Avid Monsters: The Look of Agony in Contemporary Literature

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In describing his preparation for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, the mad genius and connoisseur of human flesh in The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins has noted that one of his chief inspirations came from the characterization of HAL, the spaceship computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. From HAL, Hopkins borrowed the quality of maniacal composure and soft-spoken ruthlessness. If HAL's revenge on the astronauts for their plot to dismantle their defective computer is made all the more chilling by the machine's self-possession as it organizes their deaths, as if demonstrating the frigid indifference of deep space itself, Lecter's misanthropic delectation similarly mixes elegant reserve with vile savor. In each case, neither raving nor wrath marks the monster so definitively as the studied remove from which he operates. Urbanity seems first to conceal his nature, then to convey it. When fiction demonstrates the same penchant for squalor, the moral incentives of the author become no less a subject of interest than those of the fictional character who serves as his accomplice. This border dispute between artist and subject, as well as that between aesthetic and civic imperatives, has intensified in recent years as some of our most honored writers have apparently felt compelled to spend their talents on spectacular violence, tabloid sensationalism, and history's ever-mounting body count. When, for instance, Daniel Isaacson steels himself to depict the state executions of his parents in E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, we may be led to wonder on whose behalf he is drastic. suppose you think I can't do the electrocution. I know there is a you. There has always been a you. YOU: I will show you that I can do the electrocution (312). Daniel's own revulsion, like his parents' bodies, is a field of resistance through which current is directed; but there is a kind of narcissism, too, underwriting the dare Daniel tracks back to his reader and uses as motivation. Is he deriding us for the voyeurism he has enticed? More to the point, what is the political service, much less the personal duty, the coming ugliness performs? What is most monstrous is sequence, Daniel claims (262), but the lethal circuitry he is about to recapitulate hardly reads like saving grace, however courageous the commitment of his narrative to the full scope of horror may be. The issue is complicated when the prose itself is as luxurious as the sensual degradations it visits. A deftly cadenced immersion into the mire is immersion nonetheless. Thus John Hawkes, with his hallucinatory indulgence in gangrenous detail, seems determined to see to it that no agony be endured behind the arras. Is there a more intemperate imagination in contemporary fiction, one as replete with seared and starved landscapes, corrupted fleshes, violated psyches, dripping wounds? Here is one exemplary passage from an early Hawkes novel, The Cannibal: All during the day the villagers had been burning out the pits of excrement, burning the fresh trenches of latrines where wads of wet newspapers were scattered, burning the dark round holes in the back stone huts where moisture travels upwards and stained the privy seats, where pools of water became foul with waste that was as ugly as the aged squatter. These earthen pots were still breathing off their odor of burned flesh and hair and biddy, and this strange odor of gas and black cheese was wafted across the roads, over the fields, and collected on the damp leaves and in the bare night fog along the embankment of the Autobahn. This smell not only rested over the mud, but moved, and with every small breath of air, the gas of mustard, soft goat pellets and human liquid became more intimate, more strong and visible in reddening piles. One's own odor could always be sifted out and recognized, a disturbingly fresh stream in the turning ash, a personal mark that could be sniffed and known after midnight, sometimes as if the tongue were poking in the incinerator and the warm air curling about the hewn seat. …