With the publication of The Passion Artist (1979) John Hawkes completed a decade of writing that marked a clear, if subtle, change of direction in his fiction. Most apparent and controversial was the emergence of a highly explicit and, in a manner, titillating sexual content, dominating all four novels written by him in the seventies [The Blood Oranges (1971); Death, Sleep, & the Traveler (1974); Travesty (1976); and The Passion Artist]. Combined with the gothic strain that has characterized his writing from the beginning—his fascination with violence and cruelty and death—both the explicitness and the untraditional nature of the sexual concerns have tended to overshadow the less striking but as essential evolution in his use of form and pattern. Hawkes's structures seem to have become more severely controlled in these four novels, his style more classical, his manipulation of his material far more noticeably self-conscious. His characters emerge more sharply from the novels, in large part because they are more simply and essentially patterned. The fragmented images and events of his earlier novels have been consolidated within a more traditional plot sequence, while at the same time the multiple points of view of the earlier narratives have been incorporated into an all-encompassing single point of view. Such an inclusive perspective more immediately invites comparison with the artistic vision of the author himself, particularly when it takes the form of first-person narration, as is the case with the first three novels.
In general, Hawkes's writing seems to incorporate a general awareness of itself as esthetic pattern, a tendency which may in part explain Hawkes's admiration for the more explicitly self-referential fictions of John Barth, with which Hawkes's fiction of this period bears an affinity not at first apparent…. All the major male characters in the four novels are in some manner artists, either by vocation or avocation; they are poets, photographers, artisans, musicians, or collectors of erotica. More important, however, than the ubiquity of such concrete artistic pursuits is their link with a more pervasive obsession with pattern and order which Hawkes shows to lie at the heart of man's psychology in general. The novels of this period seem to demonstrate an awareness of a basic correlation between both the subject and form of man's various patterned versions of reality and his psychology.
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