The Beetle Leg and The Lime Twig are the other ones I picked up, so I’ll be heading to those soonishly.
One thing I do appreciate about Hawkes is that he’s not just retreading Joyce or Woolf with the way he’s playing around in The Cannibal. It’s harder to put a finger exactly on what he’s doing or what his goal in this miasma is, but it’s certainly unusual.
I often feel that the bulk of experimental fiction post-Faulkner is just people trying to push Joycean language farther, which usually leads to failure. I like how Beckett pushed language as far as possible in the opposite direction and I like how Burroughs just let nonsense guide him or how Acker let theft be her guide, but in the last hundred years, I feel that people are just running in circles, trying to deform and reconstruct language, which usually leads them back to Paris in 1922 rather than anywhere new. I think Danielewski, while still deeply Joycean at his worst, at least attacked the book as a physical object and tried to stretch those boundaries.
Like, I read someone like Blake Butler and mostly feel he’s drowned himself in asemic gobbledygook or Peter Markus who has spent his career tinkering in a very specific type of extreme minimalism that has eventually led him to writing books that read like they were written by a toddler.
But Hawkes seems at least interesting. It’s a funny quality, reading something that has precision and clarity but still finding yourself lost after a dozen pages.
