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 Thilleman’s book is not for everyone. His prose, a mirror of his narrator, is distorted and unconventional. The philosophical and theological rants he puts into the mouth of his hero are not always easy to parse even if they are the stuff that makes him what he is. More often than not, like many modern heros, thinking about action takes precedent over the action itself.
Reviewed by Jack Goodstein
Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen
by Tod Thilleman
Spuyten Duyvil
Paperback: 304 pages, November 15, 2005, ISBN: 1933132000
Let me begin with a quotation from the Hungarian Marxist critical theorist Georg Lukacs’ essay "The Ideology of Modernism:" "Man, for these writers [modernists] is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings. . . .Man, thus imagined, may establish contact with other individuals, but only in a superficial, accidental manner; only ontologically speaking, by retrospective reflection. For ‘the others,’ too, are basically solitary, beyond significant human relationship." Had this not been first published in English in 1964, it would not be a stretch to think that Lukacs was talking about Tod Thilleman and his novel, Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen.
The novel purports to be the journal of Knudsen an unpublished writer living in Brooklyn and working in a restaurant kitchen. He begins the journal in a state of depression after a bad experience with an experimental theatre group and what he at least considers a thwarted love affair. In a disjointed narrative, he goes over his experience with the theatre, interspersing memories of his childhood in Pennsylvania, an abortive stay at a seminary in Greenwich Village, and a description of his state of mind and life as he writes in the present. To this he adds some sophomoric philosophizing, rambling solecisms and agonizing self analysis.
What his journal reveals is a self absorbed young man incapable of communication except with himself. He is never, for example, able to tell the woman he loves how he feels. He expresses his religious doubts in the seminary through comic patter and non-sequiturs. His attempts to explain his theatrical ideas are so much gibberish. He is a man completely unable to engage in any kind of meaningful relationship who finds himself in a world filled with people just like him. Communication, if it exists at all, is merely the incessant grinding of one’s own particular axe. The artistic director is concerned with some nebulous project which he is plotting out on some graph paper and which he can never really explain. One actor is interested only in the opportunity to perform his prepared monologue. The director is obsessed with control. People talk at each other in meaningless cliches and empty generalities. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone rushes in to speak. Interruptions are frequent and half sentences wander off into the void. Communication becomes a comic routine, more often than not, played purely for laughs.
And it is not merely the pretentious theatre people, there is little meaningful communication between any of the characters in the book, whether it’s the hooker who insists that her husband has inserted mercury in her son’s penis or the Spanish super who keeps apologizing for the raise in the rent. It is the kitchen worker who insists that he has done his half of the closing chores, the Yugoslavian immigrant who is pitching a play about Tito as a hero of the people, the waitress who wants praise for her photos, the Professor of Theology who uses the Thirty Nine Articles as a club to beat down opposition.
Knudsen’s own communication often borders on the absurd. At times pretentious: "Abstract isn’t bad as long as we understand collectively what abstract actually means. If we visualize it and not relegate it a concept or some such." His explanations cloud and bewilder. This is his explanation of an experiment which will use index cards to randomly indicate actions for actors to perform on stage: "But those cards. . . are only literal in that we think we know what is literal about them. The so-called nonsense cards have to be seen as literal. . .in order that we have a way to continuously reify the parameters of the event. We’re simply not going to be able to continue if we don’t start mining away at the unknown here."
More often than not he has trouble saying what he wants, if he is ever able to say it all. When he finally meets the hooker’s husband, he has all sorts of trouble getting himself to ask if the mercury story is true. He is unable to tell Sara, the married director, that he doesn’t want to have sex with her. He can never tell the actress, Hippolyte with whom he claims to be in love, how he feels, expecting her to intuit it from his rather cryptic signs and gestures. Even when he describes his own states of mind in the journal, his language is not particularly lucid: "Others, it seems, have already passed this way. And yet is it only my sense of things. I call it the Cogito. Keeps me in contact with the ‘character’ of other citizens? I think I have developed a conscious sense of Being the other do not possess. It is as if I have possessed my own self to a degree to which no ‘other’ has any need nor want to inhabit." Fuzzy punctuation, questionless questions, ambiguous language: all these are characteristic of Knudsen’s style. He is a confused young man and his prose reflects that confusion.
Religion has played a major part in his life. He was brought up in the family of a Liberal Lutheran Pastor, but he rejects both his father and Lutheranism. At age eight he objects to his father’s preference for discussing sports with the altar boys rather than theological issues. He finds that his father is unable "to discern between good and bad within the teaching of Luther’s catechism." In a sense he identifies Lutheranism with his father, rejection of the one means rejection of the other. He goes to study at a more conservative seminary, but what he finds is a professor who seems more interested in tennis than theology. In the end pushed by his reading of the rationalist Descartes, he convinces himself that he has gone beyond conventional religious teachings.
Like his fling with the theatre, his religious struggles are treated more or less comically. He preaches to schoolchildren from a roof near a playground. He calls on the power of the Lord to make him a champion at marbles. He disrupts classes at the seminary bay shouting out his own list of articles in competition with the instructor’s recitation of the Thirty Nine Articles. He is as his professor disparagingly calls him, a comedian.
But he is a comedian who sees the dark side of life– the particular: the dirt in the hair of what should be a beautiful woman, the scab on the back of the neck of a student of theology; the general: the self absorption of the artist, the aridness of theological formalism, the vacuousness of liberalism. He is obsessed with the pustule on the face of humanity. This is best symbolized by the muck and mire of the Gowanus Canal:
"The point is, of course, the canal is palpably poisonous. Viral strains emanate from its rich black inky bottom. A body falling into it would (it had been proven) not make it another day. Pathogens of the old world–
"Choler, TB, diphtheria and deadly viruses not yet named or forgotten, took hold of the swimmer and leveled his ability to go on among the living."
Man cannot swim in the canal because it is poisonous, neither can man swim in the swamp of this world.
Thilleman’s book is not for everyone. His prose, a mirror of his narrator, is distorted and unconventional. The philosophical and theological rants he puts into the mouth of his hero are not always easy to parse even if they are the stuff that makes him what he is. More often than not, like many modern heros, thinking about action takes precedent over the action itself. But most of all, it is a comic book with a bleak vision of life. Religion, philosophy, art, all seem to offer a life with meaning, but each in its turn fails, and in the end there is only the miasma of the Gowanus Canal.
It is a comic novel that may well leave the reader feeling very sad.
About the Reviewer: Jack Goodstein is a professor emeritus at California University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught English for more than thirty years. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Critique, Theatre Journal and College English and in literary magazines such as The Maine Review, The Small Pond Magazine of Literature and The Jewish Digest. In 1990 at age 51, he tried his hand at acting, and while he has always loved the theatre from the audience, discovered an unexpected addiction to the stage as a performer. Since then he has appeared in more than sixty plays throughout Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania. He has also done film and commercial work. This ultimately led to his attempts at writing for the stage. His one act, Pinochle was given a staged reading at the ATHE conference in Toronto in July of 1999 and was published by the University of Charleston Press. In April 2000, his one act, Poker, was produced by the Pulse Ensemble Theatre in Manhattan as part of their OPAL series. Bride of the Father(2000) and Creative Daydreaming (2001) were produced by the Gallery Players of Park Slope in Brooklyn. Other one acts have had readings or been staged at Far Off Broadway and Northern LightsTheatre in Canada, and New York University and the Cafe Sha Sha in New York.
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