Fictionalizing the Folkloric: Matt Clark's Hook Man Speaks

Abstract

Matt Clark's 2001 novel Hook Man Speaks emerges from familiar, protean American of Hook Man- for Clark the rock star of (142). Identified by Jan Brunvand as archetypal example of genre and a favorite of folklore scholars Encyclopedia 200), story enacts Hook Man's terrorizing of trysting young couples parked in secluded areas. Typically, a radio broadcast announces escape of hook-armed man, criminal or sex maniac, who interrupts teenagers' lovemaking either through their belief in imminence of his assault or their conviction that he is actually invading car. Often in story couple returns to girl's home to discover a bloody hook on door of passenger side of car. Stephen King proclaims legend of The Hook to be the most basic horror story I know (19), and Clark's novel attempts both an imaginative embodiment of this vaporous figure of inveterate horror and a contemplation of Hook Man's place in American culture and history (Clark 3). In its knowing transformation of oral legend into novel, Hook Man Speaks cunningly mediates realms of folkloric and literary. Clark specifically confronts problem of possible ephemerality of contemporary legends, suspicion that Hook Man's story and its ilk are old potatoes, greasy kids' stuff (80). In raising questions about Hook Man's obsolescence, Hook Man Speaks functions not only as commentary on nature of circulation of contemporary legend but proffers literary repositioning of Hook Man as a necessary replenishment of legend itself. Folklorist Gary Alan Fine's usage of proves more useful for this analysis than more common nomenclature of urban associated with Jan Brunvand. Fine proposes that even rubric is a compromise of convenience (1) but argues that a temporal (contemporary) rather than geographic (urban) base for term ought to prevail, because These legends are not always urban, often are transmitted in suburbs and are about suburban life, and sometimes are about rural areas and small towns (1-2). Given southwest American setting of Hook Man Speaks, Fine's remarks are especially pertinent. Moreover, Fine's suggestion that contemporary legends, through their ability to borrow from and to transcend traditional and current, comprise a recognizable form of postmodern discourse (2) establishes some discursive continuum between contemporary legends and Clark's twenty-first century novel. The primary difference between two, though, resides in self -consciousness of Clark's rendering of material. Brunvand underscores how unselfconscious narration of contemporary legends is Hitchhiker xiii); similarly, Fine observes that contemporary legends tend to be relatively formless (2), Rosenberg notes how folktales have scant descriptions of inner life of their and rely heavily on active events- and repetition- for their effects (149), and King acknowledges that Hook Man story offers characterization, no theme, no particular artifice (21). Clark responds to precisely these lacunae, crafting in Hook Man Speaks a strikingly writerly novel. Hook Man Speaks begins, for example, with epigraphs from Neruda and Nabokov. Much of novel unfolds as a colloquy between Hook Man and folklore professor Dr. Brautigan, a pointed reference to Richard Brautigan, popular American novelist of 1960s. The final section of Hook Man Speaks revels, like a Nabokov novel, in its own artifice, constructing an elaborate screen of literary allusions whose meaning is unavailable to characters themselves of novel. Although novel evokes and revises an extensive body of contemporary legends and seemingly grants narrative primacy to Hook Man's first-person perspective, authorial consciousness that looms behind events of book finally predominates. …