John Hawkes's Second Skin : The Dead Reckoning of a Northrop Frye Romance

Abstract

John Hawkes's Second Skin: The Dead Reckoning of a Northrop Frye Romance Carol Helmstetter Cantrell Colorado State University The improbable, desiring, erotic, and violent world of romance reminds us that we are not awake when we have abolished the dream world: we are awake only when we have absorbed it again.1 Northrop Frye Second Skin is a troubling book, a book that presents a contemporary reality as disturbing in its outlines of massed menace as in its detail of felt cruelty, fear, and pain. It is a book that plunges the reader into the horrors as well as the immediacy of nightmare. From time to time, the reader enjoys with the narrator the relief of a pause in a dream world that is a nearly exact counterpart of its opposing nightmare. These peaceful episodes are, however, also troublesome, for they raise the book's central question as insistently as their nightmare counterparts: What is the book's moral center? Or more narrowly, what are we to make of the narrator and protagonist, Skipper? Critics of this book have disagreed sharply on the answers to these questions, and much discussion of the book has inevitably centered on the question of whether Skipper is or is not an unreliable narrator.2 Important though this aspect of the book's structure is, a more basic question ought to precede it. Given Skipper's two allusions to his tale as "the dead reckoning of my Romance,"3 how does it fit into the romance tradition? Once we ask this question, we are freed from the assumptions of realistic fiction; in exchange, we find that the conventions of romance illuminate every aspect of the book. Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance provides us with an exceptionally illuminating 1.Northrop Frye,The Secular Scripture; A Study ofthe Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p.61. Further references will be indicated parenthetically within the text. 2.See, for example, John Kuehl's excellent discussion in John Hawkes andthe Craft of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975), pp. 113-126. 3.John Hawkes, Second Skin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1963), pp. 162, 173. Further references will be indicated parenthetically within the text. 282ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW analysis of the nature of romance, for it reads almost like a gloss of Second Skin. Central to romance, in Frye's analysis, and central to Second Skin, is "the polarization of ideal and abhorrent worlds" (Frye, p. 80) into day, night; dream, nightmare; upper and lower — "as though romance were simply replacing the world of ordinary experience by a dream world, in which the narrative movement keeps rising into wish fulfillment or sinking into anxiety and nightmare " (Frye, p. 53). This description not only catches the ambiance of Second Skin, but also the specific contrasts between the cold and rocky Northern island and the warm and verdant dream world of Skipper's Southern island. More generally, it describes the contrasts between a whole lifetime cursed by the legacy of the "seeds of death" inherited from Skipper's mortician father, where love is scorned and where eggs are hand grenades, and the contrasting world where Skipper as artificial inseminator bestows "seeds of life," where everybody wants to kiss him, and where Catalina Kate bears their child as he completes the telling of his tale. Consonant with the polarized world they inhabit (Frye, p. 53), the characters in Second Skin characteristically come in pairs. The nightmare women, Miranda, Cassandra, and Gertrude, for example , seem to have their dream counterparts in Big Bertha, Josie, and Catalina Kate: Miranda who cuts the nipples off baby bottles is transformed into Big Bertha, a cook; Cassandra, cold but not virginal , associated with silver, is replaced by Josie, a smiling little nun with gold teeth; and promiscuous, insecure Gertrude is metamorphosed into the dusky-skinned Catalina Kate, happily shared by Skipper and his beloved friend Sonny. Sonny's nightmare counterpart is Fernandez, Cassandra's Peruvian husband, whose abandonment of his wife and family finds its converse in Sonny's faithfulness and ultimate reunion with Skipper. Similarly, the destructive homosexuality of Fernandez finds its benign counterpart in...