A Geometry of One's Own

On John Hawkes' The Cannibal

The Tower of Babel in Genesis tells us a possible origin of human being’s distances in language, but a funny thing happens in the opening verses: God moves towards earth twice. From The Book of Genesis, Chapter 11, verses 5-7 (USCCB Translation):

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built./

Then the Lord said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach./

Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another.

The Old Testament writers seem to suggest God’s distance from the human world; He is so far above and beyond us that one descent isn’t enough. It is a humorous bit of Bible verse, playing at the immensity of God and the puniness of human beings. Intentionally or not, this story about the origins of languages and the inability of people to speak across cultures represents a good metaphor for narrative consciousness, where God is the singular I, so distant from the human beings below, above, or beyond, that a singular voice must struggle not once but twice (perhaps many more times for mere mortals) to reach across the vast distance of consciousness. I thought of this story and the distance of language, consciousness and humor when reading The Cannibal by John Hawkes.

The debut novel published exactly seventy-five years ago when Hawkes was only twenty-four is tricky to describe in plot terms. The basic elements, such as they represent anything like a narrative, are structured into two parts. One begins in 1945 after the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany, which is split down the middle by a second part set in 1914, on the eve of World War I. The 1945 sections follow a German town patrolled sporadically by a sunglass wearing American on a motorcycle. The narration is at once internal across the various townsfolk but at times centered by the manic, Hitlerian, Zizendorf, who wishes to re-establish Germany under the old, pre-World War I regime of glory. He believes that murdering the Sunglasses American will free the “black air” town from the “piles of debris” that represent the collapse of the Nazi regime. The 1914 section explains the passionate fall of Madame Snow, the matron of the town, from brilliant noble in a future pan-Germany to the sickly mother of several mentally unstable men, with a sister, Jutta, harassed by someone ominously called The Duke, and a nephew named The Fairy. The Cannibal follows this cast in a sort of Buddenbrooks by way of Faulkner style, but the unity of Hawkes vision isn’t mimicry, but a floating time signature, whose leitmotif are the epochal dates of 1914 and 1945, and whose conductor, Zizendorf, takes over a dozen pages to introduce himself with a simple, “I, Zizendorf, his friend, sat through every hour of the day thinking of the past.”

In his rhetoric, Hawkes manipulates the world of the novel through floating commentary, motifs of decay, and black humor to achieve the effect of ironic unsettling of both narrative and intention. Rather than obscure the novel’s thoughts about the issues of Nazism, American hegemony, or sexuality, the provocations allow space to unwind consciousness and thought through distinct narrative and imagistic placements. The characters best set to render this for Hawkes are the principles, Zizendorf, Madame Stella Snow, and the Duke, each of whom act as pieces in Hawkes’ narrative triangle of decay, commentary, and humor.   

Most of the remaining cast of characters are named for their roles or positions: the Pastor, the Census-Taker, the Signalman et al. Hawkes’ suggestion seems to be an exaggerated sense of character that reappropriates work as a defining quality to such an extent that it becomes someone’s whole being. Each one says little and dons their position like a landed title. The irony is that their names belie their flatness. Work creates the barriers around which they are defined, making their crammed placement and introduction overdetermined as a technique. Character, for Hawkes’ novel, collapses outside the structures of work. The upshot here is that these characters and their roles come absent of consciousness or interiority, the thing that supposedly rounds out character. The Signalman has “nothing to eat and nothing to say” and alongside this statement, Hawkes deadpans the depravity of his situation in parallel images:

Black men in large hats and capes were painted all over the walls of his station. Relics of silver daggers were looted from the nunnery and stored in trunks with photographs or taken off to foreign lands. The bells never rang out. Fires burning along the curbs and dung heaps smoldering on the farms filled the air and alleys, the empty shops and larders, with a pungent smell of mold. (pg. 8)

The prose is symbolic, not in the sense it means something specific, but more that it signifies an abstraction suspended by the narrative. Nouns like “relics” and “photographs” two elements of a memorial culture have been stolen away. This set of literal things are enacted upon, but the meaning of that deployment is the more serious motif of loss. Bells don’t ring, a reminder of one’s place in the day has stopped; time itself has paused. Fires burn but “dung heaps” smolder. It is graphic. And the man is speechless. The characters in similar positions, the Mayor (blind), the Census-Taker (drunk, bad at math), the Pastor (murdered by Zizendorf) each have the same detailed significance that presents the reader with a striking sense of the novel’s sphere. Yet upon a closer read, one can see that the irony allows the worker/role/character position to become nonrepresentational and move outside the world of the novel.

The second layer of irony then comes with setting. One cannot help but think of the “I was following orders” plea from Nazi officers at Nuremberg when considering men in administrative roles in 1945. Hawkes begs the question a bit on this reading, where the characters themselves have significant positions and traits within the novel. By disembodying consciousness, Hawkes establishes a world of symbols where one’s work, role or post becomes one’s self, thus further emphasizing the inability of one’s consciousness to act upon the world. It is instead institutions and ghostly, nameless things that do. Like the “pungent smell of mold,” the coincidences and alignments are too extreme to ignore or pass off as such.

John Hawkes and one of his many horses

The most significant conscious character that follows this motif is Madame Stella Snow, for whom the most pages of the novel are occupied. Snow was a dame of the young Germany, destined for greatness. She sat “many times in a golden opera box,” and “craved candies imported from France and Holland.” Inverts, a mid-century term for queer people, envied her mouth’s shape; she was a “respected crone.” Her introduction, told through a distant narrator that might be Zizendorf, presents considerable technical problems. The cinematic and levitating nature of the third person narration, the kind that sees back, forth, and all around works only insofar as there is relief from it and strong ground on which to land, most of which comes from the sort of play with form and common conceptions Hawkes engages in. The commentary around Snow offers one solution, as does the long middle passage about her origin. Yet similar to the men who have roles, Stella Snow becomes a tragedy of her own position’s failure.

The once promising singer fell into the arms of Germanophile Englishman, Mr. Cromwell. Again, the allusions stack up so that one must hold them both in one’s mind, rotate them, and establish connection. The English statesmen Oliver Cromwell comes to mind for two major reasons: one, his successful bourgeois revolution against Charles I of England, which has resonance in the novel of Zizendorf’s aspirations and Stella’s eventual fall; and second, his genocidal campaign against the Irish, that circles back onto the Holocaust. Mr. Cromwell deepens the abstract nature of Hawkes’s work: is it a willy critique of realism, or a speculative tale of Germany after the war? And how do those two relate to each other?

Stella’s narrative bisects these oppositions by becoming a realist novel within an unrealist one. Through this section Hawkes has rendered only her first name, with no maiden name. Her story is a marriage plot where she must decide between the romantic Cromwell and the serious noble Ernst Snow. She is a singer of some renown, moving between the balladry of the town’s pub and the grandeur of the castle’s halls with ease.

In Stella’s sections, Hawkes play with form to demonstrate decay. We have spent dozens of pages in an unrealist landscape lingering in the knotty world of the unconscious. For Stella, however, just like it seemed in 1914 for Germany, the task was simple: choose how to win. The romance of WWI, such as Hawkes lingers on it, keeps her choices simple and clean. Her family’s home, “despite the dark brown symmetry and shadows of the building outside,” possessed an air “filled with a light green haze.” Here Hawkes alludes to the underlying “dark” symmetry and “shadows” that the reader experienced in the 1945 section of the novel. They are portentous shades, designed to remind the reader of a return to 1945, but the “light green haze” promises just a bit more life for Stella and one of her lovers.

Her predicament sounds like the stuff of simple or comedic fictions, yet within her thoughts, one is reminded of the limits Hawkes has placed on interiority, whereby its intentions are always and forever misaligned with its functions. Upon news of dead soldiers at the German front, Stella’s mother serves tea to the mourning wives and mothers which Stella names the “last chance for gossip.” Her happiness begins fading, the mourners were “taking away the joy of sunshine, casting a blot, like an unforgivable hoard, on the very search and domestic twilight peace she did not understand.” This particularly feminine moment struck me for its resonance within the novel. Here are a group of women meant to mourn and remember together, but the reader’s sole view into the space has the sense that the experience is trite. In one reading, Stella’s feelings could be slanted by the atmosphere of the tea party, or the internalized feelings of superiority that come prioritized in third person fiction. Yet, the reader can’t help but wonder, if Stella is being positioned as the exemplary German woman of the era by Hawkes, does not her struggle to connect with the women around her mean that they too are failing to reach across their own consciousness? And does not Hawkes beg the question that Stella’s own rhetorical and intellectual failure to bridge the gaps between these women suggest that the romantic feelings of German unity and nationalism driving them into the Great War are limited, simplistic, or even naïve? We find possible answers in the commentary offered to conclude this scene where the “seascapes lost their color” and the “old house was sealed tight.” Thrown against these passages of lack and misplaced desire comes a space of domestic simplicity and success, where Stella and her mother visit a market surrounded by the women of the town and goods sellers, who peddle and suggest items for them to buy.

Of This Men Shall Know Nothing, Max Ernst, 1923

The implication about the world of the novel Hawkes wishes to draw here might be at first simplistic: life goes on; so it goes. In fact, it would seem to me that the novel’s oddity and unrealism increases here. Rather than chasing her desires or deepening her experience, instead of following her sense of failure and the clear feelings from her desire, in place of swerving left when the world says go right, when the seascapes have lost their color, Stella chooses the thing that is in fact no choice at all: duty. Rubbing against the dictates of desire is that old, liberal imperator, or put another way, following orders from the institution of womanhood rather than one’s consciousness. The scene is shocking just as it is expected. It is in fact a realistic portrayal of both Stella and even women at the time, or life in general, because one always needs to grocery shop. It is real in the way that it follows a logic. When placed contextually at this point in the novel, knowing where she ends, where Germany finds itself in the novel, and situated against each other in the narrative, the reader wishes to shake Stella from her rut of malaise, or perhaps like watching a horror movie where the viewer knows the killer lays in wait just behind the frame of the door, one wants to shout at her. One believes that Stella is no longer at home within the domestic and national institutions she has around her, and the failure to assert her desires onto the routine and rules of the world gives over to people like Zizendorf and The Duke to attract followers.

Zizendorf is the editor-in-chief of the town’s only paper, owned by the Snow family, and the murderer of The Pastor who refused to recant his Nazi views. Most of his action is internal or narrative, the whole of which takes place over several hours. Here once more the job in the town means a role in the novel. One does things not because of desire or interiority, but from the dictates of nameless institutions. As the editor of the paper, so too is his mimetic sensibility the editor and surveyor of the novel. Who is narrating the 1945 sections of the book could be debated but if taken at its word, Zizendorf offers two insights into the work. The first are about the fractured psychic vision of the commentary and ordering of images which at once is exciting and humorous just as it is unnerving. He notices odors and mud; “the gas of mustard,” “human liquid;” slim light “with its tail of angry short tongues of fire.” His mysticism is limited not only by his vision, but his aesthetic interests. Hawkes delights in the differences between a common reader’s response to observations or phrasings like “busied himself with a worn grammar,” or “the child was not yet asleep, the drains were running foul to the basement, the Mayor dreamed.” The reader’s response to the accelerating and unstable images in the second quote represent an opportunity for Hawkes, via Zizendorf, to delight in the suspended irony they create. It further opens space for Zizendorf to relish in the possibilities of his pursuit and murder of the nameless Sunglasses wearing American. “The child was not yet asleep” suggests a certain peace incoming that is not only simplistic but necessary and healing, but juxtaposed with foul drains offers them each a new menace: what is filthy about the drains and what is the child going to suffer from? And The Mayor, the man responsible for the drains and whatever befalls the child as a result, dreams—of what though? A better world? The institutional power to fix the situation? Zizendorf watches, imagines or narrates the Mayor masturbate like “foraging children” to relieve his paroxysms. The oppositions are graphic just as they are delightful, presenting the sort of odd or off-center visions of a deranged Zizendorf against the sad, human simplicity of sleeping children and the Mayor.

It is in this space, Hawkes’ efforts to not privilege certain consciousnesses suffers, however. By entering the world through the vision of Zizendorf rather than limiting the leaping consciousness, he gifts Zizendorf mystical powers that make his eventual rise to power in the town significantly less surprising because the reader understands his almost ubermensch like power. The townsfolk see him as the only a way through the morass, one that leads back into a neo-fascist German regime. He is the central figure, perhaps not a protagonist in the literal sense, but someone from whom the yarn is spun, threads are cut or wound. The sense of the world we receive from him cannot be challenged or discussed in a way that a realist first-person narration does. Whether or not Zizendorf needs “challenging” is a distinct issue for a different type of essay, but what the absence of space the novel offers for these interventions signals is a limit of the unrealist mode Hawkes wishes to achieve. And at the same time, it might be a larger ironic ploy to inversely argue the overdetermined nature of a realism that mimics the reality of the world, whereby a reader feels the desire to debate the truth of the matter around the plot, narrative ambitions, or behaviors of the novel.

These sorts of recursive and reflexive logics obstruct some analysis. If the novel can be anything, nothing, and everything at once, then what is it? Enter The Duke, who haunts the plot as he chases The Fairy, nephew of Stella Snow, through the town. The Duke is the titular cannibal and this act offers something of a solution to the problem of Hawkes recursions.

His name indicates something historical, a name for a landed gentry long forgotten and thrown away by the successive wars and revolutions of the 19^th and 20^th century. He is someone whose title suggests employment, and his nature, his lineage is one meant to obscure his mission. When the Census Taker greets him, the Duke says “‘you are mistaken.’”  He lives on the second floor of the main apartment building, rather than a grand estate. He is “feared for his clean standing” and “aristocratic caliber.” The Fairy flees for his life, his “knees the size of finger-joints whirling in every direction like the uncoordinated thrashings of a young and frightened fox.” The Duke appears once in an aside in the 1914 section as “the Grand Duke,” who no longer calls on Stella after her marriage to Ernst Snow. The initial motivation for the Duke’s murderous rage against The Fairy then is not precisely homophobic animus, but lovelorn revenge against Stella and Jutta for never falling in love with him. Yet, it is notable that the child he wishes to murder and then eventually consume is queer (“inverted” in the novel). The desires of the Duke are attuned towards order and control, whereas a proper inversion might be the topsy-turvey world of revolution. Further, the term “invert” was pioneered in Germany during Weimar, that chaotic democratic period of inter-war Germany. Perhaps the Fairy symbolizes not German sexuality and potential wasted but a despised recent history. An abhorrent lineage.  

The queer child becomes a wily animal, a fox, the thing hunted by aristocrats across the fields of Germany and England. The Fairy’s name might also signal a role, like being a “young and frightened fox.” What position and what institution drives and obstructs the Fairy’s consciousness? The simple answer is heterosexuality, but in the position of the hunted, the Fairy’s place becomes the institution of victimhood, someone whose place in the order of things is to be consumed by the rich and powerful, used for sport. The Fairy is also a child. Someone with built in potential and future, which the Duke destroys and makes his own by eating his flesh. The Duke stands “alone on the hillside” and draws his sword “in a flourish.” He cuts into the “fox,” who kicks back and is horrified. The Duke wins out thinking simply “men should be precise either in being humane and splinting the dog’s leg, or in being practical and cutting it off.” I was mistaken. The institution at the forefront of the killing is not victimhood but masculinity and its attendant desires for flesh, blood, and work. The unreality of the work in Hawkes novel then isn’t maybe the half-formed shock of modernism or provocation, but the solemn evil that takes human beings, abstracts them to objects, or animals, combatants or terrorists, that distinguishes wantonly between “men” and “women and children,” that stridently sets out to find right and wrong through the violence of war and honor. Institutions everywhere remove human beings from their consciousness and desires in an effort to prioritize the nameless drives and feelings. Institutions possess a schematic and circular set of motives, ones that are arrived at by an internal logic that recurs back onto itself, justifies that logic, and then acts according to the justification. But we, human beings, all have names, we all have desires, futures, wants, needs, and lives. We do possess consciousness that is not schematic or angular. Hawkes’ novel argues against the final thoughts of itself and of Madame Snow to do “as she was told,” long live duty. The novel wishes its readers to establish a geometry of one’s own.