[In the following essay, Greiner offers a close analysis of terror in John Hawkes's Death, Sleep & the Traveler, noting that the "pure terror" of the novel represents Hawkes's movement away from the comic horror that characterized his earlier works.]

John Hawkes has spent most of his adult life probing the "psychic sores" of his grotesque characters. Beginning with Charivari and The Cannibal in 1949, he has combined experimental technique with narratives of extraordinary pain and violence to expose the murky interiors of what many people call "reality." Yet despite the shocking images, the revelations of pain, and the investigations of ugliness and failure, Hawkes has always considered himself a comic novelist. Many readers will recall a 1966 interview in which he insisted that "I have always thought that my fictions, no matter how diabolical, were comic. I wanted to be very comic—but they have not been treated as comedy. They have been called 'black, obscene visions of ¿he horror of life' and sometimes rejected as such, sometimes highly praised as such."¹

The comic treatment of diabolical urges directs his novels through The Blood Oranges (1971). Yet in that novel, the humor seems noticeably darker when compared to Skipper's comic bumbling which reaches lyrical heights in Second Skin (1964). Cyril, the narrator of The Blood Oranges, finds that his tapestry of love not only purges him, the self-styled sex-singer, but also results in Hugh's hanging, Catherine's breakdown, and Fiona's departure. The comedy is a long way from Skipper's "naked history" and his serene celebration of "love at last."

Apparently directing the more recent novels away from the comic terror associated with his work, Hawkes has written in Death, Sleep & the Traveler (1974) a truly terrifying book. One of his own statements seems especially pertinent here: "I might add that I'm no longer interested in writing comic novels, that I'm wary now of the 'safety' inherent in the comic form, that from now on I want to come still closer to terror, which I think I'm doing in the short novel I'm trying to write at the moment."² The novel he refers to remains unnamed, but it seems likely to be Death, Sleep & the Traveler, published almost simultaneously with his remarks. If so, Hawkes correcày describes his latest fiction, for in it the relatively few comic scenes are dwarfed by the exposure of Allert's horrifying dreams.

Most reviewers of the novel failed to take such change of emphasis into account; the publication of Death, Sleep & the Traveler elicited the wildly varied reviews which readers of Hawkes have come to expect. One consistently penetrating critic of Hawkes' fiction finds the novel too accessible and laments diat it disconcerts him "far too little."³ Another Hawkes fan believes mat the novel is too easy, "a book that is virtually all narrative line and little else."⁴ Another reviewer, however, condemns both Death, Sleep & the Traveler and Hawkes, and for some reason he also attacks Hawkes' admirers; those who praise Hawkes' artifice are as intolerable as those who create it: "artifice is the good currency which, for those who will accept it, eliminates any need for the best."⁵ Finally, another's disapproval is a bit more balanced; Hawkes is granted the stature of a major novelist, but the latest two novels are "rather wispy works," having "the air of dazzling exercises performed on the edge of nothing."⁶

Death, Sleep & the Traveler is not as difficult nor as compelling as The Cannibal (1949), The Beetle Leg (1951), or The Lime Twig (1961), but it is far from a wispy exercise. Hawkes may be turning away from the comic delights of parody and strange laughter, but his latest novel is not a completely new departure. Rather than divorce himself from his earlier work, he has reentered the dream world of Michael and Margaret Banks in The Lime Twig. In that generally acclaimed novel, the Bankses cross the line between reality and dream in search of sexual fulfillment, only to be smashed within the dream following an orgy beyond their wildest fantasies. Yet that violently comic novel ends affirmatively, for with his sacrificial death, Michael Banks redeems his life and brings down the dream world. In Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Allert Vanderveenan similarly pursues sexual fulfillment to the netherworld of dreams. Rather than emulate Michael, who realizes his error and tries to surface, Allert elects to remain within the dream where sex and death unite. His prospects—and the novel itself—are especially grim.

Commenting on novels in general, Hawkes argues that "the true sources of fiction—interesting fiction—no doubt lie buried in some inaccessible depth of the psyche."⁷ The sea, with all of its traditional suggestions of psychological depth and eternity, plays a crucial role in Death, Sleep & the Traveler. Water is everywhere: Allert drinking glass after glass of cold water, Allert struggling to reach the very bottom of the ship's pool, Allert participating in erotic saunas. The sea itself is the central fact of Allert's psyche. Unlike Skipper in Second Skin and Cyril in The Blood Oranges who bathe in tropical waters, Allert crosses the ocean aboard a ship going nowhere. Hawkes notes the association between sea and psyche in his own fiction: "By now it's obvious that I'm obsessed among other things with the sea and with islands, and whereas Donne says that 'no man is an island,' I myself believe that we're all islands—inaccessible, drifting Hawkes' apart, thirsting to be explored, magical."⁸ Hawkes' comment is echoed by Allert himself: "Every man is an island.… I am like the rest."⁹ Inaccessible to all but himself, unapproachable from the fictional convention of verisimilitude, Allert finds that his psyche is a nameless sea on which he drifts. The novel he narrates invites us to explore the magical atmosphere of his "island."

Allert boards an ocean liner for an adventure to the island of his unconscious. Hawkes, recalling from his childhood the image of a great house ("dead house with beams like great bones"), explains that the abandoned house explored with an older female cousin remains the source of three related images which continue to "obsess" him: the abandoned lighthouse, the abandoned ocean liner, and the fishing village on an island. The village appears in Charivari, the lighthouse in Second Skin, the liner in Death, Sleep & the Traveler. He describes the ship as part of a "waking dream in which I stand alone at the edge of a straight empty shore at low tide and gaze with both fear and longing at an enormous black derelict or damaged ocean liner that looms in awful silence in knee-deep water about a mile from shore." Compelled to explore it, Hawkes remembers how in the waking dream he wades slowly through the shallow water to the ship, convinced that he must investigate its "vast world" until he finds either childhood hopes or emptiness or floating corpses.¹⁰

In Death, Sleep & the Traveler he finds the corpses. The dark ship which Skipper sees on the horizon in Second Skin becomes another metaphor for Aliert's psyche. Reading Hawkes' latest novel, we are at sea within Allert's grotesque visions, wading with Hawkes himself as we navigate the shallow water to climb aboard and plunge into the terrifying immensity of the narrator's wayward ocean liner.

Allert provides the clue to his own tale. Detailing a scene aboard the ship, he notes his awareness of "concreteness rotating toward illusion" (52). The drift toward illusion describes both the hazy atmosphere of the novel and our inability to pin down anything for precise definition. For on opening Death, Sleep & the Traveler we enter the dream world of Aliert's subconscious and pursue the illusions of a man who admits to loving psyche's "slime." The novel is framed at beginning and end by his wife's departure, but even the reality of this apparently "concrete" event is suspect. Allert's description of it rotates toward illusion, for he cannot settle upon a definition of Ursula's attire as she walks out the door. His first account suggests that she wears her entire wardrobe: "Dressed in her severe gray suit, her gardening hat, her girdle, her negligee, her sullen silk dress, her black blouse, her stockings, her red pumps, and carrying a carefully packed straw suitcase in either hand, thus she is leaving me" (1). As if his description were not confused enough, Allert confounds us even more when at the end of the novel he insists that she is carrying not straw suit-cases but a handbag and a lambskin case while wearing white slacks and a red knit top.

What do we do with such a narrator? The point is that Ursula, Peter (her lover), Ariane (Aliert's shipboard mistress), and Olaf (the ship's radio operator who shares Ariane) may all be projections of Allert's mind, complications in his personality which he cannot control until he describes the series of dreams which is Death, Sleep & the Traveler. Or perhaps Ursula has had Allert committed to the nearby mental hospital, Acres Wild, leaving him to his sexual fantasies and to his illusions called Ariane and Olaf (he explains several times that he is reluctant to depart on the cruise and that Ursula wants him to enjoy her body and stop dreaming). The novel invites both interpretations. A schizophrenic in the layman's sense of the word, Allert plunges deeper into the violent depths of his dream until he purges himself of all four characters: Ursula leaves; Peter dies of a heart attack; Ariane disappears from the ship, supposedly murdered by Allert; and the radio operator is relieved of duty.

Although difficult to trust, Allert drops enough hints to suggest mat the mysterious ocean liner is the dreamer himself, while the sea is his dream world. He describes himself, for example, as "the alerted sleeper" and as "alert yet immobilized," and while immobilized he identifies with the unmoving ship (7, 111). Struggling unsuccessfully to understand a fear he has never known before, he suspects that his problem concerns "two cosmic entities": "the sea, which was incomprehensible, and the ship, which was also incomprehensible in a mechanical fashion but which, further, was suddenly purposeless and hence meaningless in the potentially destructive night" (7). Conscious of his "total identification with the dead ship" and aware of the propeller vibrations inside him, Allert watches the ship point toward "the unmoving fictional horizon" (8), a destination which may become the novel.

Trapped within his vision, Allert is an alerted sleeper dreaming to discover who he is. He notes that even though his life has been uncensored, he cannot explain the meanings of his experiences because each stands before him like an overexposed piece of film. His fantasies control him to such an extent that he has no life outside of the dream-narrative which he hopes to explain to us. Indeed, Ursula taunts him several times with the accusations that he is not real, that he is a "psychic invalid," and that he has "emotionally annihilated himself (8, 46). In conventional terms, she is correct. Allert has no reality beyond the "cosmic entities" of the ship and the sea, and he is afraid when he feels "the stasis of the ship" in his large body (7). His merger of sex, the ship, and himself is surely clarified when he reveals that he is guided by a compass known as the "rare North Penis" (16).

Allert, of course, defends himself against Ursula's taunts. Arguing that he is not a "psychic casuality," he explains that all he wants is to exist, to believe in "the set and characters on the stage" (9). Yet he also longs to be the director of what he calls his "secret stage," casting all of the characters out of his dreams as projections of himself. Little wonder that he has no answer when Ursula insists that he is incapable of distinguishing between his life and his dreams. His idea of a cast of characters involves the two love triangles of the novel: one with Ursula and Peter, the other with Ariane and Olaf. Each person is the contrast of the other. Suave, sophisticated Peter is the opposite of coarse, dissheveled Olaf; large, sultry Ursula contrasts with tiny, boyish Ariane; and the cold, white, snow-bound scenes of the first triangle are the inversion of the hot, white, ocean-bound locales of the second. In its evocation of sexuality, Death, Sleep & the Traveler is Hawkes' most erotic novel. One reviewer calls it "steamy,"¹¹ and certain scenes—Peter's sauna, the voyeurism, the bats engaged in autofellatio—seem designed to stimulate fantasy without resorting to explicit description. Yet unlike the union of sex and regeneration which is found in Second Skin and attempted in The Blood Oranges, Allert's sexual fantasies veer toward derangement, exposing his onanism and culminating in death.

His dream of the grapes containing tiny red fetuses wriggling like worms before being crushed suggests his compulsion to negate the union of regeneration and sex.

Ursula later tells him that he dreams rather than lives because he has the face of a fetus. Allert is also fond of using such similes as burning logs as large as the bodies of children. Perhaps the most grotesque images of his onanism and destructive sexuality are the acrobatic bats engaged in autofellatio, their "sickening faces as large as an infant's fist" (123). Recalling the references to crushed fetuses, the bats are also an illuminating reference to Allert's memories of the childhood dreams which produced his first orgasms. In one dream he is a boy eager to know what a nude woman looks like. Dressing as his mother in order to strip, he finds that his most urgent desire is not to see the female body but to "love and relish" himself. When he removes the female panties to expose femininity, he experiences instead a "spectacular ejaculation" (140-1). A similar orgasm occurs in another dream from his boyhood when he views the photograph of a nude woman while sitting in a barber's chair (49-51). Hearing of these dreams, Ursula laughingly replies that the childhood delight in self-induced orgasms accounts for his current fascination with pornography and for what she calls the "psychic siphoning" of his adult "nocturnal emissions" (51). Although she laughs, Allert's predicament is not funny.

Rather than extend the association of lyricism and life which Skipper finds in sex, Allert expands the equation of sterility and sex which Cyril and Hugh suffer.¹² His pornography collection and onanistic dreams make Hugh's nude photographs and masturbation seem like child's play, and his erotic descriptions of dreams while "drenched in sex" leave Cyril's fantasies far behind. Cyril's visions of sexual harmony may accidently lead to death, but Allert openly courts death as his final mistress. He is so caught up in the problem of self-definition that he seems unreal. Stuck in a dream which lures him to the depths of the ocean liner's pool, he trembles with the realization that he alone is the only "access" to what he wants to know. He becomes, in effect, his own mother when he dresses in her clothes in order to peer at nudity, and the orgastic experience of seeing himself beneath the woman's undergarments suggests that he is incapable of enjoying sex except with his own fantasies. He likes to believe that he willingly shares Ursula with Peter, that he even encourages the triangle, but his repressed dislike of Peter is reflected in his jealousy of the radio operator with whom he shares Ariane. Indeed, Ursula is no more than a symbol for him, one woman and every woman, as his interpretation of her name shows: "uterine, ugly, odorous, earthen, vulval, convolvulaceous, saline, mutable, seductive" (61). If she is only a projection of his psyche, so much the better, for he finds the most satisfac-tory sex to be not heterosexual but autoerotic. Given the choice between the bats' experience or sex with women, he would choose the bats. Thus all he must do to complete his immersion in the visions of his private fetishes is to eliminate the other "characters," and he dispatches them with ease: two die, one leaves, and one is relieved of duty.

Such visions, of course, are the stuff of madness. Allert is deranged only in the sense that he is cut off from commonplace definitions of reality, an alert sleeper sailing through a sea of dreams, content to stay submerged within the ship. The potential for violence is endless, for he hopes to free himself from all restrictions. Peter the psychiatrist asks him the key question: "What do you think of my theory that a man remains a virgin until he has committed murder?" (26). The equation of sex and death is unmistakable in Peter's question, and the novel chronicles Allert's determination to prove its validity and live the equation. Finding in his own name "paranoia curled in the shape of a child's skeleton," refusing to eat grapes because they might contain fetuses, and incapable of maintaining the sexual triangles which he so erotically describes, Allert encourages the relationship between his onanism and the merger of sex and death. His most spectacular orgasm will occur not during another peeping scene with his "mother" but when he successfully encloses himself within his dream, murdering the "real" Allert and thus shedding his virginity. He has apparently neared his goal by the end of the novel: "I now mink without doubt that I, the old Dutchman dispossessed of the helm, am the living proof of all of Peter's theories. Or almost all" (167). His dead or totally insane body will be his final mistress.

When Peter explains that Allert believes normality to be a perversion, he hints at the reversal of standards which motivates the dreamer. Even Ursula interprets one of his visions—in which he drags a narrow tin coffin—as "the telltale dream of an only son," for she knows that the coffin contains a woman, perhaps Ursula, perhaps his mother (111). A few pages later Ariane and Allert ride in a hearselike carriage, and we know that his equation of sex and death is complete. The final thrill will be the murder of his companions, which means either his own death or his complete loss of rationality, since his friends are but images of himself. Allert comments, for example, that the identification he feels with Peter has been achieved by "certain psychic ties" (31). The tin coffin which carries the female corpse is a reference to his "vision of Peter sealed at last in his lead box but with his penis bursting through the roof of the box like an angry asphodel" (31). The union of Allert, Ursula, Peter, sex, and death is perhaps best illustrated when the three lovers join for a sauna.

Walking to the bathhouse, Allert interprets his footsteps as those of a "lurching murderer." He comments on the tension between the white snow and the black water, and he decides that the rocks surrounding the windowless sauna have the "texture of a man's skull." The searing, dry heat "stimulates visions," and Allert admits that the heat is high enough to bring death. Luxuriating in the nudity and in the excitement of Ursula's penchant for oral sex, he wonders if the heat will kill them. Later, when climbing from the bath to the house, he has the vision of Peter dead in the lead coffin. Although Allert claims that their sexual sojourn amid the searing heat, the nudity, and the oil of eucalyptus has the "clarity of a peaceful dream," the only clarity we can be sure of is mat he equates sex and death.

Allert undergoes a parallel experience aboard the imaginary ocean liner. Ship and pool replace bathhouse and sauna, Ursula and Peter become Ariane and Olaf, and death again is the result. Hinting that the ocean liner is another vision from his dream world, Allert admits that once aboard the ship he expects monsters and bad dreams. He gets them: "A clear day was no guarantee against the diving and rising monsters of the deep. The length of the corridor was spanned underfoot by a thin rubber mat.… Through the thickly-smoked lenses of my dark glasses the details of the corridor were so darkly obliterated that it might have been leading me through some unfamiliar hotel or through the severe structure of a bad dream" (28). In addition to paralleling the sauna, the experience in the pool is a metaphor for Allert's plunge into his own psyche. While swimming, he likes to submerge as deeply as possible, struggling to achieve the bottom, to propitiate the god of "all those in fear of drowning at sea" before prolonging the "ritualized agony of the return to the surface" (33). He enjoys the shadows lurking at the bottom, and on another occasion he wonders if he were "wearing the rubber suit of the skin diver beneath my clothes. In the grip of the steam whistle my body was drowning in its own breath. Inside the rubber skin I was a person generating his own unwanted lubricant of poisoned grease" (79). All of the water imagery, the references to rubber suits and mats, and the explorations of the unconscious finally meet in his recollection of yet another dream experience. Waking, he finds himself wet in bed and bound in double thick sheets which engulf him like "some enormous scab," surely a reference to a psychiatric cure known as the rubber-sheet treatment. The moment baffles him, and he wonders where sleep has taken him and what he has dreamed (128). The only answers to these crucial questions are mat he has entered his unconscious—me one place where he truly lives—and that he has dreamed a novel tided Death, Sleep & the Traveler.

Unable to believe in what he calls "the reality of the human self," he knows that he is inexplicable except, perhaps, when he dreams. For Allert, the alert sleeper, is a sick man, surely schizophrenic, perhaps murderously insane.¹³ Obsessed since childhood with sex, he finds that he does not want to repudiate his onanism nor his mania that sex leads to death, even though Peter tells him that at the nearby asylum, Acres Wild, sexual affairs are often part of the cure. Allert never says so explicitly, but he is likely a patient at Acres Wild suffering a series of psychic shocks while wrapped in rubber sheets. Peter argues that the treatment is barbaric and dangerous. Note his references to white, sex, sea, water, sexual agony, death, and omer images consistently used throughout the novel as he describes the cure in terms reminiscent of the sauna, the ocean voyage, and Allert's plunge into the pool:

by subjecting the patient to deeper and deeper states of coma we brought him increasingly close to death's door. The patient descended within himself and, while we, the worried staff, hovered at his side, always waiting to administer the antidote or undertake the rescue mission, so to speak, the patient was traveling inside himself and in a kind of sexual agony was sinking into the depths of psychic darkness, drowning in the sea of the self, submerging into the long slow chaos of the dreamer on the edge of extinction. The closer such a patient came to death the greater his cure. The whiter and wetter he became in his grave of rubber sheets, my friend, and the deeper his breathing, the slower his pulse, the more he felt himself consumed as in liquid lead, the greater the agony with which he approached oblivion, then the greater and more profound and more joyous his recovery, his rebirth. (143)

The terror is that Allert is never reborn. He remains, as it were, at the bottom of the pool, free to explore fantasies of sex and death, eager to probe the darkness of his unconscious being. For him, the great joy is not the recovery from but the approach to oblivion. Listening to Peter's description of the rubber-sheet cure, Allert imagines "some hostile patient who, in a mad stroke of understanding, snatches from the pocket of Peter's long white coat a cheap paperbound work of fiction concerning a pair of young nurses who set about using their sexuality as a cure for maniacs" (143).

Perhaps he is that maniac, Peter the doctor, Ursula and Ariane the pair of young nurses, and Death, Sleep & the Traveler the paperback book of fiction. More likely, however, only the first of these possibilities is true, that Allert is a patient who at times imagines himself a ship traveling on the sea of his erotic, death-filled dreams. Coma and myth are one, Peter tells him, a fact which he discovers during his incarceration in the rubber sheets: "has it ever occurred to you that your life is a coma? That you live your entire life in a coma? Sometimes I cannot help but think that you never entirely emerge from your flickering cave" (144). Filtering his life through fantasy, Allert prefers the cave with its bats. Ursula is correct when she argues that a man without a memory is a man without an identity and thus unreal. Allert is that man.

At the end of the novel, he wonders if he should commit himself to Acres Wild, forgetting that he is probably already there. Rejecting a return to what we would call "reality," he opts for his dreams: "Instead I shall simply think and dream, think and dream. I shall dream of she who guided me to the end of the journey, whoever she is, and I shall think of porridge, leeks, tobacco, white clay, and water coursing through a Roman aqueduct" (179). We never learn the answers to the questions which he raises early in the novel, queries which ponder if he is free, lost, exhilarated, or "flushed with grief." All we can do is accept his intuition that he is now "more youthful and yet closer to death" than ever before (38). He seems confident. At the end of the novel, he rushes toward death and his greatest sexual experience.

Though the creator of dozens of grotesque, violence-prone characters, Hawkes has always encouraged the reader's sympathy for psychically maimed, often bewildered people. In most of his novels, the identification of victim and victimizer is so complete that the reader sympathizes with both simultaneously. Indeed, Hawkes argues that "this special sympathy for decay, deterioration, destruction (and for the maimed, the victimized) is one of the essential qualities of the imagination."¹⁴ In the past, he has used what he calls "extreme fictive detachment," reader identification with the prevailing point of view, and comedy to generate such sympathy.

Death, Sleep & the Traveler is an unusual addition to his canon because it does not have the often outrageous tone of humor usually associated with novels as violent as The Cannibal and Second Skin. Though Hawkes remains completely detached from the wanderings of Allert's psyche, and though he again uses the first-person point of view to narrow the distance between reader and narrator and thus encourage sympathy, he has turned from comic terror to terror in his latest fiction. Sympathy is maintained, despite the reader's revulsion at witnessing Allert's violent dreams, because one naturally feels for a character so completely unable to determine his identity. Yet terror tempered by comedy is somehow less stark than terror standing alone. Since pure terror finally denies us the humanizing gesture of laughter, Death, Sleep & the Traveler is closer to The Blood Oranges than to Second Skin, and probably closest of all to the grim, though funny, earlier The Beetle Leg and The Owl (1954). Its relative accessibility, perhaps the result of Hawkes' desire for a wider public, may be a flaw. True Hawkes fans like their novels tough. Yet comparative ease does not always undermine impact. In Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Hawkes has set aside the affirmative lyricism of his more recent novels to explore once again the dark recesses of terror.

¹ "John Hawkes on His Novels: An Interview with John Graham," Massachusetts Review, 7 (Summer 1966), 459.

² John Hawkes, "Notes on Writing a Novel," Tri-Quarterly, 30 (Spring 1974), 111.

³ W. M. Frohock, "How Hawkes's Humor Works," Southwest Review, 59 (Summer 1974), 331.

⁴ Stephen Koch, "Circling Hawkes," Saturday Review / World, 1 June 1974, p. 22.

⁵ David Bromwich, review of Death, Sleep & the Traveler, New York Times Book Review, 21 April 1974, p. 6.

⁶ Michael Wood, "O Tempora! O Moors!" New York Review of Books, 8 August 1974, p. 41. See also the following reviews:

⁷ Hawkes, "Notes," p. 112.

⁸Hawkes, "Notes," p. 113.

⁹ John Hawkes, Death, Sleep & the Traveler (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 104. Subsequent references are to this edition.

¹⁰ Hawkes, "Notes," pp. 114-5.

¹¹ Rust Hills, "Writing," Esquire, July 1974, pp. 42-9.

¹² Apparently Hawkes hopes to encourage allusions to his other novels: the phrase "second skin" is used (p. 138), and the description of the grapes (p. 14) recalls the erotic grape-tasting game in The Blood Oranges.

¹³ There is even a hint that he is "imperfectly lobotomized" (p. 135).

¹⁴ Hawkes, "Notes," p. 119.