The Cannibal

FOR SOPHIE

Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the
classic text under consideration is deservedly a classic, with hidden meanings and beauties.
But in the presence of a highly experimental novel, and of such a considerable new talent as
that of John Hawkes, an introduction should perhaps attempt no more than to clear away some
of the peripheral difficulties and obstacles of strangeness which might prevent an early
understanding and enjoyment. No doubt the reader has a right to discover the hidden beauties
for himself, during the first years of a novel’s life. But isn’t it also the novelist’s own
task, a few readers will certainly argue—“to clear away some of the peripheral
difficulties and obstacles of strangeness?” My own answer is that this question can be too
costly. The merely secondary difficulties and obstacles involved in the first appearance of
a Franz Kafka or a William Faulkner or a Djuna Barnes are not comparable to those involved
in the first appearance of a conventional realist … and perhaps it would be well if we could
get at the restless and original Kafkas at least, if not at the Djuna Barneses, over a
shorter period of ridicule, without having to wait so long. I use the names of Kafka and
Faulkner and Djuna Barnes advisedly, these august names and coldly intense writers … for I
think the talent, intention, present accomplishment and ultimate promise of John Hawkes are
suggested by some conjunction of these three disparate names.
^*
I know that this is to say a great deal,
and also to predict most rashly as to the future direction an original talent will take.
John Hawkes is now, at the outset of his career and at the age of twenty-three, a rather
more “difficult” writer than, Kafka or Faulkner, and fully as difficult a writer as Djuna
Barnes.
The Cannibal
, written in 1948, is less surrealist than
Charivari
,
a short novel written in 1947;
^†
and I suspect Hawkes will move still further toward realism. But his
talent, whatever may happen to it, is already a major talent.

The peripheral difficulties, then, and obstacles of strangeness … The plot
is a simple one, but not to be simply apprehended. There is in the first place an
interesting interlocked story of Germany during the first world war and of Germany in
“1945”—a mythical year of the allied occupation, when a single American soldier on a
motorcycle is left to supervise a third of the country. In 1914 Stella, later Madame Snow,
night club singer and daughter of a general, meets an English traitor Cromwell, and marries
the feeble Ernst. In 1945 Stella Snow’s boarding house in a ruined village harbors her
sister Jutta, mistress of Zizendorf … new political Leader and “narrator” of the story.
Zizendorf successfully plots the death of the lone American overseer and the capture of his
motorcycle, and the book ends with the rebirth of an independent Germany. For the tiny
gutted
Spitzen-on-the-Dein
—with its feverish D.Ps., its diseased impotent adults
and crippled children, with its foul choked canals, with its hunger, militarism, primitive
memories and its unregenerate hatred of the conqueror—is Germany itself in microcosm. (As a
picture of the real rather than the actual Germany, and of the American occupant of that
Germany,
The Cannibal
is as frankly distorted as Kafka’s picture of the United
States in
Amerika;
and also perhaps as true, thanks to that very distortion.) This
interesting story is left very much in the dark, however; is obscured by brilliant detail,
by a submersion in many different minds and their obsessions, by a total vision of horror …
and by a very distinct reluctance (the reluctance of a Conrad or a Faulkner) to tell a story
directly. As in Faulkner and Conrad, we have the effect of a solitary flashlight playing
back and forth over a dark and cluttered room; the images may be sharp ones, but a casual
reference to some major happening may be clarified only fifty or a hundred pages later. The
inattentive reader would be hard put to make even such a bare plot-summary as mine; though
he might easily go far beyond it—to see in Stella Snow, for instance, both Germany herself
and the Teutonic female and fertility principles, the traditional earth-mother of German
beer and metaphysics, survivor and protectress of the sterile—“for she had survived and
hunted now with the pack.”

The peripheral difficulties are obvious enough … for the reader who vaguely
recognizes his own adult world in
The Cannibal
, as well as his own childhood fears.
The story is radically out of focus, which was of course intended; yet there is no
consistently distorting point-of-view. The narrator Zizendorf was perhaps intended to supply
an even source of distorting light. But Zizendorf, a relative failure, poses more problems
than he solves. Again, no character—except Jutta in the single episode of the
nunnery—receives that
consistent sympathy
which most of all holds the
average reader’s attention. John Hawkes clearly belongs, perhaps this to his credit, with
the cold immoralists and pure creators who enter sympathetically into all their characters,
the saved and the damned alike. Even the saved are absurd, when regarded with a sympathy so
demonic: to understand everything is to ridicule everything. And it is also to recognize
that even the most contaminated have their dreams of purity which shockingly resemble our
own. … A third difficulty and distraction is provided, as in Djuna Barnes, by the energy,
tension and brilliance of phrasing often expended on the relatively unimportant: the
appalling and prolonged description, for instance, of Madame Snow strangling a chicken, a
description interrupted momentarily by the appearance of the Kaiser’s thin and depressed
face at the window.

The final obstacle of strangeness—suggested by the Kaiser’s face—is that
John Hawkes’ surrealism is an independent and not a derivative surrealism … I use
“surrealism” for want of a better word. There is some traditional symbolism in
The
Cannibal;
even perhaps a little old-fashioned allegory. The dead frozen monkey who
screams “Dark is life, dark, dark is death”—tail coiled about his neck, “sitting upright on
the bodies of the smaller beasts”—is an authentic surrealist monkey. But the ghosts who
return each night to the single charred and abandoned allied tank belong to an older
literature … The basic convention of the novel is this: Germany and the world have shrunk to
Spitzen-on-the-Dein
, rather than the little village enlarged. The characters are
passive somnambulistic victims of the divine or diabolic process (history), yet to a degree
are aware of their historic position. Thus Ernie running after the carriage of Stella and
Cromwell in a German town, stopping in an agony of impatience to relieve himself behind a
bush, not merely parallels or suggests but for the moment
is
Gavrilo Princip, the
assassin of Sarajevo; and Cromwell and Stella in the pursued carriage prophesy war and offer
themselves as historic symbols: “I will become, as you wish, your Archduchess for the
people.” One could even suggest the peculiarly German conception of a narrator possessed of
divine or diabolic omniscience …
which the characters enter into or share in occasional
moments of intuition
. History is blind, inconsecutive, absurd … yet a Stella Snow may
foresee it: foresee “the naked cowardice of the fencer, the future fluttering wings of the
solitary British plane leaving its token pellet in the market place, her mother’s body
rolling around it like a stone strained forever, the stain becoming dry and black as onyx.”
Of the true solid ingredients of surrealism—illogic, horror, macabre humor—
The
Cannibal
has a full share. Terror, for instance, can create its own geography. Gerta
almost stumbles over the dead body of the Merchant, on her return from the open latrine, the
“pea-green pit of stench,” behind the
sportswelt
in
das Grab
. But this
merchant, said to have fallen here some months before (page 101) actually fell near Cambrai
(page 94), in a farmhouse demolished by artillery fire:

The line between the fantasy of an Edward Lear and that actual creation
of another universe which the best surrealism attempts is a hard one to draw … the line,
shall we say, between two aspects of Coleridge’s “fancy.” Where else do the “monumental dogs
found in the land of the tumbleweed, glorified for their private melancholy and lazy high
song” belong—unless in the pages of Lear? And yet the German dogs to which they are compared
are fully as remarkable; and become both real dogs running beside the train in which the
invalided Ernie lies, and perhaps also recollections of childhood fear; and some pages
later, vague symbols of defeat and death:

The temptation to quote from
The Cannibal
is enormous. But no doubt
this passage, and the dogs’ progressive irresistible taking over of the train and the
paragraph, is enough to suggest the author’s delight in grotesque distortion—and to suggest
the dangers and promises implicit in an imagination so uninhibited and so incorrigibly
visual, immediate, obsessed.

How far John Hawkes will go as a writer must obviously depend on how far he
consents to impose some page-by-page and chapter-by-chapter consecutive understanding on his
astonishing creative energy; on how richly he exploits his ability to achieve truth through
distortion; on how well he continues to uncover and use childhood images and fears. Of the
larger distortion of
The Cannibal
—of its total reading of life and vision of
desolation as terrible as that of Melville’s
Encantadas
—there is no need to speak
at length. The historic fact of our present effort to reconstruct German pride and
nationalism is rather more absurd than the negligent withdrawal pictured by Hawkes. And yet
his few “scenes of occupation life” may someday tell us more of the underlying historical
truth than the newspapers of 1945 will tell us: the trial and execution of the pastor Miller
for having changed his views under the Nazis (the present Mayor betraying him in terror of
the curled claws and sharp hooked nose and red terrifying eyes of the eagle on the Colonel’s
shoulder); the snarling lovemaking of the American overseer Leevey and his diseased German
mistress; and the “overseeing” Leevey at work … hurtling on his motorcycle through the third
of the nation he controls, absorbed in an historical process which transcends any human
intention and which he has no hope of understanding. John Hawkes, who saw wartime Germany
briefly as a driver for the American Field Service, has written an unpolitical book but not
an unhistorical one. As Kafka achieved a truth about his society through perhaps
unintentional claustrophobic images and impressions, so Hawkes—abnormally aware of physical
disabilities and indignities and degradations—has achieved some truth about his. This is a
Germany of men with claws for hands, of women with reddened flesh, of children with braces
to support their stumps or their heads. It is a world without food, without hope, without
energy … reduced for its pleasures to impotent mechanical ruttings bereft of all desire. I
think it can be understood that this is more than post-war Germany, whatever the author
intended; that this is, to some degree, our modern world. At the end of the novel the
liberation of Germany has occurred; or, perhaps, our old world is renewed. This, to be sure,
may be looked at in several ways. The insane asylum in
Spitzen-on-the-Dein
is
reopened on the next to last page. “At the top of the hill he saw the long lines that were
already filing back into the institution, revived already with the public spirit.”

ALBERT J. GUERARD

Cambridge, Massachusetts

November 29, 1948