A Rake's Progress of Stamford Hill? Howard Jacobson meets William Hogarth

The legacy of William Hogarth pervades the tropes, images and aesthetics of Howard Jacobson’s novel Kalooki Nights (2006), an exploration of the tragic history of the Jews and the burden of its memory, which he narrates in the cartoon mode. With a constant resort to verbal caricature, paradox, hyperbole and oxymoron, Jacobson re-enacts the irreverence, dynamism and structural complexity of the Hogarthian cartoon. Hogarth is also embedded in the architecture of the novel – his ‘Progresses’ interact nicely with Jacobson’s Bildungsroman, providing a model for its multi-episodic structure. Like the pictorial series, the novel guides readers and, at the same time, invites them to wander between several narrations, temporalities, moods and modes in a structural replica of Hogarth’s ‘serpentinity’. Moreover, Hogarth’s presence in Kalooki Nights comes out strongly in one of the storylines, set in the Buchenwald concentration camp, intertwined – much like Hogarth’s line of beauty – around the main narration. In it, Jacobson rewrites both The Analysis of Beauty and Four Stages of Cruelty, drawing a serpentine line of descent be- tween Hogarth, himself and the cartoonist/narrator of the novel.