Success Quote by John C. Hawkes

Hawkes drops “dream and illusion” like two bright knives into the reader’s expectations of plot. He’s not praising escapism; he’s pointing to a method. In The Lime Twig, the “dream” isn’t a private reverie so much as a governing atmosphere, a warped logic that replaces ordinary causality. When he says those forces sit “right at the center” of Charivari, he’s telegraphing that the book’s engine is not realism but instability: perception as a hall of mirrors where motives, events, even bodies can feel provisional.

The word “charivari” does sly work here. Historically it’s a noisy ritual of public mockery - a community staging disorder as punishment and entertainment. Hawkes borrows the term to suggest a world where spectacle and humiliation are structural, not incidental. Put dream/illusion in the middle of that and you get a culture of enforced unreality: people performing versions of themselves under pressure, narrative itself acting like a jeering crowd. The subtext is that violence and comedy can share a stage, and that “meaning” is often the thing being heckled.

Context matters: Hawkes is a postwar novelist suspicious of clean moral accounting and tidy psychological realism. His fiction often treats language as a seductive threat, making readers complicit in assembling sense from distortion. The intent behind the comparison is almost a warning label: approach Charivari the way you’d approach The Lime Twig, not as a puzzle to solve, but as a dream you can’t wake from without admitting you wanted to stay inside it.