by Douglas Messerli
Hugo Claus Het Verlangen, translated from the Dutch by Stacey
Knecht as Desire (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997)
For the first
part of the novel, indeed, there seemingly is little to reveal: the small-time
gamblers (with often large-time losses) seem like the kind of boy-men who exist
everywhere, particularly as they engage in silly maneuvers to get a view up the
knickers of straddle-legged local woman, Marianne. The game, however, soon
becomes a kind of outrageous challenge, as each of the men attempt to outdo one
other, and we quickly recognize that behind the standard tools of their
trade—cards, booze, women, and school-boy behavior—something more frightening
lurks. When one of their group speaks somewhat deprecatingly of their hero
Rickabone, there is a kind of verbal ruckus which ends in the sudden invitation
by the “hyper-super-sensitive” Michel for Jake to join him on a trip to Las
Vegas. The pairing of these two is an extremely unlikely one, as strange as the
friendships between Laurel and Hardy, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pècuchet, or
Beckett’s Mercier and Camier. For like all these famous duos, the one, Michel,
is lean and, in this case, darkly handsome, and the other, Jake, a fat, jovial
and placid man, the peace-maker of the group.
Soon we visit
each of these figures at home, intuiting that something more is happening there
than what appears. Michel is living with his mother, his only true possessions
hidden under his bed: “the Hitlerjugend knife
and the airgun and the weepy love letters from Markie”—one of only two times in
this fiction that Claus hints that the beautiful Michel might possibly be
homosexual. The author is even more subtle about the home-life of Jake,
surrounded by his loving and beloved daughter, Didi, and his critical and
argumentative wife, Dina. By the end of the book, however, we perceive this
same scene in a completely different manner, as we discover that Didi is not at
all a child, but a mentally-disturbed adult woman who behaves, after her
breakdown, in a child-like manner.
Into the new
world these two proceed, seeming innocents on their way to a startling
revelation. As with most socially and culturally isolated people, however, they
cannot really take in the world they encounter. In London Michel is already
consumed with a search for porno, while Jake suffers the after-effects of a
night of Indian spices (“it’s not every day you get stuff like that in
Belgium…”). By the time they reach Los Angeles, the two are slightly disgusted
with each other’s company as they sit by their motel TV, guzzling Budweiser,
Miller, Schlitz, Jim Beam, ginger ale, Pepsi and Windsor, “a classic Canadian
whiskey with the smooth flavor you expect and price you don’t.” Michel curses
the TV for having no porno and Jake lies curled up for hours in his shorts,
“like a big fat baby that has been plunked down on the orange bedspread by a
giantess.”
In Las Vegas
things are not much better, as Michel alternates between gambling tables and
porno theaters and Jake attempts to take in the hotel pleasures, such as
watching the performers at Circus Circus. Jake soon falls under the influence
of a sham preacher, who alternates between preaching hell and damnation against
the evil city and working as a gambling croupier. Although Claus takes a few
potshots at American culture, his focus is not upon the American scene but upon
the Belgian scene these two men carry within. Under the influences of his new
experiences and his sense of distress, Jake writes strange letters home to his
wife, letters which betray a new sense of reality—issues which she quickly
discerns and confronts back in their home town.
Didi, it appears,
was in love with Markie, even preparing to marry him until he was forced by
Rickabone to break off the affair and take up a homosexual relationship with
the wealthy Salome—an act which led to Didi’s breakdown.
Suddenly we begin
to understand the complex relationship between the two men, the man who has had
an affair with Markie and the man who
has lost his daughter to insanity because
of Markie. We now comprehend the love-hate bond between them, and sense the
controlled violence that exists not only in these men’s psyches but in all the
hearts of all the Unicorn denizens. And we also now perceive that the desire of
the title is not just a search for pleasure in a world that, metaphorically
speaking, is “Rickabone’s fault” (a desire holding out against by the gaping
chasm of death into which one’s rickety bones inevitably will fall) but a
search for redemption—that Michel’s invitation to Jake was more than a whim,
was an attempt rather for the two of them reach out together for the truth.
Arriving at the
truth, however, is openly dangerous. At a late-night Vegas haunt, Jake
recognizes some of the Circus Circus performers, one of them who stares
intently at him in a clearly sexual gaze. The gentle giant snaps, violently
attacking and killing the youth. Readers will recognize that Jake’s violence
was directed not at the stranger but at the man who has brought him to this
place.
As the two men
escape back to Los Angeles and, ultimately, to Belgium, they have both
undergone enormous changes. Jake moves away, never returning to the Unicorn.
Michel occasionally visits, but he is no longer welcome, the denizens
recognizing that something terrible has happened between the two of them—and
fearing perhaps that that terrible thing is something in which they have all
played a part.
Los Angeles, January 31, 2006
Reprinted from The
Green Integer Review, No. 2 (March-April 2006)
Reprinted from Green
Integer Blog (March 2008), on-line
