About book Death, Sleep & The Traveler: Novel (1975)
Sex Without FeelingHawkes, John (1974). Death, Sleep, & the Traveler. New York: New Directions.Main character Allert (accent on the first syllable) is an overweight, middle-aged Dutchman with a younger, beautiful wife, Ursula. Their neighbor, Peter, a psychiatrist and trim, younger man, is attracted to Ursula, and Allert likes to watch the two of them have sex on the living room floor. For Peter, watching Allert and Ursula having sex makes him just a tiny bit jealous. Ursula is indifferent to everything.The sexual scenes are explicit, but indirect, using euphemisms for body parts, so it is not pornography. The focus is on the psychologies of the three characters. And what is that psychology? I would say, “numb.” Allert and Ursula especially, seem disconnected, almost zombie-like. They have no lives beyond their hypersexuality, and they don’t even care about that.Ursula says to Peter, “For you and me,” Ursula said quickly, though in a mild and somewhat unthinking voice, “…pornography would be intolerable. You and I do not filter life through fantasy. But it is otherwise with Allert. You cannot tear him away from a picture of a bare arm, let alone an entire and explicit scene of eroticism” (p. 150). Her idea seems to be that sex is just meaningless sex, so pornography is a pointless fantasy beyond meaningless. Notice that Ursula speaks in a mild and unthinking voice, whatever that is. Even when she expresses a rare opinion about anything, she is distant, bloodless, not present even to herself. But she is right about Allert, who is the first-person narrator of the novel. Via his musings, we know that he does find sex in some way exciting, though exactly in what way, we never quite learn. Certainly it is not through any lens of possessiveness, for he has not a shred of jealousy in him. He too, seems numb to sex, and to life, but perhaps slightly less so than Ursula, since he is at least interested in sex.Allert muses, “To me, it has always been curious that Peter, who never married, should have lived a life that was unconditionally monogamous, thanks to the power of Ursula’s dark allure and her strength of mind, whereas I, who became married to Ursula…have lived my life as sexually free as the arctic wind. …But during all this time …Ursula must have thought of me as a Dutch husband who had been lobotomized – but imperfectly” (pp 134-135).Sexually free as the arctic wind! Free, but forever cold, not passionate, blowing over a bleak terrain. All three of the main characters have this detached attitude toward sex, attitudes that would not be shared by most readers, and that’s what makes them interesting.As the perfunctory story develops, Ursula becomes bored with Allert and vows to leave him. Allert goes alone on a cruise, and on board, strikes up a sexual relationship with a much younger woman, a girl really, and that develops into a three-way with an obnoxious ship’s officer. But somehow, we gather through comments and snippets, the girl went overboard and died. Allert was implicated in her death, and questioned, but exonerated. The death occurs entirely off page, and we never learn what actually happened. So the book is not, as usually described, a “mystery” in any traditional sense, since there is next to no plot or even a coherent narrative through-line. In fact, time is cut up so severely, the present mixed with the past, that it is next to impossible to discern any narrative thread. Allert’s dreams are also intercut, along with brief images and aphorisms, to create a woozy, kaleidoscopic feeling, which seems to be how the characters experience the world and their own lives.The book is a literary exploration of some characters who have interesting and unusual attitudes about sexuality and life in general. It is well written, with elevated and thoughtful language that maintains that dream-like quality. Allert, the narrator, seems barely present, and his voice has a disembodied, otherworldly tone, and that is consistent with all the characters' diffidence about life, sex, and death.The mood and tone reminded me of several post-WWII books that enacted the feeling that the values of civilization had been so totally destroyed by the war that human beings could now live authentically only as unthinking animals. Hawkes’ version here, coming a little later, folds in a dose of Freudian ideas and symbols, which were influential in America during that time, but are stale now. For 150 pages, it is a worthwhile read.
Do you find this picture a little creepy? If you don't, why not?If I had an Icky-Sex shelf like Karen does, I'd put this book on it. Sort of for the same reason I find the picture above incredibly icky. The strength of the writing is evident for the two Hawkes books I've read so far, because the 'intimate' scenes in both books were almost nausea inducing. And it wasn't like VC Andrews Flowers in the Attic icky sex, where it just sort of happens once near the end of the book. No, in this book (and in Blood Oranges), the ickiness just keeps on rolling.If Blood Oranges was icky in the 'holy shit this is gay, in a wrapping flowers in our pubic hair and prancing down a beach while holding hands kind of way', then this book is icky in the 'ewwww swinger sex in the seventies, with middle aged men sharing a woman and drinking brandy out of a snifter' kind of way. Or sort of the reason why this is kind of creepy and icky:When in the past I've read the 'ewwww' parts of John Updike novels for some reason him as some kind of weird 70's swinger pops into my head, maybe it's the turtlenecks and that creepy look on this face that looks good natured but any reader of his knows that the smile isn't a grandfatherly good natured, but the look of a man who knows he's going to get his knob shined because he's John 'fucking' Updike. If I was really interested in making his book shine, and get people to read it then I'd probably write about the non-ewww parts of the book, like maybe how the juxtaposition of the erotic and the dark regions of the psyche are intertwined and blah blah blah, but I just can't, right now my head is just stuck on the icky side of the book.... and whats worse, i'm like 99.99999999% certain that my parents weren't ever swinger types, or creepy 1970's people, but there is that one/trillionth of doubt that remains and that means that it's possible I could have been conceived in some key-party meets in a hot tub (that is just floating with all of that excess body hair that people in the 1970's seemed to grow) and there were bear skin rugs and people watching as other overly hairy people were doing it, and the one/trillionth of a percent chance that this could have been how I was conceived makes me want to throw up, and actually I can taste the bile a little in my mouth now, so I'm just going to wrap up this review, and I offer this whole review as a gift to Karen to makes as many off-color jokes as she wants.....
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This book really reminded me of Alain Robbe-Grilet's The Voyeur, which I love-- there are similarities in tone, subject matter, and the geometric structures. I kind of wish i hadn't thought of the similarities while I was reading it, because it made me compare the two books, and this one did not hold up under the weight of comparison. There was so much I loved in this book--some really amazing sentences, and at times it is so beautiful and natural in its structure. Which is what made the bad even worse. Often the dialogue and sometimes even the description was stunted and too self-aware. It made me wish that Hawkes had chosen not to include dialogue at all. As it is, the dialogue interrupts the flow and took me out of the book. Overall, though, looking forward to reading another of his books.
—aya
