Hawkes's aggressive, even militant violations of the well-made novel occasionally mislead readers to assume that he is a "new" writer, but he has been publishing fiction since 1949.
Nevertheless his currently high critical reputation has developed slowly, probably because the theory of fiction which informs his novels is unusual and upsetting to unprepared readers. Happily, Hawkes has expressed his ideas about fiction in a series of interviews and essays. A comment published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature in 1965 continues to startle the uninitiated: "My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they're elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained. And structure--verbal and psychological coherence--is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding events, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing." In short, Hawkes resists the temptations of "familiar" fiction, the conventions of the standard novel.
His efforts to avoid the limitations of realism encourage an exchange of the documentation of reality for the created vision of imagination.
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