| dc.description.abstract | This study is devoted to an analysis of some philosophical and psychological concerns evident in Hawkes' major fiction. These concerns have been classified according to the three predominant motifs of history, death, and suicide and their associated themes. The introductory chapter discusses the tendency of modern literature to treat the concept of the self as the proper arena for art. The chapter surveys the critical dicta of a variety of art and literary critics, ranging from Irving Howe, Stephen Spender, Lionel Trilling, and Nathan Scott to philosophers and sociologists such as Jose Ortega y Gassett and Eric Kahler all of whom see as a central concern for the modern artist the ontological crisis of the individual. Furthermore, the chapter points out how this concern has resulted in experimentation with fictional techniques to further expand the readers' ways of knowing and discovery through fiction. Hawkes' contribution to modernist literature is seen in the structural idiosyncracies of his fictions and the themes developed around the motifs of history, death, and suicide. Chapters Two and Three examine Hawkes' use of the comparison motifs of history and death, respectively, as focal symbols of his theme that historicism's "rejection of all absolute, rational and moral norms in the judging of the creations of history . . . [and its] proclamation of the creative mind, for which no other world image, art work, system of justice, religion has value," other than those created by the individual results in the entrapment of the self, either through solipsism or through victimization by the machinery of history. Death, then, is the state of the self's entrapment in viewing history as that which necessarily is, rather than that which is always in a state of renewal. Hawkes develops his theme that historicism leads to a death-like psychic entrapment by associating the entrapment with the characters' attachment to place or by associating the psychic paralysis with a futile, aimless quest. Chapter Four, in turn, examines what for Hawkes seems to be the necessary gesture that the modern individual must make to free himself from psychic enchantment. The frequency of the motif of suicide in Hawkes' fiction leads us to believe that he is using suicide as a symbol for the imaginative rebirth, or freedom, of the self through a radical loss of self. The creative act itself, Hawkes admits in his own criticism, is a process by which the individual is released from psychic paralysis caused by psychological conflict. In those fictions that have suicide as a predominant motif, the characters most affected are artist figures. These fictions (and especially Hawkes' most recent, Travesty) are artistic renderings of A. Alvarez's assertion that "under certain conditions of stress, a great work of art is a kind of suicide." The final chapter summarizes the observations made in Chapters Two through Four, and we conclude that Hawkes gives us in his fictions a testing ground for the expansion of our own imaginative lives. The technical difficulties and Hawkes' choice of subject material ensure the reader's full participation in recreating the "total vision" of each novel, as well as ensure the undermining of our own irrational fears of selfhood and being. | |
