Decoding The Appeal Structure In John Hawkes’s Second Skin

Second Skin is one of John Hawkes’s most important and popular works, but it has been regarded as a difficult, incoherent, and unstructured novel. The root of the problem is that Hawkes applies a large number of special writing strategies, including the repetition of words and phrases, the recurrence of the same scene, the blurry characters and images, etc., which thwart the reader’s reading from the beginning to the end. By adopting these skills, Hawkes wittingly creates a great number of’"blanks" and "indeterminacies". According to Wolfgang Iser,"blank" and "indeterminacy" are the two main elements of the appeal structure. It is because of the appeal structure that the reader is appealed to fill in the blanks creatively and participate in the process of reconstructing the meaning of the text. Moreover, as Chinese scholar Zhu Liyuan puts it, neither is Iser’s discussion of the appeal structure conducted at the level of the structure of the literary text, nor does it touch upon the intrinsic structural characteristics of the text. Zhu then proposes that a literary work has its own structure which is called the structure modes of the literary work. It includes five levels:the phonetic level, the semantic level, the rhetorical level, the level of imagery and the emotional level. The first three levels belong to the linguistic level and the last two belong to the psychological level. The appeal structure of a literary text is reflected at each level and finally composed as a whole.The present thesis decodes the appeal structure in Second Skin based on Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics and Zhu Liyuan’s structure modes of the literary work. The "blanks" and "indeterminacies" in the text impede the reader’s understanding, but it is the impedance that appeals the reader to try to fill in the blanks and make multiple interpretations on the text. In this process, Second Skin changes from a literary text written by John Hawkes into a literary work co-created both by John Hawkes and the reader. Thus, the aesthetic value of Second Skin is realized. Typically, the appeal structure at the phonetic level is well reflected in poetry, while it is different case in such a novel as Second Skin. Therefore, the present author mainly dwells on the latter four levels of the appeal structure.