Happy birthday, John Hawkes! Here are some quotes from the author:
“‘Choice means variable, variable means discontinuity, discontinuity destroys hierarchy.'”
“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.”
“For me, everything depends on language.”
“The writer should always serve as his own angleworm—and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.”
“Like the poem, the experimental fiction is an exclamation of psychic materials which come to the writer all readily distorted, prefigured in that inner schism between the rational and the absurd.”
“Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war, I think.”
“What I really want to do is to create things that haven’t been created before, even though life itself seems sometimes totally cyclical and totally coherent. I find it very difficult to cope with the notion of being alive, being human; I’m not able to accept us very easily. I think we are so unaccountable. Life is also a constantly terrifying mystery as well as a beautiful, unpredictable, exfoliating, marvelous thing.”
“It is the desire for a terrestrial paradise, or immortality, or harmony and total beauty that are as much a part of my imaginative needs as the necessity of coping with the cruelest, most deformed, defamed aspects of life. I’m a very lyrical person as well as a maker of nightmares…”
“But as long as we have our physical being, there is no such thing as the imagination being used up, because the imagination is infinite, it makes up its own materials. I suppose a person could become so psychologically depressed or remote or unrewarded as to be dead in his life, so that he wouldn’t be interested in the imagination—he would forget it and wouldn’t use it. But that’s not using up its materials—an impossibility, as I see it.”
“One and all they are driven by the twin engines of ignorance and willful barbarism. You nod, you also are familiar with these two powerful components of our national character, ignorance and willful barbarianism. Yes, everywhere you turn, and even among the most gifted of us, the most extensively educated, these two brute forces of motivation will eventually emerge. The essential information is always missing; sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern. We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians.”
“Some time ago I discovered that I could no longer speak aloud or read aloud from a stage, even for the sake of hearing the effect that my writer’s voice produced on listeners. Now, curiously, the more I merely try to live, the more reclusive I become, the vainer I am. At last I am as vain as the one who instantly voices his silence inside me.”
“As a writer I’m concerned with innovation in the novel, and obviously I’m committed to nightmare, violence, meaningful distortion, to the whole panorama of dislocation and desolation in human experience.”
“[My writing contains] a quality of coldness, detachment, and ruthless determination to face up to the enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves…and to bring to this experience a savage or saving comic spirit and the saving beauties of language.”
“As a writer, I’m concerned with innovation in the novel, and obviously I’m committed to nightmare, violence, meaningful distortion, to the whole panorama of dislocation and desolation in human experience.”
“Of course I think of myself as an experimental writer. But it’s unfortunate that the term ‘experimental’ has been used so often by reviewers as a pejorative label intended to dismiss as eccentric or private or excessively difficult the work in question. My own fiction is not merely eccentric or private and is not nearly so difficult as it’s been
made out to be. I should think that every writer, no matter what kind of fiction writer he may be or may aspire to be, writes in order to create the future. Every fiction of any value has about it something new. At any rate, the function of the true innovator or specifically experimental writer is to keep prose alive and constantly to test in the
sharpest way possible the range of our human sympathies and constantly to destroy mere surface morality.”
“My own concept of ‘avant-garde’ has to do with something constant which we find running through prose fiction from Quevedo, the Spanish picaresque writer, and Thomas Nashe at the beginnings of the English novel, down through Lautreamont, Ce1ine, Nathanael West, Flannery O’Connor, James Purdy, Joseph Heller, myself. This constant is a quality of coldness, detachment, ruthless determination to face up to the enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around us, and to bring to this exposure a savage or saving comic spirit and the saving beauties of language. The need is to maintain the truth of the fractured picture; to expose, ridicule, attack, but always to create and to throw into new light our potential for violence and absurdity as well as for graceful action. I don’t like soft, loose prose or fiction which tries to cope too directly with life itself or is based indulgently on personal experience. On the other hand, we ought to respect resistance to commonplace authority wherever we find it, and this attitude at least is evident in the Beat world. But I suppose I regret so much attention being spent on the essentially flatulent products of a popular cult. A writer who truly and greatly sustains us is Nabokov.”
“The question of audience makes me uncomfortable. I write out of isolation, and struggle only with the problems of the work itself. I’ve never been able to look for an audience. […] But at any rate, I care about reaching all readers who are interested in the necessity and limitless possibilities of prose fiction, and I think there must be a
good many of them. I’m trying to write about large issues of human torments and aspirations,and I’m convinced that considerable numbers of people in this country must have imaginative needs quite similar to mine.”
“But though I’d be the first to admit to sadistic impulses in the creative process, I must say that my writing is not mere indulgence in violence or derangement, is hardly intended simply to shock. As I say, comedy, which is often closely related to poetic uses of language, is what makes the difference for me. I think that the comic method functions in several ways: on the one hand, it serves to create sympathy, compassion, and on the other, it’s a means for judging human failings as severely as possible; it’s a way of exposing evil (one of the pure words I mean to preserve) and of persuading the reader that even he may not be exempt from evil; and of course comic distortion tells us that anything is possible and hence expands the limits of our imaginations. Comic vision always suggests futurity, I think, always suggests a certain hope in the limitless energies of life
itself.”
“For me, the blackest fictions liberate the truest novelistic sympathy.”
“I take literally rather than figuratively the cliché about breaking new ground. Or I take literally the idea that the imagination should always uncover new worlds for us—hence my ‘mythic’ England, Germany, Italy, American west, tropical island, and so on. I want to write about worlds that are fresh to me.”
“[I]ntellectually, the imagination could not be used up. I suppose self, the brain, psyche, and the imagination could be destroyed cell by cell through drugs. But as long as we have our physical being, there is no such thing as the imagination being used up, because the imagination is infinite, it makes up its own materials. I suppose a person could become so psychologically depressed or remote or unrewarded as to be dead in his life, so that he wouldn’t be interested in the imagination—he would forget it and wouldn’t use it. But that’s not using up its materials—an impossibility, as I see it.”
“From the time I was writing The Cannibal, I knew I wanted to be creating landscapes that were different from any world I knew personally. I had a simple theory of detachment: that if one could find a landscape which, in some way or other, without the writer necessarily being conscious of it, could touch off psychological themes, that would provide the energy and even the subject matter of a fiction. I was trying to find, or happened to be exposed to such landscapes. I knew that I wanted, emotionally and literally, to be very separated from what I was writing about. I knew that what I was writing about was so emotionally charged or cathected, that only considerable detachment would make it possible to write the fiction in the first place. Every novel is somehow related to a brief, intense moment of existence in a foreign landscape which then gets elaborated upon or becomes the germ for a new world. In a sense, my writing is a real life acting out of a theory or a metaphor–the metaphor of distance.”
“I do see things as cyclical and ordered. I have a powerful associative imagination. What I really want to do is to create things that haven’t been created before, even though life itself seems sometimes totally cyclical and totally coherent. I find it very difficult to cope with the notion of being alive, being human; I’m not able to accept us very easily. I think we are so unaccountable. Life is also a constantly terrifying mystery as well as a beautiful, unpredictable, exfoliating, marvelous thing.”
“Thinking of that image [of ‘the fetus fished out of the flood in The Beetle Leg‘] reminds me of an interview with John Graham where I said that ‘the writer should be his own angleworm, and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of the darkness, the better.’ […] It’s an interesting paradox: separating the artist from the human personality, the artistic self from the human self, then thinking of the artist’s job as one of catching, capturing, snaring, using a very dangerous and unpleasant weapon, a hook, knowing that his subject matter is himself or his own imagination, which he has to find himself and which he catches ruthlessly. It’s a very schizophrenic image, full of dangerous, archetypal maneuvers in the deepest darkness within us. To me, the most horrifying object to touch would be the fetus, and I would be unable to touch one. But in The Beetle Leg, that action is a real paradigm of what the artistic process should be. The writer should undertake to do what he finds most difficult and most threatening, and then deal with these materials in such a way as to reintegrate them within human consciousness. When the protagonist of the novel seizes what he has caught, this aborted, fish-like form of dead human life, and removes the hook from the caul that the hook has actually penetrated, then puts it back into the initial floodwaters of Noah’s time–that, to me, is a parable of the artistic process.”
“I could never get over my fear of life, because without it one would then be innocent in the worst possible way. One would be the lyrical fool without the fool’s wisdom. The Shakespearean fool is not merely a life-giver or scene-changer or ringer of the bells; he is the figure who incorporates that which is taboo, and thus is rejected from the human community. He is utterly alone, and he both entertains and advises the sovereign. Of course, being sexless, he can have no lover, no sexuality, because he is androgyny elevated to a very high and, at the same time, crippled level. So he is polarized as we all are in that we are aware of our constant failings yet, at the same time, acting as the judge who wants to be aware of and condemn our own weakness. I’m interested in a life where weakness is absolutely essential. I cannot stand the person who is totally self-confident; my fiction is based on the opposite. It’s Conradian, in the sense that the failures which are absolutely integral to us all have to be acknowledged and seen as somehow beautiful or useful, but in the guise of physical disability, as corpses.”
“I’m not interested in reflection or representation; I’m only interested in creating a fictive world, and my concept of a fictive world means that it draws heavily on what Bernard Malamud once called ‘psychic leakage.’ For me, I think the metaphor isn’t strong enough or large enough. I’m interested in the mainstream of psychic life; I want to find the underground conduit or river in which all the dead and living dwell. I want to find all the fluid, germinal, pestilential ‘stuff’ of life itself as it exists in the unconscious. The writing of each fiction is a taking of a psychic journey; the fictions, in themselves, are a form of journey, I consider being alive a form of journey, and I want to imitate the interior journey, so I like traveling. And the journey, in a sense, is always the same.”
“It’s important for a writer to say all that he can to anyone who is interested in his work. Of course, the work ultimately stands alone. But insofar as the living person who created it can find his own way through it, his uncovering of the work’s materials and dilemmas has to be of some value to the reader. I look at my work as if somebody else had written it. When I talk about it, I do so with the sympathy and detachment that I would use in talking about anybody’s work. Even though we know that all writers are untrustworthy, liars, distorters, and so on, still I take a very naive, interested attitude toward my work, I want to help find out what’s in it; I would like to help the reader understand it, and, again, I feel generally quite different from the personality that created it. I like and admire this work a great deal, I know that nobody else has written anything like it, I feel that it’s important, and I feel that I can say things about it that are helpful.”
“Every one of my characters is, in some way, a criminal character. The criminal character is an outcast, an alien in society, disabled in some way, sometimes a figure of enormous rank or authority. My fiction has always been concerned with reversed sympathy, and the whole point of it has been to help the reader expand his own capacities for compassion, to view these dangerous creatures exiled from human society, and to discover that he, the reader, is every bit as vulnerable to unsocial behavior that might result in his imprisonment or being ostracized. Emotionally, that’s one purpose of my fiction, and in that sense, it’s very Conradian in its viewing the conflict between sympathy and judgment. It’s a romantic notion, I know, to conceive of the writer as a kind of Shelleyan, satanic figure, but I have often felt that way. The matter would relate, again, to the problem of space, traveling, and distance. Extreme detachment might be a quality of the extreme authoritarian, the dictator, or the leader of a criminal gang.”
“But for me everything is dangerous, everything is tentative, nothing is certain. I think the writing of fiction involves enormous anxiety and enormous risk. And I want fiction always to situate us in the psychic and literal spot where life is most difficult, most dangerous, most beautiful.”
“My work is so saturated with unconscious content anyway that I’ve got about five left hands all digging in the mud someplace. I have a hard time just trying to maintain consciousness and struggle along through the well‐lighted mire.”
“It’s a question of mind, temperament, and vision. There are certain fictions that are transparent: you see through them, you read through them. You’re not interested in the fiction but in the ‘life’ the fiction seems to be about. Such writers think they are reflecting or reproducing reality. They must think they know what reality is; they must think that ‘out there’ is reality, which I don’t think at all. As a writer, I’m not interested in ‘life.’ Fiction that insists on created actuality is its own reality; has its own vitality and energy. The writer wants the reader to speak it, to hear it, to see it, to react to the various aspects of its reality as art. Perhaps something Barth once said has to do with this question; he said, ‘God was a pretty good novelist; the only trouble was he was a realist.'”
“I think that in a large way fiction has usurped the place of poetry. I think there are many more of us who are sustained by fiction, made to grow, made able to survive through language used in narrative form. But there are also certain poets whose works are very much alive.”
“Of course my main interest has always been in the visual imagination and an intensity of language which in itself is erotic.”
“I’m only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.”
“I don’t advocate crippling; I’m an opponent of torture. I deplore nightmare; I deplore terror. I happen to believe that it is only by travelling those dark tunnels, perhaps not literally but physically, that we can learn in any sense what it means to be compassionate.”
“Well, you understand that . . . I would prefer that the remains of our crash go undiscovered, at least initially. I would prefer that these remains be left unknown to anyone and hence unexplored, untouched. In this case we have at the outset the shattering that occurs in utter darkness, then the first sunrise in which the chaos, the physical disarray, has not yet settled—bits of metal expanding, contracting, tufts of upholstery exposed to the air, an unsocketed dial impossibly squeaking in a clump of thorns—though this same baffling tangle of springs, jagged edges of steel, curves of aluminum, has already received its first coating of white frost. In the course of the first day the gasoline evaporates, the engine oil begins to fade into the earth, the broken lens of a far-flung headlight reflects the progress of the sun from a furrow in what was once a field of corn. The birds do not sing, clouds pass, the wreckage is warmed, the human remains are integral with the remains of rubber, glass, steel. A stone has lodged in the engine block, the process of rusting has begun. And then darkness, a cold wind, a shred of clothing fluttering where it is snagged on one of the doors which, quite unscathed, lies flat in the grass. And then daylight, changing temperature, a night of cold rain, the short-lived presence of a scavenging rodent. And despite all this chemistry of time, nothing has disturbed the essential integrity of our tableau of chaos, the point being that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design.”
