"Travesty" by John Hawkes *****

• Originally published in 1976
• US author
• Setting:  south of France
• Epigraph:  
• "I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that the poetic structure--like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel--can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns withing us."  --Michel Leiris: "Manhood"
• "You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories:  those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.  I'll let you choose the pigeonhole that suits me."  -- Albert Camus:  "The Fall"
• Quotes:
• p.15..."Like schoolboys who have studied the solar system (I do not mean to be condescending or simple-minded) you and I know that all the elements of life coerce each other, force each other instant by instant into that perfect formation which is lofty and the only one possible."
• p.17..."Total destruction.  In its own way it is a form of ecstasy, this utter harmony between design and debris.  But even a poet will find it difficult to share this vision on short notice."
• p.58..."The unseen vision is not to be improved upon."
• p.62..."...surely there is no eroticism to match the landscape of spent passion."
• p.75..."For me the familiar and unfamiliar lie everywhere together, like two enormous faces back to back.  I am always seeing the man in the child, the child in the grown man.  Winter i8s my time of flowers, I am a resigned but spirited voyager."
• p.81....."Who does not dread the unimaginable condition of not existing?"
• p.82..."Tonight of all nights why can't you give me one moment of genuine response? Without it, as I have said, our expedition is as wasteful as everything else."
• p.82..."We rush off to die precisely because death's terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future moment, like tears of poison, with an anguish finally so great that only the dreaded experience itself provides relief.  We are so consumed by what we wish to avoid that we can no longer avoid it."
• p.99..."...sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern.  We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians."
• p.100..."Because in our case it now appears that the poet is the thick-skinned and simple-minded beast of the ego, while contrary to popular opinion, it is your ordinary privileged man who turns out to reveal in the subtlest of ways all those faint sinister qualities of the artistic mind."
• p.100..."No, it is simply that the night is to my eye as is the pair of goggles to the arc-welder.  Through the thick green lens of the night I see only the brightest and most frightening light."
• p.103..."I have pursued clarity as relentlessly as the worshipers pursue their Christ."
• Notes:
• Honorine (his wife) was his clarity, the poet's Muse
• What was the purpose of the scene at the waterfront restaurant with the carrots?
• Review:  What is the meaning of travesty? A travesty is a literary or artistic composition so inferior in quality as to be merely a grotesque imitation of its model.  John Hawkes' novella is a poetic travesty.  The driver of a luxury sports car, an upper class intellectual, has decided to commit the ultimate poetic act.  Is it because his wife is his poet best friend's mistress?  Is it because his daughter is mistress to the same poet?  You will have to join the threesome on this ride to death to determine the meaning of the driver's choice for yourself.  I could feel the wind in my hair on this ride through a rainy night in southern France.  Do you dare?