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CHRISTOPHER MAKOSA
It would seem, then, that Hawkes's reputation as a master of the 20th century American novel was assured. And yet, this accomplished writer was plagued by adverse, if not hostile, criticism. For example, Richard Todd, while praising one of his books for "clarity," "graceful sentences" and "luminous scenes," adds: "but I wouldn't pretend to be wholly clear on its events, let alone their significance."2 Moreover, the critic dismisses Hawkes's work as a mere game: "Hawkes's work seems to me too narrow, game-like, self-protective to justify the formidable claims that are made for him."3 Bob Tisdale, deploring the preoccupation in Hawkes's novels with artifice and the absence of a traditional storyline, concludes: "Hawkes is basically not a good storyteller. When I read, I want to be beguiled, carried on some viewless wings; I don't want to see the machinery or be continually prodded back into judgment. So if writing the "experimental novel" entails the loss of narrative moxie, I'm against it."4 David Bromwich accuses the author of indulging in hollow verbalism or, to put it differently, of sacrificing substance at the altar of Form: "Hawkes is a writer who has never quite realized that words are the daughters of earth, that they are around to do a job, and that unless they are made to serve they will drain life from the most colorful of fictions."5 The reviewer, in conclusion, asserts: "Surely, Hawkes has the rhythms of a great novelist, but not the revelations, the cunning required to be a great prose stylist."6 Having cited several Hawkesian idiosyncrasies as instances of poor prose, Martin Amis refers to Hawkes as a bad writer: "Mr. Hawkes is not a Writer's Writer so much as a Bad Writer's Writer: he gives them encouragement and he will win their praise. But nobody else need listen."7 Yet, from the viewpoint of this study, the most interesting critical
opinion can be found in an unsigned review of The Passion Artist in "The
Atlantic Monthly." In it, the anonymous reviewer notes the stylistic
brilliance of certain "passages," but dismisses the entire novel on purely
structural grounds, criticizing the alleged non-functional nature of particular
scenes and the lack of overall coherence:
In "The Passion Artist by John Hawkes: A Study of Structure and Themes," we propose to treat this interesting statement as a starting point in an attempt to demonstrate that the opposite is true - i.e., that the scenes depicted in The Passion Artist do serve a specific structural or thematic purpose and that the novel does cohere into a consistent whole. In order to substantiate this view, we shall examine the structure and themes of the work in question. Furthermore, while describing some of the techniques employed in The Passion Artist, we shall try to show that they are invariably at the service of themes which are, in turn, subservient to the structure of the novel. Finally, we hope to prove that, despite its often violent and even "repulsive"
content (including murder, mutilation, rape, incest, juvenile prostitution,
among others), The Passion Artist is not a futile exercise in sensationalism,
but a profound, refined and aesthetically satisfying work of art. CHAPTER ONE Judging by his work, it is fair to say that John Hawkes
viewed reality as an absurd, chaotic and infinitely complex affair. A
conscientious artist, he was concerned that the conventions of realistic
fiction, which he found too rigid for his purposes, would not help him explore
the deep reaches of the psyche. Hawkes the novelist believed that, in order to
convey his artistic vision in full, he had to violate the cardinal rules of
the traditional novel. What is more, he knew that he would need effective
“tools” to transcend the narrow confines of realism. Consequently, he
dismissed - at least in the early, distinctly experimental stage of his career
- some of the most popular conventional ordering devices, such as
chronological sequence, character development, recognizable setting or
realistic theme. Instead, he worked out a method of composition depending on a
totality of vision and involving ample use of interlocking devices, i.e.,
symbols and metaphors, foreshadowings and echoes, parallels and contrasts. As Donald J. Greiner has observed, this intricate method of
composition adds to the poetic quality of John Hawkes's prose: "Structure in
Hawkes' work is based upon cross-references, parallels and contrasts, rather
than upon the development of plot and character. It is this technique that
enriches the nightmarish overtones and gives them their poetic quality."9 It
must be stressed, however, that in the later phase of his career, beginning
with The Lime Twig (1961), Hawkes tempered the visual impact of his earlier
fiction and began to parody the novel form by playing with the old conventions
of the genre. As Greiner has observed:
The Passion Artist belongs to that period of John Hawkes's life in which the author produced a number of works noted for their intricate yet well- controlled structures. The novel is a third-person narrative divided into three parts entitled "The Revolt," "Skirmishing," and "The Prisoner," a division pointing to the dramatic character of the work. The action of The Passion Artist is set in an imaginary European city, where life is centered around its prison for women called La Violaine. Konrad Vost, a fifty-five-year old pharmacist, obsessively grieves for his dead wife Claire, lives an uneventful life, frequents a cafe (called, like the prison, La Violaine) located across the street from the prison and raises a schoolgirl daughter, Mirabelle. Vost, a long-time resident of the city, awaits the release from La Violaine of his mother, Eva Laubenstein, incarcerated in Vost's childhood for the murder of his father. Vost, by sheer accident, finds out that his daughter is a juvenile prostitute; has sex with one of her schoolmates; and then denounces his own daughter to the police. When a riot breaks out in La Violaine, he joins a group of men to subdue the rebellious women. Yet during the skirmish in the prison yard, the determined female inmates put the male volunteers to rout, seize control of La Violaine, capture Konrad Vost in a swamp outside the city, take him hostage, and drag him to the prison. Finally, Vost is reunited with his mother and introduced to the delights of the "willed erotic union" by his mother's best friend. At first glance, The Passion Artist offers little in the way of daring formal
experimentation: Hawkes provides a "conventional" exposition, which may
mislead the unwary into thinking that the narrative will develop along the
well-trodden paths of a traditionally-plotted novel. This deceptive impression
is further enhanced by Hawkes's magisterial poetic prose: the lapidary,
gemlike sentences of the opening section are marked by euphony, clarity,
precision; every word is pregnant with meaning; while the impassible narrator
stands at an ironic distance from the characters and events he describes:
This expository section reveals that, unlike Hawkes's early experimental novels, The Passion Artist has a clear and "fixed" focal point, i.e., Konrad Vost who, it must be noted, serves as the structural and thematic linchpin of the narrative. Indeed, the novel begins and ends with Vost in the center of our attention. Hawkes, proceeding in an orderly, deliberate manner, gradually eases us into the dreamlike interior world of Konrad Vost; yet, for the time being, he spares us its nightmarish elements. At first he introduces the protagonist - a robot-like character resembling a sleepwalking phantom - and then "the three women who in a sense composed the garden in which he was cultivated" (1) - Claire the dead wife, Eva the imprisoned mother, and Mirabelle the daughter. Instantly, we realize that these women are the three most important people in Vost's life and that, together with the other female characters of the novel, they form one of the key themes of The Passion Artist. In these opening pages, we also learn of Vost's inconsolable grief, obsessive nature and methodical habits. It is worthwhile to note that, in portraying his protagonist, Hawkes resorts to the direct description, which he frequently employs to describe the characters of The Passion Artist:
A prime example of the above-mentioned direct description can also be found in the characterization of minor characters - e.g. a woman who, having been released from prison, approaches Vost at the "La Violaine" café and informs him that a fierce revolt is just about to flare up:
It should be pointed out, however, that the passage quoted above also features a less direct method, describable as characterization through quoted speech. The author, by drawing the reader's attention to carefully selected, telltale clues, lets him deduce the woman's character from her behavior, speech patterns, mannerisms, etc.:
The woman "has no regard for the traffic" and wears a jaunty red hat "perched on top of [her] head at a crooked angle"; her face is described as "impassive"; she looks "directly, firmly into [Vost's] eyes"; "regards [Vost] with an expression of intimacy and complicity"; and talks about the imminent riot in dispassionate tones, "as if she were discussing a route on a map" ( 24-25). Yet the most revealing traits are conveyed through quoted speech: the woman's tone of voice with its abrupt, staccato cadences, bespeaks a merciless female, going about her business with cold calculation and ruthless efficiency:
A third method - characterization through indirect description - consists in one character describing another through quoted speech. This is particularly evident in the course of a mock trial that takes place immediately after the doughty females defeat their woeful opponents. In that Kafkaesque scene, the witness for prosecution - a young woman testifying before a hooded judge "whose heavy face had been wiped clear of features like a slab of white wax caressed by the heated iron" (65) - discloses the truth about Vost's latent fear of women. The woman's "testimony" deserves to be quoted in extenso, as misogyny forms one of the key themes of the novel:
After the all-important theme of death is introduced - the novel begins, unfolds and ends under the sign of Thanatos - we learn that the Vost lives in the unnamed city of the novel only because his mother is incarcerated for life in La Violaine. Two central themes - imprisonment and motherhood - are therefore prefigured right at the beginning of the exposition. We note Vost's ambivalent attitude toward his mother, Eva Laubenstein:
Likewise, we cannot fail to notice Vost's ineptness as a father: Vost does not realize that he is being deceived by his daughter, who is no longer, as he mistakenly assumes, a docile and dependent child, but - to quote the author's apt metaphor - a "female genie who had already discovered how to escape at will from her bottle" (3). It should also be noted that the above-mentioned metaphor prefigures the important theme of liberation, which serves in The Passion Artist as a counterpoint to the equally important motif of imprisonment or, to use a broader term, confinement. Moreover, we come across the first reference to Vost's misogyny (this motif will be resumed in the above-mentioned mock-trial scene and developed in Parts II and III). Hawkes, in an attempt to generate suspense, concludes the opening section by hinting at another central theme of the novel, i.e., corruption of innocence:
Confronted with this premonitory statement, we instantly realize that
something sinister is lurking nearby. Soon afterward, we find out that the
narrator has even more horrors in store for us: for alluding to a surrealistic
poem from Rilke's The Book of Images, later used by Max Ernst for his picture,
"Children Menaced by the Nightingales," he concludes: Claire the dead wife.
Eva the imprisoned mother. Mirabelle the daughter. Surrounded by the music of
such names, it was inevitable that Konrad Vost should himself become one of
the children menaced by the nightingales (3). Subsequently, the author describes Konrad Vost, an obsessively exact, ridiculously pedantic person, who seems to resemble Frankenstein, the protagonist of Mary Shelley's Gothic romance, rather than a lifelike character of the realistic novel. Hawkes, deliberately overemphasizing the heteroclite aspects of this character, attracts our attention to his puppet-like artificiality; in fact, he even uses the telltale term "manikin":
On scrutiny, it becomes clear that this grotesque creation is a bizarre composite of:
"Perfectly," "ill-fitting," "worn at the heels," "imperious," "womanly," "hostile," "ruthlessly exacting," "deceptively large," "sinister" - all these words and phrases, woven into the narrative with great deliberation, enhance the comic incongruity of the character. The reader, in addition to the obvious parallels mentioned above, notes the syncretic character of the description: well-defined, angular geometric shapes are contrasted with flaccid, amorphous body parts or ill-fitting articles of clothing; hard metal objects with soft flesh; black with white; large with small; elegance with sloppiness; and finally, masculinity with femininity (as Chapter Two will show, women in Hawkes's fictional world are "masculine" and active, whereas men "feminine" and passive). In point of fact, syncretism - definable as "the union of conflicting elements"- characterizes Vost's exterior and interior. Vost's grotesque looks correspond to his syncretic psyche, which is composed of seemingly irreconcilable features, such as self-loathing and self-love; yearning for claustration and liberation; secret longing for death and love; for nonbeing and the absolute; for corruption and innocence; as well as for an immurement within the self and a radical escape from it. It is revealing, too, that Hawkes's characterizations present certain analogies with his settings, whose desolate aspect reflects the spiritual desolation of the people that inhabit them. Besides, what lends an extra comic dimension to the portrayal of Konrad Vost is that this man who bears "all the hallmarks of the born pedant wedded to those of the petty genius of the police state" (4), this grotesque and sinister character with hands "so suited to gripping the truncheon" (4), is a meticulous pharmacist "dispensing syrups and powders to old women in black shawls" (4). Finally, it is worth noting that we realize what readers of a traditionally-plotted book should not know at all: the protagonist of the novel is a puppet-hero and someone is behind the scenes pulling the strings. Hawkes's anti-realist technique, the obvious "literariness" of the narrative, the status of The Passion Artist as a self-contained artifact - all these elements of the novel are here laid bare. It is easy for us, now, to grasp the meaning of John Hawkes's aesthetic creed: "I want whatever one creates out of words to be clearly something made, so clearly an artifice."11 The author, in the next section, resorts to an unexpected flashback. All at once, and without any transitional device typical of the traditionally-plotted novel, we meet Vost's wife Claire, dead for five years, who attempts in vain to persuade Konrad to accept reality with all of its unavoidable imperfections:
This abrupt temporal shift is characteristic of the novel's time-jumping structure. Scrambled mental flashbacks and incongruous episodes disjointed from the natural, linear flow of time are the two formal devices that help Hawkes establish an alinear, purposefully disordered storyline. The author, from the artistic point of view, achieves an interesting effect: in fracturing what we refer to as "reality," he confronts us with the dreamlike or, better still, nightmarish experience of his protagonist. Indeed, the structure of the novel reflects the agitated, backward and forward motion of Vost's feverish mind; so much so that we visualize Vost trying desperately to plumb the dark, mysterious depths of his memory by sifting through images, scenes, events and free associations uninformed by chronology or causality. In other words, the author places the reader inside Vost's mind, so that he may join the protagonist of The Passion Artist on his psychic voyage into the innermost recesses of his disordered consciousness. Consequently, we are forced to participate in the novel; piece together the chronologically jumbled events; find the pieces missing from the jigsaw puzzle - and solve the rebus offered us. In forcing the reader to become involved in The Passion Artist, Hawkes achieves a well-calculated artistic effect: he deprives him of the sense of security so familiar to passive recipients of traditional fiction. This is exactly what Donald J. Greiner meant when he wrote:
Although it is impossible to determine the period wherein the action of the
novel takes place (Hawkes studiously avoids giving any specific dates), a
close reading of the narrative reveals that the time-scheme of The Passion
Artist is based on two temporal levels: the Chronological Present and the
Non-Chronological Past.
From snippets of information scattered throughout the exposition, we deduce that, at the beginning of the narrative, Vost is fifty-five years old:
The turning point of the novel (as well as Konrad Vost's life) occurs on a Sunday in summer at the railroad station, when he encounters a woman prisoner manacled to two guards from La Violaine. As the woman does not pay attention to Vost and seems to be "unable to feel the weight of her guilt," Konrad feels nothing but contempt for her:
Still, the dramatic action of The Passion Artist does not begin until Vost goes for a walk to greet Mirabelle at the end of her day at school and, quite by accident, meets one of Mirabelle's girlfriends, who informs him that Mirabelle, like herself, is a juvenile prostitute. Vost has perfunctory oral sex with her, which exposes his inadequacies; then, out of shame, he goes to the police and turns his daughter in for prostitution. Since the girl serves as something of Mirabelle's "double" within the logic of the narrative, this illicit encounter in Vost's mind takes on incestuous proportions. Incidentally, the Mirabelle motif is the false clue of the novel: Hawkes, in the beginning, pretends to be interested in developing it; then, quite unexpectedly, he sends off Mirabelle's double (who is therefore reduced to a purely functional role) to meet Vost in the school yard; and, after Vost reports his daughter to the police, the author, toward the end of the novel, playfully resumes the motif by having a young woman approach Vost, to inform him that: "Mirabelle is living with the boy friend" (183). The schoolyard scene, it should be observed, fulfills a significant function within the structure of the narrative, for it marks the end of the exposition. In the next section, Hawkes finally provides us with a framing device, thereby
letting us establish the chronology: twenty-four hours later, Vost joins the
civilian volunteers who, stick in hand, set out to quell the rebellion in La
Violaine. Interestingly, and somewhat symbolically, the agitated men gather
"in the makeshift staging area of the schoolyard" (46), i.e., exactly where,
the previous day, Vost had had illicit sex with Mirabelle's girlfriend and
where he had found out the truth about his daughter's double life: "Minutes
later, in the twenty-fourth hour following his submission to the naked
schoolgirl, Konrad Vost alighted from the last of the blue vans to enter the
main gates of La Violaine" (48).
Until the tragic denouement of the novel (Vost is shot by his demented friend,
Gagnon), Vost spends two more days inside La Violaine, where he finally meets
his mother, Eva Laubenstein, and indulges in the transports of the "willed
erotic union" with her best friend, Hania. Strictly speaking, the dramatic
action of The Passion Artist lasts five days, which is something Hawkes
indicates by furnishing another framing device: "Thus he passed the fifth day
since the revolt of the women, and his second day in La Violaine, lying on his
prison bed and giving shape to the invisible while awaiting the night." (176)
Therefore, the Chronological Present in The Passion Artist is book-ended by
two events, i.e., the announcement of the revolt on the radio and Vost's
second day in La Violaine. Structurally, the Non-Chronological Past is made up of flashbacks, often cued by Vost's free mental associations. Besides, it features an important subplot (or more exactly, a "plot-within-a-plot"), i.e., a horror story related to Vost, in La Violaine, by his mother. Arranged chronologically, the events that make up the Non-Chronological Past of the narrative would form the following linear sequence:
This is where, right in the beginning, we meet the protagonist of The Passion Artist. Yet plot is not the only element of narrative structure that enables Hawkes to challenge the conventions of the traditional novel. Equally important in this respect is setting. On p. 5, the narrative shifts back to the imaginary city where the action of The Passion Artist is set. The author depicts the drab monotony of life in the city with all its banality, monotony and tedium. The whole imagery of this episode serves to convey a sense of "the boredom and security of time passing as it was expected to pass, indifferently, without meaning, without the threat of impending unwanted change or even disaster" (5). As this part of the novel reveals, the tomblike city seems to be immersed in deadly stasis, suspended in a place beyond time and space, trapped in a permanent state of irreality. Images of monstrous ennui, repressive order and all-pervasive entropy abound. Typically, Hawkes floods the episode with hypnagogic imagery, letting us slowly dream our way through his "lunar landscapes." Among the sights and sounds to which the ennuyed habitués of the cafe are exposed in this eerie urban vista are the "official entrance of La Violaine, an entrance consisting of a pair of high narrow rusted gates both barred and grilled . . . nothing more than the traffic of rattling trucks and automobiles and the occasional clumsy motorcycle with its sidecar attached . . . the lengthening of a shadow . . . " (6). Their usual distractions may be reduced to those "special" occasions, which have over the years turned into a kind of ritual, when "across the street a woman was freed . . . in every several years but predictably at the hour of noon . . ." and ". . . as if she had been instructed to do so, she crossed through the traffic, entered the cafe, and again by instinct seated herself with one of those regular habitués whose own life had once been unutterably changed by events long since associated with the prison." (6) The passage quoted above, it should be noted, has a great thematic value in
the structure of The Passion Artist. First, it prefigures the omnipresent
entropy motif, which insinuates itself into every pore of the work's texture.
Second, it provides an essential structural link, carefully established by Hawkes, between the strange ritual described on p. 6 (a released woman
selecting one of the cafe habitués), the turning point of the novel on p. 14 (Vost
meeting a chained woman prisoner at the railroad station), and the fateful
encounter, on p. 24, with the released female prisoner who, in line with the
strange ritual, singles out Vost, tells him about the imminent riot in the
prison, and thus changes his life forever. It becomes clear, moreover, that
the cafe is a mere reflection of the prison. Surely, the absurd duplication of
the name La Violaine and the ironic aphorism La Violaine to La Violaine strengthen this impression still further.
Grotesque deformity, inadequacy, drowsiness, jarring elements brought into senseless juxtaposition - there can be no doubt about the dog's significant function, both thematic and symbolic, in the novel. Indeed, the ungainly creature is nothing less than a trotting, staggering symbol of the bizarre city and its freakish inhabitants - and it is little wonder that the customer most preferred by it is Konrad Vost. Claire, in the next episode of the exposition, mentions a friend or a relative who, unlike K. Vost - and this is the whole point of this seemingly gratuitous scene - is so contented with himself that "he could live happily in the bottom of the toilet bowl" (8). However, this brief section serves a thematic function, for in resorting to metaphor, Hawkes introduces the scatology motif, which ties in with Vost's view that "every man contains his psychic pit, and that each such pit is filled with slime." (32) This scatological remark, functioning here as a foreshadowing, will be reiterated throughout the narrative as an echo. Then, the all-important theme of death is resumed, and the narrative again shuttles back across time and space to the Non-Chronological Past or, to be more exact, Claire's funeral. Suddenly, the reader is confronted with incongruous and, for the time being, inexplicable mental associations (doubling as cross-references in Hawkes's narrative scheme), which appear, disappear and reappear throughout the novel:
In fact, this passage may serve as a perfect example of Hawkes's use of foreshadowings and echoes. Although we are still unable, at this juncture, to find any points of reference for certain incongruous images - the barn, the hay, the garlic, the village - we make a mental note of these foreshadowings, and then, much later in the novel, we come across those scenes in which they reappear as echoes. On p. 135, for instance, the narrative shifts to a primitive village with a house for disordered children run by Anna Kossowski, where Vost has spent part of his unhappy childhood upon his mother's incarceration. Little Konrad has just stepped into the barn (symbolizing the maternal womb), to attend to his beloved horse (embodiment of comfort and security) called, like the woman, Anna Kossowski; but, more significantly, the boy wants to find out "where Anna Kossowski the horse expels her manure" (142). The cruel woman believes that, having discovered Nature's forbidden secret, her charge has "shamed the horse"; and, as a result, little Konrad Vost suffers one of the most shameful humiliations of his childhood: the woman forces him to undergo a hideous bath, all but drowning him in the downpour of the horse's urine. Likewise, the mysterious garlic reappears on the wall of the house for disordered children: "He was aware of the bed, the sun, the garlic hanging from a nail in the sloping stone wall" (165). In the same episode, we come across another inexplicable image of grotesque incongruity, monstrous emptiness (physical and spiritual), as well as absurd displacement, all of which inform Hawkes's fiction:
Nor is this all. Unexpectedly, the author offers another surrealistic, and vaguely menacing, image of incongruity, emptiness and obscurity, which serves to bring up Vost's (as well as our own) sense of bewilderment:
The baffling church scene is immediately followed by a description of the city, wherein the key motifs of entropy and death are resumed and developed. Hawkes, in typical fashion, uses the technique of meaningful inversion to depict the inner world of Konrad Vost. More specifically, he points to Vost's spiritual torpor by describing the desolate environment in which Vost, as well as the other characters of The Passion Artist, are condemned to live. The narrator, in posing a rhetorical question to the reader, suggests that the entropic city might reflect the metaphysical malaise and death-in-life of its inhabitants: "And what was this city, denying in its daily life the validity of recorded history, if not the very domain of the human psyche? (12). Inevitably, the description is full of imagery that serves to convey an irremediable sense of desolation. The bizarre city is not only devoid of a name; it is also deprived of trees, flowers, ponds. Hawkes, in an effort to conjure up a visual equivalent of metaphysical oppression, deliberately fills the setting with images of hard, lifeless, potentially dangerous objects. This bleak, dusty, smoke-blackened setting, reminiscent of the desolate city in The Cannibal (Spitzen-on-the Dein), consists almost entirely of "cheaply built concrete dwellings," whereas "sacks of concrete" line its streets. The play equipment in the only municipal park for children resembles a "collection of devices for inflicting torture," and Vost's apartment is cluttered with "squat iron bottles of compressed gas" (11, emphasis added). Inefficiency, inadequacy, incompleteness and repressed energy (physical, mental, spiritual, sexual and otherwise) are all evident in the low-hung electrical wires feeding "only the barest energy to the tin trolley cars"; in "unfinished apartment houses;" in "unshaded light bulbs"; in "incomplete pipelines"; and in "abandoned telephones poles" (11, emphasis added). If the dying city conveys a sense of confinement and constriction, the disintegrating countryside, which lies right beyond the city, evokes nothingness, waste, sterility as well as meaningless expansion. This is where, one might say, time has come to a standstill; a haunting poetry of stillness, immobility and immutability pervades this vast oneiric landscape:
Quite clearly, the woeful phallic images of the "sunken post," the "incomplete pipelines," or the "abandoned telephone poles invading the harshness of the landscape" suggest impotence, a sort of dormant male sexuality. Eros, we know, is imprisoned in La Violaine - Thanatos, therefore, reigns supreme. Equally revealing in this regard is the topography of the city:
Two elements of this topographical scheme deserve special mention. The cemetery - "like the replica of the city itself" (22) - is the heart and pulse of the city, symbolizing the spiritual death of Konrad Vost, as well as the predicament of his friends Gagnon, Herzenbrecher (the old pharmacist) and other unnamed pathetic males, each of whom seems to carry a built-in necropolis within himself. Moreover, "the enormous cross the color of blood washed in the rain," situated atop the hospital, lords it over the city, evoking the inevitable image of a vast grave. It should be borne in mind, too, that the sinister cross has a dramatic and structural relevance, for its portentous "color of blood washed in the rain" foreshadows the bloody revolt in Part I. As evidenced by the key episodes of the exposition studied in this chapter,
the structure of The Passion Artist has little in common with that of the
traditional novel. The fragmented plot of the narrative is subordinated to the
subjective consciousness of the protagonist; a certain semblance of
chronological sequence can only be established through reader participation;
the causality of the work is disrupted by the bizarre logic of the nightmare;
while the characters and the settings of the novel violate the rule of
realistic verisimilitude, thereby accentuating the self-conscious
"literariness" of The Passion Artist. Furthermore, it must be noted that the
structure of the work is not controlled through the traditional devices of
plot movement, chronological sequence, causality, recognizable setting or
realistic theme. Rather, it is held together and developed by means of certain
cross-referencing patterns, i.e., symbols and metaphors, foreshadowings and
echoes, as well as parallels and contrasts. Finally, the structure of The
Passion Artist, it must be noted, testifies to the painstaking care with which Hawkes has planned and composed the novel, skillfully integrating all of its
elements into a harmonious whole. CHAPTER TWO
The author, in characteristic fashion, resorts to metaphor and paradox, setting up a counterpoint - a "cesspool" (thesis) and a "bed of stars" (antithesis) - with a fundamental structural and thematic value. The counterpoint referred to above occurs in The Passion Artist in somewhat different form, for the narrator describes Konrad Vost's theory of the interior life of the man as a "bed of stars" and a "pit of putrescence" (31). In other words, the chief opposition in the novel is that between purity and filth, or innocence and corruption, or beauty and ugliness. It should be stressed that this dialectic view of human nature has come to be regarded by Hawkes's critics as one of the most notable features of his fiction. Patrick O'Donnell, for example, has said:
The Passion Artist belongs to his later novels, in which the relationship between femininity (love) and masculinity (death) forms a dominant theme. Indeed, as O'Donnell has observed: "sex as battle, as corruption, as violence, finally as inextricably linked to death, seems to dominate every human relationship in The Passion Artist."14 Nevertheless, it would be simplistic to claim that everything in The Passion Artist revolves around sex, whereas the other themes and motifs are merely subservient to it. In fact this rich, dense, "contrapuntally structured narrative" - to use Frederick Busch's phrase15 - contains a number of diverse themes, including innocence and corruption, imprisonment and liberation, as well as pleasure and pain. It must be added, too, that the novel offers a wealth of secondary motifs, such as victimization, dehumanization, deformity, oppression, prostitution or incest (to name but a few), all of which support the primary themes and complement the bleak vision of the author. The Passion Artist, as indicated in Chapter One, is dominated by the death motif which, in one form or another, permeates the entire structure and texture of the narrative. When we meet Konrad Vost, he obsessively grieves for his dead wife (Claire) and regularly visits her grave. The theme of death is extended through the description of the entropic city where the action of the novel is set, as well as through the baffling, surrealistic "church scene" taking place at Claire's funeral. Right in the beginning, the reader discovers that Vost, hopelessly imprisoned or, better still, entombed within his own self, is fascinated with the notion of death. He is, for example, drawn to the sepulchral aspects of the railroad station, conjured up in the following eerie passage which, in its poetic evocation of unrelieved somnolence, silence and alienation, brings to mind a Chirico painting:
Characteristically, Hawkes supplies imagery suggesting the existence of hidden thematic and symbolic potential which, in this case, serves to evoke the funereal atmosphere that pervades the setting. And thus, he works into his dreamscape images calculated to evoke a sense of entombment, such as: "sooty mausoleum," "metal bins like crypts for the dead"; fixity and immutability: "systems of iron barriers," "schedules chalked on slate"; lifelessness and soullessness: "wooden benches," "iron barriers," "metal bins"; futility of dysfunctional objects: "broken clock," "vending machine bereft of anything to appease the waiting passenger or angry child"; as well as chronic, pathological deterioration of things - or, to put it differently, the slow, steady, subversive wearing out of matter due to the erosive action of Time: "grass growing between rusted tracks," "sooty mausoleum," "rotted passenger platform," and "tattered suitcase." In the final analysis, what Hawkes strives to convey in his description of the railroad station is an overall sense of a terrifying fixity of the setting and a protracted, steady degradation of objects. It is interesting to note that, in the manner of a poet, he turns the evanescent into the tangible without specifying the actual object of his descriptions, which, on scrutiny, may be defined as the fusion of life and death. Yet as the presence of death in life is an elusive and multi-faceted affair, the author repeatedly resorts to metaphorical language. It is worthwhile to add that Hawkes's approach to description or, more specifically, his interest in the world of phenomena, his preoccupation with the appearance and "life" of objects - which, incidentally, he renders with the painstaking care of Alain Robbe-Grillet - dwarfs his fictional creatures, alienates them from their environment and, consequently, dehumanizes them. Although there are many instances of dehumanization in The Passion Artist, this aspect of Hawkes's technique is particularly apparent in Vost's bizarre journey through the marsh, symbolizing a journey into the darkest and innermost chambers of the protagonist's repressed psyche. Images of desolation, here as elsewhere, are in evidence:
To be sure, there is more to the above-cited description than a mere exercise in desolation; in fact, what the author manages to convey through the medium of his verbal art is a sense of man's alienation from his natural environment. Nature is presented here not only as a wasteland; it is also shown as alien and even hostile to human beings. The characters that inhabit the world of The Passion Artist are by no means surrounded by good, benevolent Mother Nature; there is no Arcadian "communion" between her and them. The Romantic notion of man's pastoral, reassuring "at-homeness" in the Universe is by turns parodied, scorned and rejected in The Passion Artist. Confronted with Nature, the human being feels awkward, ill at ease. Konrad Vost, in particular, feels estranged from Mother Nature, just as he feels rejected by his natural mother. To Vost, Nature is absurd, devoid of "shape and meaning" - not unlike the unnamed city where he is condemned to lead his dreary existence. There is one more thing that should be pointed out in the context of the life/death opposition: Hawkes applies verbs of action not only to people, but also to inanimate objects. As a result, the author achieves the illusion of suspended animation - a paradoxical combination of movement and immobility, which presupposes the correlation of life and death. On the one hand, he fills his descriptions with verbs of action and ascribes human traits to nature to convey a sense of animation of the inanimate; on the other hand, he imprisons motion within the confines of a fixed stereoscopic vision, thereby arresting all movement. The result is, not surprisingly, one of motion without movement. Although the environment referred to above promises (or rather threatens) to spring into life, it actually remains immobile. Time, action, setting, even the characters, everything in the novel seems to be suspended in an eternal present; and oddly enough, Nature itself appears to be denatured. And so, during his journey through the marsh, Vost - who, incidentally, exhibits fewer signs of life than the flora around him - sees a peculiar geometric ballet being performed before him: "undulating grasses that rose higher than his head and whispered like thin blades sharpening each other"; "wells that dropped downward for immeasurable distances", "stands of pale trees suddenly sprang up from the mud"; " the vestiges of an immense canal undulating through ribs of sand; more fence posts, the rotten ribs on backbone of a small boat, brightly colored marsh plants festering in sockets of ice (85, emphasis added). At the same time, the author takes pains to imprison this magical choreography of the organic within the confines of "soulless" geometry and stereopsis, weaving into his description images evocative of fixity and monumentality, such as, for example: "geometric arrangement of wet stones," "tracks constructed on a roadbed nearly level with the deceptive surface of the marsh"; "sheets of water"; "immeasurable distances; immense canal; flatness and emptiness; "an agglomeration of flashing mirrors; "piles of rocks" or "depths of the wells" (85, emphasis added). Consequently, what Vost witnesses in this passage is an example of literary legerdemain - a twofold metamorphosis of the inanimate into the animate and of the animate into the inanimate. As a result of this trick of stylistic sleight of hand, any distinction between the animate and inanimate, as well as the organic and the inorganic, disappears; if "dead" objects seem to be endued with life, life in its turn appears to be inert, immutable and, indeed, dead. As previously noted, Love (Eros) is set up as a counterpoint to Thanatos (Death). If Thanatos symbolizes sterility, torpor, tedium, paralysis of the will, imprisonment in the self and a yearning for nonbeing, Eros connotes sex drive, vitality, strength, exuberance and the will to live. It should be pointed out that Thanatos in The Passion Artist is represented by the men, and Eros by the women; in fact, one of the most striking aspects of the novel is that Hawkes's women are stronger, more vital, more active, more determined, and more ruthless than his androgynous males. The women of La Violaine vanquish their male attackers, butcher sadistic Dr. Kropotkin and seize control of La Violaine; notorious Eva Laubenstein, having murdered her husband, attains a short-lived liberation of her son; Anna Kossowski manipulates young Vost as if he were no more than a wire-pulled puppet, exposing him to all manner of sexual abuse and warping his psyche forever; precocious Mirabelle asserts her independence by getting out of Vost's control, plying the trade of a prostitute while still in her teens and leaving her father to live with her boyfriend; and even her equally precocious schoolmate turns out to be much more adept than Vost, a fifty-five-year old man, at making love. Without question, the demonic females of The Passion Artist, in contrast to the lymphatic males, get their way and, what is more, they get things done with the ruthless efficiency that is traditionally attributed to men. Typically, by depicting virile women and effeminate men, Hawkes overturns all preconceived notions the reader might have on the subject; yet, in doing so, he again places artifice in the service of themes. This is especially evident in the way he portrays his characters. For example, Konrad Vost's skin, which "covered the flesh of his deceptively masculine large frame" is distinguished by its "womanly whiteness," whereas his hands are referred to as "soft" and "white." (3) Konrad Vost the Father, in his turn, sports a pair of arms described, rather enticingly, as "warm," "hairless," and "as thick and smooth as a woman's thigh"; his flesh is "gentle" and "tinted with the warmer tones of a flower with petals reflecting the color of sun and blood." (115) By contrast, the woman prisoner we remember from Chapter One wears a "small bright red hat perched at a crooked angle" (virile jauntiness) and gives the little dog "one deft vicious kick" (tough-guy treatment); besides, her face is marked by rough hardness and mannish coarseness:
To cap it all, she drinks and smokes like a man, speaks in a "matter-of-fact tone," and looks "directly" and "firmly" into Vost's eye (27). The two hetaerae that capture Vost during his journey through the marsh - "the one holding the end of the rope, the other still bearing her wooden pitchfork" - are depicted as "heavy and plain"; whereas their voices betray "not the slightest sound of girlhood or laughter" (122). Grotesque-looking Anna Kossowski, Vost's surrogate mother, is "lightly bearded, heavy, passionate, with the thick large hands and feet of a man" (134). The crude jottings Vost studies on the walls inside La Violaine are the "equal of the vulgar cravings of any man" (155). In fact, only when he discovers the sign Between my legs I do not have a bunch of violets does he realize that this, as well as the other vulgarities adorning the walls of La Violaine, could not possibly have been inscribed by men. The dichotomy between Eros and Thanatos in the novel is best exemplified by Konrad Vost and his relations with the most important women of his life. As previously noted, Konrad Vost, at the beginning of the narrative, is shown as a death-in-life figure who, haunted by the memory of his dead wife, frequently visits the cemetery where she is buried, roams the streets of the nameless grave-like city and seems to be drawn to the clockwork routine and deathlike predictability of the railroad station. Later on it becomes obvious that his overwhelming desire for love has been thwarted by his two mothers, Eva Laubenstein (his natural mother) and Anna Kossowski (his surrogate mother). Eva who, like her son, is a victim of child abuse, is shown as a domineering, unfeeling person. She is referred to as the "woman of the house" (112) and the "fearsome heart and mind of this household" (79). Vost recalls his mother either lying alone, asleep on her bed, cooking in a hot kitchen, or giving music lessons to other children in the village. Revealingly, he perceives her bedroom as the "forbidden room" (115). Hanging on the wall above the head of her bed is the "framed portrait of the naked bright red heart trussed up in the green thorny vines chopped from some wild and frightening bush" (113). Moreover, as she is incapable of maternal tenderness, Vost views her as an inhumane woman with something vaguely disconcerting about her. The only person who treats Konrad with due parental warmth is his father, whom the author, in line with the logic of inversion prevailing in the novel, endows with maternal and feminine features. However, the tie between father and son is brutally severed by the mother, who burns her husband alive, thereby inflicting a deep psychic wound upon Vost. It follows from the narrative that, on murdering Konrad Vost the Father, Eva Laubenstein is incarcerated in the La Violaine prison, while Konrad winds up in a grotesque village orphanage for disordered children. His surrogate mother, Anna Kossowski, subjects him to abuse and humiliation aimed at suppressing Konrad's budding sexuality. Moreover, the perverse woman uses the girl Kristel (whose name suggests purity) to arouse Konrad and then humiliate him in the presence of a disordered child from the farm. From now on, in Konrad's mind, sexual pleasure is inevitably linked with pain, which provides the basis for the ambivalent feelings he will exhibit in the future:
Konrad is further confirmed in his feeling of sexual ambivalence on being assaulted by a swarm of wasps and removed from the orphanage by Anna Kossowski for "having been outside in the night with Kristel." (169) This way Konrad Vost, for the second time in his life, is disowned by his mother. More important, however, his emotional life is crippled and his psychosexual development arrested, something that Claire, his compassionate wife, who actually doubles as his third mother, detects in him:
Unfortunately for Konrad, Claire (whose name suggests the ability to see things with clarity) dies and Vost, symbolically, becomes an orphan for the third time in his life. As noted in Chapter One, the role of Vost's daughter Mirabelle is, from the structural point of view, purely functional; from the thematic point of view, however, her importance is crucial. One day Konrad Vost, who firmly believes that his teenage daughter is a pure and innocent child, accidentally finds out that she is a juvenile prostitute. He thus suffers one more disillusionment, which is all the more painful as he has been duped by his own daughter (Vost's bewilderment finds poetic expression in one of the best metaphors of the novel: "his entire world fell from him, like a facing of ice from an immense cliff"(34)). Moreover, his instinct for innocence which, despite his horrifying past, has somehow survived within him, is destroyed in an instant and all he can do now is to vent his pent-up fury on women. The following passage, one of the dramatic highpoints of the novel, reflects Vost's stupefaction and pain on finding out about the double life of Mirabelle:
Yielding to the sadomasochistic tendencies and unconscious incestuous urges stemming from the "lessons of devastation" mentioned above, Vost resolves to desecrate the very ideal of innocence. Juvenile prostitution is thus presented in the novel as both the reverse of an unattainable ideal and a corollary to death. As the scene with the juvenile prostitute reflects the relentless struggle between love and death in The Passion Artist, some of its aspects merit analysis. The following description of the setting features the same stylistic devices Hawkes frequently uses to convey a sense of oppression, corruption and a slow wearing out of things, all of which reflect the death-agony of the spiritual realm:
"A narrow door," the "cubicle that was the toilet," the "cubicle containing the stove," the "gaunt narrow chaise lounge"- these images are suggestive of constriction and claustrophobia, singularly at odds with the actual purpose of the place. The "single shuttered window," the "empty walls of whitewashed concrete," the "iron bottles of gas," the "meager tins of food," the "outmoded refrigerator on the top of which rested the radio of blackened Bakelite," the "smell of meat boiling in a steel pot" all serve to point up the shabbiness of the apartment. Finally, the incongruous "gaunt narrow chaise lounge," to which Hawkes draws our attention, evokes an image of decadence, which is here juxtaposed with the dismal appearance of the setting. This anachronistic piece of furniture is definitely out of place in the young prostitute's sordid little apartment; what is more, it conjures up images a high-class fin-de-siecle brothel with its characteristic kitschy opulence. More important, however, the image of the "chaise lounge that extended into the room like an ornate tongue, like the narrow prow of an entombed boat, like the reclining place of a courtesan with feathers and painted skin" (37), is also reminiscent of an ornate coffin. Hawkes, moreover, works into the texture of the narrative other images and phrases suggestive of decadence and death. The light filters into the room through the slats in the shutters "as through the skeletal ribs of an animal long dead" (36). Through the open door Vost sees "the black and white toilet stark and waiting like and instrument of execution, and still wet from and noisy from the girl's use" (36). The choreography of movements was undoubtedly prepared with characteristic deliberation and care. This is evident in the way Hawkes contrasts Vost's pathetic clumsiness and passivity with the young girl's vitality. Throughout the scene one constantly senses Vost's frigidity, which is the result of his latent fear of women and the uncomfortable positions he is compelled to assume. It is quite clear that the girl deftly manipulates Vost, who seems more dead than alive, as if he were a mere rag doll. At times, he appears to be as motionless as the furniture around him: "he had not moved since entering this place of nakedness, and when the girl returned from the cubicle of the kitchen bearing a small glass filled to the brim with a clear liquor, he found it difficult to raise his arm, extend his hand, seize the glass" (36). In contrast to Vost, the girl: "in an easy gesture, and with both hands, pulled the white shirt over her head and free from her body" (36) and "directed him as if he were a walking invalid" to the chaise lounge mentioned above. Vost allows himself to "raise and maneuver his right arm and hand so that his forearm was extended between her legs and the hand was clutching to himself the tightly denimed weight of the girl's leg and thigh" (38) Lying on the chaise lounge, Vost "was like a man fallen to a narrow ledge" (38). One also senses that Vost is at the mercy of the young prostitute:
In view of the descriptions discussed above, it is easy to see why W.S. di Piero draws our attention to the contrived, stagy character of erotic scenes in Hawkes's fiction, saying: "His eroticism is staged reality at best: we can almost see klieg lights burning offstage."16 The following image of a predator devouring its kill adds a touch of bestiality to the oft-romanticized sex act; here, the theme of dehumanization in The Passion Artist is pushed to its limits:
Moreover, "in the midst of his shock and pleasure" Vost fights the girl's greedy mouth "as the child fights his bladder in the night" (40). Similarly, the other (non-) erotic scenes in the novel are replete with images of oppression, constraint, violence and death. Repeatedly, the dehumanization motif recurs in the course of the narrative. For example, the women Vost encounters in a barn after his escape from the hospital "seized and held his jaw in a thoughtless grasp, while a still bolder hand, which surely belonged to the woman lying behind him, reached over his hip and, catching a handful of the trousers bunched between his legs, roughly shook him like a cat with a bird" (106). Here, too, one can find the characteristic combination of desire and reluctance on Vost's part, which makes sex a decidedly ambivalent experience for him. At a certain point, the sex act is transformed into a struggle between passive victim and active victimizer, producing pain and pleasure at the same time:
Soon it becomes apparent that what we witness in this scene is rape or, more exactly, rape in reverse; for, quite apart from being repeatedly rammed into his side with a woman's pointed elbow (parody of the sex act and masturbation), Konrad Vost is literally coerced into having sex with the perverse women. At the same time, one of them "defiles" the gloved silver hand, which Vost proudly views as the externalization of his heroism and masculinity. The involuted sexuality of the scene echoes all the other erotic scenes in the novel:
Olfactory sensations play a large part in this scene: "Again he was being drugged on what he was breathing: the smells of manure, dust, perspiration, unwashed hair, a rancid mouth." (106) The anti-climax comes when Vost turns his head, twisting his mouth away from the woman's, and suddenly feels "relieved to be inhaling the smell of manure instead of the breath of the woman." (109) No wonder, then, that O'Donnell believes that the view of sexuality as a life-and-death struggle is central to the "war of the sexes" theme:
However, this is only one aspect of sexuality in The Passion Artist. Vost, toward the end of the novel, is forcibly brought to the La Violaine prison, where he confronts the women he has brutally clubbed. During his stay in La Violaine he also confronts the most secret recesses of his psyche, finds out that his mother was victimized in childhood, discovers that his hand is not silver but quite ordinary, and finally experiences, at age 55 and for the first time in his life, the transports of the "willed erotic union":
In this way, Vost discovers that the internal life of a human being is not only a cesspool, as he has hitherto thought, but also a bed of stars; what is more, thanks to his mother, he finds the key to the other, happier, side of the human condition, which is represented in the novel by Eros. However, Vost's sense of gratification proves to be short-lived, as he is accidentally shot by his friend Gagnon. In Konrad's case, death triumphs in the end and his lifelong yearning for non-existence is fulfilled. At last, he discovers "what it is to be nothing" (184). Like the struggle between love and death, the opposition between innocence and corruption constitutes a major theme of the novel. Generally, all characters in The Passion Artist are at once corrupt and innocent. This duality, so characteristic of Hawkesian themes, is best illustrated by Konrad Vost. On the one hand, he is presented as a man capable of hate, loathing and cruelty. He possesses sadistic, misogynistic and criminal tendencies, which come out in the open during the skirmish with the women. A fanatic by nature, Vost is ready to annihilate all those who might dare prevent him from indulging in his fantasies. On the other hand, he is an idealist, a dreamer in search of love, compassion and innocence, a fact which has prompted O'Donnell to sum up the whole novel as a "quest-romance, wherein the artist searches for the unbroken cup of his own lost innocence."18 Moreover, Vost exemplifies corrupted innocence which, in his case, begins right with the inception. We learn from his mother's account that she and the baby she was carrying in her body were subjected to horrible torture by a demented village doctor. Characteristically, no justification is given for this inhuman and absurd treatment. All we know is that the sadistic doctor "disliked her on sight for her small size and attractive face" (32). Therefore, in line with the weird logic of the nightmare, the doctor manages to convince the woman that the baby is already dead, and that it should be expelled from her body "in all possible haste." Symbolically, little Konrad, even before his birth, is subjected to constriction - another important theme of the novel:
As a result of this gratuitous act of cruelty, Konrad Vost comes into the world malformed (the deformity theme), born "not in love but in terror". Moreover, he exposes her mother to suffering, both physical and psychological, warping her mentality, distorting her view of men and destroying her instinct for innocence.
As for Vost, the instinct for innocence mentioned in the excerpt quoted above is the only thing he has left, for he has been deprived of maternal love and familial warmth. Constantly victimized and scorned by those closest to him, Vost eventually turns into a cold, heartless man who longs to take his revenge upon the world and impose his own idea of law and order on others. In conveying the idea, Hawkes transmutes dross into gold:
Similarly, small and pretty-faced Eva Laubenstein falls victim to the gratuitous cruelty of men. Even before the nightmarish experience with the doctor she is molested - just for fun, it would seem - by her brother. Interestingly, it is difficult to resist the impression that descriptions of sadistic brutality in The Passion Artist are bound up with perverse pleasure. Indeed, Lech Budrecki stresses the ritualistic nature of cruelty in Hawkes's fiction, adding that there exists in Hawkes's novels an indissoluble link between victim and victimizer.19 According to the critic, just as the victimizer craves for the victim, so the victim longs for the victimizer. In the passage quoted below, Eva Laubenstein tells Konrad of her childhood molestations, concluding that, during her ordeal, there was no one she loved as much as her brother. In this episode, sadism is commingled with masochism and incest with love:
Child abuse, senseless victimization, gratuitous cruelty, martyrdom - these motifs constitute the essence of the nightmarish vision presented in The Passion Artist. This moral turpitude, however, engenders a yearning for purity and innocence. Vost, for instance, volunteers to quell the rebellion in La Violaine and participates in the brutal skirmish in the prison yard; but, soon afterwards, he encounters the "little martyr of La Violaine" (95) - a woman he and his friend Spapa have viciously beaten during the skirmish - who now produces a feeling of compassion in him. This unexpected encounter serves as something of a Joycean epiphany (one recalls the famous "midstream scene" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); indeed, Vost views the "little martyr of La Violaine" as a symbol of purity and innocence. The millpond scene, which takes place during Vost's journey through the marsh, is a watershed in Vost's life, as he realizes his desire for innocence and love:
Likewise, Eva Laubenstein, who brutally murders her husband, ruins her son's life and slaughters one Doctor Kropotkin, redeems herself by liberating her son. As regards the "good" characters of The Passion Artist, all of them are tainted with impurity to a lesser or greater extent. Vost's wife, Claire, may serve as a case in point: although she is depicted as a considerate, loving, tender woman, the reader, at the beginning of the novel, finds out that, "during the last six years of her life she had regularly had fleshly relations with a man somewhat older than himself whom she had met in a bakery"(4). According to Patrick McGrath: "When physical beauty, or sexual perfection, occurs, a stain of impurity will always be revealed and the deformity identified as an internal condition, a corruption of the soul."20 One of the most striking traits of the novel is a proliferation of forms characterized by grotesque deformity and mutilation. McGrath, when commenting on Hawkes' s fiction, has this observation to make:
As previously noted, the fragmented structure of the narrative, the pulverized plot, the deformed dog described at the beginning of the novel and Vost himself provide excellent examples. Sometimes, the description of a deformed human body is placed in the service of the dehumanization theme; at other times, the deformity fulfills a parodic function. For example, the old, shriveled peasant woman Vost stumbles across during his journey through the marsh resembles a witch from a tale by the Grimm brothers:
Anna Kossowski, another witchlike female character in The Passion Artist, relates to a comic-book or fairy-tale, depending on one's point of view. The following excerpts are so patently grotesque and absurd as to defy common sense or belief:
At times, the good woman brings to mind a character that has flitted out of a Gothic romance:
- or a S. Dali painting, complete with this image of a putrescent feminine sanctum:
Yet it must be stressed that these uncanny images of physical deformity, symbolizing as they do a corresponding corruption of the spirit, are not designed to shock the reader or draw his attention to the author's descriptive prowess. In fact, like all the descriptions in the novel, they serve a strictly functional role - namely, they add to the theme of dehumanization, which assumes monstrous, absurd, comical or even frightening dimensions. Sometimes, human beings are likened to freaks, objects or animals. Little Konrad Vost, for example, is referred to as " . . . The red insect. The malformed child. The small red dripping thing . . ." (133) The disordered orphans left in the care of Anna Kossowski "lay sprawled like dogs or dwarfs about the fire in the iron stove . . ." (134) What is more, they have "hairless heads and faces as well as . . faces [that] were concealed behind mats of hair . . . bright red lips that never closed, fingers without fingernails, large round faces watered with the fluids of the mouths and eyes." (134) Some characters wear telltale scars, bruises or tattoos, which not only mar their physical beauty but also reveal their intrinsic impurity or imperfection. For instance, the woman prisoner Vost meets in the "La Violaine" cafe has a scar "in the shape of a barb" on her chin (25); the young prostitute encountered in the school yard also bears a scar "in the puckering of the naked waist that might have been inflicted in the fury of some childhood beating" (37); old Herzenbrecher, despite his extreme age and the suggestive "looseness of his soft skin," bears a tattoo on his upper arm revealing his pathetic yearning for freedom and sexual liberation, i.e., the image of a "balloon in flight with two plump naked women waving from its basket, as if this aged and gentle pharmacist had once known virile days in a distant part of his young manhood" (76); and even the beauty of the "little martyr of La Violaine" is not flawless:
The dichotomy between confinement and liberation forms another important theme of the novel. Typically, the theme of confinement is presented on two planes, literal and figurative. On the literal plane, there is the prison for women, which, ironically, constitutes one of the landmarks and tourist attractions of the city: "in all this was to be seen the only terrain appropriate to the city that featured La Violaine in its racks of weathered postcards" (12) Figuratively, however, all the characters of the novel are imprisoned in one way or another. The women, including Eva Laubenstein, Gagnon's daughter, Spapa's wife, among others, are literally incarcerated in La Violaine, while the men are confined to the nameless city or, strictly speaking, to the "La Violaine" cafe which, as we remember from Chapter One, serves as the mirror-image of the La Violaine prison:
Konrad Vost is confined to the prison of his own nightmarish past, whereas his friend Gagnon - himself a prisoner of the sordid city - keeps exotic birds in wooden cages stacked and hung "in a cell-like room."(19) Yet this pervasive feeling of imprisonment inevitably engenders its opposite - a yearning for liberation - which assumes various forms in the novel, giving rise to the motifs of escape, rebellion and journey. The theme of liberation is prefigured right at the outset, when we find out that Vost's daughter breaks free from parental control. As mentioned in Chapter One, Mirabelle is portrayed, metaphorically, as a "female genie who had already discovered how to escape at will from her bottle" (3). Mirabelle's successful attempt at liberation is symptomatic, for the other women become free, too. Incidentally, it is worth mentioning that Mirabelle is not the only character to attain freedom. Here too, Konrad Vost may serve as an example. During his unhappy childhood, he breaks away from the village orphanage where he is at once cared for, molested and, to a considerable extent, imprisoned by his victimizer, Anna Kossowski. The theme of rebellion looms large in The Passion Artist; in fact, the entire Chapter Two ("Skirmishing") is devoted to it. Like the motif of escape, it is prefigured at the beginning of the narrative, when a woman released from prison informs Vost of an imminent riot. Subsequently, we find out that the women prove to be stronger than the men who volunteer to quell the rebellion with the help of sticks, which acquire an obvious symbolic value. They overpower the male volunteers and, consequently, seize control of the prison. They, too, belong to those characters who gain freedom. Konrad Vost's case, however, is far more problematic. Vost, like all the other male characters, is torn between two conflicting urges, i.e., the solipsistic need to escape into his own self (which would be tantamount to imprisonment and death-in-life) and the compulsive desire to flee from himself. The former is bound up with his deep-seated death-wish, his yearning for self-annihilation and nonbeing. Although the journey motif is introduced early in the narrative ("He was the stationary traveler, that much he knew" [14]), we realize the Vost's destination is far from certain and that the next stop might as well be death. In the episode immediately following the brutal skirmish with the La Violaine women, Vost travels by train; but, oddly enough, he does not seem to be heading anywhere in particular. Moreover, this slow-moving, lugubrious episode is replete with familiar images of death, desolation and stasis:
At a certain point in this bizarre journey Vost sees, or rather imagines, a silver coffin which reminds him of his father's funeral. Now Vost's obsession with the funereal turns into an explicit death-wish, as witness this sepulchral image:
Ultimately, having experienced the transports of the "willed erotic union" (181), Vost too achieves freedom - the destination of his harrowing voyage into the subconscious . However, Vost's victory over his own repressed psyche is qualified, for he is accidentally killed by his demented friend Gagnon, who mistakes him for one of the La Violaine women. There is no doubt, then, that in Vost's case, death triumphs over life. Ironically, the protagonist of The Passion Artist finds "stars" in the "cesspool" of reality only upon fulfilling his obsessive death-wish:
In this way, John Hawkes begins and concludes with the theme of death, thereby
enhancing the architectonic integrity of The Passion Artist. CONCLUSION As we have shown in the course of this study, The Passion Artist by John Hawkes eschews conventional ordering devices, such as linear plot, chronological sequence, recognizable setting or realistic theme. Some readers, particularly those weaned on the traditionally- plotted novel, may be tempted to view the whole work as little more than a jumble of brilliant if disjointed scenes. The "Atlantic Monthly" review quoted in the "Preface" proves that such a surface impression may suffice for a lazy or ignorant critic to dismiss John Hawkes's novel on purely structural grounds. However, as we have shown in this study, the reviewer's position is untenable, since structure is among the undisputed strengths of The Passion Artist. Although the novel does not offer a linear plot, it does feature an intricately and tightly interwoven spread of cross-referencing patterns, symbols, metaphors, foreshadowings, echoes, parallels and contrasts. Moreover, contrary to what the "Atlantic Monthly" reviewer claims, the scenes depicted in the narrative are organized in such a way as to perform a specific structural or thematic function. This is also true of all the techniques employed by the author. At the same time, it should be admitted that The Passion Artist presents a formidable challenge to the reader, for it contains a number of blank spaces that he must "fill in"; indeed, only then can the structure of the novel yield a coherent and cogent whole. There is no doubt that, to understand the work properly, the reader should participate in the reconstruction of events based on the clues scattered throughout the text. Furthermore, as Hawkes often exploits the structural, thematic and symbolic potential of imaginative detail, it is imperative to pay close attention to the texture of the novel. On the thematic plane, The Passion Artist may dismay the reader, since it contains a number of potentially repulsive motifs, such as death, cruelty, murder, victimization, deformity, dehumanization, rape and incest, to name but a few. Surely, some people may find it difficult to resist the impression that the author is trying to victimize them - or, in other words, to force them to suffer the novel, as Flannery O'Connor has remarked, like a nightmare.22 Yet there is no point in implying, as does the anonymous reviewer in "The Atlantic Monthly," that the work is an exercise in sensationalism with "shock value" as its be-all and end-all. As indicated in this study, The Passion Artist explores a number of challenging and provocative themes, including the interrelation of love and death, the struggle for dominance between men and women, corruption and purity, freedom and imprisonment, dehumanization, or a quest for lost innocence, among others. Naturally, the striking originality and peerless artistry with which the author handles these themes enhance the value of the novel. Finally, it must be emphasized that despite the all-but- apocalyptic violence of certain scenes and the author's remorseless, if not "subversive," exposure of the seamy side of life, The Passion Artist may serve as a source of genuine aesthetic pleasure. An in-depth study of its texture would undoubtedly reveal the author's concern for beauty of expression, together with a wealth of rhetorical devices and poetic tropes. It must be noted, however, that even beauty does not exist in the novel for its own sake. Indeed, like so many components of The Passion Artist, it too performs a specific function within its structure by mitigating its nightmarish content. As Patrick McGrath has observed:
In the final analysis, it is precisely the magic of John Hawkes’s style, with “its unabashed erot |