Fictionalizing the Folkloric: Matt Clark's Hook Man Speaks

Matt Clark's 2001 novel Hook Man Speaks emerges from the familiar, protean American "contemporary legend" of the Hook Man- for Clark "the rock star of folklore" (142). Identified by Jan Brunvand as the "archetypal example of the genre" and a "favorite of folklore scholars" Encyclopedia 200), the story enacts the Hook Man's terrorizing of trysting young couples parked in secluded areas. Typically, a radio broadcast announces the escape of the hook-armed man, criminal or sex maniac, who interrupts the teenagers' lovemaking either through their belief in the imminence of his assault or their conviction that he is actually invading the car. Often in the story the couple returns to the girl's home to discover a bloody hook on the door of the passenger side of the car. Stephen King proclaims the legend of The Hook to be "the most basic horror story I know" (19), and Clark's novel attempts both an imaginative embodiment of this vaporous figure of inveterate horror and a contemplation of Hook Man's "place" in American "culture and history" (Clark 3). In its knowing transformation of oral legend into novel, Hook Man Speaks cunningly mediates the realms of the "folkloric" and the "literary." Clark specifically confronts the problem of the possible ephemerality of contemporary legends, the suspicion that Hook Man's story and its ilk are "old potatoes, greasy kids' stuff" (80). In raising questions about Hook Man's obsolescence, Hook Man Speaks functions not only as commentary on the nature of the circulation of contemporary legend but proffers the literary repositioning of Hook Man as a necessary replenishment of the legend itself. Folklorist Gary Alan Fine's usage of "contemporary legend" proves more useful for this analysis than the more common nomenclature of "urban legend" associated with Jan Brunvand. Fine proposes that even the rubric "contemporary legend" is a "compromise of convenience" (1) but argues that a temporal ("contemporary") rather than geographic ("urban") base for the term ought to prevail, because "These legends are not always urban, often are transmitted in suburbs and are about suburban life, and sometimes are about rural areas and small towns" (1-2). Given the southwest American setting of Hook Man Speaks, Fine's remarks are especially pertinent. Moreover, Fine's suggestion that contemporary legends, through their "ability to borrow from and to transcend the traditional and the current," comprise a recognizable form of postmodern discourse (2) establishes some discursive continuum between contemporary legends and Clark's twenty-first century novel. The primary difference between the two, though, resides in the self -consciousness of Clark's rendering of the material. Brunvand underscores how "unselfconscious" the narration of contemporary legends is Hitchhiker xiii); similarly, Fine observes that contemporary legends "tend to be relatively formless" (2), Rosenberg notes how folktales "have scant descriptions of the inner life of their characters" and "rely heavily on active events- and repetition- for their effects" (149), and King acknowledges that the Hook Man story offers "no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice" (21). Clark responds to precisely these lacunae, crafting in Hook Man Speaks a strikingly writerly novel. Hook Man Speaks begins, for example, with epigraphs from Neruda and Nabokov. Much of the novel unfolds as a colloquy between Hook Man and the folklore professor Dr. Brautigan, a pointed reference to Richard Brautigan, the popular American novelist of the 1960s. The final section of Hook Man Speaks revels, like a Nabokov novel, in its own artifice, constructing an elaborate screen of literary allusions whose meaning is unavailable to the characters themselves of the novel. Although the novel evokes and revises an extensive body of contemporary legends and seemingly grants narrative primacy to Hook Man's first-person perspective, the authorial consciousness that looms behind the events of the book finally predominates. …