American novelist John Hawkes is often accused of penning unnecessarily convoluted, pessimistic tales which shamefully hide behind the curtain of postmodernism. Many of these commentators would indubitably cite David Foster Wallace’s distain for what he calls Bret Easton Ellis’s sadistic hostility toward his reader as being analogous to Hawkes’s approach to his readership. Hawkes would, at least in part, refuse to object to such observations for he himself stated in an interview, “I’m reluctant to argue too strongly for the necessity of hope.” Moreover, like his contemporary William Gaddis who authored works which were equally challenging for many of the same reasons (only much, much longer), some readers are goaded by what they agree to be an offensive shield put forth by the author. However, such pundits almost inevitably follow with a defense akin to Samuel Beckett’s support for James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Life is never simplistic, nor clear and, as such, when art aptly reflects life, much like its subject matter, it might not readily avail itself to its audience, or, at all. This says nothing of life ever being fair or, contrary to Hollywood’s Haze Era belief, always concluding an the proverbial “happy note.” In many respects, this aesthetic philosophy and application is the epitome of John Hawkes’s masterpiece, The Lime Twig.
Flannery O’Connor tells us, “You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream.” More exactingly, the events contained within Hawkes’s narrative are a nightmare for they revolve around Michael and Margaret Banks, a couple living in England, who are met by William Hencher. William wants to repay the couple’s kindness for allowing him to rent a room in the house where he and his mother lived twenty years prior. Unfortunately, his method of gratitude comes in the form of an illicit race-horse scandal which, in order to fashion the payoff, must be fronted by Michael. When the heist goes awry, killing William, the gang which organized the enterprise-turned-debacle kidnap Margaret in order to retain Michael’s allegiance.
Citing his aesthetic principle as being one in which “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.” Hawkes does just this as he tells his tale in a disjointed, dreamlike manner in which essences can be glimpsed but never steadfastly grasped. As the author forces us to experience the surreal, breakneck and oftentimes illogical, piecemeal events which serve as a complete contrast to the standard, rote lives of Michael and Margaret, we foolishly come to depend upon the open of each chapter, which begins with commentary by a sports writer named Sidney Slyter. Yet, much like our protagonists, we quickly realize that though we might be graced by one instance of constancy in a perpetually revolving world, such does not decree that dependable routine equates with reliability.
Yet, though we might pity Michael in his naiveté and tragic innocence, what lies at the heart of The Lime Twig is not a recognition of the often ironic, futile attempts at life, but a cautionary warning not unlike the one witnessed in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. Though Michael and Margaret are swept into an illegal scheme, Hawkes cunningly incorporates Freudian imagery throughout, thus signaling that, however desolate, what is occurring to our two characters is nothing less than wish fulfillment being coincidentally and exactingly executed at the hands of individuals whom are unaware of the accuracy of their demands. As crime, blackmail, rape, murder, and untimely death unfold before us, only after the fact do we realize that such dire circumstances are exactly what our couple paradoxically desires yet never willfully housed the ability to enact without proper provocation.
What is to be ultimately gained from John Hawkes’s seminal text is how to reconcile the Sartrean facticity of life. By refusing to arbitrarily force his storyline in directions other than the one which the (non- or un)plot demands, we are obligated to contend with, not life as we would like it, but the manner in which it is. The irony in such is that Hawkes avails us to such by way of the Freudian-esque adage of “Be careful of what you wish for” for we find that many of us are not ready to contend with life as it now stands, no less life as we might like it to be. A masterpiece, and only a masterpiece, could accomplish such a lofty goal but, alas, we have John Hawkes reminding us that life might well be a nightmare but, if this is so, wouldn’t it be easier to contend with such if we were to readily accept this fact as opposed to deluding ourselves so as to further postpone and prohibit our ability by way of distance to appositely navigate our lives?
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with Director David DeFalco (Chaos) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Nathan Baesel (Behind the Mask: ROLV) - January 22, 2015
- An Interview with Bentley Little - January 22, 2015
- So You Want to Be a Movie Critic, Heh? - January 22, 2015
- Fearful Meditations: An Annotated Bibliography of Studies in Horror Cinema - January 22, 2015
- I Can’t Discuss Glen Morgan’s New Film, [Censored] [Censored], Because Liberty Counsel Says It’s Rude: Race, Religious Tolerance, Ethics, and Aesthetics and the 21st Century Holiday Horror Film - January 22, 2015
- Roger Ebert’s Bloody Ax: An Examination of the Film Critic’s Elitist Dismissal of the Horror Film by Michael “Egregious” Gurnow - January 22, 2015
- Defending the King: An Examination of Academia’s Reaction to Stephen King Being Awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters - January 22, 2015
- Zarathustra . . . Cthulhu . Meursault: Existential Futility in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” - January 22, 2015
- The Evil - January 18, 2015
