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"The true poet has the face of a criminal:"

Violence and Power as Constitutive Elements of Discourse in John Hawkes'Travesty

Elke Pacholek





   In literary texts, violence and power are relevant concepts in many respects. Their most obvious form of appearance is, of course, interpersonal physical conflict in the literal sense as a theme or motif, which is complemented by an intellectual sort of power manifesting itself in language as a means of manipulation, or in verbal combat as it occurs, for example, in many of Shakespeare's plays. A third, also interesting variation is the 'power struggle' between writers and their precursors, that has been examined in detail by Harold Bloom in several studies of English and American poetry. 1
   The focus of interest in the present investigation, however, is yet another aspect of the general thematics of violence and power, namely their existence as figurative phenomena in a metafictional representation of the confrontation between a writer and his medium, or his text. Such thematizations or fictionalizations of the difficulties inherent in the process of writing find an early representation in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent (1759-67). - In this paper, I will draw on a postmodern American novel, published in 1976, for illustrative material.

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   The narrator of Travesty wants to realize a linguistic, or literary, project in which language is used for a fusion of creation and destruction - in fact, according to Travesty, destruction is creation. Thus, on the level of the plot, the writer/narrator seems to be in a position of absolute power; but whether he really wants to claim such unlimited power is one of the questions that predominates in my reading of the text.
   The novel starts in medias res with an admonition of the autodiegetic narrator to a male person called Henri:

Hands off the wheel. Please. It is too late. After all, at one hundred and forty-nine kilometers per hour on a country road in the darkest quarter of the night, surely it is obvious that your slightest effort to wrench away the wheel will pitch us into the toneless world of highway tragedy even more quickly than I have planned. 2

As the reader will get to know in the course of the novel, the narrator intends to kill himself, his daughter Chantal, and Henri, the lover of both the narrator's wife and daughter, in an accident that only darkly announces itself in this first paragraph of the text. What is important to notice here is the fact that the narrator has a plan, even if it has not yet been explained in detail. Considered in the context of Blanchot's conception of literature, this carefully planned suicide subsumes the protagonist in the category of writers and artists. His reflection on the striving for death expresses his awareness of an inevitable aporia:

We rush off to die precisely because death's terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future moment ... (82)

This passage, regarded together with the general structure of Travesty, corresponds to Blanchot's comparison between individuals who are eager to create and those who are tired of life:

Both the artist and the suicide plan something that eludes all plans [...] Both strive toward a point which they have to approach by means of skill, savoir faire, effort, the certitudes which the world takes for granted, and yet this point has nothing to do with such means [...] it is as if they were embarking upon a kind of action which could only reach its term at infinity. 3

   The narrator's reaction to his daughter's behavior gives proof of the fact that control is a vital element for him; quite obviously he does not appreciate Chantal's lack of composure: "Emulate Henri, my poor Chantal, and control yourself" (11). 4 As a sort of consolation he tells his terrified companions: "At least you are in the hands of an expert driver" (12). There is a hidden metafictional aspect to this statement that reveals itself retrospectively, when this sentence is reread in connection with a description from a later part of the narrator's monologue, where the imagery links up driving with writing and violence: "... again we are safely adhering to the earthly path of our trajectory - which on a white road map looks exactly like the head of a dragon outlined by the point of a pen brutally sharpened and dipped in blood" (52). 5 If the assertion of the driver's expertise is considered together with this passage, it shows that the narrator takes the aesthetic dimension to be superior to moral or ethical questions; 6 the technique, the expert handling of the situation or, read in the metafictional context, of his material (i.e., language) is the only relevant point in his view.
   Unfortunately, there is an obstacle to the mutual understanding of the three persons involved in the plan, that cannot be removed: since language is ambiguous and opinions differ, it will be impossible to achieve a consensus. 7 A first hint at this difficulty is given when the narrator says to Henri: "... then you will attempt to dissuade me, to talk me back to sanity ( as you will express the idea ) ..." (12, emphasis added), and then warns him to keep his hands off the wheel: "I am as serious as a sheet of flame" (12). There is no unequivocal concept of sanity, and there is no unequivocal concept of seriousness either: the reader will already be confused at this point because it is clear that the text he is reading could not have come into existence if the planned tragedy had really taken place. 8 So he might ask in what sense the narrator has been 'serious;' as an allegory of the process of artistic creation the narrator's project may indeed be very serious but not, of course, as a realistic presentation of the 'literal' plot. These questionable points, then, impede any easy consumption of the novel.
   The rhetorical question: "Murder, Henri?" (13), refers back to Henri's accusation which, for the narrator, is unacceptable: what he wants is systematically planned destruction in accordance with rationality ("in all this there is clarity" 14), destruction as a sort of art, as opposed to the chaos of affect, of "murder," of the "loss of emotional control" (14). 9 Later on, the narrator elaborates on this dichotomy, when he sets off "witless, idiotic disaster" (23) against:

... an accident so perfectly contrived that it will be unique, spectacular, instantaneous, a physical counterpart to that vision in which it was in fact conceived. A clear "accident," so to speak, in which invention quite defies interpretation. (23)

For the narrator, this accident, because of its inexplicability, would be the perfect work of art; he is obviously very keen on producing a mystery. After having described in much detail an old Roman viaduct as the perfect place for the accident, he explains:

Yes, here would be the natural site of what will be called our "tragic accident." [...] But you are wrong. Because that is the problem. Precisely. All those "logical" details and all those lofty "symbols" of melodrama speak much too clearly to the professional investigator. (24, emphases added)

According to the narrator's idealistic vision, the event must be "incomprehensible," "improbable," and "senseless to everyone except possibly the occupants of the demolished car" (24 f.). Therefore, apart from the 'literal' car accident that is planned, the more general meaning of the word which the OED gives under accident I.1.b., is important in this context: "Anything that happens without foresight or expectation; an unusual event, which proceeds from some unknown cause ...". This definition reveals the power of the narrator who, by creating this 'accident,' makes himself not only master of the life and death of his daughter and friend but master of all those who will hear about this accident and will in vain look for an explanation. In this process of creation, the narrator does not observe any abstract rules but follows the necessities of his own design only: "Slow down, you say? But the course of events cannot be regulated by some sort of perversely wired traffic policeman" (15). In the narrator's view, there is a kind of inevitable logic in the course of (fictional) life that results in perfection, provided that banal emotion is left out of play: "... all the elements of life coerce each other, force each other instant by instant into that perfect formation which is lofty and the only one possible" (15, emphases added). So the completion of such a project implies power or even violence - as the narrator assures his companions: "But don't worry, despite all this talk of mine I am concentrating. [...] Yes, my concentration is like that of a marksman, a tasteful executioner" (17). However, the adjective 'tasteful' indicates the difference between normal acts of violence and what is planned by the narrator: his intention is to produce an aesthetically flawless disaster coming up to even the highest expectations. He pretends never to lose control; his apparently relaxed talk is in fact strategically employed on the well-planned way to destruction - this as a first hint at his love of paradox, here revealed in the opposition between perfect rhetoric and unchecked babble.
   What this "tasteful executioner" will ultimately kill in his 'accident' is the traditional novel: the present non-traditional novel is the "staging of a death that never manifests itself as anything other than metaphor, vision, tableau." 10 Despite all the linguistic precision, there is neither a realistic development of characters in time nor a location of the few characters mentioned that goes beyond clichés from trivial literature; and the few things (allegedly) happening - as, for example, Chantal's vomiting on the floor of the car - are not described but only reported by the narrator. Nevertheless, a text is produced and will remain for the reader to read in spite of the narrator's promise that "there shall be no survivors. None" (128). Thus, I cannot quite agree with Conte who states that

... it remains impossible for this novel to achieve the totality of closure: the impact and its aftermath can only be imagined, never described, by the narrator. The three characters must always be suspended in motion as they race toward, but never attain, their final destination. The narrative is thus a self-consuming, self-destructive artifact. 11

While frustrating conventional expectations in the production of the text, the narrator is nevertheless (pro)creative in verbalizing his imaginary project and in making material from the unconscious come to the surface through the only seemingly coincidental stories he keeps inserting into his narrative. Ultimately, the text does not destroy itself but create itself in this apparent act of self-destruction.
   Time and again, the narrator emphasizes the fact that he is not subjected to chance: "Of course I am not joking. [...] I am certainly not the man to take risks or live or for that matter die by chance" (18). On the metafictional level, his intellectual power and his being in control apparently give proof of his mastery over the text. However, he is quite patient with Henri's and Chantal's unappreciative reactions to his plan:

How in but a few minutes can you adjust yourself successfully to what for me is second nature: a nearly phobic yearning for the truest paradox, a thirst to lie at the center of this paradigm: one moment the car in perfect condition, without so much as a scratch on its curving surface, the next moment impact, sheer impact. Total destruction. In its own way it is a form of ecstasy, this utter harmony between design and debris. (17)

Although the expression used is 'total destruction,' this artistic project actually aims at a fusion of destruction and creation, a "harmony of design and debris;" and this is a vital point which the narrator wants his daughter and Henri to understand: "At last you perceive that I am not merely some sort of suicidal maniac, an aesthetician of death at high speed" (18). His detached planning is striving for more than pure aestheticism: his detailed explanation reveals the almost philosophical ideal of the realization of paradox. Design and debris shall be shown to be an indissoluble dichotomy that is constitutive of the creative process: "Design and debris. I thrive on it. For me the artificial limb is more real, if you will allow the word, than the other and natural limb still inhabited by sensation" (27). 12 Again, the reader is told about the narrator's predilection for constructedness and artificiality that coins his conception of himself as an artist; true creation, in his opinion, is the work of art as opposed to natural being. 13 In the same way, for him, "incipient infection is livelier than the health it destroys" (26) - illness and destruction are presented as more dynamic in comparison to health which, though generally regarded as a positive status, is here shown as lacking creative potential.
   It is not enough, however, to have creative potential, nor to make use of it in solitude; therefore the narrator has chosen two companions for this 'journey to the death,' a journey concerning which Henri has two questions that the narrator repeats: "Why not alone? Or why not the four of us?" (18). Quite obviously, Henri's alternatives would spoil the narrator's project: on the one hand, nobody could appreciate his ingenious idea, if he was to realize it all on his own and, on the other, the demonstration of his power is much more complete, if some close relative such as his wife Honorine is left behind in confusion, trying in vain to find a solution to this mysterious event. What should not be forgotten, of course, is the fact that the whole thing is a purely intellectual project, an allegorical rendering of the narrator's conception of the ideal creative process. That is why he also invents his companions in accordance with his overall design; when he tells Henri: "... the reason for this disparity between us is more, much more, than a matter of temperament, though it is that too" (19), this statement indirectly refers to the fact that the narrator has made the character of Henri so as to match his own in perfect opposition - again, the element of control and design comes in.
   In order to corroborate the logical development of his artistic aspirations, the narrator discloses that his childhood 'hobbies' anticipated his wish to fuse creation and destruction, eros and thanatos:

... you cannot believe that a life as rich as yours, as sensual as yours, as honored, can suddenly be reduced inexplicably to fear, grief, skid marks, a few shards of broken glass; you simply do not know that as a child I divided my furtive time quite equally between those periodicals depicting the most brutal and uncanny destructions of human flesh [...] and those other periodicals depicting the attractions of young living women partially or totally in the nude. (21)

This particular textual instance might be integrated into a broader theoretical background when read together with Barthes' dictum that "[n]either culture nor its destruction is erotic" but "the seam between them." 14 The whole of Travesty seems to celebrate this intermediate realm, the 'non-space' of destructive creation.
   Time and again, the narrator expresses his disappointment at Henri's reaction: "But the lack of knowledge and lack of imagination are yours, and not mine" (21), and tries to convince him that there is indeed an intellectual dimension to their journey: he concedes that "perhaps 'murder' is the proper word, though it offends my ear as well as my intentions," but prefers to say "our private apocalypse. It is like a game" (46 f.). Again, the word 'game' - as opposed to 'play' - with its implications of rules and mastery suggests the narrator's substantial influence in the whole process.
   Although, in this game, the perfect arrangement of all the appropriate elements is a vital point, the narrator respects Henri's wish to leave the radio off; however, he himself would have liked a musical background:

... the musical experience, like the automobile, guarantees timelessness, or so it appears. The song and road are endless, or so we think. And yet they are not. The beauty of motion, musical or otherwise, is precisely this: that the so-called guarantee of timelessness is in fact the living tongue in the dark mouth of cessation. And cessation is what we seek, if only because it alone is utterly unbelievable. (22)

'Song,' 'road,' and 'motion' symbolize the creative process, here the process of writing, which is (theoretically) endless because language cannot be brought to a stop, cannot produce the ultimate version of whatever it wants to express. The sole event that can bring about an individual end only is a particular death; however, of this death there can be no consciousness so that it must remain unrepresentable, or unbelievable. 15 What the reader is presented with in Travesty, then, is a 'writing to the death;' but, at the same time, the text itself is a deferral of this death - and must be, for the deferral or unreality of the accident is a sine qua non for the existence of the novel. 16
   Ultimately, the writing about the projected death and the aesthetic implications of the resulting text are the really relevant points here. Destruction is thus an artificial construct, an ideal that the narrator has no intention nor possibility of actually achieving - his announcement: "Nothing will destroy the symmetry I have in mind" (25), will be regarded as unreliable by the reader who knows that Travesty exists. Literal destruction will not be allowed to destroy the creation of a fusion between creation and destruction; the vision of destruction at work is more important than the fact of destruction. 17 The narrator is fascinated with what cannot be consciously experienced and cannot be expressed: it is not literal destruction that he advocates but figurative destruction which, on the level of the 'plot,' allegorizes the process of writing and, on the stylistic level, through negations and denials, produces the necessary deferral of the desired "explosion that will inaugurate our silence" (25). In analogy to the dichotomy of design and debris, the paradoxical combination of explosion and silence conveys the idea of an artistic project that is as universal as it is impossible. The planned result would be an almost mystical silence full of meaning which, apart from the fact that it cannot be achieved, is not meant to be deciphered.
   The narrator's fascination with language not as a means of everyday communication but as a magical tool in the playful exploration of the potential of literary production becomes obvious in his way of expressing himself. He does not confine himself to positive statements of what is but revels in the invention of possibilities that he does not want to substantialize, as, for example, the following quotation shows:

Let us hope that I have not miscalculated and that there is not some overblown machine now lumbering down upon us, filling the road ahead, its great belly brimming with thick liquid fire and, in its noisy cab, a gargantuan young peasant singing to keep himself awake. (22 f.)

Apart from such negative hypotheses, the narrator's text contains numerous if-clauses and makes ample use of the conditional, showing its affiliation to (post)modern discourse, the effects of which are described by Schleifer as follows:

Such effects include meaning and understanding; but they also include other senses discourse communicates: desire, power, pleasure, and anxiety. One sense among these [...] is the felt but not always clear sense of the arbitrary and contingent nature of meaning, the sense that alongside the more or less transcendental meanings of discourse [...] is a sense of meaninglessness, nothingness, nonsense. 18

At last the narrator comes to the core of his artistic design: he tells Henri and Chantal that "it is this idea that lies at the dead center of our night together: that nothing is more important than the existence of what does not exist" (57). On the one hand, this statement anticipates the lucid summary that Henri will later be said to have given of the narrator's design: " Imagined life is more exhilarating than remembered life " (127); on the other hand, it implies the importance of death as a 'vital' concept for the narrator: the striving for nothingness with all its detours and deferrals is the "motor of signification" (Schleifer 197) in Travesty:

Moreover, death is [...] the motor of love and of desire itself. For Lacan, desire itself is an act of signification, and the desire for death, the Freudian death-wish, "is not in fact a perversion of the instinct, but rather that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct." It is the purest form of the affirmation of life because it appropriates death itself - the seemingly inarticulable and radically arbitrary violence of death as discontent, as aggression, as "nothingness and pure non-sense" - as a signifier in the human act of signification. (Schleifer 197) 19

For ultimately, in the symbolic order, "nothing exists except on an assumed foundation of absence. Nothing exists except insofar as it does not exist." 20 The subject's imaginary 'reality' does not exist since it is only a projection and an illusion, whereas the Symbolic creates a linguistic 'reality' that is non-existent insofar as it is infinitely deferred in the chain of signifiers. - When the narrator concedes to Henri, then: "How sad it is, cher ami . What a brutal sport" (60), this can only be taken to be ironical, for what he is envisioning for the three of them is his ideal of the inevitable combination of the creation and the destruction of life: "After all, my theory tells us that ours is the power to invent the very world we are quitting. Yes, the power to invent the very world we are quitting. It is as if the bird could die in flight" (57). The repetitive formulation puts emphasis on this statement of the narrator's artistic credo: in planning to leave the 'world' by means of the accident, the narrator, together with his companions - even if they are accessible only through his comments and repetitions -, creates this world in the first place; the 'bird dying in flight' is an emblem of the text that will stop while, on the level of the 'plot,' the narrator is still driving.
   Nothing is gratuitous in this fictional scenario presenting the narrator's vision of seeming omnipotence as an elaborate "game" (47), in which the smallest detail has been chosen in accordance with the overall design. Therefore, the narrator cannot agree with Henri who charges that his "extensive articulation of violent, unseemly details is nothing more than a kind of unfair tugging on the fishhooks already embedded beneath [Chantal's and Henri's] skin" (56). 21 The narrator wants to explain the necessity of violence for his artistic project because it is important for him not to be misunderstood as a sadist; for all the aspects of his plan are constitutive of the execution of his vision and not superfluous accessories for a perverse narrator to enjoy.
   When, in the context of the 'importance of the existence of the non-existent,' the narrator says to Henri: "There you have it, the theory to which I hold as does the wasp to his dart" (57), it becomes clear that his violence is not gratuitous. Usually, the wasp stings only in order to defend itself; the aspect of violence and the element of poison implied in this comparison between writer and wasp therefore do not present the narrator as a dangerous power who likes violence for its own sake but who needs it in the realization of his conception of art. He would "by no means accept the notion of 'trivia,'" since, in his project, the "nature and extent of physical damage can never be trivial" (56).
   If the idea of triviality is rejected, solipsism is another reproach that might not be so easy to dismisss. Apart from the fact that there is no serious communication (in the sense of interaction) between the passengers of the car, the narrator's narcissistic attitude, that is characteristic of autoreferential literature in general, 22 also reveals itself in his theoretical approach to life. Quite in accordance with his love for paradox, the narrator is a proponent of 'dead passion:' "Yes, dead passion is the most satisfying, cher ami " (63). Passion might be 'dead' because it belongs to the past, or because it is reported passion, once removed from the realm of experience through the medium of language, or because it is at last 'fulfilled' in death; in either case, the narrator creates a distance between himself and others, or between himself and life in order to be in control. For this control might be imbalanced, if he allowed others to be active in his projects, as is illustrated by an episode with his former mistress Monique, about which he tells Chantal and Henri:

But what is still most important about that particular and now long-lost night is that it reveals that I too have suffered and that I am not always in total mastery of the life I create, as I have been accused of being. (74)

As a result, he has become suspicious, or careful, and forbids Henri to speak or move when they approach the site of the accident: "And I warn you now that if you make a single movement or utter a single sound once we pass Tara your death will not be an ironic triumph but a prolonged and hapless agony" (109 f.). However, the satisfaction of his desire for omnipotence is not only endangered by a possible interference on Henri's part but also by the narrator himself, who is an embodiment of various intersecting mechanisms. Stating that "these yellow headlights are the lights of [his] eyes" and that his "mind is bound inside [his] memory of this curving road like a fist in glass" (15), the driver becomes one with the vehicle as in fact he is the vehicle in the metaphor of driving for the process of narration. If his mind is bound in his memory, the comparison "like a fist in glass" suggests passivity rather than omnipotence on the part of the narrator. There is, at first, a certain amount of violence in the act of hitting the glass, so there is also an aspect of reciprocal violation. But the result, in spite of the bloody 'inscription' of both fist and glass, is physical damage to the fist/mind/narrator in his confrontation with the memory of the 'road' of writing. 23
   The narrator cannot realize his aggressive potential beyond the 'violence' of his aesthetic programme that consists in forcing together seemingly contradictory elements because of his "nearly phobic yearning for the truest paradox" (17). Although he is steering the car and thus apparently in control of the trajectory of the text, the narrator is subjected in the linguistic realization of his aesthetic ideal to the memory and the unconscious at work in the back of his mind. There is a fusion, then, of both power and powerlessness that undermines his illusion of omnipotence. The ideal of the artist's 'cold detachment' 24 is only theoretically achievable - in the creative process, it is always already marred by the 'underground workings' of the unconscious.
   Ultimately, the narrator's plan is at least partly a special gift to Henri, namely in that he creates a situation that is meant to show to Henri how a 'poet' (the narrator) can 'live' Henri's poetics - which implies a fitting paradox because (at least theoretically) they will die in the process:

But then it is what you at least deserve, since you have spent your life sitting among small audiences [...] telling those eager or hostile women that the poet is always a betrayer, a murderer, and that the writing of poetry is like a descent into death. But that was talk, mere talk. Now, if given the chance, you could speak from experience. (80)

While, in the presence of his audience, Henri has talked metaphorically only, in order to produce an interesting picture of himself, the narrator pretends to literalize this metaphor in order to point out to his friend the difference between egotistical ostentation and serious 'art.'
   The reader, however, knows that the narrator's project is as metaphorical as Henri's statements and might, therefore, come to the conclusion that the latter is the former's alter ego . Travesty could then be read as presenting the recipient with a writer's fictionalized autoreferential reflections on the theoretical implications of the relationship between a writer and his medium. For all the power and influence he desires and pretends to have, he remains in the end subjected to language: although he apparently presents himself as being at the controls, it is he who is 'driven:'

I am always moving. I am forever transporting myself somewhere else. I am never exactly where I am. Tonight, for instance, we are traveling one road but also many, as if we cannot take a single step without discovering five of our own footprints already ahead of us. (75)

This description again reveals the analogy between the process of driving in Travesty and the metonymical activity of language in its involuntary representation of the unconscious: according to Lacan, the subject can never reach a final truth and can never be identical with her/himself because of the endless deferral of meaning in the signifying chain 25 and because of the unconscious that, notwithstanding its inaccessibility, keeps recurring in the subject's (body) language. 26 Thus, the subject's knowledge (if there ever will be such knowledge) can only be belated with regard to the underlying unconscious (present and past):

In this sense there is nowhere I have not been, nothing I have not already done, no person I have not known before. But then of course we have the corollary, so that everything known to me remains unknown, so that my own footfalls sound like those of a stranger, while the corridor to the lavatory off my bedroom becomes the labyrinthine way to a dungeon. For me the familiar and the unfamiliar lie everywhere together. (75)

Ultimately, the narrator's power consists of the awareness that he does not have any power; his programmatic insight: " Imagined life is more exhilarating than remembered life " (127), shows that the question of what might be true about the narrator's project is irrelevant - not least, of course, because one might also ask to what extent remembered life is in fact imagined. The only important factor in his design seems to be the abstract purity of the construction, which says nothing as to the real power of its creator - who obviously enjoys his play with the concepts of truth and travesty. In compliance with one of the novel's mottos, taken from Michel Leiris, Travesty illustrates the idea that "the poetic structure [...] can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void ..." 27 - As the narrator tells Henri in a depiction of his behavior as a young man, he was plagued by what he called the "fear of no response" (84); his being depended on his mirroring himself in others and getting an affirmative response:

If the world did not respond to me totally, immediately, in leaf, street sign , the expression of strangers, then I did not exist - or existed only in the misery of youthful loneliness. But to be recognized in any way was to be given your selfhood on a plate and to be loved , loved, which is what I most demanded. (85, emphases added) 28

The 'literal' project of Travesty is a peg on which to hang both metafictional reflections on the status of the writer or narrator in the creative process and fictionalized reflections on the human psyche which then result in a playful denial as well as enjoyment of powerlessness. The narrator quite obviously delights in the production of this entangled piece of writing that combines a main text with an imaginary sub- or counter-text, in which he even gives a critical interpretation, or analysis, as it might be uttered by his invented companion:

... if you were in fact thinking, if you were but a little more engaged in our discussion, then you might well retort that for a man who has pre-empted absolute or, we might say, whiplash control over this much immediate last-minute life, all speculative fantasy becomes a mere glut of self-indulgence. (56, emphasis added)

But since the reader knows that only in his imagination the narrator can have control over "this much immediate last-minute life," he might readjust the narrator's self-critique to a more disillusioned conception of his position and his power. He might confront him with the reproach that most art is a "mere glut of self-indulgence," put up in defense against the disagreeable recognition that it is impossible to be always in mastery of one's life.
   There is a revealing instance of the narrator's dilemma in his aversion to Honorine's old-fashioned clock. He cannot stand its ticking, which he sometimes violently stops by "jam[ming] its works" (34), but the difficulty is that he "hear[s] that ticking loudest when the clock is stopped [...] It is the war [he] cannot win" (35). Transferred to the level of the workings of the psyche, this means that the negation or repression of an unpleasant event or aspect of life does not solve the underlying problem. In the same way, a narrative will always and inevitably reveal more or less obvious traces of hidden implications that the narrator, in spite of all his tricks and ruses, does not have the power to conceal.

Notes

1 See, for example, Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry . New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, or his Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism . Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1983.
2 Hawkes, John. Travesty. New York: New Directions, 1976, 11. Subsequent quotations from this edition will be given parenthetically within the text.
3 Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 106.
4 This admonition might be regarded as an early hint at the author's poetological concepts: "... my fiction has nothing to do with automatic writing. [...] my own writing process involves a constant effort to shape and control my material ..." (John Enck. "John Hawkes: An Interview." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6 (1965): 141-55, 148).
5 In this context see also Travesty 97: "... my silent lips are moving with the car itself, as if I am now talking as well as driving us to our destination."
6 With regard to the aesthetic dimension of Travesty, see also Alfred Hornung. "Sex and Art in Hawkes' Triad: The Pornographic, the Erotic, and the Aesthetic Modes." Amerikastudien/American Studies 26 (2, 1981): 159-79.
7 In a psychoanalytical reading of the text, this apparent dilemma may be 'solved' by reading the three main figures of Travesty as the three registers at work in the human psyche according to Lacan's theory: although an exact attribution of the registers to the individual figures is not possible, a rough analogizing would establish connections between Chantal and the Real (she does not speak but is presented only in the manifestations of her bodily reactions - she is described as crawling on the floor, sobbing, and vomiting), Henri and the Imaginary (Henri clings to the illusion that he might still be able to talk Papa out of his destructive project and does not see the situation as it really is), and the narrator [Papa!] and the Symbolic (his domain is language; whatever he does and describes, exists in his monologue only). The main aim of the novel, then, is the attempt to bring material from the unconscious to the reader's attention - which, for Hawkes, has been a central point in his poetics from early on in his writing career: "... this fictional preoccupation and this particular interest in language do depend [...] on my interest in exploiting the richness and energy of the unconscious" ("John Hawkes: Interviewed by Robert Scholes." Joe D. Bellamy, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, 97-112, 103).
8 In this context, cf. Ferrari's statement on the analogy between driving and writing: "Because Papa's last act can only exist as language, his death drive is equivalent to his narrative drive" (Rita Ferrari. Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, 113).
9 See also Travesty 95: "The problem is that you are being emotional again, rather than rational."
10 Herman Rapaport. "Staging: Mont Blanc." Mark Krupnick, ed. Displacement: Derrida and After . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, 59-73, 65.
11 Joseph M. Conte. "'Design and Debris:' John Hawkes's Travesty, Chaos Theory, and the Swerve." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37 (2, 1996): 120-38, 122, emphasis added.
12 In this context, see Ferrari's comment that also points out the combined gain and loss in the process of creation: "This paradox subsumes all contraries in the novel and in Hawkes's stated aesthetics, so that Travesty [...] enacts both authorial innocence and power and their simultaneous loss" ( Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes 110).
13 It is therefore only consistent that he plans to steer the car into a wall, a man-made construction: "And it will not be against a tree" (21).
14 Roland Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text . Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975 (Paris 1973), 7.
15 See also Wittgenstein's comment: "Death is not an event in life. Death cannot be experienced." (Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung . Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1980, 113 [6.4311], my translation), or Lacan's remark "Death is never experienced as such [...] it is never real." ( The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954 . Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Trans. John Forrester. New York and London: Norton, 1991, 223.) Furthermore, cf. another passage from Lacan where a connection is established between death and the 'negativity of language:' "... behind what is named, there is the unnameable, with all the resonances you can give to this name, [...] it is akin to the quintessential unnameable, that is to say to death." ( The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955 . Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York and London: Norton, 1991, 211).
16 What Herman Rapaport, in the theoretical context of Blanchot and Derrida, writes on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound , applies equally well to Travesty: "... the hero is at the arrêt de mort , is [...] suspended in an 'écriture du désastre,' but he is also at the arête de mort , or ridge or arris of death, while still discoursing, having an entretien infini " (H.R. "Staging: Mont Blanc," 65).
17 In this, then, lies the essential difference between Travesty and J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973), a novel that, according to Kathy Acker, might be called a "celebration of wounds" (K.A. Bodies of Work: Essays . London: Serpent's Tail, 1997, 174). These wounds also, of course, imply a symbolic level, but they are rooted in a more literal meaning of violence and physical destruction than the planned 'wounds' in Travesty. The latter text might be described as a more conventionally aesthetic version of "the murderous merging of author and creation" (Susan Stewart. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation . New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, 284).
18 Schleifer, Ronald. Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory . Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990, 3 f.
19 Schleifer's first quotation is from Jacques Lacan. Ecrits: A Selection . Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977, 104; the second quotation is from Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 130.
20 Jacques Lacan. Ecrits. Paris: Eds. du Seuil, 1966, 392, transl. in Malcolm Bowie. Lacan. London: Fontana Press, 1991, 92 f.
21 The poetological implications of this accusation, that again shows Henri as the mouthpiece of the narrator, become clear in the context of the following statement by Hawkes: "... the writer of fiction should always serve as his own angleworm, and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of the darkness, the better" (J.H. "Notes on Writing a Novel." TriQuarterly 30 [1974]: 109-26, 117).
22 See Linda Hutcheon. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox . New York, London: Methuen, 1984.
23 Cf. Travesty 22 and p. 10 of this paper.
24 With regard to the 'coldness' and 'detachment' of avant-garde writing, that Hawkes finds in his own writing, see the interview by John Enck 143.
25 Cf. Lacan: "... the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread" ( Ecrits 166), or ibid. 154: "We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier."
26 See Lacan Ecrits 59: "... the symptom is itself structured like a language," and 69: "The symptom is here the signifier of a signified repressed from the consciousness of the subject. A symbol written in the sand of the flesh [...] But it is speech functioning to the full ..."
27 For a development of the idea of an original lack as the impetus for narrative see, for example, Peter Brooks: "Narratives both tell of desire - typically present some story of desire - and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification [...] Desire is always there at the start of a narrative" (P.B. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984, 37, 38).
28 The narrator's childhood anxieties in this presentation, that centers around signification, identity, and love, might gain a more general dimension when read in the context of some of the statements relevant in Lacan's conception of the workings of the human psyche. See, for example, Ecrits 58: "... nowhere does it appear more clearly that man's desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other." See also Ecrits 86, 286, 309, and 311 for the intertwining of the concepts of signification, being, identity, demand, and love.



Elke Pacholek
Department of English Literature
RWTH Aachen, Germany



SHORT PAPER ( ABSTRACT)

Literature as an Arena for Sham Battles


   With regard to the general thematics, "Postmoderne Diskurse zwischen Sprache & Macht," my research project holds a marginal position since it deals with the most elusive form of power (and violence) manifesting itself in metafictional reflections on the process of literary creation. Going back to archetypal patterns such as the striving for (intellectual) power or the concept of culture as sublimation, this figurative literary power that finds expression, for example, in metaphors, symbols, or allegories, allows the 'return of the repressed.' A presentation and analysis of examples from both poststructuralist theory and literature intends to demonstrate that, for the writer, language has the double function of being an opponent as well as an indispensable instrument of power.

   Roland Barthes, for instance, regards signification as an act of subjugation, syntax and grammar as hierarchizing forces with restrictive potential. But since the (writing) individual is inevitably dependent on language, the only escape from the tyranny of the medium, except for a retreat into silence, is a disintegration from within, a play with the destructive potential of language. - Derrida's concept of the "originary violence of language" is illustrated in his writings through the frequent use of metaphors that either denote or connote violence and power and, thus, on a figurative level, give 'proof' of his statement that the distinction between language and violence will always be "an inaccessible horizon." - Lacan, who calls the subject a "slave of language" and language, or the symbol, the "murder of the thing," establishes a close connection between language, subject, and violence/power. At the same time, through his matheme of the four discourses, the subject is presented with several possibilities of (at least playfully) fighting against the dilemma of its powerlessness.

   The textual analyses that form one of the main parts of my study are meant to demonstrate the diversity of (meta)fictional reactions to this basic problematics: the writer can take the role of victim or aggressor, he can switch roles; there can be a serious discussion or fictionalization of the conflictual constellation as opposed to a playful version that makes fun of the situation. All of this, in a sort of double twist, can be simulated and later denied, only to be taken up again in another form - it will not be easy to put an end to this ...



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