A Newly Envisioned World: Fictional Landscapes of John Hawkes

Abstract

The verbal pictures in John Hawkes's novels are unforgettable, provocative visions that have perhaps more impact on the reader than any other element in Hawkes's fiction. Descriptions of slumbering insane asylum, an arid desert inhabited by giant snakes, an abandoned lighthouse amidst sharp, black rocks, lyrical Illyria of no seasons, an anchorless, drifting ocean liner, and car streaking toward destruction are all powerful images that dominate such other fictional elements as plot, character, or theme. Rather than exploring subject or pursuing the location of truth, Hawkes wishes to enthrall, capture, and enchant the reader with the intensity of his vision. He chooses not to offer an accurate representation of an independent, pre-existing reality but insists on the creation of, in his words, a totally new and necessary fictional landscape or visionary world (Interview with Enck 141). As Hawkes explains in his interview with John Enck, his novels originate with pictorial flickerings in the not with substantial narrative materials or even with particular characters. He continues: In each case what appealed to me was landscape or world, and in each case I began with something immediately and intensely visuala room, few figures, an object, something prompted by the initial idea and then literally seen, like the visual images that come to us just before sleep (148). This comment suggests that one key to Hawkes's image-making is his ability to tap the dream-energy residing in his unconscious mind; he himself admits that his work is saturated with unconscious content (Hawkes and Barth 32). Familiar locales would crowd and inhibit his imagination, he feels, because they require semblance of the representation he eschews and would offer, moreover, what he regards as autobiographical entrapments. He