The Blood Oranges

John Hawkes has a rather special vision of things, compulsively original and relentless in its own terms. A lesser writer would be hard pressed to find words adequate for its expression; but his readers well know that Hawkes has shown himself far and away the most accomplished literary craftsman today writing in English.

Such a vision--whose form follows in the tradition of the nouveau roman--presents some challenging difficulties. But not without rewards: as sonorous and mysteriously evocative as Faulkner's, more poetically intense than Lawrence Durrell's, Hawkes's lyrical energy in The Blood Oranges conveys in prose more than the feeling of poetry--in fact, there are whole passages rendered metrically. One or two even contain rhymes.

It is, ultimately, in attempting to distinguish Hawkes's vision (and its moral implications) from his ambitious method (with its technical complexities) that one runs into the greatest difficulty. The Blood Oranges too much begs to be called either a masterpiece or a skillful put-on; I am not sure which. For the risk lies in praising the book for the wrong reasons, or in rejecting it because Hawkes's style--deliberately, I believe--tends to cloud the moral issues any serious novelist is obliged to face.

A chief drawback attaching itself to Hawkes's first-person narrative technique rests with none other than his narrator, Cyril, who (as one gathers early on) is the archetypal "multisexualist." Through Cyril's eyes--his center of consciousness--the reader surveys obliquely a "tapestry of love." The Arcadian setting is as timeless as it is detached from the quotidian world of mortals--or so Cyril believes: "In Illyria there are no seasons."

Cyril's "relics are circular," and his undisguised highest obligation has become the gratification of his own senses. He and his beautiful wife, Fiona, cannot be content with each other alone. Instead they require the complementary presence and attention of Hugh and Catherine if their "successful" marriage is to go on working.

We broke, we ran, we scattered on the face of our favorite hill like birds or like children, and because I was last in line, lowest figure in that bright pattern, and was holding back as usual (tall of the kite, conscience and consciousness of our little group), I found myself generalizing the visceral experience of the moment itself, found myself thinking that our days were idyls, our nights dreams, our mornings slow-starting songs of love.

Indeed, Cyril's single-minded pursuit of pleasure--matched by Fiona's overwhelming (yet apparently insufficient) sensuality--and the almost grotesque immersion they seek in sex are fully compatible with the claims of the setting. But the resulting demands are so intense, the sex esthetic so jealous of other considerations (such as the urge to live decent lives instead of envious or exploitative half-lives), that the very paysage moralise becomes finally, for all but Cyril, more nearly that of hell than of heaven. Most of the elements which might arrange themselves in a really fine novel are present. But Cyril, whose commentary proves vital, is an arrogant, humorless cad, and his worst qualities conspire to weaken or even to destroy the novel's power.

Were it not for the skill with which Hawkes handles his language, the presence of so many potentially heavy-handed symbols would be intolerable. If the tapestry metaphor provides a unifying principle, the images betray an artificial sense of indeterminacy: church icons, an eagle, the color orange, the children, a shepherdess and a shepherd, the fortress and the arbor, all these comprise a fabric of pretentious love and meaningless hatred. On a note of tragedy the tapestry grows sordid, but Cyril is so consistently enervated even the tragic sensation becomes a cheat.

The book's failure shows itself not in Cyril's character, as such, but in his flaw as an unreliable narrator. Not only does his insensitive greed provoke a climate for disaster (with Hugh's death in a fatal game of masturbatory coupe-corde, and Catherine's descent into madness), but his absolute self-preoccupation and enfuriating blindness deprive the story of its tragic force. Crushing Hawkes's poetry is the dead weight of what he contrives as Cyril's stupid prose:

And in the midst of it I reminded myself that Flona knew full well that the physical exercise I had undertaken throughout our married life surely guaranteed the muscle development of my thick arms.

Or even worse:

I waited, and beneath by two hands now clasped around one heavy knee...felt like some living prehistoric bone full of solidity, aesthetic richness, latent athleticism.

Such stuff turns back the most attentive and sympathetic efforts to see things Cyril's way, which is unfortunately the only way Hawkes provides. Motives and individual fates sink under the trumped-up fetishes, and the vision is hopelessly blurred.

And the vision, because it is uncanny and so much depends on our willingness to accept its terms, proves a dangerous basis for the novel: style outpaces content until even Cyril's pleasure principle is violated--inadvertently. So one finally believes that John Hawkes has the over-fat soul of a child. No matter how precocious, he is unable or unwilling to match his obvious talent with any sort of serious moral statement. Instead, Hawkes has cast himself (and his book) into a state of unresolved fantastic formalism.

It works; and yet it doesn't. The book exudes freely without quite giving of itself and hints at cloudy meanings without any apparent obligation to follow through on them. The Blood Oranges, like anything wholly out of time, can never grow. Like ripe fruit and sweet erotic fiction (which it is), it can only shrink and fade when we finally flee Illyria (which we must) and retreat into the more familiar haunts of life itself.