

Ifiobert Creeley, "How to Write a Novell" New Mexico Q uarterly. XXII (Sumner 1952), 2*10-1. ?A11 page references within the text of Chapter Three are to The Beetle Lea. New D irections Baperbook Edition! copyright 1951* 3fodlcal Innocence (New Yorki Harper Colophon Books, 1 9 6 1 ), 12. Newsweek Magazine (Sept. 25, 1972) c a rrie s an obituary fo r WUllam Boyd of the "Hopolong Gassidy" film sc rie s 1 "The silv er-h aired 'Hoppy' never smoked, drank, swore, spat or kissed a girl, and he always let the bad guys draw first. Boyd became upright off-screen as well, explalnlngi 'When you've got parents saying what a wonderful guy Hoppy Is, what the hell do you do? You've got to be a wonderful guy.'" (p. 71). ^Jhese words also place Luke In the position of daring the myth of his dead brother, like the welders Who bait the ghost once out of sight of women* ^Luke's seeds are like those of the parable* They will not contribute to the flowering of the myth* 7 This Is the same anmunltlcn that will later provide the explosive climax to the symbolic mape-hunt. CHAPTER FOUR* THE LIMS TWIOi

FANTASY A3 GAMS

I

Whereas In The Beetle Leg the cowboys' abiding dream Is of a puritanlzed denial of man-woman sexuality. The Lime Twig (1961) presents that dream turned Inside out. Now, a mythicized world will support an ldeallzod, perfected existence in which sexual dreams are fulfilled literally, rather than repressed into vicarious violence, Nevertheless, an essential continuity between The Idas Twig and the other novels s till holds. For Michael Banks, as a prototypical Hawkes character, is like Ernst and Zizendarf In The Chnnlbal. like the Sheriff and Cap Leech and Luke in Tho Beetle leg, like Skipper in Second Skin, and like Cyril arvi Hugh In The Blood Oranges, in so far as he pursues a dream which, despite its externally mythic proportions, derives from his own need to create from within himself

136 137 a world beyond death, and a dream which becomes In i t s Imperfect, violent fruition as Impossible to endure as the life he has fled. Like his spiritual brothers In the other novels, Michael Banks allows his obsession to gather unto itself the alternately symbolic and literal things of ex­ perience. The novel’s action centers on the efforts of Mlohael Banks to break away from h is dreary London f l a t and wife by Joining a plot to steal Rock Castle, a retired horse race champion, and run him In the Golden Bowl a t Aldington. Until the very end of the novel, the scheme is mutually beneficial for both Banks and the gang of horse thieves i he being provided fulfillment of his erotic fantasies, they acquiring a respectable front behind which to operate, But the situation becomes almost hopelessly complicated, in a moral sense, when Banks summons his wife (who is progressing through her own set of dreams), to Aldington, where she is kidnapped, tortured and raped by the gang as they hold her hostage, Urns, Michael B a n k s ' s attempt to liberate himself into the world of pure desire creates an uncontrollable cycle of violence that is Interrupted, but not ended, after he himself commits an a c t of ultim ate violence i destroying 138 himself by running onto the track In front of the horses, ■ thus ruining the plot that has now come so close to success. Die fact that Banks crosses up the gang at the very end makes him sig n ifican tly d ifferen t In a t le a s t one sense from Hawkes*s earlier dreamer-characters. Fbr he seems to recc&iize the impossibility of living with his envisioned Ideal, a recognition with which people like Zizendorf, Ernst, the Sheriff and Luke are not blessed. Banks is very like them in that his quest translates very easily into a flight from death, an attempt at mythic permanence, but he chooses death as an alternative, as his leap from myth back Into time. Whether o r not th is ac t tran slates Into h is "redemption,** though, is a problem to be d e a lt with after considering the quality of both Michael and Margpret Banks's experiences. The world Michael Banks w illingly enters is the world of his dream, of his obsession. Like Ernst's mountain, Z izendorf's Germany, and the cowboys' desert dam, the place in which Banks pursues the fru itio n o f his dream is f u ll of nythic pretensions. The horse Bock Castle itself, Bhnks's "own worst dream, and best," is frequently described in terms that suggest its archetypal value. Stolen from a 139 remote farm after years of retirement* the horse appears near death—swaying back* hardening coat* stiffening legs— but* as Hencher tells Banks as they ride the Artemis through fog Into the land of their dream* "'He's ancient* Book Gas tie Is* an ancient horse and h e 's bloody w ell run beyond memory Itself. . .'" (39) Understood merely as a horse* naturally* Rock Castle is dumb, an actor given mythic meaning by its expropriators' needs. Hawkes cleverly manipulates the horse-as-symbol into the realistic texture of his plot, until it gradually acquires a significance close to what Clrlot describes as "an ancient symbol of the cyclic movement of the world, of phenomena," as w ell as a symbol of men's "Intense desires and instincts. . the magic side of 2 Ban." So even though the horse itself has no memory of the heroes spring from his seed (Just as the statues along the Avenue of Heroes don't "know" the feeling they are projecting Into Ernst and just as the dam at Mistletoe* even as it moves life-like to deny its builders' dream of permanence, doesn't "know" this significance), it never­ theless, like those other objects given mythic animation, acquires tremendous symbolic power within the context of the i novel's psychological landscape. Sydney Sly ter, sensing the fact that Rock Gastle w ill destroy his cherished notions about an open race, i.e ., about freedom In the world, speaks of Hock C astle's "predetermined. • .cyclic emergence again and again, snorting^ victorious, onto the salt-white racing course of the Aegean shore" (139)* For Slyter, who has a rather excitedly mundane way of articulating the novel's truths, if the horse exists, It wins. As an unbeatable horse and sim ultaneously a s a symbol o f human d e s ire , Rock Qastle comes to represent a recurrent, virtually unstoppable, p a tte rn in th e human c o n d itio n . Once adm itted onto th e field of forces, desire wins hands down over other qualities o f th e human psyche. Complementing this symbolic value is an extensive pattern of Imagery suggesting Rock Castle's place in the whole scheme of man's mythically-shaped desires. At one point, the horse has a "white marble shape" (^9 ) that links its appearance to that of the marble cherubim atop Dreary Station, the same angels who provide a kind of mythic sanction to Bencher's dream of a destructive mother-love. Just as these particular stone figures become for Bencher symbols that define and legitimize his dream of the past, the horse w ill give a sim ilar kind of expression to Banks's dream lk l

of tho future. The very name Rock Qastle le suggestive of a cathedral, and when Hencher, helping to lift the horse out of the barge, is reminded of men lifting a bomb out of a crater, "fishing up a live bomb big enough to blow a cathedral to the ground" ( 5 1 )* a pattern develops in which Rock Qastle, symbol of passion with his "fluted and tapering neck of some serpent" (49), becomes the new (albeit old, very old and cyclical) Incarnation of man's desire to find a mythic definition far his destructive passions. At first, this Image pattern suggests that Rock Qastle, devil figure, symbol o f d a rk , u n co n tro llab le p assio n s, I s a "bomb" to those religious Instincts In man that symbolize his control over, or at least direction of them, that is, a kind of dlalectio opposite to the cherubim and the cathedral. But such a separation Is too pat, like the "opposition" between Zizendorf and Ernst, or between the Sheriff and Qap Leech. It Is a separation at the level of results, rather than of origins. Fbr as the original link between horse and religious artifacts suggests, It Is the desire for some kind of idealized, mythic permanence that is the underlying theme In the experience of Hencher, In the experience of Michael Banks, end Indeed, In the experiences of a ll Ik2 of Hawkes's dreamer-heroes. Just as Iarry is sometime angel, sometime devil, Hock Qastle Is part cathedral, and part destructive passion, but always myth, alleys available to the final cyclical need to see experience in terms that suggest permanence, in terms that defeat death. Of course, even in the nldst of a ll this heavy archetypal activity, the comic-satiric mode of Hawke s's perception never allows the reader to admit these dreamers onto the real battlefields of the gods. We can never forget that Rock Qastle is Just an old horse dragged Into the mythic affairs of would-be deities. In one brilliant scene that suggests the tragicomic quality of the whole spiritual relationship between horse and man, Hawkes has Banks look up as the horse is being hoisted out of its orate, when "high in the air it became the moonlit spectacle of some giant weather vane" (52). Figuratively speaking, stiff and old as it is, the horse is driven by the winds of fate, as it were i but "fate" in 'The Lime Twig, as in Hawkes'a other novels, is not distinguishable from man's equivocal confrontation with the fact of his own mortality. Earlier, the power of Michael Banks himself over this beast/tyth is suggested in an Image of "the silver horse with Its ancient head, round which there buzzed a single fly as large as hla own thumb and molded of shining blue waxw( 5 0 ) ~ that Is, it is an equivocal power, In that for all practical purposes it is not (perhaps can not be) used. Tho h o rs e 's "decorous drained head smelled of a violence that was his own" ( 5 0 )—the same violence that by implication is responsible for Hencher*a death, for Banks's own death, and for Margaret's victimization and probable death. Rock Qastle, while not quite as stylized as the surreal Red Devils, is nonetheless sim ilarly symbolic of the destruction resulting from man's deep, self-defeating drive towards the ideal. Since the horse comes to embody Banks's dream, the sum of everything he has desired and been denied to that point, the world Banks enters when he Joins the scheme to steal it is naturally a prototypical dream world, full of the inexorable logic of myth. Herein lies an inescapable paradox, though. A dream fu lfills not only the hidden wishes of the dreamer, but its own irrevocable logic, too. In fleeing Margaret and the life of the flat, Banks is seeking a world more amenable to the desires of his imagination* He can not control life in or cut of the flat (the dreamer's lack of effective control over external events is a persistent theme In a ll of Hawkes's novels)* can not love M oi^ret, can only dream the horse is there standing In his living room, and so must pass physically Into the actual world of the conspiracy before he can realize In the flesh a ll the premise It represents. Thus, Hencher and Banks travel across water (recalling the sim ilarly tinged voyage of the cowboys and Gap Leech in The Beetle Leg) * on the Artemis, named after th e Greek goddess of th e moon and w ild anim als. Hawkes has conraented In an Interview on some irony he Intends with that name* noting that "'what her power really was, was the power of chastity* the power of virginity* of purity"* That a boat traveling under such dedication carries Banks into the lap of his fondest erotic fantasies is certainly a pointed irony, particularly after the lie by which they have gained access to the boat In the first place. For Hencher has told the captain that "'ny old woman's on that b o a t'" ( 3 6 )* thus reaffirming the novel's central motif of the unending cyclicalness of the dream-nyth-death-eto. process. Hie excursion, that safe, temporary refuge from the uncontrollable reality of day-to-day living, becomes their trip into an ostensibly otherworldly dream* but It Is a real nyth they are approaching, one from which they w ill not return. Erperlence will be tamed, laid cut for them, Just as Bock Castle Is waiting for them to seise the race winnings. Just os Sybllllno is waiting for Michael to take her to bed, no questions asked. The former world (where dreams s till wait to blossom from the Imagination), th e world th a t bombed H encher'a f l a t and c o n tin u a lly denied him and his mother a home, lies dead and tamed before therai . .ahead of the Artemis lay a peaceful sea worn smooth by night and flo tillas of landing boats forever beached" (If?) • They pass a wrecked destroyer, but now the wreckage Is "safe from tides and storms and snowy nights, the destroyer's superstructure rising respectable as a lighthouse keeper's station" (4*4). They pass Into a thick, mysterious fog, and Banks senses the Im plicit symbolismi "where to discover everything he dreamed of except In a fog." But also, "where to lose it a ll If not In the same white fog" (^5 ) • tfawkes repeats the word "fog" so much during this scene that it approaches the point of parody, which Is precisely consistent with the whole Ironic nature of nyth in the novel. These modem gods have enough to do fighting the demon-shaped world of their own perceiving consciousness. Like the terrible nythlc horse seen earlier aa a large weather vane. the fog, hefty symbol of mystery, magic, and the unknown, is finally wom through to its other side, producing Banks's ironically Justified paranoia. "No one trusted a man's voice In a fog," he thinks (45). This motif carries through the rest of the mythic world of game. Aldington, where the race w ill be held and where Banks is granted satisfaction for his desires, is described as "diaphanous and silent" (82), and the steam bath completes in a literal manner the effect of the image, since there, in the thick, man-made fog, the promise of violence Banks has sensed is finally fulfilled when Iarry appears out of the steam long enough to murder Cowles, then disappears Just as mysteriously, mixture of apparition: and terrible reality. Then at the end of the novel Bonks returns to the steam bath to be cleansed of his experience, passes back through the fog, as it were, so that the motif comes fu ll circle, Introducing and ending the world of incarnated dream. Since this dream world consists of both myth and fact, the real objects and people within it seem to move with the inexorable logic that characterizes any dream. And since the world begins as a result of Banks's own wishes, it is not surprising that the necessities of the dream quickly take precedence over his "freedom.* Even on the Artemis. the predetermined quality of this world is foreshadowed as Banks watches the people dance. Just as it does In foe Cannibal and The Beetle Leg, the Image of the dance becomes strongly suggestive of the controlling, freedom- denying artifice men's externalized passions become. It Is a form, a ritu al to which men must conform because they need and want to. Hiding the boat from the reality of denial to the reality of desire. Banks watches the vacationers "kicking, twirling, holding hands, fitting their legs and feet to the steps of the dance” (41). Beyond th is, a whole range of mock supernatural allusions suggests that Bonks has entered a world much more susceptible to control by archetypal forces than by conscious, rational human devices. Before entering Into the Golden Bowl of earthly pleasures, Banks goes through a kind of passage rite In an underground men's room. There, men described as "soothsayers" (in reality members of the gang) are alternately threatening and promising to him, offering him women if he cooperates, death if he doesn't. The promise is In the form of magic wards the soothsayers seem to know w ill have a narcotizing effect i "Sybllline's in the Fhvllllon." But the threat too has its magic connotationsi If Banks doesn't play along with th e gang, th ey w ill to s s bombs a t him th a t resem ble e ig h t balls. Suggestions abound that this world Is controlled by unfathomable forces. At one point. Banks and his chair are "pressed Into motion by the crowl on the 001 Ja boaxd of the Bavlllon's floor" (99) • SyblUlne herself Is not only easy seductress, but complete manipulator, leading i Banks on with her slbyl-llke prediction that "'you can win If you want to, Hike, ny dear'" (1*&). She thus echoes the signs placed around the town ("You Qan Win If You Want To" [ 77] , "Win With Wally" £8 l) ) • which In their promise of winning* of liberation from the restriction of losing, serve as mocking counterpoints to the deterministic nature of the unfolding tragedy* These slogans, and Banks's orgiastic Indulgences aimed a t verifying them, play off against the frequent ominous suggestions that the pursuit of an Ideal freedom Is necessarily made In terms that define total slavery. Rook Gastle himself, symbol of the dream, Is the thirteenth horse to enter the Golden Bowl. > * The deity within this world, of course, is larry, the leader of the gang* Be becomes, on the one hand, the agent by which the secret fantasies of both Michael and M a r^ re t a re re a liz e d , and on th e o th e r hand, an awesome power, In complete control of things until Michael Banks crosses him up, and even then he merely fades away with Banka's wife—is definitely not destroyed. Hie appears in Hencher's World War II narrative to give a pain-killing drug to Henoher's mother, just as he does for Sparrow a ll through the novel. He provides Banks with any woman he could have dreamed of, and fu lfills Margaret's peculiarly ethereal, passive needs. He Is the onnl pro cent angel providing people wounded by reality with illegal relief, clandestine passage into a world where law has no force. As he tells an Inspector, "'There's power in this world you never dreamed of. • (147). Characterized by his black clothes and steel, bullet-proof vest, he represents a dark power lmnune to dying, a power that is larger than (even as it represents and fulfills) the scope of human passion. His presence has a continually strong sexual tone to it. In Margaret's first glimpse of him, he Is Impeccably dressed except "his tie was loose and he was an impassive escort who, by chance, could touch a woman's breast in public easily, with propriety, offending no one" (7 4 ). Of co u rse, a t th is p o in t Hawkes i s g iv in g us both the body of Larry and the mind of Margaret, so 150

that it becomes clear that Maigaret is not entirely Innocent of her victimization. But consistent Kith his ambiguous position os a petty crook and as the fulfiller of dreams, larry alternates between a cold, violent murderer and a kind of god. He can k ill Cowles in the steam bath, but he can also be "'you full-of-grace'" to L ittle Dora (157)• In one passage we see him as both a manipulator of the race track world and as that world's quintessential supernatural figure. He "stood straight as he did when predicting, l a r r y who was an angel if any angel ever had eyes like his or flesh like his" (83). At times, he approaches archetypal stature os the savior, the reviver of life. During one of Sparrow's fit3 o f p ain , we h ea r, in mock h ero ic to n es, that "Larry, who had greased his hair even in battle, was s till compassionate" (8 6 ). Slowly, he recedes from his merely human, menacingly phallic power into something else—the vague, androgynous presence of a dream figure. About to minister relief, he stanis over Sparrow's bed, where from his great height, drawing back his coat flaps and lapels so that the gun and the gun's girdle—the holster, straps, strings—were visible, slowly putting his hands in his pockets, larry spoke the name, larry who had been the first to carry him the night he screamed . . . .As often as Sparrow fainted, Larry revived him . . . as carefully and coo|y as a woman of long service. ( 8 6 -7 ) 15X

Wavering here between Christ and mother, Larry Is nevertheless a particularly cold, modem demon. Rar from breathing fire, he reflects the moon's, light from the steel plate over his heart as he prepares to assault Margaret. She sees him as an angel, but also notices a broken part of his mouth, a promise of violence In this dream/nightmare that "set her trembling" (136) • Margaret, as Is suggested a t the end of the novel when she makes only cursory efforts to reach Michael on the race track, yields to lorry's power. Sparrow, too, has yielded to lorry for his release from the reality of pain—nelease from his painful steel legs coming from the man with a steel heart, Ihe life-draining quality of such dependence (a foreshadowing of Banks's own fate) is suggested at one point when lorry withdraws the needle from Sparrow's ana with "a tiny heart of blood on the tip of it" (8 8 ) • As long as larry is in control, which In the novel means as long as Michael Banks dwells In the fabulous world of pure desire, the Ideal of pure freedom is alternately exciting and violent, seemingly sprung from time, but actually tracked Inexorably Into the reality of death. The world of the flat, the world back in time, is eliminated, furniture smashed and discarded, even Margaret's 152

clothes burned. Sydney Slyter somewhat unwittingly describes the fu ll moral force Larry represents when, conjecturing who could have devised the whole plot, he describes him as "possessed of prescience and having time stuck safely like a revolver In his pocket. • •" (139) • But—central to the paradox of a ll Hawkes's quests—Larry, source of violence and death, is also applied to as refuge from death, from time. The Ideal is constantly double-edged. Like both the Germanic ideal in The Cannibal and the Pure Cowboy Ideal In The Beetle Leg. Banks's dream world is fu ll of mythic pretension, of passive external symbols of the inner craving to escape death, to leap Into the timeless world of lranortallty, even as it becomes an expansion of the land­ scape and possibilities of death.

II

As one of Hawkes's quintessential tragic dreamers, then, Michael Banks pursues his qyth and is driven to destructive­ ness by the terms and conflicts deriving from that pursuit. His attempt thus partakes of what Tony Tanner characterises as "an abiding dream In American literature that an unpatterned, 153

unconditioned life is possible."^ Winning with Bock Qastle, In this metaphoric context* becomes symbolic of the fulfillm ent of this dream* of this particular myth that allows the dreamer a wild control over his life unachieved in the "real* world. And since Banks must lose his freedom to a gang of criminals during the process of seeking his "liberation*1* the romantic Ideal acquires a tragic, or classical solution* which is the same pattern of ideal pursult-and-destruction holding In a ll of Hawkes's novels. Ihe basic flaw remains nan's tragic discontent with himself, and the mythic literary structures within which the characters move turn out to be mythic psychological structures derived from within, lhus created from within the psyche, or given significance thereby, they then affect from without* whether as people, institutions, things, or even mass actions like war. The cycle then becomes an endless rhythm between the needs of the Individual and the brutal loglo of external "distortions'* Uke Lorry. It is endlessi both throughout Hawkes's corpus and by implication beyond the end of the world of each novel. Within this world of ever-changing cyollcalness, Michael Banks is a kind of Everyman figure. One of the novel's key points (and one that bears directly cn any consideration of the problem of "redemption") , is that Banks Is not the man, ultimately, to be Judged. Bather, what must be Judged Is the recurrent human condition of the inability to control the passion against what can only be summed up as the category of deathi against imperfection and restriction, against complication in personal relationships, a g a in s t th e f a ilu r e o f th e human b e in g 's cap acity to lo re to catch his need to love. By having Bencher narrate the first part of the novel, Hawkes makes a clear structural pattern that illustrates this theme. It seems rather odd, at first, that The Lime Twig should be told for its first twenty-eight pages by a man who, besides being relatively minor to the plot, is moreover killed off before the story is even half way complete. But the Hencher narrative, through a series of suggestive parallels, serves brilliantly as an Introduction to the problems dealt with in the Klchael- Margaret Banks adventure, and thus is an important part of the novel's incarnation of mythic cyclicalness. Hie central issue In Bencher's rambling speech, the central pain, seems to be the key opposition between the domestic construct and the outside world i in other words, the very opposition personified in the later experiences of Michael Banks. 155

Hencher tells of his lifelong attempts to find a home, to find some security within his permanent condition as a wandering lodge-seeker. As a child, he has wandered with his mother In search of a home—eventually husbanding her In Just about every sense except the strictly sexual, and even then comnlttlng Incest with her on a psychological- symbolic level. It Is Bencher's obscene Intimacy, towards both his mother and later the Bankses, that becomes significant In the symbolic movement of the novel. For Hencher, the finding of lodging, of a home secure against the world (and ultim ately against death), becomes the moment of regression backwards to the womb, and thus Into a kind of living death. Die Banks's flat becomes the place for the playing out of this dream, since it Is the same building where, years before, Bencher's mother had been given momentary relief from the pain of reality by larry, whore Hencher had symbolically "taken" her during the firebomblng* and where she had finally died. The flat Is burdened with the weight of a home, as well as with the weight of a destructive domestic love defined In Hencher. There, living with the Bankses years later, Hencher can look out the window to see "the cherubim safely lit" (1 7 )—those mythic stone Images which provide 156 him with a some that the world Is secure against fire and destruction and who later are linked metaphorically with Rock Castle—s it In the bathroom, run water and smoke cigars "until there is nothing left to feel." Like the ubiquitous sleepers In The Cannibal. Hencher uses a recurring symbol o f d eath to fo rsak e a world too awesome to c o n fro n t. The fla t becomes his hedge against the world, And the Bankses themselves, whose bed he examines, for whom he fixes breakfast In bed, and whom he finally Introduces Into the world of Rock Castle, take the place of Mother as objects of his Insidious love, Hencher Is the one who sends them to picnic under a dead tree, and the one whose metaphor for their love—a boy and his dog he remembers huddling against the war—Is the same metaphor he uses to define the love between himself and his mother. The same animal-like definition of love occurs later when Margaret, missing her husband, crawls, pet-llke, around the kitchen floor of the flat. This quick degeneration of an essentially romantic concept Into a vehicle that dehumanizes Its adherents is typical of the thematic movement throughout Qawkes's fiction. The Ideal (here, love as a wall against the world’s des­ tructiveness) , when translated Into the realistic psychs 157

of the Individual, becomes something monstrous, and ultim ately part of the very cycle of destruction it is Intended as a hedge against. And Just as with Hencher, so with the Bankses. The result, whether it be gazing In shopwlndows or going to Aldington, is dream, springer of myth eternal, refuge from mortality. But In Hencher* s retelling of his past, he reveals the Jyrxhlc nature of Illusion*s victory over reality. Hie war has shattered his own dream of a mother he could love truly, forcing him to replace her with the Bankses. In a passage evocative of the serio-comic style of revelations of Skipper In the later Second Skin. Hencher describes the flre-bomblng of their fla t in terms that transform it Into a symbolically incestuous event. As they struggle away from the flames, "mother and son in a single robe,** ha grunts and goes at her as she tries to **pluok away her bosom's fire" (15)* But then the law, structure of repressive reality, cut him short. He "was slapping the embers and liftin g her back toward the bed when I saw the warden's boot in the door and heard the tooting of his whistle." This mixture of fire-mother Imagery contrasts sharply with nearby associations between snow 15B

and naked women as he walks out through the war’s devastation and comes upcxi a downed plane. A naked woman named Rose has been painted on the side, "the airman’s dream and big as one of the cherubim" ( 2 1 )—yet another evocation of the continuing, massive cycle of destruction-dream-deatruetIon. This Is what the Intersection between the p ilo t's dream and the modem world looks llkei Her face was snow, something back of her thigh had sprung a leak and the thigh was sunk In o il. But her hair, her long white head of hair was shrieking In the wind as If the Inboard engine was sucking the strands o f I t . (1 9 ) Just os Hencher later w ill enter Intimately Into the Uvea of his landlords, he now puts his feet Into the holes of Rose's legs and says, climbing In and denning the p ilo t's oxygen mask, that he "was breathing out of the p ilot's lungs" ( 2 2 ). Then, using the affectionate name he has been applying to his mother, he puts on the helmet ("ny bloody coronet"), asking with typical Freudian double entendre, "'How's the fit, old girl?'" ( 2 3 ). Hencher Is the Incurable dreamer, going on until Rock Castle, the ultimate dream of escape, kicks him to death with a logic that Is as perfect as It Is unintended. Who else but Hencher should Introduce Michael Banks to Bock Gas tie? Hie cycle of dream and destruction mist continue. For Michael Banks, Instead of finding mythic security within the domestic construct epitomized by Hencher, must search for it by destroying the home, by leaving his wife and the obituary colunna in the evening paper and seeking the eternally rejuvenating Woman fantasy dangled before his eyes. Back In the present, Hencher remarks on "how permanent some transients are at last" ( 2 7 ), emphasizing the terrible continuity not Just of his own, but of all men's floating among different occasions for the spinning out of fantasy. The statement also resonates forward through the novel, since it points Ironically to how transient Hencher's own landlords w ill be, how even lodge-glvers are finally without a home. Together, both facts make a perfect statement of the ambiguous, shifting natures of "real* and "dream" worlds in the novel. Hencher praises the flat as "a home for the waiting out of dreams" ( 2 7 )—Just after prowling through It, sleeping In the Banks's bed, using Margaret's lipstick to draw red circles around his eyes, and Just before Michael Banks w ill fantasize the horse In his living room. As both an example of one of the novel's central themes and an Introduction to the experiences of Michael 160 and Margaret Banka, then, Hencher la perfect. The home- world dichotomy that operated between Hencher and Banka, I th in k , I llu s tr a t e s Hawkea'a ty p ic a lly awesome m oral s ta a ls . Whereas Hencher'a fantasies result In a drive Inward—to a home, to an Intimacy so clanmy it la finally obscene— Banks's fantasy takes him out of this whole construct—away from the home, from domestio entanglement, from emotional Intimacy, away from symbols of organic process that admit of death, Into a pornographic view of love that la finally Just as obscene as Bencher's. Thus, as is the case with Emst-Zizendorf and with Sheriff-Qap Leech, two moral poles, conceived as mythic ideals through the vehicle of dream, generate Identical results. Men and women become doomed no matter which "choice" they make. As Sydney Slyter says, anyone could be Michael Banks. In fact, a ll the major characters In The Lime Twig— Hencher, Slyter, Margaret, larry—are subjeot to the same fatalistic mythic dream terms as Michael Banks. Furthermore, like Ernst, Zizendorf, the Mistletoe oowboys, Skipper and Cyril, Banks seels an Idealized world of the Imagination. His literal transition Into this world occurs shortly after Hencher stops narrating the novel. Now, the structure is 161 telling us, we K ill natch the Banks family fantasy. In the cases of both Michael and Margaret, the dream-fantasy- myth construct becomes the vehicle (symbolic as well as literal) by which they try to liberate their fatally-hood from the organic mortality cycle consistently dogging their lives. And one of the crucial points of The Lime Twig— a point Implied also ty the first two novels—is that the dream itself Is almost as "alive" before Banks departs from the flat as after, Just as the mortality It is an escape from Is nothing If not enhanced in its Idealized world, the timeless world of Bock Gas tie . This fact makes such ex post facto Judgments about whether Banks redeems himself difficult and potentially Irrelevant. What "guilt" Is there to be redeemed from? The shadow of Bock Gas tie hovers Inside the flat, inside the "home" that has Inter­ sected so completely with Bencher's dream. Preparing to depart on his escapade. Banks stands "next to their bed— the bed of ordinary down and ticking and body scent, with the course of dreams napped on the coverlet. • ." (3 0 ). At this point of transition, between Time when his dreams happen In his head, and Timelessness when he w ill exchange his life for an escape from death, at this point between 162

the two worlds, Hawkes provides us with another of those brilliantly comic Images that tend to reveal the spiritual outlines of the moment. As Banks stands beside the bed, "his gold tooth Is warm in the sun, his rotting tooth begins to pain" (30), Ihe glittering world of the Golden Bowl, that mythic repository of b rillian t, Inhuman permanence, waits for him to shed his mortality and step Into it. It w ill be a flight from Margaret and her dreams. He "has his day to discover and it is more than pretty dresses and ganderlng at a shiny steam iron and taking a quick cup of tea1* (31) * Given over to a fantasy that promises to liberate him from the domestic construct, Banks would like to hear sounds of the outside, or "perhaps the smashing of a piece of furniture" ( 3 1 )* thus unwittingly anticipating what the thugs actually do to the flat later on, confirming once a&iln the deeply rhythmed continuity between dream and reality, and emphasizing (as Idle case of Margaret does later) the novel's morality-decomposing suggestion of linfra between the desire to be violated and the fact of victimization. Given the fact and the power of Banks's fantasy, it is only natural that the description of the horse, symbol of the fantasy, should break down the literal wall between 163 real and Imaginary* since that in fact is what Banks presently w ill do* E 9 knows that "his own worst dream, and best* was of a horse which was Itself the flesh of all violent dreamsi knowing this, that the horse was in their sitting room. . (33)* The in itia l moral terms of the dream soon become clear. On the Artemis, Banks tells Hencher not to mention Margaret's name, even as they pass the ghostly hdlks of previously eliminated "complications." Thereafter, he returns to the flat only when he gets sick and fails to pursue Margaret when he sees her held captive at the race track. He is even too dense to perceive the ironic significance of her dress, a costume "from another age* too large, too old" (10.6)* when she appears in the stands. "'She's not yet thirty'" is his rather pathetic response, a feeble perception that coincides with an inability to confront his fear when he can not pursue her and her captors down into the men's room, that sinister underworld he has Just had a taste of death in. Banks is being wagged by his dream, as he surrenders his former identity to the irrational controls of this new world. The Initial fog, mentioned earlier, provides an atmospheric, if conventional, symbolic environment for this surrender* At the outset, Banks has heard the "sounds of sloops or ocean-going vessels protesting their identities* • .on the whole of this treacherous and fog-bound river's surface," while his own "barge, of a ll this night's drifting or anchored traffic, would come without lights and making no sound* • •" (4-5) • The world becomes primeval in its expression of his deepest irrational drives* 'There was an entire white sea-world floating and swirling In that enormous open door, and he crawled out to it" (** 6 ) • Just as the world with Margaret is one where her "ugly voice" has spoken to him as he sits and obsessively reals the obituary colunn In the newspaper, this new world is free of a ll that slavery to the dictates of time. Now, "it was not Wednesday at a ll, only a time slipped off its cycle with hours ' and darkness never to be accounted for" (J*9)* Within this mythically "eternal" world, Sybllllne becomes the firs t goddess-like woman to fu lfill Banks's dream of passion* Ihe complete opposite of Ehgllsh housewife Kargaret, she is a naturally primeval creature, exotlo with hair "like the orange of an African bird" (98). After Journeying through the fog and the dangerous "underworld" (a restroom fu ll of Freudian suggestiveness, eliciting 165

connections between the dangers of Bonks*s unconscious and the dangers of the gang world he has entered), Banks emerges Into the sunlight to reap his otherworldly reward i women who make love at the drop of a pin, and who stimulate him to any pomogmpher's dream of super-human performance i women who ask no questions, whose voices are not ugly. The affair begins, like Hencher*s dream, on a romantic n o te . "Coo, Mike," she said just before they reached the table, "It's going to be a Jolly evening*" In Syb's voice he hear! laughter, motor cars and lovely moonlit trees, beds and silk stockings In the middle of the floor. (120) Sybllllne’s function, like the function of the other Conquests,*' is essentially as a fulfiller of Banks's dream of a purely physical, pornographic love (Just as Hencher*s dream has been characterized by purely emotional pornography). She functions. She makes love over and over with Banks, each time "her fresh poses making his own dead self fire as if he had never touched her and making her body look tight and childish as If she had never been possessed by him" (1^2). This nythlc combination of fire and eternity, passionate woman and budding child, of one free of time, makes SybiUine a natural inhabitant of this nythlc world, in which Banks seeks his Idealised eternal reward. This perfect, ageless prophetess—naturally, on the realistic level, Just stringing

i Banks along u n til the gang has bagged Bock Castle*a winnings— voices the essential prediction of the dream, "'You can win If you want to, Mike, uy dear1" (1W). In effect, Banlcs ends up screwing abstractions i Sybllllne the insatiable Woman, widow the Mother, and Annie the G irl Next Door, Together, they comprise a gallery of fantasy creations, given flesh, but not real life. One of Hawke s's most frequent themes Involves the character who In searching for some kind of Ideal (national purity in The Qamlhal. earless purity In T&e Beetle Leg, a purified, Idealized form of love in the other three novels), destroys the Ideal because of the distortions inherent In hunting for It. Even In this context, though* we Bust speak advisedly of "distortions,** since the word Implies something out of the ordinary, whereas Hawke s's monstrous worlds and characters become nothing if not frighteningly fam iliar and ordinary, Ihe envisioned world becomes dictator to the actual, real world, the result being, If not distortions, a t le a s t c o n f lic ts between th e two. In 'Ore Lime Twig, violence and dehumanization became symbolic of the Impossibility 167 of reconciling the two worlds. Once Banks has literally entered the dream, death becomes the only escape from its terms. His subjection to decidedly unromantio elements is implied by the title motif itself. Hie lime twig, a twig covered with lime that is used to ensnare birds, suggests the fatal attraction Banks's dream has for him. Throughout the novel, Hawkes plays around with this image to suggest the sweet-and-sour quality sunk Into the whole texture of Batiks 1 s world. At the first point of discomfort in his adventure, he is "tasting lime" (5*0. Just as Margaret "tasted the green" (77) as Larry and L ittle Dora rush her away into captivity. Banks is again "tasting lime" when confronted with his inability to pursue Margaret and her captors down into the men's room, that tunnel of his fears, suggesting his complete entrapment on the lime twig, inmoblle save for the directed movements by his captors, themselves there, created In a sense, by his own wishes. After the wind*** of Cowles in the baths, "Banks caught the lime rising at the odor of Cowles* blood. . •" (117), emphasising the violence as a real consequence of the fantasy-trap. Lime- green color imagery spreads out through the novel, coinciding with the spreading violent implications of the dream. 168

Sydney Slyter reports that Rock Qastle is racing ’Hinder the colors (lime-green and black) of Hr. Bunks” (62), thus adding Larry's characteristic color to the complex of association, and later we find that the child Monica is wearing a bright-green dress as she is shot dead in the street by the constable. As Is the case in Hawkes's other novels, children become Dangled particlpator-victlms in worlds their elders are constantly trying to idealize into perfected, nythlc versions of their desires. The lime imagery further suggests the same kind of circularity Implied by the Hencher-Banks parallel when, just as Rook Qua tie seems about to win, larry and L ittle Dora discuss the Imminent fruition of their fantasyi "Tell you what" [larry saysj , " I'll make It up to you. I 'll moke it up for the twenty years. A bit of marriage, eh? And then a ship, trees with Unwi on the branches, niggers to pull us round the streets, the Americas—a proper cruise, plenty of time a t the bar, no gunplay or nags. Perhaps a child or two, who knows?" ( 1 6 5 ) Thus, back Into the dream cycle we go. A home, seme children, and then perhaps dreams of some new kind of Aldington, who knows? As this kind of image-patterning suggests, concepts like rationality and freedom are somewhat artificial In the kind of world Hawkes is creating. It Is a world that 169 derives symbolically from the obsessions of its inhabitants i a world whose final implication, is that most* if not all, forms of violence and distortion In human relationships (up to and including war) are the result of man's need to create a mythic version of himself. Just as Michael Banks is ruled psychologically by his dream of the horse, he becomes ruled literally by the gang behind the horse. As long as Rock Castle is In the race, Banks has no chance to decide his fate outside of the dream. Just as he loses his Identity and his sense of time, he loses his ability to choose. Just as he has watched those people on the Artemis fit their limbs to the dance, he swings with Sybllllne in the bar even though "he had never learned to dance" ( 119 )* As he thinks of Margaret during some idle moments a t the race track , we get a picture of the actions of his shadow, as if some other reality than his own consciousness were directing him, as if he is not fully realized in his humanness. Standing suspended from time, beneath a tower "with the gilded face of the clock hung over with canvas" ( 1 0 2 ), he eats a sandwich but "his long shadow was taking food." Then he "turned a l i t t l e and h is shadow, lik e the arm o f a sundial, pointed at someone else" (103)* Within such 170 a manipulated climate, "redemption" seems a truly superfluous concept* Banks's thoughts turn to Margaret mainly when he Is sick or hungry* and even h is death-daah a t the end* during which he speaks her name* coming as I t does during the remorseful afterflow of his night of orgy* Is more a final forsaking of her than any kind of redemptive act* Running Into the path of Rook Castle certainly Isn't going to free her from the gang* The whole series of Images and situ atio n s suggestive of dehumanization In the novel gives a clear sense of what Is Implied by the characters' dream pursuits* Syblllina may be the fruition of Banks's search for a moment of eternity, but she (and he) pay for it* Her brilliant hair becomes one of the distinguishing points of her exotio reality to Banks* but "her skin was white as if It had taken all the skin's pigmentation* flesh color* to tint the hair" ( 9 9 ) • Ihe steam bath 3—perhaps an element In Banks's eventual disillusionment—have on their outside walls pictures of naked men losing their flesh color to the sun* while Inside* Larry's red tie fades, phallic symbol dripping the color of blood across the steel plate that covers his heart* As In a ll of Hawkes's novels* the dream is saturated with 171 qualities that deny It any enduring romantic reality. Banks is inspired and attracted to Sybllllne even as he sees in her eyes Hthe eyes of an animal that has seen a lantern swinging on a blackened hi11" (121). But It is not Ju st the symbolic fantasy f u lf ille r s who are dehumanized* It Is the dreamers themselves, ttsncher, speaking for them a ll In the “waiting out" of their dreams, says they "spend our days grubbing at the rubber roots, pausing a t each other's doors" (27)—thus denying himself and the Bankses an organic source for an image of the very bases of their lives, and slnultaneously setting up a key motif that recurs throughout the novel, throughout the waiting out of each person's dreams. Rubber brides and grooms in Aldington sto re windows, rubber carpet on the stairway leading up to the rooms where both Michael and M ar^ret experience the gruesome Intersection of desire and reality, the rubber truncheon Thick uses on Margaret—a ll suggest the particularly violent and synthetic (deathless because lifeless) reality characteristic of a world wrecked by man's frantic transformation of himself into nyth. The Arcadian world of the game, In which a l l the normal class and economic re stric tio n s are gone, is lit up by a sun that sucks away life, instead 172

of feeding it, that seems to generate illusion rather than vitality. After Banks says he has seen his wife In the grandstand, Cowles and Jinny Needles hustle him off to the baths, warning him several times that "'you'd better take care in the sun'" (107)* Does Banks redeem himself then? lb speak of redemption, we must assume g u ilt, which i s d iffic u lt to do in a world, even a fictional world, where the very foundations are so symbolically personalised in focus that they defy the kind of objectification required by abstraction of action into meanings like guilt and redemption. In an interview, Hawkoa has maintained that he was "very leery" of saying that the end of The Lime Twig was "redemptive," but In terms ambiguous enough to approximate the actual moral ambiguity of Banks's condition at the end. I am not really a religious writer. I'm made uneasy by these materials, but the fact of the matter is, they got in there and I think they work. I think they are fictionally true. And I suppose that despite of all my interest in evil, a ll my belief in the terrifying existence of Satanism in the world, I guess by the end of that novel I somehow Intuitively must have felt the human and artistic need to arrlye at a resolution which would be somehow redemptive. $ What with a ll these "leery's" and "guess's" and "somehow' 8 ," it is not surprising to find disagreement among readers 173 and critics of the novel as to whether its ending is redemptive. Reactions range from the feeling that redemption is "not only a possibility but an actuality,"^ to the adamant assertion that the characters in the novel are "neither saved nor damned," but "only human, figures to be given life by the author's malice or plty."r This kind of disagreement illustrates the very core of the problem of dealing with "morality" o r i t s lack in Hawke s's fic tio n . Even i f we assume th a t the characters are not wholly driven by environment (and one of the most exquisite paradoxes of the fiction is its combination of naturalistic moral effect Kith totally antl- naturallstio stylistic methods)--even if we make this initial assumption that the characters are more than behavioristic machines, we must ultimately take refuge in the trap-like dictum that they are somehow "responsible" even if they are not "free." Banka walks away from a woman described as "a creature no one could love" ( 1 3 1 )* end i f th is view of Margaret is a fact within the novel's world (indeed, a fact at Margaret's most pathetic point), who are we to dispute i t in our Judgment of Michael Banka? There is a profound pity for both Michael and Margaret in the novel, but that fact is separate from the inventing of concepts 17^ like guilt and redemption. In spite of the destructiveness of his dreamt Banks Is no more "redeemed" at the end of the novel than are the members of the gang who run off because their plot has failed. Hawkes makes concepts like "guilt" and "redemption" profoundly irrelevant! so that we are forced to leave them within the mythic structure of religion and deal with the world of his fiction on Its own terms—terms which require the decomposing of such very mythic structures. In some ways, Margaret herself is more responsible for her victimization than is her husband. Does she need to be redeemed? When these kinds of categories break down (I.e ., when our own attempts at moral understanding become myth), the only thing we can say Is that the characters* If possible, should be liberated from their dreams. Which Is to say nothing, which Is to say everythingi that Is the quality of Banks's fictional "redemption." Death frees him from h is dream, from the myth of him self. There need be no expiation of his guilt, however, since In the sunken texture of the world this novel defines, either everyone or no one Is guilty. Death Is the only escape Implied In the novel, even as the dreams themselves are Intended as escapes from the 175 reality of death. The dream cycle, with its implied violence, gpes on and oni before Banks in the person of Hencher, after him in the persons of all the survivors. Just as the performance of Hawkes *s style intnobilizes any true separation we might try to make between the flat and Aldington, it does the same for any rounding out we might try to see in the death of Michael Banks. For although Bonks destroys the race that symbolizes a ll the romance and destructive violence of his particular dream, he simultaneously restores Sydney S ly te r's mythic dream of human freedom, of a race that is not fixed, not dominated by a horse whose "cyclic" appearance automatically decides the outcome. Banks by his act is thus restoring that state of affairs prior to his entrance at Aldington, but it is a state that itself is a myth, waiting to be played with by the next Michael Banks, or perhaps bombed by the next war, waiting to be fixed by the next version of Hock Gustle, His death rush I ts e lf "becomes the long downhill deathless gliding of a dream" (1?1). Everything is eternal. Banks could be, is, and w ill be anyone, including a sizable number of characters from Hawkesrs other novels. R ot of the reason Michael Banks's guilt and redemption 176 are so ambiguous Is that his own wife, even as she is being victimized by the gang so symbolic of her husband's dream, is realizing with brutal logic her own best and worst fantasy* Ifrus, like other Bawkes "victims," such as Ernst in Pie Cbnnlbal and Luke In Pie Beetle Leg, her victimization is a profoundly logical extension of her psychic participation in reality. On the one hand, from an externally objective point of view, Michael Banks is responsible for his wife's victimization. I t i s h is decision and h is sumoons th a t springs th e se rie s of events culminating in her torture and rape* In spite of a ll the ambiguity in Margaret's character, she is sympathetically portrayed as being devoted to her husband. In the early part of the novel, when Banks "Intends not to be horns when she returns" (30), we see Margaret's dream lead into, not away from, her spouse. On Wednesday, h er day to go out and dream at the shop windows, she w ill buy Michael and Hencher something, but for herself nothing* • .she will hold a plain dress against the length of her body, then return it to the racks. * • .look at the dolls behind a glass. . • .And come home at last with a packet of cold fish In the bag" (30). Against Sybilllne maybe Margaret 177

is dull* even "a creature no one could, love* ( 1 3 1 ) • tu t Margaret is s till always there the next afternoon, waiting and crying in his absence* When Banks falls to return, having departed into the timeless world of his dream, Margaret's grief puts her too out of time, as "the missing of Michael came over her, • .and she was drifting quickly down the day and time I ts e lf was wandering** ( 63)—thus suggesting her utter dependence on him In assembling the categories of her life. But when, In the midst of her grief, Margaret complains that she Is "'dead to the world"* ( 6*0 , she is speaking a truth deeper than she realises. For the gpp between what she sees of the world and the total world we see In the novel is awesome. After Hsncher has described his quasi- obscene mother-love story, he reports that Margaret **says X was a devoted son” (9 ) • C lichi and euphemism, those constructs of words the mind uses to sh e lte r its e l f from r e a lity , are with Margaret carried to a point o f awesomely banal art. As Bock Castle is acquiring Increasing symbolic weight and looking more suspicious to Sydney Sly ter, to Margaret he is simply ”'a fine horse. A lovely horse. • .*" (& ). And during her captivity, as Larry drugs Sparrow In an 178

episode Intensely symbolic of the whole spiritual dream- movement of the novel, Margaret's response, while on one level Ironically accurate, is on the realistic level typically prosaici "'Michael was sick once'" (8 8 ), The deep rhythm between the quality of Margaret's psychic approach to life and the quality of her dreams tends to mitigate the at first shocking lack of sympathy Hawkes extends to her victimization. For her passive victim­ ization by the gang is the brutally logical culmination of her passive life previous to capture, an expression of her natural congeniality with constriction and the categorized life. She takes her definition from time In Its proper place, from the proper day on which to dream In the shop windows, even the proper time (after lights out) to have erotic fantasies. Her reliance on pattern, on ritual, on time, a ll Imply her later passivity with the gpng. She does word crostics, and at night has erotic dreams of men "with numbers wrapped round their fingers" feeling h er leg s (6 8 ). It requires merely events, then, for her to progress to a room where she Is held captive, playing card games with a child who always wins, wearing—ultimate Image of helplessness and diseased passivity—a white hospital 179 gown. Even her clothes, one of the crucial symbols of her Identity in the novel, are taken from her and burned. Like her husband, she experiences the loss of her Identity as a casualty of her dreams. Leaving the flat for the last time, she anticipates In the drift of her own imagination the impending loss of the kind of Identification she has thrived on. She was Banks' wife by the law, she was M argaret, and If the men ever did get hold of her and go at her with their truncheons or knives or knuckles, she would s till be merely Margaret with a dress and a brown shoe, s till be only a girl of twenty-five with a deep wave in her h a ir. (7 0 ) Even before events oblige her imagination, she is becoming le s s the wife o f Banks, mare the anonymous victim rep resen tativ e of her dreams. The process is strikingly similar to the one Michael Banks undergoes. The major d ifferen ce lie s in the fact that, whereas Michael tries to break through the constrictions of time and humanness, Margaret is a dialectic opposite, fulfilled because of the utterly passive quality of her being. She does not try to alter the cards, or to fix the race. Instead, grieving for her missing husband, crawling around the dark floor as If she were the very pet she is feeding, she wonders "what a fortune­ teller. • .would sake of her at this moment" ( 6 5 ). 180

The sexual suggestiveness of Margaret’s Imagination Implies that even while she Is being victimized by her husband’s dreams, she Is receiving a completion to her own. Besides her nightly dream of sleeping with an obscure member of the government, she wonders In her characteristically Innocent fashion If-the occupants of a car she sees out the train window are kissing, and again, later, Is Impressed ty Iarry as a nan who could touch women's breasts In public. At one point, Hawkes, who frequently uses color motifs to suggest symbolic movement In his novels, has Margaret somewhat comically refusing to buy a pink dress a t some point In her bourgeois past, then holding the pink railroad ticket In her hand as she finally does travel into the captivity of dream, lhe rapid de-roaantlclzatlcn of Margaret's role as the sweet, devoted wife continues as we realize that her perceptions seem to Instinctively fall Into patterns that, consciously or unconsciously, Intended or unintended, organize reality Into terms consistent with her victimization. Even her fantasy of children being run down by the train she Is riding in (thus symbolically liberating her from motherhood even as she Is being liberated from ranantlo wifehood) turns Into grim fact when her child friend Mdnlca 181

Is murdered, most likely because of her friendship with Margaret. In one curious but perfect passage* Hawkes suggests the de-romantlclzatlcn of emotion that clarifies Margaret’s symbolic role In the dram of the dream. Feeding her pets before leaving for the train station* Margaret becomes drawn Into a kind of stlmuluo-respanse metaphor that seems to anlmallze her by analogy* She crawls around and scratches the floor just like her cat* the "creature that claws tweed* sits high in the hall-way, remains Incorrigible upon the death of its mistress" (6 3 ) . The animal looms completely alo o f from "human" s e n s itiv itie s . The c a t "sucked and gagged on the fish as if drawing a peculiar sweetness from the end of a thin bone" ( 6 3 )* lea* "but there was no sweetness for her"—the simple repetition of the word "sweetness" suggests that it Is Margaret who is defined ty the animals* not the reverse. Hawkes's unflinching, personalized, anti- reallstio "realism" consistently lumobllizes our sentiment as we read his novels. The horror of the crime against Margaret Is one thing* undeniably 1 but the horror, the awesome Inadequacy a t Margaret herself In dealing with reality is something too. Her main regret about the possibility Thick might k ill her is that she w ill miss the cord games 182 xlth Monica. And wo can manage at best an empathetic chuckle when a woman Mho Is tied on a table to be tortured and assaulted Is reminded "of exercises she had heart. were good for the figure” (128). At the end of her beating, she is "bleeding, but not from any wound she could see" ( 1 2 9 )— indeed, the re a l wound seems to have proceeded her beating by a long time.

i n

The Implications of Kar^iret's wound, both literal and metaphoric, spread throughout the whole of Hawkes*a world. The mythic proportions of this world (deriving from the symbolism of external re a lity ) are no g reater, and no less, than the literal proportions of Its inhabitants* desires. In the case of Michael Banks, who represents the prototypical Hawkes character's search for a permanent Ideal molded from Impermanent human tissu e, fo r a dream of perfection created from a spirit woefully and comically Imperfect, the question of redemption Is superfluous to the essential problem of moral paralysis in a world where the victlmlzer w ill destroy himself and the victim has 183 grown with the part. "Redemption" becomes an artificial device derived from outmoded categories, a legalistic con­ trivance, comparable In its Irrelevance to the role of the "law" In the novel, wherein constables either ignore or actively further the playing out of the Illegal dream- drama. At the very least, law in The Lime Twig Is completely Irrelevant to the deep, psychic-ridden texture of reality. The detectives who appear at the end to find Handler's body w ill decipher the "particulars" of what has happened, but how can they ever know the real contents of the dreams which produced the carnage? Sydney Slyter, even as he announces and cocments on the action for us, is similarly outside of the essential dream reality of the novel. All he can do is watch and report. He can't even change events when he gets wind of the plot. Ieslle Fiedler calls him "at once a spokesman for the novelist and a parody of the o novelist's role," thus making of him a comically telescoped version of what I think is Hawkes*s favorite mode of presenting the artlst-flgure in his novels. For like Zleendorf, like Gap Leech, and like the tale-spinning narrators of Second Skin and The Blood Oranges. Sydney Slyter has access to facts necessary far the affecting of events—he could do 181* something to make things right* we think. But It doesn't make any d ifferen ce. In h is knowledge* he Is profoundly Irrelevant to the reality of events in the novel. He can cnly watch and perhaps lament. Which Is a ll the novelist himself and the reader can do. Hawkes's fiction* while severely controlled and poetically stylized* nevertheless conveys the Impression that Its creator is helpless before the awesome terror of his vision. Unlike Charles Dickens, whom he appears to be mockingly 9 emulating In this novel, Hawkes does not sentimentalize the existence of evil. Nor does he divide It up In portions among selected villains, or keep It from the scope of motivation of a lily-white heroine. As Hencher reports in his personalized sto ry of World War I I , a copy of The Vicar o f Wakefield (wherein sentiment gets the best of realism) "was run over by a fire truck outside my door" (11). For Hencher as for a ll of Hawkes's dreamers trying to transcend their essential humanness, there is "plenty of soot and scum the memory could not let go of." Things will never be the same. 185

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPIER POUR

All page references within the text of Chapter Four are to The Lime Twig. New D irections Raperbook Edition, copyright 19 ST ^J. E. Clrlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York, 1 9 6 2 ), 144-5.

3John Graham, "John Hawkes 1 On His Novels" [interview], Massachusetts Review. VII (1966), 454. ^^Tony Tanner, City of Words 1 American F iction 1950-1970 (New York, 1971). 15* ^Graham, 45?.

^Robert I . Edenbaum, "John Hawkes* The Lima Twig and Other Tenuous Horrors," Massachusetts Review. VII (1966), 474. 7S. K. Oberbeck, "John Hawkes* The Smile Slashed ty a Razor" In Contemporary American N ovelists, ed. Harry T. Moore (Garbondalei Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 199. Q •The Pleasures of John Hawkes," Introduction to The Lime Twig (New York, 1961), x l l . ^Cf., for example, HawkeB's consistent use of children as participating victims In the surrounding societal morass* also , p artic u larly In The Litre Twig. Hawkes almost outdoes Dickens In his use of name 3 evoking physical as well as moral qualities* Little Dora (Little Dorrlt?), Sparrow, Cowles, Thick, Hencher, Needles, Sydney S ly ter. QIAFIEB FI VS i SECOND SKIN AND THE BLOOD CRANSB3»

THE NARRATOR AS DREAMER, THE NARRATOR AS DREAM

In Second Skin (19#*) and 'Die Blood Oranges (1971)» hla two most recent novels, Hawkes combines many of h is earlier stylistic and structural experiments with the fairly traditional literary device of the first person narrator used throughout* Both Skipper and Cyril in their dream- tinged narratives create similar problems of Judging the truths and falsehoods of their essential moral poses. Likewise, both men In their roles as story-tellers use a quas i-lmaginary , pastoral landscape to throw into relief the reality-versus-llluslon motif which Is a key concern In a ll of Hawkes's fiction. While both men pose as Idealized lovers of others, It becomes gradually apparent In both novels that each can love only himself, and more significantly, can love only himself within the context of an egocentric Idealized world he has rig id ly Imposed on re a lity . Die markedly sim ilar structures of both novels tend to complement

186 their similar motifs of rmratar-as-perverse-survlvor, as-ldeal-hero. For both Skipper and Cyril tell stories that are both poetically and thematically tortured and controlled, even though they are temporally fragmented, even chaotic. Since both men's stories mix present and past events, the resultingly ambiguous separation between memory and present re a lity becomes a stru ctu ra l complement to the whole theme of the illusion of reality Itself, or, to state it In the form of its sinister presence throughout all of Hawkes*s fiction, of the reality of illusion. Just as Skipper intersperses throughout his recollections the story of Gatalina Kate's "redeeming" pregnancy, Cyril inter* sperses throughout his recollections the story of how he exerts his will and physical influence to bring the temporarily Insane Catherine back Into the life of his Illyrian landscape. And both men use their present activities as Justification for the ways their illusions have helped make the past so destructive—denying any guilt, relying on their versions of mythicized illusion to dismiss any possibly damaging interpretations of their actions. 188

I

Second Skin Is Skipper's retrospective self-Justification! a selective, highly colored account of his survival In a h o stile world* Hawkes uses p lo t fragmentation and poetic texturlng of his narrative—devices that can be seen evolving throughout his first three novels—to here give depth to Skipper's temporally random but psychically revealing ordering of events. Moreover, as in the earlier, novels, such stylistic techniques as image patterning and sexual symbolism become part of the larger thematic patterns of the novel, reinforcing the texture of ironic moral paradoxes, forcing us to see evil's truths and virtue's lies. Piecing together the events Skipper recalls, we learn that his father, wife and daughter have a ll committed suicide, and that he has been threatened and victimized (according to his awn definitions of things) by a variety of characters ranging from Tremlow, a mutineer on the ship ha commanded In World War II, to Miranda, a widow on the island on which he takes refuge with his daughter, Qassandra. But more Important than the events themselves is their significance to Skipper—their true "tonality," to use his own term—a revelation In which we discover 189

1 that Skipper's dream-ideal la a paradise world he can utterly control, with a cast of docile coloreds obeying his every whim, and In which we see numerous contradictions between his real self and his idealized self. Qftus, the characteristic Internalized split between real and Ideal worlds (with the flight from one to the other) so apparent In the earlier novels is once again dramatized in Second Skin, this time linked to Skipper's attempts to convince us that the Ideal world he has found ("Love a t la s t" he c a lls i t ) on h is paradise island represents his "triumph" over the real world of evil (of Tremlow and Miranda and death) that has dogged him throughout his e a rlie r life* Since the entire novel is narrated by Skipper, the whole artistic construct oust be viewed as a result of the shaping powers of his Imagination. Skipper Is telling us h is biography—its e lf a kind of posthumous process, implying a spiritualization that can only be artificial for the moment—that is, he Is conveying to us certain past and present events, picked and mixed with a certain Intent in mind. And although In his many mythic allusions Skipper does not go so far as to acquiesce In the role of an Ancient Mariner, doomed to shucking his guilt with 190

the repetitious, exorcising sound of his own words, he does both consciously and unconsciously attempt to manipulate the ways in which we understand and Judge his complicity In and liberation from events. Confined by the shape of Skipper's peculiarly escapist and sterile imagination, we watch his progress through a kind of morality play in which he is the personification of virtue, and those who manipulate or victimize him personifications of evil. When he finally reaches his "floating" Baoiflo Island, complete with darkles who obey his finally heard commands and cows who passively satisfy his need for an uncomplicated, cleansed, artificial sexual conmunicn, he calls it "love at last." And it is in accepting both the truth and the lie in Skipper's finding of "love" that we understand Hawkes*a characteristically morally paralyzing vision. Skipper undergoes a kind of traditional mythic rebirth on his pastoral island after a flight from what is in many ways an evil and destructive world, but—vision of the earlier novels, vision of the future—he does so in terms that cement his participation in evil, Instead of triumphing over It, as he would have us believe. In portraying his past, Skipper repeatedly sees 191 himself in mythic terms that enable him to define his failure- ridden life according to a congenial destiny* To himself, he is fighting the white and black battle, so that it is impossible for him to recognize his arm grayness. Consistent with his view of himself as virtuous victim, he says that had he been born a woman (a significant speculation in its own right) he would have been an Iphigenia, sacrificial victim later resurrected In a far-off land (i.e ., the actual mythic progress of his own life). His comparison has its . validity, since those who have tried to "sacrifice** him for various favorable winds of their own—Tremlow, Cassandra, Miranda and her friends—are a ll either dead or 'defeated** (using Skipper’s terminology) by the time he composes h is story on the wandering paradise island. Skipper is at least indestructible. "To bleed but not to bleed to death would have been my fa te ," he observes with good-humoured but passionless resignation from the security of his enchanted island, "forgiving them a ll while attempting to wipe the smoking knife on the bottom of my thick yellow skirt" ( 2 ).* Skipper's attempts to mythicize his identity frequently cast unintended irony on his moral posturing. In identifying himself with Iphigenia, for example, he not only de-mascullnlzes 192

himself In the midst of a story that Is supposed to demonstrate his potency, but he specifically rejects Identification with Clytetmestxa (who In the myth killed Cassandra), deliberately leaving that role, we assume, for Miranda cn her Atlantic island. All this mythic posturing tends to move him away from responsibility for Cassandra's death, which contradicts the reality of some of his later indiscreet revelations. Skipper even distorts the Menelaus-Helen-Baris myth to have himself, as Menelaus, actually delivering his wife Into the hands of Bar is, thus giving ironic emphasis to the fact that he actually does abandon his wife Gertrude to her fate, while himself traveling about on various archetypal quests* Skipper consistently Invokes myth to supply moral legitimacy for himself, but there Is always a degree of Irony* even parody, to his comparisons that, aside from Its comic relief, tends to undercut the legitimacy of his whole moral posture. He sees his passage from the black Atlantic Island of Miranda to the serene tropical island of Qatallna Kate as an archetypal cnet "From the frozen and crunchy cow paths of the Atlantic Island—my nythic rock In a cold sea—to this soft pageant through leaf, tendril, sun, wind, how far Z had coma" (165). He invokes an image 193

of himself as a kind of twentieth century Don Juan ("tossed up spent and half-naked on the Invisible shore of our wandering island" [ 162]) even as his primary expression of sexual

potency comes as an artificial lnsemlnator of c o n s * He Is "an old Ariel In sneakers" (162) on his floating island) even as his real self is suffering total eclipse Into his Ideal s e lf) the la s t vestiges o f h is humanness dying in to his imagination* He dispassionately recalls his "father) wife, daughter, each of whom Mas his own Antigone—the sand- soratchers, the Impatient sufferers of self-inflicted death) the curious adventurers for whom I remain alive" (2), even as It w ill become clear how Intimately he was Involved In each of their suicides. Skipper uses myth In ways that have now become characteristic of Hawkes's fiction* to fu lfill psychic necessity) to answer the need to realize literary and cultural legitimacy for the Idealized conception of the self* Fbr even as Skipper Is busy finding mythic and literary antecedents for his Idealized self» the accompanying irony and outright contradictions reveal the gap between his Idealized self and his real self, and cast light on his attempts to manipulate the relationship between the two* l$k

lhis struggle within Skipper himself, in which he tries to create from his imperfect self the idealized self of north and dream, leads him into an imaginative re­ creation of the past that will Justify him as well as emphasize the significance of his present bliss. Just as he creates northlc prototypes to define his past actions as parts of unavoidable fate, he actually views his pursuit of control, his travels among the evil, as a quest that could have been no other way. He reminds us that "of course history is a dream already dreamt and destroyed*1 (^5)» in effect making both the past and the future a part of illusion. If he can not escape knowledge of the past, he can at least try to escape responsibility for it. Writing down his life on this paradise island, his past ^s a dream because now he is in control of its tone, even if he did not control Its literal events, and still can not escape the final fact of evil and death that it represents for him. In describing the past. Skipper presents it as a dream even as it Is being experienced. Things could have been no different. He frequently shades this reality according to the necessities of his own psychic determinism. Miranda's house "was Just as 1 had dreamed it*1 while in the navy ( 5 2 ), even though 195 he gives no Indication of ever having known about it before actually arriv in g on the island. Sim ilarly, coming upon ths dilapidated home of Captain Bed and his sons Jomo and Bub, Skipper, even though he would not meet them fo r some time, "still. • .felt that I knew the place and had seen {Bub'sjbicycle racing in my own dreams" ( 5 6 ). And discussing the crucial trip on the Peter Poor, during which Bed and Jomo apparently seduce Cassandra while Bub knocks out the helplessly concerned Skipper with a pipe, he admits he wouldn't have turned back from the trip even if he knew In advance of Captain Bed's "naked passion" for Cassandra (5 6 ). He defines that boat trip as fateful, as beginning a process that led directly to Cassandra's death, and admits that he "must have known even then that I could not escape the lighthouse" where Cassandra takes her fatal jump (58)* Qassandra's destruction, in some deep sense, becomes a necessity as a result of the shaping power of Skipper's dream-obsession. Whether o r not Cassand ra 's death can 2 be directly linked with that one boat trip, it is clear that Skipper sees it that way, and that he realizes that he wouldn't have altered things. For Cassandra dead is Qassandra safe—from the love of others as well as from 196 the possibilities of her own passion. She resides now In Skipper's dream of the past—"my daughter, my museum piece" (29)—and her death is one of the terms in Skipper's "triumph" over Miranda. An Incurable abstractionist Mho believes in north and persistently identifies himself with 3 Kinged creatures. Skipper makes his dream-obsessicn into a denial of sexuality in both himself and others—particularly Cassandra—and ultimately into a denial of his very physical self. Cassandra in death is at least safe from Miranda, who Is Skipper's would-be seducer and who wants him to le t Cassandra, have her fun with the boys. Speaking from the controlled repose of his paradise island, where as artificial lnseminator he has achieved the necessity of procreation without the encumbrance of passion, he confronts the elusive separation he has finally erected between dream and reality, seeing himself "as if memory had already done Its work and flowered, subjected even myself to the golden glass" (99), Having spent his life incarnating virtue and courage while denying the very generative principle of life, Skipper new, on his floating island (his terms suggest that It might not exist in reality, that for a ll we know he could be writing at a table in an 197

Institution for the Insane) willingly admits hie present self Into the memory-museum of his Idealized self. 2hus, he recreates the essential spirit of Hawkes's three earlier novels, achieving his final dream In terms that deny him h is humanity. As one of a "few good men. . .destined to live out our fantasies" (18), Skipper has achieved the fruition of his dream and come to the brink of total abstraction. In contrast to his evocation of the past, which is hauntingly real, his description of the present, In the form of the tropical Island, Implies its vagueness in both space and time. He calls it "our wandering island" (109), and Is pleased that ships—vehicles in which many of his past scrapes with evil have occurred—pass by its shores, urmotlolng. In the manner In which Its tenuous reality coincides with the needs of Skipper's Imagination, Skipper's paradise Island recalls the world of Michael Banks's Aldington, the dam of the cowboys In 2322. Beetle Leg, and the reviving Germany of Zlzendorf, and In that sense Is an exemplary objectification of the split between real and idesil dramatised so often In the minds of Hawkes's characters. As part of his attempts to sustain his Ideal and lgiore the evil within himself, Skipper continually takes 196 refuge behind a screen of bathetic sentimentalism. His dlme-store novel attitudes are constantly becoming h is talismans against evil* His Instinctively nythiolzing imagination enables him to speak of his childhood as having "the proportions of a working fairy tale" (6 ) In the midst of a gruesome lis t of his mortlclan-father's customers* Skipper always prefers to deal with death In terms of Imaginative * refuges* He prefers to dream of his mother (who has extended h is knowledge of death "toward the promise of nysteiy"[fJ]) going o ff In a mysterious ca r, rath e r than to remember the more concrete Image of his father shooting himself in the bathroom, which is "lurid truth"—no doubt Incompatible with the kind of sentiment Skipper Is erecting against reality. As a child, we learn, Skipper's reaction to his father's impending suicide was to try to prevent it by playing Brahms on his cello. For every threat of despair or evil around him, Skipper can call an one of his little sentimental Ideal files to save himself from the sufferings of knowledge* Undergoing the pain of Chssandra's sadistically requested tattoo, he fantasizes that he is being tortured by an oriental enemy, and his patriotic courage pulls him through* To him, Catalina Kate is a Joan of Arc because she has of necessity 199

outKalted an Iguana that has attached Itself to her tack. His sentimentality is like a train rushing him towards the culmination of his dream. Hie can't help the protective drift of his own Imagination. A tire blows out on the bus taking him and Cassandra and Pixie from San Francisco to New York, and he Instantly imagines the three of them up against "a pack of roving and mindless Mexicans" (36 ). When he first moves into Miranda's house, he is Instinctively drawn against his will to the "preposterous love and bravery," the "floating sentiment" (61-2), of the Horst Wessel lied. so that his weakness for sentiment is stronger even than his patriotism or his fear and hatred of the evil he already feels Miranda represents, later, he utters his disgust with the "glaring bathos" of the high school dance even as he himself is unable to resist the teasings of an old woman and a little girl that he must bo a great lover* Sentiment is Skipper's last refuge against reality, the one Instrument by which he can control things (at least to h is own sa tisfac tio n ) th a t would otherwise seem completely out of hand* Skipper's weakness ultimately is for a world imaginatively cast under his control. He can be pathetically racist towards Mexicans, Blacks and Indians, bub benevolently 200 loving to such safe docile dream-coloreds as Sonny and Oatollna Kate and Sister Josle. But even If he can survive on the sentiment deriving flora his Imaginative control over reality, Skipper's reader is more likely to feel the weight of awesome despair it is a hedge against# The candy he so fondly packs for the bus ride to New York has by nightfall "dried like blood" on his white uniform. Skipper's little dreams always end, but the large dream, the one controlling his destiny, the one of his very life, past, present and future, goes on# This is why, paying a last visit to Gassandra's grave, he can deal with the loss of the dream of her love by transforming the scene into a marvelous still-life# "Yellow stubble, crumbling iron enclosure, ta ll white grizzled stones and names and dates creeping with yellow fungus. And the sky was like the stroke of a brush# And of course the wind was only the sun's chariot and the spray was only a veil of mist at the end of land" (20*0 # Skipper's fancy becomes a w all he constructs against everything (particularly death) in a world he can not cope with* The massive weight of his self-serving imagination settles over his dream of the past, absolving himself o f 201 responsibility, transforming himself Into a hero* distorting and defining Into Insignificance those who have violated his Illusions. Shortly after Fernandez has abandoned Cassandra, Skipper listens to Pixie's cries on the bus as If they were "only the faint turbulence of an Insect trapped In a bottle*" He finds them "amusing. Pitiful. A little bottle of grief like her mother" ( 2 5 ), dism issing In one facile metaphoric stroke the whole tragedy of Cassandra's broken marriage. Gertrude's grief and suicide are nothing to him. The mare she drinks and looks for love elsewhere, the more she is doomed to failure against his "Increasing tolerance" (1 3 1 ), for the more she drinks, the more his virtue is vindicated, the more he can forgive. The hypocrisy Inherent In Skipper's attitude is present also In the way he treats Cassandra. At the high school dance, he Interrupts his muslngs on the "slow motion smoke" (80) of Red and Miranda In a sudden panic over Nhat might be happening to his twenty-five year-old daugiter In the hands of her beau on the opposite side of the dance floor. He lmnedlately sets out In her direction, only to be Interrupted from that chore when his fancy Is caught by some young girls, at which point he starts to speculate on their underwear,

» 202 touches one on the shoulder and is rebuffed, then recovers in time to impose Chastity by cutting in on Jomo and dancing with his own daughter, having Just fantasized about a "little Dionysian incest" (82) with one of the previous girls. Skipper guards Cassandra against defilement, even as he frequently admires her body and literally drools over any favors she should bestow on him. Perhaps the most grotesque climax of Skipper's hypocrisy comes at Gertrude's death. Having abandoned her into the abstract realm of his tolerance, he spends too much time getting dressed and struggling w ith h is swozd so th a t he him self makes the fam ily la te to the funeral home—the hearse has left without them. At this point, in one of those comic-ironic phrases Hawkea seems to be developing a patent on, Skipper tells the driver of their limousine to hurry up, that " 'it's a matter of life and death. Do you understand?'" (133)* As if this ironic self-condemnation weren't enough, Skipper then pro­ ceeds to spend most of his time admiring the limousine, totally ignoring the reason he is making the trip In the first place. An easy target for seduction in his continual struggle far romantic control over reality. Skipper is naturally mare Interested in a fine car than his wife's 203 death. The one weapon Skipper has against a wounding world is his willingness to be blind to it. He can exaggerate himself into a regal presence among the drunk and unnotiolng sailors in a Chinatown restaurant. He can straddle Qatallna Kate and the Iguana, becoming "colossus over the reptile* colossus above the shores of woman" ( 1 0 6 ), even though hia heroic efforts at salvation merely cement the llzaxd's claws further Into Kate's skin. This man who can stand over a woman with a llzaxd on her back that has been In the same place for hours and report that "I got him with the first grab" ( 1 0 7 ) certainly has no trouble defeating the reality of his miserable past with every weapon of mythic and psychic illusion he can muster. Skipper's dream of the past is an attempt to validate his whole moral pose as he speaks from his enchanted island. He frequently assumes a rhetorically argumentative tone, as if his reader were the Jury and he his own defense lawyer. He c a lls h is opening chapter "Naming Names," as i f to expose those responsible for a crime. When we have heard his story* "it will be clear, I think," that he is a man of both love and courage ( 1 )—both qualities his actions deny while his words ore affirming. His survival becomes the rationale for his rightness. As the lawyer for his own soul he seems burdened with the need to prove that he la not guilty— which Is Itself some measure of the past's weight on hla conscience. His argumentative method Is to use his present condition (boss and resident artificial inseminator on the floating Island) as proof of his ultimate virtue, as the undeniable and unalterable fact that outweighs any reservations he (and we) might have about his role in past lethal events. Thus, he needs to "gather around me the evidence, the proof, the exhilarating Images of my present life" (48) in order to Justify himself. Then, like a lawyer, "having summoned my evidence and stated my position. • • 1 can afford to recount even the smallest buried detail of my life with Miranda" (48). Skipper tries to construct a massively proven case that will persuade his reader that his survival an the magic island does, Indeed, represent a victory of courage and of love, of virtue. S till reposing in sentiment, he gloats about "how satisfying that virtue always wins" (9 8 ), and Identifies himself and his three dark minions as "four particles of its golden dust" (93) • But It becomes apparent In his defense that Skipper defines virtue as a flight from physical love, and as a 205 denial of the necessity- far traditional courage. Ultimately, Skipper's ’Virtue” becomes synonymous with his flight from reality Into dream* He defines his sterile, panicky flight from Miranda's attempts to seduce him In the hotrod as a triumph for sexual purity—"Mere victory over Miranda Is nothing, while virtue Is everything" (99)* He devotes a good part of his life to trying to prevent his once-married twenty-five year-old daughter (whom he Identifies with the Blessed Virgin Mary) from even kissing another man. And as fo r courage, he reacts to h is knowledge th a t Tremlow is up to no good by going to his cabin and falling asleep while reading the New Testament. Hie gap between his words and his acts Is further exacerbated by the fact that he will lie or distort matters If It suits his purpose, as when the sexually threatening Miranda o ffers him some Old Grandad, and he tells her that he doesn't drink (even though we've already seen him taking it straight from the bottle with Fbrnandez during the honeymoon sequence), or when he refrains from telling Gassandra that her husband la lying dead only a few blocks from their hotel during their stay In New York, prior to their departure for the Atlantic Island, 206

Skipper's case is so full of holes that it is no wonder that he feels constrained to depict himself in such morally righteous ten s. He frequently refers to himself as a kind of suffering Christ figure, willingly taking wounds only to fin a lly triumph on h is heavenly islan d a f te r all his tormenters have been killed off, or at least stayed in place while he ran away. Looking back, he allows that "all these years I have suffered with a certain dignity" (2). He has h is confrontation w ith the d e v il and Tremlow wins, at least temporarily, committing an act of homosexual rape on him to boot. During his misadventures on the black Atlantic island, Skipper asks in saintly lament, "how*long, oh rqjr God" he endured the abuse of the islanders, and litanizes h is own rep ly i "Too long, oh God. . •" (80). He c a lls the high school dance at which he is tricked outside and pummeled with snowballs "my night of trials" ( 8 8 ) . Gut all this is merely proof of his virtue, for "the scars are sweet" (5) • The "exquisite torture" of the tattoo turns him into a "courageous victim" (19) • His arch enemy Miranda calls his saintly bluff, however, draping his ship's captain uniform over a female mannequin and spreading catsup down the front in an outrageous parody of the crucifixion. 207

Skipper's frequent and unwitting ironic undercuttings of his own position make it impossible for us to dismiss Miranda's blasphemous image of him, as he would like* as merely the dirty trick of an evil woman. Fbr Skipper's virtue is a parody of Itself» unable to survive Intact from his own naive descriptions of it. He takes pride in a Good Conduct Ribbon that "like a dazzling insect narked the spot of my heart" on his white uniform (13). His main fear of the tattoo Is that it will mar his unblemished skin. And when it begins to recede into the tan and hair of his chest after his retirement to the enchanted Island, he is almost a parody of Hester Prynne, carrying the second- skin scar of his shame through the artificially fertile works of h is l i f e of vindication. In ambiguous juxtaposition with Miranda, he boasts that he substitutes "far each drop of the widow's poison the milk of my courageous heart" ( 2 ), thus leaving himself open to a rather damaging interpretation of the terms of his substitution. Skipper's idealized version of his own virtuous self Implies a denial of love and of sexuality to the point of emotional and physical sterility. Ihus, after a life of flight from love, he sees his triumph in the birth of 208

Qatallna Kate's baby, even though it is most likely Sonny's. Chronologically, his life on the Atlantic island, with its constant aerual threats and Cassandra's suicide, comes just before his bliss cn the invisible tropical island, so that he enacts a kind of nythlcal rite of passage through a series of trials into a rewarding paradise. But like similar passage rites in Hawkes's earlier novels, this cne is realized In terms that deny its hero authentlo human values. For Skipper runs away from Miranda, his chance to love, and achieves mere artificial potency (as well as a very artificial kind of master-slave "love") on the island of his triumph. His role as artificial lnseminator is a perfectly appropriate self-expression for an artificial lover. His weakly self-serving pun on Beatrice and Sister Josie ("cow's head next to cowled head"[l69j) is illustrative of the kind of artificially abstracted life required to complement the necessities of his dream of himself. Just as he fanatically tries to deny Cassandra any chance to be alcne with potential lovers, he himself refuses to sully his body with Miranda. He can not help but be fascinated by her larger-than-life sexuality, and never misses a chance to comment on her "greater-than-llfe-slze breasts" ( 9 5 ) o r 209

any of her other dangerously erotic qualities. He sees her as an Impressive Cleopatra, admiring her archetypal q u ality —"Dense shadow of woman. Queen of the N ile 11 (9*f). And chasing the car In which, he thinks, Jomo and Cassandra have trouble on their minds, he can still color his puritan mission with the knowledge th at Miranda s ittin g next to him is "larger and whiter and more Venus-like than ever" (191)• But Miranda is also "treacherous" ( 5 ) and evil, precisely because of her ominously representative physlcality. Skipper sees bitter "false suggestiveness" ( 5 ) in the fact that she has the same name as the primitively Innocent character In The Tempest. She has a "black heart" ( 5 8 ) and plays music of the German eneny. She refuses to be docile and quiet, offends Skipper by applying flippant nicknames to himself and Cassandra, in fact is so strong and uncontrollable that he sometimes describes her in masculine terms ( 6 2 , 6 3 ) • The initial sight of her black bra hanging in the bathroom tells him there is trouble in store on the Atlantic island. But in.a deeper sense, Miranda seems to represent a principle of reality that Skipper is unwilling to accept. So many c r itic s o f Second Skin seem to take Skipper's dism issal of Miranda as evil at face value, and to proceed from there 210

to the conclusion that Skipper is a bumbling but basically good-hearted hero Who survives the forces of death* Miranda being one of those forces. But Miranda Is an appropriate thematic foil to Skipper In the sense that she realises and accepts the world for what It Is* and does not engage In the kind of destructive dream-living Skipper Is Involved In. Her most outrageous acts—the cutting up of Pixie's nipples * the "crucifying" of Skipper's uniform on the female mannequin, the presentation to Skipper of an apparent fetus taken from Cassandra's dead body—while they are offensive and even perverse In one sense* are also appropriate satires on Skipper's fantasies of him self. Skipper seems to be aware of Miranda's true symbolism. He calls her the "final challenge of our sad society" (5)—and, Indeed, she is his last connection with mainland American civilization and the war before taking up residence on the Imaginary Island with his docile troupe of dark-skinned misfits. She consistently speaks the tru th about Skipper, mocking his unnatural protectorate over his daughter, calling him an "old maid" (189) * puncturing the patina of his falsifying sentimentality* It is no wonder that he considers her his most formidable opponent (not Fernandez for marrying his daughter, not Tremlow for violating 211

both his authority and body ) , t a r In the fullness of her body and her knowledge, in her acceptance of both good anl evil, of both life and death, she represents the perverse, ungainly world as it exists without illusion, and thus is a persistent, living mockery to Skipper*a virtuous pose, the last great obstacle to his flipping totally out into dream* Skipper's escape from Miranda and the principle of reality that she represents, though, is part of the larger life-denying pattern of his sexual ambivalence and repression. His posture as virtue incarnate is always accom­ panied by suggestions and Implications that virtue is his wall to prevent us (and perhaps himself) from understanding the nature of his own dark needs* His virtue becomes a rationale for his fear of love, and far his Inability to assume his role in any kind of mature man-woman relationship* To begin with, he frequently, and with no particular reticence or concern, entertains visions of himself as a woman. In this characteristic he evokes earlier dreamers like the S h eriff and Gap Leech and Luke In The Beetle Leg, who also became somewhat androgynous in the process of living out virtuous, sexless dream-ideals. Skipper can see himself 212

as an Iphlgenia, he can tell us that he "swept" down to Miranda's beach wearing his "rubber skirts" (57), and on a more significant psychological level, he constantly reacts to the sexual assertiveness of other males as if he were the one being threatened, as if their llbldlnal power represented evil Itself. He devotes considerable energy to recalling the dark Fernandez with his snake-skin belt, to evoking the dark sexuality of Tremlcw, to worrying on the Greyhound about the potential threat to Cassandra represented by a sleeping sailor who has thrust an exposed ankle between his own two feet, and to what the sinister Captain Bed and Jomo might do to Oassandra. Hie few times Skipper * does achieve a kind of psychic potency as a man have to do with his idealized "loves"—Cassandra and Catalina Kate, neither of whom threatens him with the possibility of any kind of emotional response to his attentions (as Miranda and Gertrude, his rejects, certainly do), or Indeed, with any kind of mutually physical relationship at a ll. Undergoing the tattoo pain for his beloved Cassandra, he holds in h is woman's scream o f pain and comes through i t lik e a man, the tortured hero he dreams he is. And living on his enchanted island, he can exalt that he has "knocked up" Sweet Rryllls (a ccm) while conveniently obscuring the fact that Qatallra Kate has probably become pregnant either by Sonny or by a fisherman living by the shore* Sexuality that threatens a fertile culmination (i.e ., attempts at love by Gertrude, Gassandra, Miranda, Gaptain Red, Jomo) Into actual sweat and flesh, oust always be smoked back into hiding places in little deceiving corners of his narrative. He tries to Imply that the three naked AWOL soldiers who hold him, Flxle and Gassandra at gunpoint end up merely taking turns kissing Gassandra. He is similarly obscure during the homosexual rape scene In which ho is victimized by Tremlow, providing enough d e ta ils to suggest what has happened but shading the experience with delicate, conventionally virtuous terms, "abomination" and "degradation" being among hla favorites. Sex and its attendant passions are evil, an enemy to his Impotent peace. He keeps a banal prayer on the bathroom mirror ("Wake with a loving Thought. / Work with a Happy Thought. / Sleep with a Gentle Thought." [72]) that becomes his "talisman" against "the horrors of blue tit" and the "thought of the black brassiere" (72). The whole sexuality-denying structure of Skipper's sentimentality and self-serving myth-making becomes in tills context a 2H+ vehicle for his realizing control over the realism of his own llbldlm l energy. Passion Itself becomes an enemy to Skipper's Idealized self. After the snowball attack at the high school dance (an act which, momentarily excited, he associates with Tretnlow's violation), he quickly struggles to restore his heroically obsequious rationality i I waited. And slowly X controlled my temper and qy pain, controlled my breathing, brushed the palm of my hand over my scalp and regained my usual composure. I was wet and chilled, but I smiled when I saw what an enormous rin g I had trampled a l l about me In the snow. The great stag that had been at bay was no longer at bay. Tremlow, if he had ever been there, was gone. (68) There are numerous suggestions th a t ^kipper's most potent eneqy Is actually his own libldlnal unconscious, and that, like the pure cowboys In The Beetle leg who chase down the Bed Devils, he transforms a ll external figures Into symbols of the clashing forces of his psyche. His Inexplicable association of the snowball attack with Tremlow— who has passed out of his life by this time and is possibly even dead—can be amplified if we see Tremlow as Skipper's symbol of a l l h is fears of male sexuality. When Skipper does penult him self a momentary tr ip Into the random realm of his psyche, the associative results are revealing* I glanced again at the night sky—unmoved by celestial side show—and far some reason, scowling into the salt 215

and pepper stars, gritting my teeth at that silent chaos, the myriad motes of the unconsciousness, I found myself thinking of Tremlow, once more saw him as he looked when he bore down upon me during the height of the Starfish mutiny. Again I lived the moment of my degradation. (37) During the actual mutiny aboard the Starfish. Skipper's description of the grass-skirted Tremlow is, like his descriptions of Miranda, half fascination with sexual explosiveness and half stem disapproval for the evil act of insubordination against his will, for the lack of good conduct. Skipper actually stops Sonny from killing the mutineer while he spends time noticing the "long dark flank that had come out of the grass like a tiger" (1^5) * And In the middle of noting the way the moonlight strikes Tremlow's skin, he leaves himself totally open to attack while the mutineer comes up and socks him in the mouth. In the rest of his narrative, Skipper always associates Tremlow with naked men—Fernandez*s dead lover looks like Tremlow, the soldiers who rape Gassandra remind him of Tremlow. There Is even enough evidence to develop a theory that Skipper is actually II homosexual, a q u ality :th at would complement h is f lig h t . from women, but the more pervasive pattern of his behavior in the novel suggests that he Is Involved in a flight from a ll sexuality. When Fbmandez begins to whistle at Gassandra 216

as they leave on their honeymoon, Skipper conically transforms the event to a level where he can deal with It abstractly, refining it Into a little mental category where he can keep it safe* remarking that fbrnandez "had given way, at last, to the psychic tensions of his mysterious past" (119) • The ultimate and logical result of this whole attitude occurs, of course, on Skipper's Imaginary island, where he achieves "victory”—where there are no men who directly threaten his control over the world, and where the source of his sexual strength, his participation In the life cycle, derives from his delight at watching Kate grow big with a baby he has probably not fathered, and where what "fathering" he does achieve involves his calm and benevolent delivery of frozen sperm into cows who moan for his presence and never talk back. Like so many of Hawkes's other dreamers, then, Skipper turns the whole landscape and drama of his life Into a symbolic battle among the warring factions of hie psyche. Unable even in retrospect to control the ambiguous expression of his own libldlnal energy, it is not surprising that he feels alternately threatened and fascinated by that energy in others. He projects this destructive and uneasy 217

balance onto Cassandra, just os it has been implicit In the ways he has viewed such enemies as Tremlow and Miranda* He says that he "fought against" her death "the hardest" (2), which in terms of the way he is dreaming his past translates into the fact that he struggled heroically to keep her from loving anyone else but himself* He holds an internally contradictory view of her that is an accurate objectification of his whole llbidinal struggle throughout the navel* She is both a cheerleader, a "teenage bomb" (32) who is liable to waltz away from him into some marine's arms at any moment, and the disdainful, serenely cold mother of Pixie, purd and remote from the life of passion* And wasn't this precisely what I loved? That the young- old figure of my Cassandra—sweet queenly head on an old coin, yet flesh and blood—did in fact conceal the rounded high-stepping baby fat and spangles and shoulder-length hair and dimples of the beautiful and wised-up drum majorette, that little bomb who is all hot dogs and Egyptian beads? (32) Skipper spends much time privately fantasizing about Gassandra* a body while simultaneously acting as her public protector from any potential ravishment. His conception of her "double ana tony, this schizophrenic flesh" (33) is both a natural result of the split between reality of flesh and ideality of virtue locked in deep battle within his own psyche, 218 and a possible contributing factor to Cassandra's suicide* As Is Im plicit In the "young-old” passage quoted above* Skipper loves Cassandra because of her denial of hlmi given his virtuous posture, he can only "love" someone who embodies for him the Impossibility of physical love. Ihe only point In the novel a t which Gassandra seems to be emerging from her cold, bitter silence Into a kind of happiness occurs during the weeks after what Skipper calls the fateful trip on the Peter Poor. But Skipper Instinctively equates her sudden signs of small Joy with slavery to Miranda and thus with evil and death. Hie rapist Tremlow is a "devil"i the would-be seductress Miranda Is a treacherous wltchi Captain Red and Jomo are both villains for lusting after Gassandra. Skipper makes It clear that he views It as his responsibility to make sure that the queen wins out over the teenage bomb. He frequently Identifies Gassandra with the Blessed Virgin Mary (118, 199)—even being assaulted by the three soldiers she is a "silvery blue Madonna in the desert” (42) In the degree of her cold passivity. Early in his narrative he Is worrying "that I could fail and that the teen-age bomb could k ill the queen or the 219 queen the bomb" (3^)« But It seems that Skipper's failure lies ultimately In these very terms he uses to divide up the reality of the people around him. Unable to accept or to consummate his own llbidlnal energy* he must obscure the sexuality of others Into a fantasy he can control i In the case of Gassandra, he must manipulate her life so that It Kill be consistent with the requirements of his dream of her. He Is the white knight battling for control of her soul while Miranda, the black witch, leads her to death. The "schizophrenic flesh" he creates within his daughter Is an objectification of his own schizophrenic way of casting the universe. He tries to divide the world up Into whites and blacks. He Is proud of his unblemished skin, his White uniform, and his good conduct medal. He Is In flight from black, the color of his father's hearse, of Miranda's brassiere, of Jamo's hotrod. Hie prefers the white dream of his mother to the black memory of his father. But the ultimate texture of the world, like the final texture of Skipper's psyche, can not be denied Its fluctuating com­ plexity In which good and evil not only constantly struggle, but undergo reverses In their definitions. He reports himself wearing a "stiff new black and white checkered 220 sh irt" (53) on his first morning cn Miranda's Atlantic island— an appropriately ironic combination for the hidden composition beneath his purltanlstlc pose. And Just as he can not control the damaging knowledge he reveals about him self, he can not be consistent with his metaphors. His enemies can be black at one point, but when he las the dark natives under control on his paradise Island, it is safe then for even his own skin to darken* He can speak of both his symbolically white uniform and of "time, the white monster" (57)* Perhaps the most striking Image of this whole metaphoric complex lies in Skipper's description of the lighthouse from which Qas sandra Jumps to her death. It Is white with a black door, the la s t outpost on an Island where good and evil are battling for both her soul and her body. Her death becomes the logical escape from the virtuously conceived fight, and a black and white lighthouse on the shares of the ocean the most logical point of transition from the worldly conflict of dream and reality Into the simplified, less spiritualized answer of the earth* Skipper'8 use of Cassandra in the schizophrenic drama of his dream does not end with her death. His con­ flicting erotio-virtuous memories of her are enough to 221 establish that fact. But In terns of his struggle to establish and live within an Ideal world In which he has control over the expression of love* he has achieved victory over Chssandra, far now any of the docile natives w in kiss him any time he so orders (whereas after Cassandra had been raped by the soldiers, she had Interrupted his consoling words by telling him that "'Nobody wants to kiss you, Skipper'-[^ 3] ) • He has survived Cassandra as well as his father and Gertrude, so naturally he can celebrate victory over death on his dream island by conducting a picnic with his minions in the graveyard. In spite of Skipper's attempts to present himself as a kind of archetypal figure of rebirth, the final effect of his story Is to convince his reader that, if there are degrees of death, he is deader than his father, Cassandra, or Gertrude. He creates a dream of his past to accompany the dream of his present In league against the reality of evil. But Skipper embodies a kind of living death from the very beginning, perhaps dating from his father's suicide, an act after which he would go and lie In the back of the family hearse "to awult my final vision of that experience denied me In space but not In time" (7) • He has somehow had a life gland, if there is such a thing, 222

cut out of the middle of his heart* He speaks of his father as "Death himself" and of himself as "one of those little black seeds of death" (l6l), averring that he has "'never been afraid of the seeds of death'" (12). He seems Instinctively drawn to dissolution. The whole landscape In which he moves Is In ruins, fran the broken down bus In the desert to the run-down houses and broken cars on the Atlantic island to his own Plantation House on the paradise island. There, Sonny wants to fix a hole In the bam roof but Skipper prefers it the way it is, "or as it would be” (102). And the baby whose birth Is supposed to be the final tern of his vindication over the past—over death—is said by Catalina Kate to look like the unknown man In the grave on which they picnic as if in evil league with the devil. As with Hawkes's other dreamers. Skipper achieves the fruition of his death-defying ideal In a way that defines his life as more horrifying than death itself. Fbr as a man enacting a kind of perpetual living death. Skipper can not help but participate in the victimization of others. In spite of his best attempts to load the narrative In his own favor,. he is driven to both subtle and candid admissions of guilt. He senses the full moral quality 223

of his relationship to Cassandra, calling himself her "accomplice, father, friend, traveling companion, yes, old chaperon;, but lover and destroyer too" (175*6), Lite Zlzendorf, Skipper can delineate his own perversity without being able to do anything about it* But as with the moral Implications Inherent In the lived idealizations of characters In his other novels, Hawkes structures so much ambiguity Into Second Skin that it Is finally Impossible to Judge Skipper Innocent or guilty of the deaths around him. Given his fanatical tries to prevent a twenty-five year-old daughter for whom he has Incestuous feelings from even kissing another man, it Is tempting to view him and his Illusions as in some sense responsible for her sulcldo. And yet Miranda herself implies that Cassandra has Jumped because she was pregnant, a Judgment that lends a perverse truth to Skipper’s lament that Qassandra was lost the minute he let her board the Peter Poor. In other words, she was lost. Just as he maintains, as soon as he lost control over her love. Chronologically, the two month-old. fetus would have been conceived on that boat trip , while Skipper was knocked unconscious. Of course a logical resolution to this parados is that Qassandra would naturally have the same schizophrenic battle between flesh and spirit as her ever-present, domineering father. In this sense, Skipper*s dream of his past Is exactly right* because* like Kawkes's other dreamers* ha has ensured that reality must Inevitably follcM the design of his fantasy. And like other Hawke a "victims," Qassandra participates in her victimization by Skipper's fantasy, Just as Skipper himself has intimately participated In his victimization by Tremlow. Qassandra never makes any realistic effort to escape her father* even to the point of allowing him to accompany her and ffemandez on th e ir honeymoon. It is even conceivable that she has allowed Skipper himself to choose the unreliable* homosexual Fernandez for her as her husband.^ Her one act of escape Is self- destruction* which paradoxically keeps her safe for her father forever. The Sklpper-Gertrude relationship presents similar problems of interpretation. Cki the one hand* Skipper Is abominably unfeeling towards his wife. He does not recount a single Instance of being together with her In the entire novel* and reports that he met her obviously desperate attempts to prick him Into some kind of feeling—love or hate—with "Increasing tolerance." Strong implication 225

(especially given other Instances of Skipper's inability to love women) that Skipper drives his wife to drink, other men and self-destruction. But since we see and hear Gertrude only second-hand, we can never truly be sure. Skipper calls her "my weightless wife, a flower already pressed between leaves of darkness before we met" (2) and, as In the case o f The Lime Twig n a rra to r's d escrip tio n o f Margaret Banks as "a creature no one could love," we have no way to dispute his Judgment. What we can understand, thought axe the consequences of Skipper's perversely self-serving definition of love. Dismissing his wife and Miranda, he loves a daughter he can not touch, he loves Sonny, the black mess boy who symbolizes an agreeable domestication of all the dark powers Skipper has spent his life struggling against, and of course he is "most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self" (1). What all this boils down to is that Skipper loves that which he can work into hie dream of control over the world's forces of evil and death. A daughter who Is a latter day BVM, a house nigger, his own virtuous self—all satisfy necessary niches In the fantasy by which he defeats the death from which he has sprung. Skipper can wonder If he is somehow Involved In 226 the e v il th a t has dogged h is l i f e , can wonder I f the sn a il boy's cello helped make him the "child accomplice" to his father's suicide (7), or if he was the "unwitting tinder" precipitating Qassandra's jump from the lighthouse (197), but he can always evaporate from under the weight of his own misgivings, gliding victoriously up into the gaseous atmosphere of his cosmos-rlghtlng illusions. Blaming his father for all the death, he ends up trapped In another of his dramatic ironies. He says the shot "was meant for toe" but "went wild. It carried off instead dear Qassandra and hopeless, hysterical Gertrude" (3)—a statement that can only Imply that leaving Skipper alive somehow caused the deaths of his subsequent wife and daughter. This kind of ambiguity bears out Skipper's admission that he "will never really be able to conceal myself completely in a ll those scenes" (99) which comprise the dream-substance of his narrative. He wants "to restore a little of the tonality, to set to rights my passion" (150) concerning the violent events of the past, but the more he says the more his Idealized s e lf becomes implicated In the destructiveness and death it was meant to be a hedge against. Thus, in the cyclical nature of his destructive dream Skipper fulfills what by 227 now has become a ty p ical Hawkes m otif» the dreamer who trades his human life far a death-defying idealization of himself, the destructive fantaslzer whose victims axe willing victims. Having abstracted his self out of the capacity for feeling, he can laugh with his friend death, then, "nothing, free, only a closed heart in this time of no time" (173)* Skipper would have us believe In the s p iritu a l validity of his mythic Journey from the black Atlantic island with its evil Miranda to the timeless, paradise island with i t s pastoral warmth and regenerative q u a litie s . And while he does have at his disposal all the paraphernalia of an at least superficial mythic transformation and rebirth, there has been no inherent change in his destructive qualities. Hie often-discussed Qatallna Kate-Iguana scene, in which Skipper tries to pull the phallic lizard off of KateSs back but only succeeds In exacerbating the original problem, is illustrative of the continuing destructive power of his Illusion the more the virtuously heroic Skipper pulls, the more the animal holds on "In some terrible Inverse proportion to a l l the upward force" he exerts (10?) • Some readers—partlcularly those inclined to take Skipper straight— 2 2 8

see In this scene his final acceptance of the elemental forces of nature* but It Is more likely Just one more example of his alternately Inept and harmful attempts to Impose his dream on reality. Fbr In spite of his forced acceptance of the uncooperative Iguana, Skipper's principal transformation is that he has finally found a place with a modicum of pliability to his illusion of control over reality. He can finally be the boss. Lounging in his Plantation House, he can admit his latter day slaves in to kiss him at any timei he can take credit for Sonny's child i he can achieve passionless regeneration by the strange tut appropriate sequence of shooting frozen bull sperm Into cows, then meeting Catalina Kate to feel her bulging womb, as if his solitary act of artificial potency has somehow caused Kate to miraculously conceive. His imaginary island Is similar to Michael Banks's dream world at Aldington, for it is a place In which the illusion of free sex with and unquestioned power over exotic women seems true* Hawkes, who tends not to be coincidental in his Imagery, has Skipper frequently identified with birds (like Banks), and, mlrablle dlotu. enjoying the lime trees on the imaginary Island! The parallel is appropriate, since both men are q uintessential Hawkeslan 229 destructive dreamers. But whereas Banks chooses to Jump * tack Into time and death, Skipper Is content to enact the continuing dream-drama of his living sterility, to achieve death In time if not in space. He makes a point of his "time of no time" (1 6 2 ) In paradise, which contrasts with the "time that swept us all away" ( 1 9 0 ) in the reality of the Atlantic Island. But more significantly, Skipper has managed to exchange Impotence fo r power. To the n ativ es, he is ’Taster. . .Gift of God. Ecstasy” (100). There is "no mistaking me for anything but the leader now" ( 1 6 6 )— in spite of surrogate babies, gaping graves and Intractable lizards. Here, he can shed his clothes and impassively touch a pregnant woman's stomach because as the imagined owner of these people he no longer feels threatened by llbldlnal energy. He has exchanged the cold, willful Qassandra for the warm, pliable Gatallna Kate, the Impossible black haired Hiratvla for the docile black habited Sister Josle, and all his male threats and rivals have dissolved Into the obedient Sonny, faithful servant and cheerful instrument of vicarious sexual power. He has achieved that archetypal dream of the American romantic by retiring from the rigors of civilization with his dark friend i he has obscured the 2 3 0

i d e a l i t y of his impotence In the process of creating for us the Illusion of his power. Skipper's story seems both more and le ss than the alternatives he would allow us to choose from—more than a mere "trivial record of collapse," but not quite "the history of courage" he would have it be (162). For Skipper's world, like the real-ideal worlds Hawkes defines in the first three novels, is so textured with moral paradoses as to paralyze our Instinct to ccndenn that which we despise, or to approve that with which we are In sympathy. In trying to manipulate reality into a shape consistent with his Ulus lens, Skipper acquires guilt for the consequences of those illusions.

Gut he himself is a victim even ob he Is helping to create victim s. In the severity with which Skipper idealizes himself, creating with an almost schieophrenically simultaneous mixture of detachment and extreme subjectivity a vision of himself-os-god, he becomes part of a developing personality Hawkes seems to have been working with over the course 6 of several novels. He also anticipates the Insidiously Impenetrable Qyril of 2 2 £ Blood Oranges, especially In his attempts to achieve freedom from evil by willfully defining 23X and living an Idealized detachment of emotion signifying a static perfection in love. Skipper's boast that "in body, in mind, am I not lather the aggressive personification of serenity, the eternal forward d rift or handsome locomotion of peace itself?" (3 ) evokes almost exactly the perverse but more cannily controlled self-idealized godhood of the later Cyril. In the larger context of all the novels, Skipper becomes a member of th a t growing Hawkesian population (Zlzendarf, Ernst, the S heriff and h is M istletoe cowboys, Gap Leech, Michael Banks) of se lf-ld e a llz e rs who frame and live out imaginary worlds acutely, realized in their conflict of reality and ideality.

II

Whereas Skipper is consistently ludicrous In his Imagined godhood over his fellow men and women, Cyril of The Blood Oranges is far more powerful in the recognizable effect he has on others as a result of his idealized godhood. He is more potent a t forcing l i t e r a l conformance to h is 232 dream, to his sexual-aesthetic definition of love and of reality, and correspondingly far more effective than Skipper at creating a strength and perverse validity for his Idealized world* The Blood Oranges represents Hawkes's Ingenious exploitation of the sex novel, with hero Cyril being a kind of tireless performer a la the heroes of Henry Miller. In previous novels, Hawkes has applied his peculiarly personalized, mythic-cyclic vision to antl-reallstlo twists on the historical novel, on the American western, on the psychological th r ill e r , and on the American Innocent m otif. Now, the sex novel becomes the vehicle from which Hawkes derives perverse truths about love. Like Skipper, Qyrll-as-conslstent-narzator Is In complete control of the story we hear. Like Skipper's paradise island, Cyril's setting is vaguely situated and perpetually warm, now a seacoast village In the southern Mediterranean area. There,rone warm Idyllic day, Hugh, (Catherine and their three children arrive by accident, as it were, when their touring bus wrecks Into the village sewage canal. They are given housing and food by n arrato r Cyril and his wife, Fiona, who seem to have been leading a long, Idle, pastoral existence in a set of villas overlooking 233

the primitive village. Cyril and Fiona immediately move to take lovers out of the unexpected guest family, Cyril bedding Catherine the first night and Fiona trying, but succeeding only much later, to do the same with Hugh* What appears to be superficially a simple case of mutual adultery, or "swinging," to use a more contemporary term, gradually evolves Into a complicated confrontation between Hugh (with his tortured guilt feelings, his family possessiveness, his acute sense of cuckoldiy and historical doom) and Cyril (with h is Idealized notions of "sex-singing" and random lovo without possessiveness, complemented by h is Illy ria n landscape and his contempt for the "barbarian" past so prominent In Hugh's psyche). Hie struggle leads directly to several face-to-face confrontations between the two men, the result being that Cyril finally prevails on Hugh to sleep with Fiona—the act being Hugh's lost effort to maintain his self-respect—thus completing the loving foursome with the kind of aesthetically symmetrical precision Cyril so admires. But shortly thereafter, apparently still tortured by feelings of guilt and Inadequacy, Hugh hangs himself. Hugh's suicide is an act that completely sabotages the harmony of Cyril's idyllic existence, for it causes Catherine to go temporarily Insane (the state from which Qyrll Is reviving her as the novel progresses), and Fiona to take the three children and leave Qyrll and Illyria. It is Important to keep in mind that all this, with the exception of Catherine's cure, like Skipper's past misfortunes, has happened before the novel opens, and that Qyrll's narrative, like Skipper's, represents at least In part a prolonged, defiant defense of the validity and power of his Illyrian illu sio n . The landscape in which Qyril's story takes place is a mixture of lush vegetation and forbodlng, "barbarian* qualities. Ch the one hand, there are woods and grape arbors suitable to the quasl-mythic love games that take place there, while on the other, there are the primitive, inscrutable villagers, the excrement-ridden waters, and the abandoned fortress, suitable to Hugh's instincts for the anti-lyrical aspects of human existence, for pain, suffering, and the Inherited conventions deriving from an acceptance of human limitations. Ihe dichotomy of the vegetatlcn-reblrth archetype versus the sterility-death archetype is an analogue for the same archetypal dichotomy dramatized In the Qyril-Hugh conflict. Qyrll would have 2 3 5 the harmonious foursome spend a ll its time in languorous reclin e among the grape arbors and woods, o r cn the beach, while Hugh leads them on a trip down into the dangerous pit of history, an abandoned fortress in which he finds the chastity belt, symbolic as well as literal foil dredged up from the past to negate Cyril's lyrical, sex-singing illu sio n of lo re . The I lly r ia of The Blood Oranges, lik e the Illyria of Twelfth Night from which it is ironically derived, is an imaginatively conceived landscape, location of rather far-fetched love Intrigues, but location also of lamed late truths about illusions of love that are both easy and difficult to accept. To Cyril it is the proper place to realize his sex-singing Ideal of love, his "tapestry," the very objectification of his "map of love" (16?). Hugh is obviously a misfit within the context of the place's lyrical, dream-like qualities. Fiona at one point is said to have referred to him as her Malvolio, and, as Charles Iamb wrote of Twelfth Night's Nalvolio, "his morality and h is manners are misplaced in I lly r ia . He is opposed to g the proper levities. . .and falls in the unequal contest.H ibid Cyril, though he never admits it, is a kind of Orslno, mare in love with Love than with any woman, enchanted by the aesthetic, perfected sound of his own lyrical voice. He admits the existence of evil In Illyria, but characteristically finds It Irrelevant to his dream, frequently finding ominous things to be merely curious. He sees a "total Incongruity" between sex and Hugh's "old world" ways of Jousting with It by assembling a photographic collection of his peasant nudes ( 6 0 ). Why Interpose a collection of photographs between the self and the concrete realization of the Ideal? When the two of them come upon Rosella In the field, Cyril's Impulse Is to "'hunt her down'" ( 5 9 ). while Hugh's Is to take erotic thrill through the masochistically shielding Intermediary of his camera. To Qyrll, Hugh as well as the natives of the place are simply barbarians In superstitious slavery to the dictates of history. Seeing a death totem driven Into a haystack, he can not help but smile "at this poignant evidence of their archaic ways" (6 0 ) • His characteristic view of the villagers Is to depict them running half-dlstnactedly about uttering things like "croak pecnle" and "orespl fagag." He describes the village itself In dark, ominous terms that evoke it as a symbol:of the chaos and unconscious drives so prevalent in the reality-lllusion dynamics of the previous novels. It Is "that wet dark place" that has derived from 237

"ancient barbarians" ( 5 ) • 3be abandoned fortress In which Hugh finds the chastity belt with which he tries to put a grotesque stop to the affair between Catherine and Qyrll is similarly loaded down with the symbolic weight of the past. Cyril describes it as "the gutted shape of history" which seems "portentous* related In some way to our own presently idyllic lives" (118). As the four idyllers leave their sunny pastoral beach and descend into the "waxen blackness" of "Hugh's pit" (20^), the understandably reluctant Cyril senses the fortress's embodiment of the kind of human religio-psychic limitations his ideal is opposed to. He realizes* given Hugh's purpose for the trip* that they are descending into the "dark caves of the heart" and "self- imprisonment* which was what we appeared to be heading for* was hardly my own idea of pleasure" (189) • The whole trip becomes a kind of return into the womb and/or exploration forward into the realm of death. At the round entrance— womb or tomb?—are scrawled messages from dead lovers "'about the singing phallus'" ( 1 9 1 )—perhaps uncomfortable reminders of the time-bound nature of all sex-singing Illyrians— and the four of them descend through a hole covered with thama into the underground landscape of Hugh's sacrificlally 2 3 8 conceived version of love, the arena In which Hugh w ill attempt to cut off their sex-singing with "the dead breath of denial" (1 9 6 )* The two-fold nature of Illyria, then, objectifies the two kinds of love represented in the struggle between Cyril and Hugh* But the distinction can not remain simple, because each man contains within himself the principle he is trying to deny In the other. Consistent with Illyria's mythic quality, both Qyrll and Hugh become identified with a kind of archetypal Dionysian vegetation myth. Cyril frequently describes himself as a white bull In his tapestry of love, and Hugh as a kind of satyr, or goat-man. Traditionally, both the bull and the goat were representations of the god Dionysius, and both were sacrificed by the followers of 9 this vegetation deity during their orgiastic rites. Dionysius was supposed to have Invented wine, and there In Illyria is Cyril with his grape arbor, his ever-present glass of wine, his grape-tasting game, his head "crowned with fruit" ( 1 0 9 )* The classical Greek antecedents for Cyril's dream landscape abound. Hugh as the goat form of Dionysius is a kind of woodland vegetation deity, chasing in and out of the trees with Fiona, who herself is frequently described in terms 239 of faun Imagery (another form of woodland d eity associated with Dionysian rites)* The fact that both Cyril and Hugh are identified with Dionysian sacrificial animals anticipates one of the novel's final ironic truthsi that neither man will "win" In this struggle between human limitation and Id y llic freedom* Both w ill ultim ately have the principle he represents sacrificed to the love rite itself* Hugh ultimately rejects his role as satyr* but Cyril achieves a god-identlty that both recalls and sigilficantly expands the roster of human deities in Hawkes*s novels. An aging, sun-bronzed, large, athletic, blond man, he contrasts favorably (especially In his boastful, self-satisfied narrative) with the small, dark "barbarians"—actually nothing mors than somewhat backward villagers—running around at his feet* We frequently see him smiling at the pathetic, merely human shortcomings going on around him. He imagines the impression ha and Fiona (as "elegant woman" and "spectacular man" [2**]) make cn the villagers* And Indeed, when Hugh and Catherine first wreck their way Into the village, the inhabitants instinctively look to their resident American couple as the ones "with the authority to receive survivors" ( 3 3 ), Fiona c a lls him " 'th e p erfect man*" (107), and Qyril sees himself i with his silver-studded sandals, as the very embodiment of precious metal, as gold itself, in contrast with Hugh’s association with the color black. He and Fiona spend their days going "each to the altar of his choice” (1 7 ) t as i f to receive human sacrifices (like Hugh and Catherine) that happen onto their shares. But Qyrll becomes a god a t the expense of his humanity, like Hawke s’s other ideal-experiencers. He can constantly delineate precisely the ordinary human emotional struggles of his Intimates, while he himself either has none or chooses not to divulge them. Like the bull with which he Identifies on his tapestry, he is abstracted motion, purified life in stasis. Sitting In his grape arbor, about to lure Catherine into his bed, he Is a paradoxical, comic monstrosity of the physical purified into the abstraction of disembodied perception • . .there was the decided possibility that my massive oral cavity and the vast dark sockets of her invisible eyes were now groping toward each other in some sort of sympathetic identification, some warm analogy of bone and shadow. ( 1 0 7 ) Dissecting Catherine’s unspoken but obvious mental anguish as she 1b poised at the edge of adultery, he finds agreeable reassurance in the Interrogatory speculation that "at the 21*1 very moment of wading fran the absurd and dangerous canal tad some vague recognition of the headless god lolling In the guise of my composure overcome her m ortification and fear far her children?" (107) • Stylistically, th e psychically schizophrenic language In these last two passages can be traced back through the self-assured boasts of the Impotent Skipper on his paradise island, to William Bencher describing himself throwing his mother onto the bed, to Zlzendorf clinically describing his taking of Jutta In The Cannibal. The division of these characters Into two selves—one an acting self, one an Idealized, narrating self—is one of the key motifs figuring In Hawkes's dramatization of the cyclical struggle between reality and illusion In his navels. Qyrll literally diminishes his humanity by defining himself into the tapestry of his illusion, and by the time he has gotten around to narrating Hie Blood Oranges he is so ab stract there seems no center to him at alli he is a walking myth. He is a collection of functioning qualities that all derive from and circle back Into the central concern of his lifei his idealized, sex-slnglng conception of love with no strings attached. Trying to sustain literal perfection of love among the foursome, zkz he speaks to Catherine with "all w voices1* (117), and assures Hugh "from somewhere in the center of my chest" that the grape-tasting game is not silly (1 8 3 ) • As a reflective, rath er than a feeling god, who embodies the principle of frank sexuality, he tells Catherine that "'I can give you clarity, . .but not understanding'* (116). He functions, therefore he exists. He derives his reality from the fact that others' needs make him a presence In their lives, like Larry and Sybllllne In The Lime Twig, or like Catalina Kate on Skipper's Imaginary island, or Indeed, like any of the characters (Including themselves) Hawkes's dreamers manipulate In pursuing their illusions. Similarly, if Qyrll loses his Idealized self-definition, if Love casts him out of i ts tapestry, as i t seems to have done a t the point in time when the novel opens, all his god-like power is vitiated. Then, he has degenerated Into a shabbily-clad man In black (Hugh's color) making weekly trip s to the asylum on a broken down bicycle, an Impotent former lover who plays a new kind of "love* game with his servant In which he does not allow himself to touch her (i.e., denied the very physical essence of his former power), and must speak love-words to her in a language she does not understand. 2 * 0

Having by this time lost Fiona, who was the other half of his former Illyrian Identity, he must now woo the mite Catherine, who has the "power to help me speak for the past, to help me see the future," and who In her living death objectifies his own heart (If that's what you can

call it)—"only the Inert supine center of my life, the sun that neither sets nor rises" ( 1 3 )—i.e., the blood orange locked Into the frozen stasis of his dream. Ey this point, after the death of Hugh and the loss of Fiona, Qyril has, like his spiritual predecessors, actually become the living psychic museum of his own illusion. He can 8 til l bask in the dream's numb communion with his own guts, self-rlghteously boasting that he has never in his life experienced pain—moods, maybe, but never pain. Even death Is a mere game to the gods, and Qyrll is locked into the royal center of his Illyria in spite of all the anti-lyrical Hughs, the excremental barbarians, the skeptical readers. J u s t as Qyrll himself seems immune to pain, he consistently dismisses It In others, aesthetlclzlng it according to the amoral terms provided by his dream. Visiting the mutely mourning Catherine at the asylum, he observes that her "pain was her beauty" (12). In the midst of the 2W+

chaotic danger attending the arrival of Hugh and Catherine via their wreck Into the canal, he calmly remains on the tank noting "several different modes of Incongruity" In the situation ( 2 5 ). After finally drawing Hugh into his realm and confronting him with the necessity that he give In to his wish that he sleep with Fiona, he watches Hugh's painful Indecision, and notes with calm satisfaction the physical movement to the rhythms of the Inexorable logic of the aesthetic dreamt "And were the ligaments beginning to port, the flesh to tear? Was his breathing under control at last? Was he beginning to appreciate the tone of my argument?" ( 1 7 5 -6 ). Cyril's characteristic pose throughout the novel Is as the reposed, smiling observer who can with gelatinous patience transform the jagged ends of human reality Into the symmetry of an aesthetic whole. He is another one of Hawkes's artlst-figures whose own life constitutes the substance at the center of his artifice. At one point, somewhat puzzled by a deviation from his usual pattern of action after visiting Catherine's bed, he finds himself returning to her villa, but can only answer this seeming psychological disturbance with an aesthetlclzed, physical resignation 1 he continues "with another smile, a keener 3*5 appreciation of the weight of the silk now dragging down ay shoulders and brushing ay calves" (151)* His own villa is the objective epitome of this attitude* It is almost a fine art museum with its "thick white walls and timeless collection of vases* earthen pots, artistic tokens of harmonicas life" (155). The "harmonious life"—all of Cyril’s perceptions and actions can be seen deriving from this ideal, and his most monstrous qualities can be observed generating from this frequent, Innocent dream of all "civilized" men. Even spying on Hugh's most private, pathetic humiliations, as when he looks through a window to find him trying unsuccessfully to woo Catherine back to his bed, Cyril's reactions are exclusively designed to Judge the scene's significance for his tapestry. He identifies the probable source of Hugh's would-be love words as the couple's honeymoon (that "cheapest myth of childhood" [ 153])» and locates his own "consolations" from this obscene invasion of privacy as coming from the fact that Hugh at least "still wanted to assume his sentimental bestial shape" (15*0. His whole act becomes Justified because he wants to protect Fiona from Hugh ' 8 "self-betrayal." He takes an identical attitude when he stumbles upcn Hugh masturbating In the woods, seeing i t as a tragedy fo r Fiona 2k6

zather than for Catherine or for Hugh himself. For it Is Fiona's latest desire (and his own sense of symmetrical love) that will be sabotaged by Hugh's Isolated act of self- love. It Is Cyril's essence to constantly articulate the precise aesthetic dimensions In the actions of both himself and his fellow idyllers, and to deny such messy concepts as pain and suffering from his harmonious lis t of calm emotions. Like Hawkes's other ideal-seekers, and like the god In the myth he Invokes. Cyril lives his dreams Instead of sleeping them. He is always awakening from dreamless sleep and moving steadily Into a love-gap in someone else's life. He is very close to not being human at all (as we ordinarily understand the term), but to embodying a principle, a principle of pure sexuality uncluttered by the ordinary complications and moral consequences we associate with love. He is half fool drunk with his own self-idealization and half aging human sex god. In one of the many Ironic truths he speaks about himself, he describes his body as a 'headless god"—sex practiced as principle, after all, can function adequately enough with mere organs. He sees his own underwear as being "like the bulging marble skin of a headless god" ( 7 5 ) • There are mountains of this kind of ludicrous bravado In the novel—Cyril treats us to descriptions of his golden voice, his handsome, athletic figure, his stylish, sexy clothes, even his golden eyeglasses* It Is easy far a reader to become bored with a narrator so In love with himself. What Is harder to accept (but Just as undeniable) Is Cyril's power and sinister effectiveness, and, more significantly, the swiftness with which other characters oblige him, the terrible symmetry by which they demonstrate his truths. He embodies without complication the perenlally denied principle of the human libido. His voice is filled with the devouring abstraction and assertive smugness of the man supremely aware of the undenlabHlty of the principle he represents i But why voice what simply runs In the blood and fills the mind of any considerate nan who has sat with another man's wife on his lap or of any woman who has cast off prudery and tugged a t cloth and moved out among the trees? Only, I suppose, In periodic answer to nagging detractors, only for the sake of those who detest my convictions, scoff a t my theories, denounce my measured presence in the world of love, , • .Old and wheeslng detractors should curb their Judgment of a man who knows, after all, what he is talking about. ( 209 - 2 1 0 ) As the practiced voice of the "measured 11 llbldlnal principle, Cyril will glide Inevitably Into all lives, for there are always love-gaps, little Imperfections waiting to be filled 2M

with the concrete application of the dream made literal. He sees fidelity as the most "manly* of a ll virtues—but his version of it requires faithfulness to desire, to their aesthetic "quaternion," in contrast to Hugh’s brand of fidelity, the conventional husbandly kind derived from history, particularly from Christian tradition, implying possessiveness and exclusivity among marriage partners. Even a f te r Hugh's martyrdom to th is trad itio n , Q yrll is s till looking forward determlnlstlcally to his "own future in the electrified field of Love's art" (15). No grief, no pain, no evening chagrin. An electrical emotion is the perfect image fo r h is movement from human in to id eal. Thus, Qyril's totally aestheticized concept of love becomes the vehicle by which he blends his humanity with his dream. Throughout his life he has "simply appeared at Love's will'' (2)—it is the personified ideal that would enact any ritual of moral responsibility, not his own directed, faithful self. Although he admits his share of failures and mistakes with Fiona during "our mare than eighteen years of dreams and actuality," they are aesthetic ones, problems Involving some lack of synmetry in their destructive relations with another couple i 2k9

f o r Instance, th ere were the momentary but nonetheless bitter whispered confrontations over use of the bed In the master bedroom, brief spurts of anger about a sudden loss of form on the violet tennis court* And there were also Instances of deeper and more prolonged periods of threatened harmony, such as the nearly disastrous days of my love for a small young woman whose husband was one of the few men whose s p ir it and personality and entire body. . .Fiona found Intolerable. ( 5 6 ) He is free from the "rage and fear that shrivels your ordinary man at the first hint of the obvious multiplicity of love" (58). E|y co n trast, Hugh seems merely human* "fie was capable o f greed and shame and Jealousy" and "persecuted himself and begrudged me Catherine" when he realized the "true artistlo nature of our design" ( 5 8 ) • At one point Qyrll uses the term "quaternion" for the four of them, a math term that suggests a pure. Idealized precision and logic to their relationship and, according to definition, Is "an expression that Is the sum of four terms, one of which is real and three of which contain Imaginary unlts"^^—the perfect term to arise out of Cyril's massively egocentric Illusion. Accordingly, Qyrll's Imposition of his dream on us, along with the manner In which the other characters react to it, forces a complete reversal on conventional moral assumptions about love. If the relationship Involving himself, Fiona, Hugh and Catherine can become a "quaternion," 250

the resulting New World of electrical love Is naturally one In which faithfulness can exist without possessiveness* Willingly precipitating the destruction of a family, Qyrll can still boast that he is "not opposed to domesticity” (88 ). He merely, In all apparent sincerity, is Interested In absorbing the family into the aesthetic terms of his love- Ideal. With Insidious but Inescapable accuracy, he perceives that ”lt was X, after a ll, who was once mare touching flame to the Idea of the family and lighting anew the possibilities of sex In the domestic landscape. • • .1 was waiting fo r the parents to become lovers and the lovers parents” (8 9 ) * The dramatic irony of the flame metaphor here approximates the moral Irony of the novel. Catherine willingly takes Cyril as her lover, wishing only th a t Hugh would take Fiona to assuage her guilt. Who is victim? Who is victimlaer? Cyril's reaction when Hugh tries to reclaim his wife by- putting a chastity belt on her (thus denying both Cyril and the principle he represents) Is precisely the opposite

% of guilt t Catherine and he have been having "perfectly normal relations” since the family's first night In Illyria, and Hugh has neither the right nor the ability to Interfere. Guilt, for tyrll, is another one of those silly barbarian 251 rennants defiling the beauty of his Illyrian landscape* His solipslstlc defense of Catherine and himself against responsibility for Hugh's death is apparently decisive In bringing Catherine out of her mourning and back into the electrical field of his illusion. Hugh's "private moods," he reassures her, "had run counter to the actualities of our foursome, so that his alien myth of privacy had established a psychic atmosphere conducive to an accident of that kind. Hugh's death hinged only on himself" (211). Qyrll has "no regrets" (5 0 ) over the affair, merely some residue of "aching candor" (6 ) over Catherine's "childish" (8 ) temporary refusal to speak to him. Unlike Hugh, Cyril would deny the necessity of suffering. Whereas Hugh is moodily fascinated with death, Qyrll mocks it, or finds it irrelevant to the aesthetio considerations of his life. Like so cany of Howkes's dream- experlencers, Cyril confronts the problem of suffering and death with a set of emotions completely numbed by the process of living out an illusion. As Hugh agonizes over what to do about the impending dissolutions of both marriages, Cyril answers him with "only patience, tolerance, my systematic personality" (174). Like the tolerant Skipper, he has cut

1 252 off his self from the mortal necessities of history. To him, the skeleton of a child Flcrn pays such reverence to * In the village church is merely a "grinning relic" ( 2 0 ). He believes In no myths but his own true physical one* During Meredith's solenn funeral for her dog. he observes that he has never believed "In the grief of children" ( 211*), and even defiles what he sees as a "makeshift ceremonial affair" by playing the role of a mock priest, swinging a cross at the rear of their procession (215)* Death to Cyril is no mysteryi It is simply Irrelevant. He can calmly speculate on whether he himself is dying after he becomes Impotent. He can even reminisce about Hugh's coffin to the still mourning Catherine, confessing that "'1 guess I like endings'" (12) even as he freshly anticipates his latest possibilities. As the archetypal foil to Cyril's illusion, Hugh moves to the rhythms of the past. His frequent Identification with traditional Christian mythology suggests the terms of his opposition to Cyril's own ideal of himself as a Dionysian god. But, as the Hugh-satyr motif suggests, there is a split in Hugh's identity between his powerful fascination with and role In Illyria and his equally powerful fascination 253 w ith the n ecessities of tra d itio n . The manner In which this split Is dramatized, not only In terms of Hugh's life but In tenns of a ll the thematic movement In his struggle with Cyril, suggests the moral paradox resulting from this classic struggle between illusion and reality. As part Christian myth, Hugh actually identifies himself as a Christ figure (16), and Cyril portrays him at several points in grotesquely distorted terms derived from C hristian mythology* His face resembles a stone Saint P e te r's (3 1 ), and he has even come rolling into Illyria mlsslonary-style, nthls ta ll hero who had come to us over the same mountains once crossed by the barbarians" (3*0. In his lonely agony he becomes a sacrificial lamb ("And Hugh is the man who died for love, not me" [ 3$]), and at his death nysterlous winds blow across Illyria, mirroring the disturbances after Christ's crucifixion. Cyril locates Hull's amputated arm cynically as the wooden arm gesturing in comic incongruity from the pulpit in the v illag e church. As Hugh's "missing am” (32)* this thing becomes a significant symbol for the ironic effect Hugh has on life In Illyria. To Cyril, it is a "comic miracle, . .the wooden hand that no one would ever hold" (22), so th a t eventually i t becomes a kind of o ssified , mocking embodiment of Hugh’s misplaced phallic power. With true artistic circularity, Cyril takes this arm from the church after Hugh's death and throws it into a cistern near his villa, where it remains under the slack, excrement-ridden waters of the past, a pear tree growing above it. Wooden and useless in life, it assumes an ironic generative role in death. Embodying as he does Christian moral assumptions, Hugh sees precisely the opposite relationship between nan and fidelity that Cyril does. To him, It is "'only natural1" that "'manhood rebels at infidelity'" (177). He uses his role as head-of-family to try to assert himself against Cyril's encroaching version of "domesticity." His idea of love implies possessive conmitment, and an awareness of evil—the kind of "crude temperament" ( 1 3 6 ) quintessential^ a n tith e tic a l to the harmony o f C y ril's tableau. In physical terms, Hugh Is deformed, craggy, weather-beaten, and sick. There is no hope that his flesh can approximate the art-god nature of Cyril's. He has "no eye for the sex-tableau" (43) because sex is not a harmonious tableau for him. It Is a mystery, like death, that he has not solved. He thus can only ruin Cyril's idyl. He farces Cyril to change his 255 artlstlo metaphor for their foursome-love from a "tapestry" to a "metaphysical circle" (118), for he provides the restrictive synmetry of time to the no-season, unendingly linear map of Illyria. That la why, to Cyril, "Love never had so fierce an antagonist" as Hugh ( 2^0 ), for Cyril's love and Hugh's love are two antithetical principles in eternal tension, and Cyril's Illyria built on top of the ancient village is one more landscape for their cosmic standoff* Hugh has history In his guts (Jpst as Cyril has a dream In his), birthing with comic suddenness one day, emerging dripping from a "canal that had once been choked with the bodies of dead barbarians" (29). And he sabotages Cyril's idealistic dream of Illyria by descending Into the "hell" of the abandoned fortress, retrieving the medieval chastity belt he has already dreamed of, and traglcomically shutting off the outraged Cyril from Catherine in mock restoration of the violated world order. Cyril's dream Just can't bg. But as Hugh's ro le as woodland sa ty r suggests, the tension between the two kinds of "fidelity” exists within his own consciousness as well as In the larger context of Illyria. He is frequently described In terms evocative of this struggle, as when Cyril notes his "saintly goatish 256

face" (31) upon the family's arrival In Illyria* a phrase that suggests both aspects of Hugh's conflicting mythic— and psychic—Id e n titie s. Ihe descriptions sometimes merge with devil Imagery, as when Cyril observes his "black sylvan whisper" and "his hand, that serpent's heal" (59) • 5hese q u a litie s complement his "barbarian" nature. As he and Cyril Indian wrestle, &tgh's hand is a "claw" in Cyril's reminiscent speculations, "as if in same anolent combat his upraised arm was dripping with raw meat and bloody bone, a t any moment he might open his mouth and shriek" (86-7)* The resulting unresolved clash within Hugh between his Christian sense of "fidelity" and his Dionysian sense of "fidelity" produces the ultimate and logical sterility of death i he is found hanging with a photo of one of his peasant nudes s till locked in his hand. While alive, Hugh's sexual coranunlon tends to occur e ith e r by himself o r in ironically symbolic terms such as the scene in which he finds the chastity belt by thrusting his phallic torch Into the hole at the center of the deepest part of the abandoned fortress. For Hugh* the mysteries of sex and death are connected, If not identical In their seductive inscrutability. Qyril notes that Hugh chooses the very place "where he himself 257 had once sprawled dreaming his naked dream" (216) to bury Meredith's dog. Death will attend Hugh's seed (his suiolde comes shortly after his night with Fiona), and, In appropriate paradox, his "missing" wooden arm w ill produce an Ironic live pear tree after he is gone. But Just as Cyril confronts Hugh with the truth of his Dionysian Ideal, Hugh forces Cyril to confront its opposite. The two men seem locked In a circular ritual, a ceremony In which their respective self-myths cancel out each other. Which is In fact what happens i Cyril keeps Qxtherlne, but, for reasons undisclosed (age? loss of Fiona? traumatic events?) he loses his identity as a sex-singer. He becomes impotent, reduced to speaking unintelligible love words to Rosella, his "barbarian" maid, and to looking forward to a future of "sexless matrimony" with Catherine. The time to which Hugi is enslaved gives chastity its victory after all, belt or no belt. During their final confrontation in the grape arbor, Hugh Is convinced that Cyril doesn't understand the seriousness of the situation, which proves true. For Hugh's suicide (a result of his inability to transcend into Cyril's dream), while delivering Catherine to Cyril, also removes Fiona from Illyria, In a sudden 2 5 8 s h ift from her ro le as woodland goddess of the dawn, she becomes the mother of Hugh's children and leaves Cyril. This transformation becomes a factor in Hugh’s ironic victory over Cyril. Par Cyril's impotence coincides with Fiona's departure from Illyria. The tapestry turns to shreds. In his ironically sacrificial death, Hugh denies Cyril the goddess who has consistently breathed life into his illusion. Within th is context, Hugh's puzzling conment early in the novel that Fiona has "castrated” Cyril acquires its own tru th . A fter Hugh's death, Cyril becomes "human," and virtually assumes the love qualities of his farmer antagonist. He is forced into "chastity," and even takes over Hugh's collection of peasant nude photographs. So Cyril and Hugh offset each other, vitiating each other's myths, moving mutually towards sterility and death. Cyril as much as admits this fact in describing the group's discovery of the chastity belt. He lamed lately senses it as some kind of bond between himself and High, "as if I myself had sought it and found it and inflicted it on all four of us, silly and pathetic and yet monstrous memento of Hugh's true attitude toward all of our well- intended loves" (201*). Later, removing the chastity belt 259

from Catherine, he can even with comic irony see himself as Hugh's accomplice for the way he can appreciate the gadget's erotic potential* Cyril destroys Hugh's husband and family myth, but Hugh destroys Cyril's sex myth, particularly by denying him Fiona* Like Skipper, Cyril exposes the tender underside of his case during the-course of his narrative. Beneath his glossy exterior is a xather chlld-llke personality that is almost inert without Fiona's potent Illyrian presence* He is constantly called "boy" and "baby" by Hugh and Fiona, and Fiona frequently has to tell him to keep his mouth shut far fear of spoiling things with Hugh and Catherine. In the one sexual scene with Fiona that he describes, Cyril is almost completely passive, being seduced and brought to life by Fiona. And on the night he first takes Catherine to bed, he has to interrupt the proceedings and go back to his own villa to get his pajamas and silk dressing gown before getting on with it* Cyril at his best is only an ironic god, like Hawke s's other dream exper lencers. Furthermore, there is a suggestion that it is Fiona's boredom with Cyril's perfected love-self that is the original spark for their affairs with Hugh and Catherine. As they wait for the new couple to come and visit on the first day, it is Fiona's 2 6 0 single-minded anticipation that gives tone and direction to the suspense* "Ate they coming?" "Not y et, I guess," "Cyril? Are they staying away from us on purpose?" "It's only been a few hours, more or less," "It's been a day, a whole day," "Perhaps they Just don't want to Intrude," "Cyril? Give me a kiss." "You're not the least bit interested In kissing old Cyril. Why pretend?" "You're right, baby. How did you know?" (173-9) As a perfect lover, Cyril will take Catherine to clear the way far Fiona to take Hugh* Similarly, he says he would give up Catherine at a word from his wife, but resists Hugh's similar desire to the death. As child-man, his true ro le seems with children, although oven they become boxed with him a f te r a while. In one scene, watching the three daughters while the other adults are busy elsewhere, he fixes flower crowns fo r them a l l , naturally reserving the best one for himself, "'God, you're selfish,'" Meredith tells him as he idealizes his image in the farm of "the familiar and freshly tumed-out man become the flower god at play" (165)* As is the case with Skipper, Cyril mitigates the monstrous idealization of himself with the comedy of unintentional self-parody. And in his constitutional inability to admit the existenoe of evil and guilt, Cyril is a comic 2 6 1 man-child, forever at play on into his fifties and beyond. Cyril and Hugh are victims of each other, a fact that anticipates the moral paralysis deriving from the shifting victimization involved with the novel's reallty- illuslon motif. Cyril becomes Fiona's victim, Hugh becomes the victim of Cyril and Catherine, and of Fiona (who wants him for her very own), Catherine becomes the victim of Cyril's persistence and of Hugh's recriminating self-destruction, Fiona becomes the victim of Hugh's hope-killing dalliance with her, and the children, as in all of Hawkes's novels, become the ever-present participating victims in all the adults' games of illusion. And just as Cyril and Hugh negate each other in their exchange of wives, the women themselves exchange archetypal roles t Fiona re-entering time, forsaking her woodland goddess life to become a mother outside of Illyria, Catherine going from pliant maternal figure to idyllic mistress. All these shifting roles and viotim-stances demonstrate once again the key cyclical dream -reality dynamlo working throughout Hawkes's novels, and emphasize his texturing of the moral stasis Inherent in the mutually cancelling properties of the novel's antagonists. Cyril gathers all of reality, including himself. 2 6 2

Into the Illusion of an aesthetic pattern* He Is the same' artist trying to transcend his self into art that Is observable at least Implicitly In each of Hawkes's dreanwexperiencers. l35ie ultimate aesthete, he proves once again the awesome destructiveness of living totally In terms of a purely abstracted, a r t i s ti c d efin itio n o f life* While he proclaims his "Interest In coherence and full circles" ( 225), he denies the natural cycle itself In his no-season Illyria and aestheticized abstraction of suffering and death* His illusion, In constant tension with reality, Is necessarily contradictory—another point of continuity between himself and Hawkes's previous dreamers. He Instinctively Identifies with the a e sth e tic symmetry of the asylum where Catherine Is housed, as I f madness were the lo g ical re su lt o f th is cosmic contradiction* He constantly poses as a smiling* disinterested onlooker* even though we see him seriously. Intimately Involved In natters of life and death (to borrow a phrase from Skipper)* Events simply don't Jibe with his Idealization of them. A self-defined smiling god, he has to rest on the shoulders of his two women as an eagle (a "reminder of terror" ) swoops towards them from the sky. He can glory In victory over Hugh's "possesslveness" 263

even as he refuses to l e t go of Catherine. He would become timeless by following the siren song of his Idealized version of love In a warm paradise* But the dreams of too many others Intersect with his, and time and loss round off his Illusion according to a necessity that can't die. Living in late chaste companionship with Catherine, they undergo an apparent re b irth ceremony as the v illage launches a new boat—a regeneration, that Is, derived from Cyril's barbarian opposites, and presided over by an old., deformed goat-like man strangely reminiscent of Hugh. In other words, h is symbolic '" s ta rtin g over"* ceremony (133) becomes actualized by principles he has all along accepted only as Interesting or charming irrelevancles. It also seems significant that this potentially climactic scene comes not at the end of Cyril's narrative, where it might cleanse him and the reader of events comprising a destructive Illusion, but right In the middle, with much dark material and an Inconclusive ending ahead of It. Cyril's Illusion, momentarily sprung from time like all the other dreams, Is finally located as Just another Incident In the continuing dream of history Itself. The winds blow away "the last shreds of possessiveneas* (155) for which Hugh died as well as the shreds of Cyril's tapestry. FOOTNOTES TO CHAFER FIV E

*AU page references to Second Skin are from the New D irections Faperbook Edition (New York, 19&f). ^It is likely that it can* since the fetus is described by Miranda as being two months old, which coincides with the elapsed time between the boat trip and her suicide* ^Biids, symbolic of spiritualization, of the flight of the human soul beyond the limitations of the earth, accompany Skipper everywhere. They appear outside his window on both islands, he fantasizes their trapped presence within his forever suffering breast (2), he mistakes the snowball attack os a flock of wild birds in "unnaturalM attack, and they accompany him a t night on h is paradise island. h See, for example, Tony Tanner*s Cltv of Words (New York, 1971)» 218-229, and Anthony C. Santore, "Narrative U n reliab ility and the Structure of Second Skin." in Studies in Second Skin, ed. John Graham (Columbus, Ohio, 1971 )* 8>-93* ^Skipper probably knew about Fernandez's homosexuality, for Cassandra*o mentioning of it sends him into a sweaty panic, as if his own guilt were somehow connected with his foreknowledge of that fact, ^See Hawkes's comment about the relationship between Hencher and Skipper in John Enck, "John Hawkesi An Interview," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. VI (1965), 150*

TaU page references to The Blood Oranges are from the Hew Directions Hardback Edition (New York, 1971)* ®"0n the Character of Malvolio," reprinted in W illiam Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or. What You Will, ed. Herschel Baker (New York, 19&5). 172. ^See S ir James George Frazer, The Golden Bcuah. Che Volume, Abridged Edition (New York, 1951). W-455* ^W ebster's Hew World Dictionary of the American language, ed. David B. Guralnlk (New York, 1970), 11 63. CHAPTER S IX * CONCUJSHW

John Hawkes's novels probe closed worlds, yet his characters, made of parts of ourselves, pull us Into their traps. His people make quiet but crazed strikes against the barrier that holds them within the small, mean, finite things of existence. They embody acts that try to be large, but In fact there Is never any true transcendence In their lives, for while they achieve certain strategies of repose within their Imaginations, they never successfully leap beyond the things of l i f e Into inclusion In a la rg e r harmony. Ernst In The Cannibal re je c ts the fhther-Hatherland complex that feeds on human beings, but his resulting would-be skyward martyrdom Is contaminated by the la s t minute appearance of CJld Snow, the "devil" still living and fighting In the carnage of the German myth. So he dies, spared of sainthood, his agony translated Into a toothache by his wife Stella, who herself is receding Into the dream of German history. Qap Leech In The Beetle Leg Is a devil to the specious god-makers of Clare, but even his virtuous realism becomes

265 a vehicle for the defeat of Illusion. He finds that medicine Is no more an answer than purltanlsm to the steady rhythm of time by which a l l l i f e moves. Michael Banks in The Lime Twig forsakes the mundane fla t and wife for the sex and money promised by the Golden Bowl a t Aldington, only to find the heaven of his clockless Illusion more unbearable than the hell of a return to time. His wife Margaret, at first the victim to his dream, ends up realizing brutal completion for her own domestic fantasies. And both Skipper In Second Skin and C yril in The Blood Oranges attem pt a t the cost of their humanity to sustain Idealized versions of love In worlds redundantly alike in their slavery to the regularity of suffering and death. But in spite of the characters1 movements through to the dark sides of their dreams, they do not attach redeeming significance to this progression. Abandoned at the edge of an abyss, clinging to an almost skeletal sanity with the tendons of their muscular Imaginations, they exist. In place of any kind of Illumination or redemption far his characters, Hawkes presents a cyclic tension, an eternal movement back and forth between reality and illusion. The characters* dreams end in spite of themselves, not because of any inherent perceptions they come to about the destructive or impossible nature of their fancies. Like the moving dam in The Beetle Leg, time acts slowly, almost imperceptibly, to return Hawkes's characters to an organic world of reality that has scarcely realized their absence, and from which their brothers and sisters must inexorably depart into new, but old, very old, dreams. It Is this cycllo quality, then, of departure into and return from a ll sorts of dreams, that makes "redemption" an Irrelevant concept to apply to Hawkes's novels. Fbr within the context of a vision that consistently modes its own created moral opposites, morality Itself eventually becomes synonymous in its abstracting, rigid quality with the perfected ideals Hawkes vitiates. To look for a moral code in Hawkes's novels is to become an ironic Zlzendarf, or a Cyril in disguise. The utter consistency of this vision from novel to novel is enhanced by the many recurring Images th a t keep appearing In the context of the characters' quests. These images help to create a continuing spiritual as well as physical landscape, resulting in the sense of an Integrated vision that informs the whole of Hawkes's artistic stance. 2 6 8

Frequently the language evokes oedipal or oral-anal fantasies that tend to define the characters Into a texture of de terrain- • istlcally Freudian action. The prominent bird imagery becomes another principle of continuity, particularly on the many occasions when the birds appear siren-like outside characters* windows (as happens In The Cannibal. The Lime TV}p:. and Second Skin). The dance becomes a frequently recurring ritual evoking a feeling that the characters are enacting a stylized, predetermined drama, that their quests, as is suggested by the mythic and literary allusiveness associated with them, are part of a large, cyclic, recurring, Inescapable, ultimately mindless pattern, The bomber crashing In the laundry court in The Lime Twig recalls the bomber In The Cannibal that falls on Stella's mother as she is shopping i and these two novels become further mutually complementary when Sydney S ly ter's vision of "lig h t returning to the faces of heroic stone" (3 ) in The Lime Twig re c a lls the German avenue of stone Heroes which provides a momentary life and passion for Ernst as he fights for entry Into the German nythlo state. And In both of these novels Hawkes uses the dislocation of war to accompany the internal, himan psychic dislocation, with no sense at all of which, 269

If either, cams first. In all of the novels, clothes imagery becomes evocative of what is happening to the characters* identities. We frequently see female underclothing impaled on harsh, lagged objects (The Qannlbal. The Lime Twig. Second Skin) , and In The Beetle Leg and The Blood Oranges the ritualistic donning and removal of clothes are associated with the characters* acting out of imaginative identities. Trains appear in both The Qannlbal and The Lime Twig, and In both cases usher characters Into lands of violence and death. The lime tree, useful as a snare for birds, appears In the "paradise” worlds of both Lime Twig and Second Skin. And the Horst Wessel lied, anthem of the Nazis, appears In both The Qannlbal and Second Skin to evoke roman tic myths that exercise magnetic attraction for the characters. There are frequent Images of rubber (The Lime Twig. Second Skin) and metal (The Qannlbal 1 that are used to do violence to the bodies of characters who have entered dream worlds to the point of no return. And In every novel appear widows and children. The widows appear to be the women le ft alive after the men have been destroyed by their quests. The children become both victims of the adults' dreams and participators in those dreams (e.g., even Meredith in The

1 270

Blood Oranges, so antagonistic to Cyril’s mythic pose, accepts the flower-dream Cyril offers her). But the paradox with which we began—the consistently ironic creation of characters who are themselves artificers shaping reality into the perfection of their dreams—leads to the paradox with which we must conclude. For by continually inventing artist-like characters and then structuring them into the texture of his artifice-destroying vision, Hawkes straddles the abyss of the meaninglessness of existence w ith not even the pose of a r tis tic meaning to consistently anchor his vision. In cyclically inventing and then destroying his characters' strategies against reality, he ultimately implies the pure irrelevance of art Itself to any enduring system of created significance. He feeds the reader's cultural (literary, mythic, archetypal) assumptions Into the grinder of his novels as he consistently reaffirms man's dreaming and then destroys the content of his dreams. In each of Hawkes's novels, oppositions grow into apparently significant battles, into conflicts of world views upon which something of cosmic importance seems to hinge, only to have their hard terms vitiated under the glare of the author's dismantling vision. But Hawkes ultimately 271

oust Include himself-as-artlat within the terns of his destructive vision, far no author who deals so openly with artlficer-characters can fail to do so. Be has written that "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.** In a sense, Hawkes is, like his comic-pathetic character dap Leech, "the dlsmantler of everything that flew or walked or burrowed at the base of a tree" (The Beetle Leg. 151)* His imagination can not help but ultimately participate In the destructive vision that necessitates the dismantling of the significance of art Itself. But—again like Qap Leech—Hawkes Is also a chronic healer, the grinning outcast doomed to returning periodically, giving miraculous birth to marginally salutary words no one wants to hear, lh e healing comedy throughout the novels both enhances and makes bearable the essential themei fo r ironic gods, even though they have sparked powers into existence that revolve mortally out of relation with any possible harmonious reality, are always funny when it becomes apparent they can be nothing but human. At odds with their limitations, his characters try to make liberating gods out of parts of their selves, and become mere piecemeal 2 ? 2 beings i schlzophrenlcally unable to sustain the flawed perfection of their time-defying dreams. And all the while their creator grins, and Invents, and destroys, and grins. 273

Fom am to chapter sec

* "Notes on The Wild Goose Chase. ” The Kassachusetta Review. Ill (1962), 783. LIST OF WORKS CCttSUUH)

Bryer, Jackson. "John Hawkes," Critiquei Studies In Modem Fiction. VI (rm 1963), 89-94 CBibliography;] . Chase, Richard. "Myth as Literature," In Myth and Kethodi Modem Theories of Fiction, ed. James E. Killer, J r . Lincoln, Nebraska* I960, 127-1*0. C lrlo t, J . E. A Dictionary of Symbols, tran s. Jack Sago, New York, 19o2. Creeley, Robert. "Hbtf To Write A Novel," New Mexico Quarterly. XXII (Sunnier 1952). 239-2*H. B iel, Leon. Modem Psychological Novel. New York, 196*> Titevised Edition) • Edentaum, Robert I . "Join Hawkes 1 The Lime Twig and Other Tenuous Horrors," The Massachusetts Review. VII (1966), **62-**75« EUman, Richard and Feidelscn, Charles, Jr., eds. Tlw Modem T radition. New York, 1965* Ehck, John. "John Hawkes 1 An Interview." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary L iteratu re. VI (1965), 141-155. Fiedler, Leslie A. "Introduction." The frlme Twig. New York, 1961, vil-xiT. ______. Love and Death In the American Novel. New York, I9 6 6 (Revised Edition; . Frazer. S ir James George. The Golden Bough. New York, 1951 (Abridged Eiitian). Frohock, W. M. "John Hawkes*s Vision of Violence," Southwest r •: Review. L (Winter 1965). 69-79- Frye, Northrop. "Tie Archetypes of Literature," In Mvth and Mat hod. l*J*+-l62. 275

L IST OP WORKS CONSUMED

Graham, John. "Johi Hawkes i Ch His Novels," The Massachusetts Review. VII (1966), 449-461. . ed. Studies In Second Skin. Columbus, (M o, 1971. Guexard, Albert J. "Introduction." The Cannibal. New York, 19^9, lx-xx. . "The Prose Style of Join Hawkes," C ritique» Stales ia Modem Fiction. VI (r-bn 1963 ), 19-29. Hasson, Ihab. Radical Innocence» Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. New York, 1966 (Paperback Edition). Hawkes, Jo in . The Beetle Leg. New York, 1951* ______. The Blood Oranges. New York, 1971. . The Cannibal. New York, 19^9. ______. "Flannery O'Connor's Devil," The Sewanee Review. LXX (Summer 1962), 395J *07- . The Innocent Party. New York, 1966. ______. The Lima Twig. New York, 1961. ______. Lunar Landscapes. New York, 1969* . "Notes on Hie Wild Goose Chase," The Massachusetts Review. I l l (Sumner 1962), 784-738, . Second Skin. New York, 1964. . "The Universal Pears," American Review 16, ed. Theodore SaLotaroff. New York, I 9 73 . Lamb, Charles. "On The Character of Halvollo," In William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or. Whut You Will, ed. Herschel Baker. New York, I 965 , 172-174-. 276

L IS T OF WORKS CONSULTED

Matthews, Charles. "The Destructive Vision of John Hawkes," Critiquei Studies In Modem Fiction. VI (Rail 1963) * 33-52. Oberbeck, S. K. "John Hawkes 1 The Smile Slashed by a Razor," In Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Harry T. Moore. Garbondale, I llin o is , 19$*, 193-20**-, Oldernnn, Raymond M. Beyond the Wasteland! The American Novel In the Nineteen-Slxtles. New Haven, Connecticut, 1972. P o lltz e r, Heinz. "Five Novels," Commentary. X III (May 1952), 5 ^ UIncludes review of The Beetle Leg f . R eutlinger, D. P. "The Cannibal! The R eality o f V ictim ," C ritique 1 Studies in Modem Fiction. VI (fell 1963)7 3 0-37. Rovlt, Earl. "The Fiction of John Hawkes* An Introductory View," Modem F iction S tudies. X, 150-162. S ale, Roger. "What Went Wrong?" The New York Review o f Books. XVII (Oct. 21, 1971)* 3 C Includes review of The Blood Oranges! • Scott, Henry E., Jr. "'The Terrifying Similarity* 1 The Themes and Techniques of John Hawkes" (DA 29 1 8 ? 8 A - 79A, W isconsin). Scholes, Robert. The febulators. New York, 1967* Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or. What You W1U. ed, Qerschel Baker. New York, 1965. Thrcner, Tony. Cl tv of Words 1 American F iction 19 50-1970. New York, 1971* 277

L IS T OP WORKS CONSULTED

Trachtenberg, Alan. "Barth and HaWkesi Two Fabulists," Critique* Studies in Modem Fiction. VI (Fhll 1963). 4-18. Warner, John M. "The1 Internalized Quest Romance* In Hawkes* The Lime Twig." Modem Fiction Studies. XIX (Spring 1973). 89-96.

Addition* A new book on Hawkes, Frederick Busch, Hawkes* £ Guide to His Fictions (Syracuse, 1973). appeared too late to consider during the preparation of this study.