The Beetle Leg

 Well that was an experience! John Hawkes's experimental 1951 novel The Beetle Leg is short enough to be read in a morning, but I found it required the afternoon to then go back over it thoroughly enough to make sense of it. After all—Hawkes, according to an oft-quoted remark, sought to eliminate the usual encumbrances of character and plot from prose fiction. This makes the book considerably harder to read; but none the less emotionally powerful and ultimately rewarding for that. One might fear, after all, that an absence of traditional novelistic touches would render the book dull—but such proves hardly to be the case. 

For one thing, Hawkes's prose is not as truly bereft of recognizable narrative landmarks and human elements as the quote might lead one to expect (Beckett's The Unnamable, say, goes much further in this direction toward utter literary "flatness" and minimalism). And it is precisely the fact that these familiar elements seem present in the novel, even as they just elude one's grasp, that makes the novel so entrancing. Hawkes's prose gets into you like fish hooks (which play an unforgettable role in one of the novel's most disturbing hallucinatory scenes). It stays at just the outer limits of accessible meaning, and therefore becomes profoundly tantalizing. 

This unique fictional dynamic kept me glued to the last page of the book in one sitting, even though—as I closed it—I found myself uttering aloud, "what was that?" Then I turned all the way back to the beginning of the book and started working my way through again. 

The novel probably demands to be read through multiple times; the best I could manage today was to read it closely once and then skim through on a brief second lap. But it does repay careful and repeated attention (something like Basil Bunting's Briggflatts in this regard). Many of the characters and incidents mentioned early in the book, after all, only attain their full significance much later, and so a second reading helps bring the pieces of the plot and backstory to light (and there are indeed such pieces in this novel, despite Hawkes's disclaimer). 

Ultimately, though—as Hawkes's quote indicates—the value and appeal of this book lies less in its narrative elements than in the indelible images it seems to dredge up from the unconscious—like a pencil drawing by Alfred Kubin rendered into prose. Hawkes makes potent use of the eerie, spectral imagery of the lake-bottom ghost-towns throughout the United States that were evacuated and submerged in order to construct major dams. The description of an underwater tree filled with the lost possessions of the former inhabitants will not leave me soon. 

Nor will one easily forget the novel's image of a worker swallowed with an enormous belch by a catastrophic mudslide, conjuring—as a character remarks—the image of Jonah in the belly of the whale. Nor the character of "Cap Leech"—a quack surgeon in a traveling wagon that leads his neighbors to expect a medicine show, whose sense of sadistic power over his captive patients is reminiscent of the eerie minister in William Gass's Omensetter's Luck. Nor a mysterious and possibly inhuman motorcycle gang, the "Red Devils," who seem almost to be made up, automaton-like, of the goggles, jumpsuits, helmets, and other paraphernalia they wear, rather than of flesh and blood. 

Is it one of these "Red Devils"—seemingly composed entirely of leather and rubber, and bearing a mask that terminates in a "snout"—that the character Lou Camper glimpses through her motel window, in one of the novel's eeriest and most surreal sequences? These are the sorts of questions the novel invites that probably have no answer. All one can say is that the images stay with one; and that they have such a strikingly visual impact that one almost wishes the book had been committed to celluloid. This scene in particular seems crying out to be filmed by David Lynch. 

The novel as a whole, meanwhile, has the feel of Kenneth Anger's 1963 experimental short, Scorpio Rising—to a large enough extent that one almost wonders whether Anger was reading Hawkes at the time he developed it (it would make sense that the quintessential early '60s "underground film" might have been influenced by the quintessential "underground" novel of the prior decade). I was therefore left feeling that there is a Kenneth Anger film adaptation of The Beetle Leg somewhere out there in the Platonic ether, even if it never materialized in our imperfect world. Plainly, the text demands that it exist. 

What are the resemblances between the two creators? There's the fetishization of biker culture for one thing—which Anger gleaned from films like 1953's The Wild One, but which were presaged in Hawkes's novel. But there's also Anger's use of the imagery of astrological signs, which is also echoed in The Beetle Leg. The Sheriff who narrates the opening of the novel, after all, begins with a disquisition on the state of the heavens at the time of the narrative's opening, and refers several more times throughout the book to his local almanack for insights from the zodiac. 

Does it all cohere? Is it "saying something"? Why should it be? As a character in Martin Amis's novel The Information retorts to this demand that novels say something—a novel says whatever it takes the full length of the novel to say; if it was saying less than that, the work could have been considerably shorter. Or, as the British painter Francis Bacon liked to quote the ballerina Pavlova, when asked about the "meaning" of her dance of the dying swan: "If I could tell you, then I wouldn't have to dance it."