Arcadio

by William Goyen

Arcadio, half woman and half man, half Mexican and half Texan, describes her life as a sideshow freak and her search for her family

Genres: Fiction, Novels

147 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Charles William Goyen was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, editor, and teacher. Born in a small town in East Texas, these roots would influence his work for his entire life.

In World War II he served as an officer aboard an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, where he began work on one of his most important and critically acclaimed books, The House of Breath. After the war and through the 1950s he published short stories, collections of stories, other novels, and plays. He never achieved commercial success in America, but his translated work was highly regarded in Europe. During his life he could not completely support himself through his writing, so at various times he took work as an editor and teacher at several prominent universities. At one point he did not write fiction for several years, calling it a “relief” to not have to worry about his writing.

Major themes in his work include home and family, place, time, sexuality, isolation, and memory. His style of writing is not easily categorized, and he eschewed labels of genre placed on his works.

Reviews

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-reading Goyen's final novel at this moment, more than 30 years after its publication, it seems to me that its great accomplishment is that it cares not at all if it offends. Goyen was never one to follow prevailing tastes, or to respect conventional notions of well-formed-ness. His language and rhythms and themes were all his own. He certainly does things in this novel that authors are not "supposed" to do. He writes in dialect, or a dialect -- Spanglish, one supposes; Southern, but only to the extent that East Texas is a weird vestige of the American South -- mostly of his own invention. He writes from the perspective of an individual whose gender and sexuality are not his own... although Arcadio's hermaphroditism is as much symbolic as it is real and felt. (In Goyen's work, the spirit and the flesh are elements confused beyond all doctrine.) And the book is open about its religious concerns. I don't know what other contemporary readers might make of all this, but I suspect it would turn off some, if not many. Which would be a shame, for the whole point of Arcadio's story is that it must be attended to, and in all its gilt and fuming. Goyen understands the difference between prurience and pathos, but he also knows that, in order to achieve empathetic understanding (a very contemporary obsession), we have to be willing to abandon ourselves in the uncomfortable territory between those two conditions. ARCADIO is one of those books that confronts you with your own vulnerability. Which is just another way of saying: "It's beautiful."

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strange and beautiful book. The surface story is about a hermaphrodite's search through side shows and brothels of rural east Texas for the mother who abandoned him (her?); intense spiritual and sexual longings permeate every page and the language is as rich and delicate and mysterious as the world it describes.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The self is not sufficient; spirit and matter must be connected, Steven G. Kellman maintains in ‘“You Wan Hear”: Dialogic Imagination in Arcadio.’ Kellman writes that even though Goyen's novels “are . . . divided against themselves.., they stand as testimony to the hunger for wholeness” and later adds, Arcadio “is a recapitulation” of Goyen's major themes, a search “and a valediction.” I can’t think of any character in fiction who’s as divided as Arcadio: half-man, half-woman; half-saint, half-sinner; half-black, half-white; half-Mexican, half-Texan; half-Anglophone, half-Hispanophone and half-brother. In an interview in Masques Goyen expounds:

This tragic mixture has always fascinated and concerned me. It’s a little like Hamlet, in that one part of him could act and not the other. Arcadio came to me as a Mexican “voice.” He “told me” his story and at one moment this “voice” became quite mad, which frightened me. I don’t know how his sexuality came to me—nonetheless, Arcadio proved to be a hermaphrodite: the sexual manifestation of an emotional and spiritual dilemma. Very early he learned that the nature of his sexuality would be the problem of his entire life. That interested me. He understood very quickly that there would be no solution for this sexual conflict. He always carries with him a photo in which he is a dazzling character who is at once more than a man and more than a woman. Arcadio can make love to a woman, a man, or himself. He is a “totality” in and of himself. He can do it with anybody. Despite this, Arcadio searches for his family—all of his book is a search.

The Arcadio we meet at the start of the book is an old man, “in his seventies” Goyen says in his TriQuarterly interview. He appears as in a vision to a young Texan and asks him if he wants to hear his story. “You wan hear?” is his war cry—a phrase Goyen likens to the French n’est-ce pas?—and he repeats it constantly throughout what he calls his song, his swan song. Goyen says, “He’s gone a bit mad. I’m not sure how much is true and how much is false of what he’s telling me at the end. He’s now such a fabricator that he’s one of the great fabricators.”

From the age of ten Arcadio works in a whorehouse in Memphis, eventually escapes and becomes a freak in a travelling carnival from which he later escapes and begins a quest to find his half-brother, his cruel, drunken and libidinous lout of a father and, ultimately, the mother who abandoned him. On his way he gets caught up in the quests of others that side-track him and twice at least he ends up having to escape from literal jails:

Everbody huntin for everbody, I says. And nobody finding anybody, or stayin for very long when they do.

His story’s biblical, parodic, fabulistic, clichéd, almost unbelievable and occasionally—these are Goyen’s words, not mine (in a letter to Tom Hart)—“just plain bullshit.” In his book It Starts With Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing Clark Davis admits that Goyen’s writing was often strange and difficult, with “a combination of folk storytelling and lyric intensity, its wedding of myth and aria.”

It takes a while to become comfortable with Arcadio’s use of language; it limps along and trips over itself:

Cantando, compadre. Canto. But there was a long time when I didn’t sing no song. I am at large. Which is how they called me on the radio when I was found missing. At large. There is no Mescan word for it. Cantor soy. I think of myself as a singer. A singer at large. I had not been free in all mi vida, that’s the Mescan word for life, until I excaped. Locked up by my father Hombre, locked up by the Chinaman Shuang Boy, locked up by Old Shanks in the Show. All of which I will tell you, singing my song. Come under the trestle and listen if you wan to, in the shade of the morningglory vine in the morning, God knows how it blooms so fresh without no water; or go on, if you wan to. I am bidding a sweet adiós to civilization, old world is wearing down, Corazón. What have they done to this place? I got a sweet goodbye to sing to it. Pasa el mundo viejo, se pasa. Old world is passing away. Meantime, I keep an eye out for my mother. Sounds funny but that is the words for it, keep an eye out, that is the Anglo espression. We have no such Mescan espression.

You have to concentrate but it doesn’t take long to fall in step with him.

As far as stories goes there’s really not much here and it’s sometimes a little hard to work out what’s driving Arcadio to find these people other than to underline another way in which he’s incomplete but when he finds them the reunions are never what he might’ve hoped for and no true reconciliation takes place. Why he doesn’t settle down with a nice broad-minded man or woman I’ve no idea. Perhaps because he’s more myth than anything else now:

You, the listener of the singer’s song, Oyente, who are you anyway? Why have you come this way and why have you stayed so long? I hardly see you now. Oyente! […] And if you were to sing my song to another listener when my voice has stopped, how would you sing it to your listener, Oyente, would you be true to what I’ve sung to you, would you be careful not to add some of your own song to it what would be your song, your song, who are you?

The simple fact is that we have not heard Arcadio tell his story. We have heard the young Texan’s version of what he says he was told and who knows if he remembered correctly? Well, we do, because in the opening chapter he says:

I have come into a vision—an “apparition” my mother would have called it—made of true memory and outrageous fabrication. And that is what I have to tell…

I’ve mixed feelings about this one. It’s a bit of a triumph of style over substance or maybe the problem is that none of the characters are very deep or have much ambition; we get one life so why spend it wandering around the USA looking for a bunch of lost causes? Arcadio uses his “little white Mescan Bible” as a screen through which he views the world and although I get it—I’m well-accustomed to religious narrow-mindedness—I can’t pretend I wasn’t annoyed by it.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved aspects of this, such as the characters and some of the language (although some of the repeated words and phrases got tedious for me), but something about it felt flat. The character didn't really change over the course of the book. He tells a little in flashback about how he changed from childhood to adulthood, but this doesn't contribute much tension to the story. I think it would've felt more alive if it had been told in real time rather than using the framing device of having the main character tell his story to a stranger.