Questioning crossing Sukkwan Island, the fascinating and too-brief first novel by David Vann is a biblical simplicity: what is that a father?
Roy leaves his family (mother, sister) to join his divorced father (divorced mother of Roy, then separated from his second wife) and live with him in a cabin on a remote island in southern Alaska. For a year they will be alone on the island, drawing from the nature that surrounds their resources. Overall, on a footing of perfect equality, the father and son try to survive in extreme conditions of isolation. The real isolation, which indicates that the solitary life on an island far from civilization, is also a symbolic isolation: it is the concrete world and banal Roy-that of women and friends, society of all days of daily life that has no need for a father to proceed normally - that is put at a distance by the sudden opening of a parenthesis in his life. This parenthesis that the son chooses to live (the son must choose to live, according to the iron law of the mother) must permit the establishment of a sustainable relationship between son and father. This is the new law of the world outside the will of the child-king, the father as a father does not exist. He is like created in his paternity by the will of the son.
the center of the world, mother and son on the sidelines of the world, isolated the world, the father. The centrality of his fallen father, father superfluous, father marginal. That father is eternally sorry and sorry to be eternally sorry. Its existence is an eternal contrition, penance and unbearable eternal eyes enraged son. That father does not protect anything, it is the same concern: it pierces the roof blows Magnum. 44, collapsed in setting them on fire, disappears abruptly at the bend of a steep path ... In the world after the father is the only son who has to justify the father. Forsaken the concrete world of women, the father is no longer dependent to attest to the reality of his existence than the eye and the approval of the son. The man himself is nothing: so that the father described his son to the human condition. "Listen," said her father. Man is an appendage of the woman. The woman is right, it does not need humans. But man needs her. Then she decides. That is why the rules are meaningless and they change constantly. We do not draw together. I'm not sure this is true, said Roy. "
In a few sentences, the paradox infernal world of ours. The father described his own downfall, but it does so by pretending to convince his son. He wants so that his word is authoritative while in essence it denies the authority. Similarly, the father puts women in positions of authority, while denying that women are intelligible rules. The son is caught in a deadly double bind. In both cases, the authority it would need so much is being undermined at the base. "I'm not sure that's true." The wonderful ambiguity of this phrase gives the full extent of disarray of the son. It gives reason or contradict the father, the son did not come out of a vicious circle. The father gives his reasons, but the son makes his final ruling, which has the ultimate legitimacy to judge the validity of the father's word. This legitimacy is too heavy to wear for the frail shoulders of the son. Give the father because it would restore all together and fall from his authority. Contradict him, it would also deny and assert the authority of the father in the same movement. The undecidability of the horizon is the only son. How to get out? By Decision (from Latin meaning decidere cut, slice) the most radical.
Thinking about my own father disappeared, the sweetness of his voice that I heard so little during his lifetime, nothing seems more shocking than this formatting romantic fragility of the father figure. This fragility is paradoxically still weighing unbearable burden on the shoulders of the son. They will not support ... because logically perspective as black, the only thing that is passed between father and son's disappearance, the evanescence of both their relationship and their respective presence to one another: the voluntary death. Suicide as the only object of transmission, this is the ultimate paradox of this novel. How not to see that the suicide of the father is the very negation of the possibility of transmission, the possibility that meaning is given to the son (and the world) by the father. And it is this very denial that became the subject of the transmission. But chose to disappear instead of his father, the son also suddenly gives the opportunity to father a time to exist in itself, apart from the possible justification by the son. By the way: the death of the son as the possibility of meaning, is of course the eternal drama of the Western stage (the "good news"), a possibility which appears here offset by the absence of hypothesis of the Resurrection. It is remains that this "withdrawal" of the son, is the creative act by which the ego of the child-Roy fades abruptly to give way (to give birth?) to the author, that is to say very specifically to hear and give voice to the father in him. This attempt to give a real presence in the dark shadow of his father, a father of evanescent after paternity, a father who is thereby suddenly choked lifeless body of his son, summarizes the efforts of this light novel dark.
That exactly describes the following passage, which in my humble opinion of father and son, the passage most shocking and most just of the novel, the which best describes the condition of the son of modernity.
"They went towards the peak, again exposed to the wind. Roy struggled to keep pace with his father and not be separated from him. He knew that if he lost sight of the space of a minute, his father would not hear it crying, he might get lost and never find the way to the hut. Observing the dark shadow that moved before him, he realized that it was precisely the impression he had been too long, that his father was a form curtain and look away as if for a moment, if he forgot or did not work at full speed, if he had no desire to have him there beside her, then her father disappears, as if his presence was up to the will of Roy. Roy was more scared and tired, he felt no longer able to continue and he began to feel sorry for herself, to repeat: I can not stand it. When his father finally stopped, Roy knocked on his back. "
ago in the last sentence of this passage a darkly comic aspect: the black shadow, this form seems immaterial what he became the father paperless with fears that it escapes us at every moment, which we believe hold the ghostly existence our hands tired, here, suddenly you bump against it ... It seems that most evanescent and most inaccessible becomes the nearest obstacle. And ultimately, which constantly eluded us becomes the most immediate model for our actions over the final, most personal.
The evanescent figure of Roy's father is the exact opposite of the crushing of the father figure of Kafka (for example) in his notorious father Letter, father whose vast body is said to be stifling for bullied son ("I thin, puny, narrow you, strong, tall, wide). I do not mean of course the wonderful novels of Kafka, but only to its child and influential Letter to Father therefore, the more likely it is influential infant letter that Kafka had of course fortunately not to publish well thought out, and in which the son it takes a balloon that has inflated itself, that of a fantasy all-powerful father figure. This monstrous figure of the father was present all the beautiful signs of materiality most obvious (the father and eats plenty loud, terrified son before deploying his huge body), it is nevertheless a figure ressentimentale omnipotent father, a Furthermore sip of vacuum that the novels of Kafka conscientiously will empty, while father and ghostly romantic Sukkwan Island eventually the contrary, by presenting the appearance of a body against which the body of the son bangs. Miracle the novel: the era spraying of the father, it finally becomes incarnate.
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