January 14, 2008

The Cannibal (1948)

John Hawkes (1925-1998)
The Cannibal (New Directions, 1949)

Roll #9 is 2332: The Cannibal by John Hawkes.

So can we talk about that cover? That is the most unacceptable cover I have ever seen. A swastika is always gonna be pretty rough going, but there can be mitigating circumstances. But in combination with a motorcycle? Forget about it. The effect is only bolstered by the typeface and the layout. And frankly the title doesn’t help either. This cover seeks to be offensive and succeeds, wildly. Way to go, cover designer Gilda Kuhlman. Note that Gilda Kuhlman (nee Hannah) was the second wife of Roy Kuhlman, whose first wife had been Ellen Raskin. I’m not sure what that’s worth but it’s interesting to me. Book design was a small world, I guess.

So I got assigned this book by the randomizer, found it – to my pleasure, in a nice old used copy at Westsider Books – and then had to immediately hide it until I could make a plain brown wrapper. I think I ended up using a page from a catalog with pictures of chairs on it. Did it not occur to Gilda Hannah Kuhlman that making your book cover scream “I AM AN ACTUAL NEO-NAZI” is a way to prevent people from wanting to buy it? If I saw a dude reading this book on the subway I’d stand somewhere else.

Also, to gradually approach the subject of the book itself, this is a terrible cover for this book. There is a motorcycle in it, true, and it is set in war-torn Germany (sort of). But it all takes place in a dream and a haze; the Nazi party isn’t really mentioned as such – I don’t think the word appears – and swastikas play no role that I can recall. Human degradation is the theme of the book, and the ghost-town shadow-puppet experimental-literature fantasyland “Germany” in which it takes place has very little to do with, and is poorly represented by, a big fat swastika. This itself might be a count against the book – in fact, I’m going to say it is – but the book still has to take ideological precedence over its own cover.

But yes, you might well ask: if this book isn’t actually or specifically about what happened in Germany during World War II, why is it “about” that in a dreamy way? And is it not perhaps a disservice to recent history, and to human tragedy, to use it as fodder for an aggressive avant-garde-ism; is it not, shall we say, in poor taste? Or, shall we say, obnoxious?

Or shall we say student-y. We shall probably not say the non-word “student-y” but we shall say that this book has the grim stubbled quality of the ambitious, self-regarding collegiate experimentalist. In a professorial introduction by Albert J. Guerard, we hear that this talented young writer has forged a genuinely new style that requires careful consideration and acclimation. What we do not hear, but what is true, is that this young writer is Albert J. Guerard’s student at Harvard and that Guerard has arranged for his publisher friends to publish this book, which will launch his student’s career. I’m not saying that such circumstances could never produce a work of true greatness. Nonetheless I found this information helpful, when I came by it, in giving some shape and category to my dissatisfactions.

I would esteem this a very worthy submission indeed, if I were a writing professor, and I would encourage this student fully. On the other hand I would not know exactly how to go about helping him improve.

Hawkes – who, please note, was 24 when he wrote this – had flunked his way out of his first year at Harvard, had then become an ambulance driver in Europe during the war, and then had a few years later eventually returned to finish his undergraduate education. The tone and subject of the book are derived from his war years, as are some descriptions in the book of various specific horrors. For example, there is a description of a chicken being killed in someone’s bare hands; this apparently is something Hawkes had occasion to do under some semi-desperate circumstances during his service. His basic artistic conception is perfectly sound: this kind of immediate, personal horror is both a nightmare symbol and actual symptom of the war as a whole. One could write a book on the ravages of war entirely in nightmare mode.

The problem is that he purports to have historical perspective even though the technique is utterly ahistorical. The book is in three parts: 1945, 1914, and then 1945 again. In 1914 we see the characters younger and get a smattering of World War I references, including a quasi-Kaiser and an abstract “reenactment” of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Then we return to their degraded World War II selves. The heavy implication is that we are learning something about how Germany came to be what it is, the ghosts of history that walk through the present. But unless I missed some subtle historical thesis – which I may have – Hawkes’s sense of history is actually just as impressionistic and limited in real depth as everything else in the book. All the historical specifics are a sophomoric pretense to an understanding that he doesn’t actually have. What he has written is a dream-impression of a ravaged town (and a contrasting impression in flashback); the insinuation that the whole thing is girded by an elaborate scheme of penetrating historical symbolism is, I suspect, just a smokescreen, which a more mature writer would have been confident enough to do without.

Okay, a break of several months occurs here in the writing of this entry because I’ve been very busy, and also because I felt a sudden trepidation about my attitude. I don’t actually know that much about German history, so where was I getting off saying this book didn’t either? Maybe it knew a lot more than I did and I was missing the whole point. So I went back and tried to reread it with a humbler and more attentive mind. Really, to reread the whole book. After the first section I felt reassured that my first reading had been pretty close to the mark, so I stopped. But it did put me back on track a bit, and some of the above is indeed a bit out of line.

The book is obviously attempting to be a psychic history of Germany, not a real one. But it is, and maybe I had underappreciated this, sincerely attempting to be a psychic history of Germany. I guess that’s not inherently a misguided task, but it’s a difficult one. Some historical specifics are in order – but which ones, and what order? How the history of human psychological experience relates to the history of events and artifacts is a deep and intricate question – for the philosopher, for the historian, for everyone. (What I found so wonderful about Auerbach’s Mimesis (still haven’t finished) is that he was making convincing inroads into this question.) Hawkes’ model for the relationship is, I stand by this, too simplistic and vague, and derived more from thinking about literary style than from thinking about humanity. But it was probably wrong for me to write that it was mere student-y pretension, which is an obnoxious criticism. His efforts to address something real certainly seem sincere enough. Sorry about that.

It’s my personal position that we must be very careful about the distinction and relationship between interior experience and exterior fact, and I feel that this book’s conflation of the two is due not just to poetic license but to an actual philosophical misapprehension. There it is in a nutshell.

Okay, that feels more fair. Now to the positive. The over-grim landscape felt a little ahead of its time – it felt as seedily gothic (or gothically seedy) as a music video, or some other late-20th-century fantasy of decay. I thought of music videos several times, not only because of the claustrophobic gray grime, but also because the formal construction was similar, intercutting among several semi-independent tableaus as they each become progressively morbid. The final surreal shocker in this book (from whence the title, hint hint) comes as the sick payoff of a long chain of vague ill omens. Just like on MTV. It’s actually very well delivered. For these things, for the purely aesthetic side of the book, Hawkes deserves some credit.

Even so, fantasies of decay aren’t really my cup of tea; and contrariwise, I don’t know that the teenagers whose cup of tea they are would ever find anything gratifying in this wordy book with the air of a college literary magazine. So I’m not sure I can recommend it. I don’t yet feel like I know the lay of the land well enough to really judge whether it merits inclusion in Bloom’s canon. But it’s hardly an obvious choice on any grounds I can see right now.

Here’s some sample text for those of you at home to make your own call. The aforementioned chicken-killing scene. Reader discretion is advised, I guess. This paragraph really sums up the whole book. If you like this, you’ll love The Cannibal, by John Hawkes.

“But you don’t have to take my word for it.” Cut to Albert J. Guerard.

Before dawn on the morning of the riot, Madame Snow stood alone by candlelight in a back room where cordwood had been piled, holding a stolen chicken struggling lightly beneath her fingers. She did not see the four stone walls or the narrow open window, and standing in a faded gown with the uneven hem that was once for balls, the untied soiled kimono flapping against her legs, she looked into the frightful eyes of the chicken and did not feel the cold. Her bare feet were white, the toes covered with grains of sawdust. The door behind her was locked, tallow dripped from the gilt holder and the bird fluttered, tried to shake its wings from the firm grasp. The old woman’s pulse beat slowly, more slowly, but steadily, and the narrow unseen window began to turn grey. The feathers, bitten with mange, trembled and breathed fearfully. The soft broken claws kicked at her wrist. For a moment the Kaiser’s face, thin, depressed, stared in at the cell window, and then was gone, feeling his way over a land that was now strange to his touch. The old woman watched the fowl twisting its head, blinking the pink-lidded eyes, and carefully she straddled the convulsing neck with two fingers, tightened them across the mud-caked chest, and with the other hand seized the head that felt as if it were all bone and moving bits of scale. The pale yellow feet paddled silently backwards and forwards, slits breathed against her palm. Madame Snow clenched her fists and quickly flung them apart so that the fowl’s head spurted across the room, hit the wall and fell into a heap of shavings, its beak clicking open and shut, eyes staring upwards at the growing light. She dropped the body with its torn neck and squeezed the fingermarks into a bucket of water, and stooping in the grey light, squinted, and plucked the feathers from the front of her kimono.

Whew, glad that’s done with. It’s been months and months and months that this has been sitting here waiting to be finished. Even more months since I actually read it. What happened to all my time?

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