The Cannibal (novel)
Encyclopedia
The Cannibal is a 1949 novel by John Hawkes (novelist), partially based on Hawkes' own experiences in the Second World War.
It is difficult to outline the plot of the novel because when the narrative shifts from 1945 to 1914 we are not clearly told what is the relation of the characters in that part of the novel with those of the first and last part; the only continuity is the presence in all three parts of Madame Snow.
Stella Snow is a young and promising night club singer, daughter of a German general, in 1914; she is the owner of a boarding house in the destitute Spitzen-on-the-Dein of 1945.
However, the story, told in a surrealistic or anti-realistic fashion, may be summarized by saying that the two parts of the novel set in 1945 depict the material and moral wasteland created by Nazism and W.W.II; the first part can be said to show the roots of those horrors in the years of earlier German imperialism and the humiliating defeat of 1918.
While the first and last part are told by a first-person narrator, Zizendorf, who masterminds a crackpot plot to kill the American overseer of the occupied German town, Leevey, and start a rebellion of the defeated Germans against the Allied invaders, the central part is a third-person narrative where fragments of the past are told, describing episodes which involve the owner of a tavern, Herman, and his son Ernst (who marries Stella), and a mysterious Englishman called Cromwell, who seems to have sided with the Germans against England but might also be a spy.
, and there is no doubt that The Cannibal was an important source of inspiration for his masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow
. Hence this novel can be read as one of the first examples of postmodern literature
and an important link between modernism
and postmodernism
.
Plot
The novel is divided in three parts. The first and the last are set in 1945, in an imaginary small German town ravaged by the war, Spitzen-on-the-Dein. The second part takes place during the First World War, from 1914 (the title of this part of the novel) to 1918.It is difficult to outline the plot of the novel because when the narrative shifts from 1945 to 1914 we are not clearly told what is the relation of the characters in that part of the novel with those of the first and last part; the only continuity is the presence in all three parts of Madame Snow.
Stella Snow is a young and promising night club singer, daughter of a German general, in 1914; she is the owner of a boarding house in the destitute Spitzen-on-the-Dein of 1945.
However, the story, told in a surrealistic or anti-realistic fashion, may be summarized by saying that the two parts of the novel set in 1945 depict the material and moral wasteland created by Nazism and W.W.II; the first part can be said to show the roots of those horrors in the years of earlier German imperialism and the humiliating defeat of 1918.
While the first and last part are told by a first-person narrator, Zizendorf, who masterminds a crackpot plot to kill the American overseer of the occupied German town, Leevey, and start a rebellion of the defeated Germans against the Allied invaders, the central part is a third-person narrative where fragments of the past are told, describing episodes which involve the owner of a tavern, Herman, and his son Ernst (who marries Stella), and a mysterious Englishman called Cromwell, who seems to have sided with the Germans against England but might also be a spy.
Meaning and Importance of the Novel
One of the earliest commentators of the novel, Albert J. Guerard, who taught Hawkes creative writing, maintains that "(...) the tiny, gutted Spitzen-on-the-Dein—with its feverish D.Ps., its diseased impotent adults and crippled children, with its foul chocked canals, with its hunger, militarism, primitive memories and its unregenerate hatred of its conqueror—is Germany itself in microcosm". Guerard links Hawkes' surrealistic or anti-realistic depiction of postwar Germany with Kafka's twisted image of the United States in Amerika; Hawkes' destructured novel is thus connected to modernist fiction. But Hawkes was praised by Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, and there is no doubt that The Cannibal was an important source of inspiration for his masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
. Hence this novel can be read as one of the first examples of postmodern literature
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
and an important link between modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
and postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
.