Sunday Morning! “The Cannibal” by: John Hawkes

Folded away in Brooklyn, New York’s Irritating District is a cluttered used bookstore that is so incongruous for the neighborhood you half expect to find a book of spells there. Book Thug Nation was started by four sidewalk booksellers who clearly know their stuff; they specialize in philosophy, literary fiction and film. I was there because Aaron Cometbus is one of the four and my friend Craig back in Hamilton wants the latest issue of Cometbus. Otherwise, I’m trying not to gather too many things as I roam the United States, which is a challenge for me in such a store. I went in, got the zine, and… only grabbed one book for me.

I chose a book I’d never heard of, The Cannibal, by an author with whom I was unfamiliar, John Hawkes, because it was on a table of writers (Jim Harrison, William Faukner, etc.) who are generally considered the “real deal” by other writers. I suspected it would be a challenging read, and, friends, it sure was. Enigmatic, fractured, filled with beautiful imagery, albeit a bit scrambled in its connective tissue, the novel holds many mysteries, a few of which became clearer after the second reading. Sometimes, I need challenging books in my life.

Don’t judge a book by its lousy cover.

It’s strange too because it’s actually a fairly straight foward book that everyone finds exceedingly hard to summarize. There is a German town, Spitzen-on-the-Dein, whose fortunes are traced during the Great War of 1914-18, and then during the allied occupation after the Second World War. There is a nightclub singer, Madame Snow, the daughter of a doddering aristocrat, who decides to marry one man and not another; thirty years later, she is now running a destitute boarding house where her ruined sister lives, both of them alone. There is an uprising at the local asylum: the women try to beat back the madmen, but they escape into the community, one of them comes to live in the boarding house, and then, as the occupation ends, they file back into the asylum. There is an American soldier on a motorcycle who patrols and oversees one-third of the country; and there is a plot to kill him and take back the nation from the invader. And there are various minor characters who are maimed, drinking themselves into ruin, or otherwise warped by the experience of war.

So, it’s a clear series of images; and yet, the narrative seems to have been blown to shards and pieced back together like the town itself. The images are vivid and striking, but they blend into one another like a burred collage. We jump between characters and eras from one paragraph to the next without warning. There are no grand epiphanies or character arcs; Hawkes is famous for having said:

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

We watch different people act and undertake various tasks and schemes, and we know that their actions are, in some sense, a product of their context; but they don’t seem entirely aware of this., which of course is the same situation we’re in. Dreams, madness, delusions, and self-absorption play as much a role in their lives as the war that we never actually see play out on the page. In his introduction, Albert Guerard has trouble placing the book, at first calling it “surrealism” and then settling with “anti-realism.” It feels more like hyperrealism to me: all of these events that happen are vivid and often memorably grotesque. I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the image of a mob of angry women fighting madmen while standing in a field littered with the frozen bodies of laboratory rats and monkeys that were released by the asylum before the patients. The novel has all of the immediacy of how we perceive the world, but it purposefully omits what we generally do later, which is to impose order on those events. It also feels like the wreckage of war, in which we’re watching purposeful little ants undertaking slightly nonsensical activities.

So, I stumbled my way around the vignettes. It’s hard not to take the story as symbolic of larger themes. The town feels like Germany in microcosm, and Madame Snow’s family’s slow decline seems a parable of the German Empire; by the end of 1945, “Germany” is a crumbling lodging house sheltering radicals, the dying, and the insane. It’s also reminiscent of Kafka’s fractured impressions of America- the strangeness illuminates something deeper than realism would.

The novel has been called an early example of “postmodernism,” and a bridge between literary modernism and postmodernism. To be honest, I’ve never quite understood what distinguishes the one from the other. Many of the traits associated with “postmodernism,” such as the use of pastiche, unreliable narration, shocking imagery, fractured plots, and self-reflexivity, were all already there in James Joyce and Djuna Barnes, and other classics of “modernism,” which makes me suspect it’s akin to “postpunk” music, which I generally find indistinguishable from punk music. I think it’s probably best to take the story as a sort of fevered dream that impresses itself upon your subconscious, and which may or may not become clearer with time, like history itself.

So, what are YOU reading, watching, playing, pondering, creating, or stumbling your way through this weekend?