Bridging Donne with the Digital Age: William H. Gass’s Devotion to Baroque Prose
(The following paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held Feb. 23-26, 2023, at the University of Louisville. It was part of the panel “Some Forms of Postmodernism in American Fiction,” chaired by Hunter Augeri, Duke University. Other papers were “The Violence of Microscopy: Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Inverted Totalitarianism at the End of History” by Jonathan Vincent, Towson University; and “Susan Sontag’s Death Kit as Pre-Post-Fiction” by Charlie Bertsch, Independent Scholar.)
William H. Gass – master stylist and acclaimed author of novels, essays, criticism, and translation – passed away December 6, 2017, at the age of 93. In the last few months of his long life infirmity prevented him from writing, but not before he was able to bring his final work to completion, simply titled “Baroque Prose.” No doubt it wasn’t as fully rendered as he would have liked, nor as finely tuned certainly, yet it was a fitting end to a life devoted to language: absorbing it, analyzing it, diagraming it, and shaping it into some of the most artful forms ever spoken or read. William Gaddis considered his friend Bill Gass “our foremost writer, a magician with language” (507); John Barth admired Bill Gass the person, but “most of all . . . the writing: in the fiction, those inhospitable landscapes and typically pathetic-when-not-monstrous characters, marvelously rendered into language; in the essays, the play of mind and wide-ranging erudition lightly deployed. And in both the prose, the prose . . .” (72). Perhaps Watson L. Holloway, author of William Gass (1990), put it most succinctly when he refers to “Gass’s finely tuned word machine,” noting it is “the language that must be at the root of any appreciation of his work” (x).
Gass wrote and spoke about the supreme importance of the sound of language too many times to count. Just how much attention he gave the aural quality of language in his own work may best be seen in his comments about his friend William Gaddis’s writing. In Gass’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Recognitions, he says,
“[W]e must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line. . .” (ix).
Sadly, Gass is not as well known, even among academics and worshippers of the written word, as he should be, so here’s a biography in miniature. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, Gass was educated at Kenyon College (A.B. in philosophy, 1947) and Cornell University (Ph.D. in philosophy, 1954). We mainly associate him with Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught from 1969 to 1990 and then established and directed the International Writers Center there until his retirement in 2000. He also taught at the College of Wooster (1949-54) and Purdue University (1955-1969). His fiction and other writings began to appear in the 1950s, and his debut novel, Omensetter’s Luck, came out in 1966, quickly followed by the collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), the highly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), and the essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970). He began writing his magnum opus, The Tunnel, in 1966, not finishing it until 1992 (pieces of it appeared regularly over the years, especially in the journal Conjunctions). Knopf released The Tunnel, all 650 postmodern pages of it, in 1995, and it won the American Book Award the following year, meanwhile accumulating an impressive array of both rose-tossing admirers and stone-throwing critics. This is a much-abbreviated description of his writings and awards over the decades.
As noted, Gass spent nearly three decades working on The Tunnel, which is unusual among novelists, but it was typical for the way Gass approached all his writing projects. He tended to work with concepts for years before considering them complete enough to appear in print. By his own admission, Gass wrote slowly and revised obsessively. For instance, characters that first appeared in 1968’s Willie Masters’ are further developed in 1998’s Cartesian Sonata & Other Novellas. The intricate structure of The Tunnel was an elaboration of the structure Gass invented for the long story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” first published in 1967. Gass’s final work is no exception. In fact, we can trace the origins of “Baroque Prose” all the way back to Gass’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor” (1954). (Happily, the dissertation and even its early drafts are part of the Gass papers archived at Washington University’s Special Collections Department – a treasure trove of Gass material.)
A brief excerpt from “Baroque Prose” was published in Gass’s lifetime, barely, in the inaugural issue of LitMag, spring 2017; and a longer version of the same excerpt appeared posthumously in the online journal Socrates on the Beach, issue 4, 2022. Gass’s widow, Mary Henderson Gass, generously and graciously sent me the entire manuscript in anticipation of this presentation. To date, plans for publication of the work are undecided. My main goals for this paper are to provide a brief description of “Baroque Prose” and to try to communicate its essence. The latter is challenging for a short presentation. Anyone who has read Gass’s nonfiction recalls that it is both tightly structured and marvelously meandering within its parts, which are constructed of highly poetic prose, often with comic touches. If one has read Gass’s nonfiction, I would say “Baroque Prose” most closely resembles his book-length essay On Being Blue, which is a beautiful examination of all the things we may mean when we use the word blue. But the comparison is far from perfect.
First, there is the word that is at the heart of Gass’s last work: baroque. He spends a significant amount of time telling us what it is, and what it isn’t. We recall, of course, that baroque refers to a style most associated with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, frequently applied to European art, music and architecture. We are told by various sources that it was known for its grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, dynamism, movement, tension, and emotional exuberance. Gass does refer fleetingly to some of the art forms known for their baroque attributes, but as his title makes clear, he chiefly analyzes baroque prose, particularly of the seventeenth century as it was practiced in the pulpit by two master rhetoricians, John Donne (1571/2-1631) and Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667). I calculate the “Baroque Prose” manuscript to be about 35,520 words, but I do so without confidence. Gass gives us copious quotes from Donne and Taylor and others, often in single-spaced block quotes; and he indulges what was a lifelong pleasure by providing numerous detailed diagrams in the service of analyzing the passages. The manuscript is divided into three numbered and well-balanced sections of about 45-50 pages, each of which is wide-ranging and sometimes overlapping in scope. There is also a rough chronological organization at work, as Gass’s main interest in the first half of the book is Donne, and Taylor becomes the latter half’s primary focus.
Gass appears to have several purposes, including defining and describing what makes prose baroque; illustrating why it’s effective (when it is effective); describing its rise and fall in the historical context of Europe; providing biographies of principals like Donne and Taylor; arguing for our continued interest in the baroque style of prose; and telling an engaging story whose main character is baroque prose. Along the way, Gass is also entertaining us with his trademark style, not holding back at all in wowing us one last time with his signature metaphors and similes. And like all of Gass’s nonfiction (really all of Gass), “Baroque Prose” is both serious and funny.
As noted earlier, Gass always maintained that effective writing was meant to be heard, not just read on the page by the eyes, but spoken, even if only to one’s internal ear, which makes his attraction to the subject of baroque prose quite natural. Throughout the manuscript, he provides italicized statements about baroque prose, eye-catching insertions that focus the reader on a particular aspect of his central subject. The first italicized insertion says, “Baroque prose begins as prose prepared to be performed . . . a prose that is therefore far from the book or paper, living, if it lives, in the listeners’ ears” ([4]). In fact, continues Gass, “once [the prose] reaches print, it will no longer be pronounced, no longer heard, no longer fed its breath, so no longer in being.” Regarding Donne’s baroque performances from the pulpit (Donne was ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England in 1615 and made Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621), Gass tells us, “Later, when publication was considered, a good deal of polish would be applied, removing, like soil from a shoe, much spontaneity, accident, and improvisation. Reading him now we must imagine dramatic pauses, gestures, sudden changes of posture, a play of facial expressions, extemporaneous additions, and the drama of the whisper and shout” ([11]).
Gass breaks down Donne’s rhetorical strategy: “During his opening Donne is establishing, not his subject, or a textual interpretation . . . ; he is not springing an apothegm to satisfy the men or a sweet sentiment to please the ladies; rather he is gathering his ruling image and its materials as though he were a carpenter arriving at an important moment of construction. . . . Donne’s mind is always moving through the middle of a metaphor” ([15-16]). In this statement we can see that Gass is still working through an analysis that began with his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in the early 1950s. In his philosophical inquiry into metaphor, Gass turned to Donne regularly. Oftentimes the precise passages appear in both the unpublished dissertation and “Baroque Prose” (for example, passages from Donne’s The Lamentations of Jeremy). One of Gass’s concerns in his dissertation was how prose writers use language devices, like metaphor, compared to how poets tend to use them; and he returns to that comparison in “Baroque Prose,” telling us that “in poetry [] modifiers often lie around as loose as change, so that the reader is at a loss to know into which pocket the pence should go . . . whereas, in prose, number and relation, modification and consignment are to be connected, balanced, obeyed, in pursuit of a coherent and completed arrangement” ([16-17]).
Here is an abbreviated summary of some of Gass’s italicized insertions: “Baroque prose is written as if it were the libretto of an opera; as if it had to compete with an organ . . .” ([17]). Another: “The audiences of baroque prose admired a quick mind and the courtly flourish; they enjoyed it when their man in the pulpit showed a bit of wit and strut. There was a deep playfulness in this prose . . .” ([20]). And another: “Baroque prose loves the parenthetical, the marginal, the afterthought, the postscript, which it then inserts into the middle of things like herbs are stirred into a boiling pot . . . ” ([28]). Yet another: “Baroque prose is built on, and out of, conflict and chaos, paradox and bafflement. Its wish is for the harmony of dissident chords, the melody of dissenting lines . . . “([113]). In each case, Gass expands on the idea with explanation, quotations, and analysis.
In Part 2, Gass turns his attention primarily to Jeremy Taylor, who “does not seem to be as troubled a soul as Donne, and he is certainly, in every way, a more temperate man, liberal to a fault according to his peers” ([49]). Gass then provides a brief biography of Taylor, who was eventually made Bishop of Down and Conner Diocese, in Ireland, by Charles II. Gass points out that Taylor’s preaching was known for its “loose style,” but he goes on to assert that there is a complex rhetorical strategy at work, easily missed by the casual listener (or reader). Gass’s extensive analysis includes detailed diagrams to illustrate the mastery of Taylor’s baroque rhetoric. He again enters into a comparison of poetry versus prose: “Poetry calls out, through the dispositions of its lines, to be read as it requires; but the words that queue up to be prose are like subway passengers during rush: crowded hip to thigh, briefcase to umbrella, shoe to shoe” ([53]).
Gass’s detailed analyses of Taylor’s sermons continues into Part 3, as does his biographical narrative, which is a segue to discussing how the baroque style fell out of favor in England and Europe generally. Gass calls 1641 “[t]he dreadful year” as Taylor was briefly imprisoned and then removed from his clerical posts. Gass writes, “On the European continent the Thirty Years War had been killing people since 1618. Later scholars would declare the conflict in Europe closed in 1648. But England would have its own war now . . .” ([108]). With the rise of Puritanism, baroque’s ornate style of preaching would be out of step with the simplicity they sought. “Another enemy was length,” says Gass. “Sermonizers are likely to be strongly winded, as if their voices were to become themselves sturdy columns, built to last as eternally as a cathedral’s. The Puritan dictatorship had banned all public amusements [including entertaining styles in the pulpit]” ([108]).
Then came another blow to the baroque: the scientific ideal after 1660. Robert South, an opponent of the baroque, “began his attack on rhetorical preachifying by claiming that only the ignorant were impressed by verbal flourish” ([111-112]). In the remainder of the manuscript, the final 30 pages or so, Gass races through the history of the baroque style to the present, meanwhile cataloging with precision various characteristics that make it deserving of our appreciation today, like highlighting “what a little excess will do for you” ([70]). In sum, he says, “In the baroque, beauty begs for more beauty” ([119]). In the these final pages, Gass gives us baroque examples from more modern authors than Donne and Taylor, for instance a passage from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.
On the one hand, Gass is typically funny in this, his final work, but he has also come to terms with his approaching end. After talking about John Milton’s “flowery style,” Gass says, “I shall take a look at Milton’s use of adjectives later on. And adverbs even later”; then adds in a new paragraph, “A promise I shall probably break” ([33-34]). At first, one thinks he means he will not return to the topics in this book, but really Gass means he will likely never have the chance to write about them. Later we get another comment that, though humorous, underscores Gass’s sense of the inevitable. Following a full-page paragraph, Gass inserts in brackets, “I have decided to leave the foregoing paragraph as it first fell upon the page, as a warning to those who compose” ([82]). Gass, the relentless rewriter of his work, has run out of time and energy to wrestle a paragraph into perfection.
Midway through Part 1, Gass elaborates on the delight of repetition in the baroque and other nuanced techniques, drawing the conclusion, “The difference between writers we should study and admire, and those we may safely ignore, partly lies in their attention to such subtleties” ([21]). Here, it seems, Gass is subtly (or maybe not so subtly) making the case that his work should continue to be studied after his death as his own baroqueness is on full display in practically everything he published. I, for one, have never needed any such prodding. Gass will continue to be the main focus of my scholarship and a limitless source of inspiration for my teaching and writing.
Works Cited
Barth, John. “As Sinuous and Tough as Ivy.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, pp. 71-72.
Gaddis, William. The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
Gass, William H. Introduction. The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, 1955, Penguin Classics, 1993, pp. v-xv.
––. “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor.” Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1954.
Holloway, Watson L. William Gass. Twayne, 1990.
From Tender Buttons to the “Heart of the Country”: Gertrude Stein’s Structural Influence on William H. Gass
The following paper, “From Tender Buttons to the ‘Heart of the Country’: Gertrude Stein’s Structural Influence on William H. Gass,” was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, the University of Louisville, Feb. 23, 2019, as part of the panel Material Readers and the Dynamics of Reception, chaired by Mark Mattes, University of Louisville. Other papers in the panel were “A Publication ‘edited by its readers’: Representation and Materiality in the Working-Class Newspaper Correspondence” by Emily Spunaugle, Wayne State University; and “Thirty Thoughts on Little House on the Prairie and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” [revised title] by Amy Gilley, Arkansas State University, Queretaro.
The author “wrote densely and brilliantly and beautifully and perversely and with intense contrivance and deep care and . . . skill” (108). Those too few who are intimately familiar with William H. Gass may have written this description regarding his contribution to belles-lettres. In fact, however, this is how Gass described one of his greatest influences, Gertrude Stein, in his landmark essay “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence” (1973). Gass always emphatically credited Stein’s influence on his work. He discovered her in graduate school, he said, and made the study of her writing a life-long occupation. (He studied at Cornell in the late 1940s, taking the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1954; and he passed away in 2017.) Yet in all his many discussions of Stein he never expressly linked her experimental poem Tender Buttons (1914) to his experimental short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (1967). The purpose of this paper is to suggest that Stein’s early poem had a direct impact on both the substance and the structure of Gass’s story—a story that became the title piece in the collection which solidified his reputation on the national literary stage, and which became the prototype for his magnum opus, the novel The Tunnel, famously 26 years in the writing.
I’ve been presenting papers at the Louisville Conference for, I think, fourteen years, and for the last decade or so my papers have focused exclusively on William H. Gass. Since discovering the Master in 2008 I have become a self-described Gass scholar and disciple—the only one I believe. I must credit the conference specifically for this paper topic. I’m ashamed to admit that until this past year I hadn’t read Tender Buttons. It had been on my must-read list for decades, but last February while browsing the new books in their usual spot on the third floor of the Humanities Building, outside of conference registration, I happened upon a critical edition of Tender Buttons, edited by Leonard Diepeveen, and as soon as I flipped it open I experienced something like déjà vu. Simply, the look of Stein’s text on the page was uncannily similar to the physical appearance of Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” an odd plot-less tale carved up into sections, some brief, some longer, each with its own subtitle. Being well aware of Stein’s influence on Gass in general, I immediately became suspicious that Tender Buttons served as a model for “In the Heart,” and I’ve spent the past year investigating that belief (in fits and starts of course).
When I submitted this paper proposal to the conference committee last summer, I hypothesized that Stein’s influence on the piece was mainly structural—thus my title—but the further I’ve looked into it, I believe the connections are even greater.
A quick refresher on Tender Buttons, which was first published in New York by the avant-garde press Claire Marie in 1914. It is divided into three parts—Objects, Food, and Rooms—with each part being further divided into subtitled pieces, some as brief as a few words, others consisting of several paragraphs. At a glance, Tender Buttons appears to be prose, but Stein called it poetry (more on this to follow). It has the reputation for being all but incomprehensible—although many have taken a stab at unlocking its meanings, including Gass in the essay previously mentioned. Diepeeven states it plainly in the introduction to his critical edition: “For many readers, one could not read Tender Buttons, or understand what it was . . .” (10). I believe his for many readers is generous: most, nearly all would probably be more accurate. The trouble begins immediately with the opening section “A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass.”:
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. (33)
Similarly, Gass structured “In the Heart of the Heart of Country” as a series of small segments or vignettes, each with its own subtitle (some of which repeat). Among the subtitles are “A Place,” “Weather,” “My House,” “Vital Data,” and “My House, My Cat, My Company.” They vary in length from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs. The story’s first-person narrator is an aging poet who goes about describing his town, his neighbors, and himself; however, there is no easily discernible plot. As far as I know, I’m the only person to see the structure of Tender Buttons in “In the Heart,” and that may be because on the surface, and from the start, Gass invites readers to make comparisons to Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928). The story begins, “So I have sailed the seas and come . . . to B . . .” with “B” standing for both a small Indiana town, Brookston, and Yeats’s Byzantium. Moreover, Yeats’s poem is about old age and the struggle to keep one’s artistic flame burning while one’s body slowly deteriorates toward death. Gass’s narrator is an aging poet who is “in retirement from love.” He says, “I’ve lost my years. . . . I’m the sort now in the fool’s position of having love left over which I’d like to lose; what good is it to me now, candy ungiven after Halloween?” (173). So, thematically, there are definite correlations between Yeats’s poem and Gass’s story, in addition to the overt clue Gass provides in the opening sentence.
What is more, critics have noted that there are the same number of sections in the story as there are lines in “Sailing to Byzantium,” a fact that Gass did not dispute. In an interview Gass said, “It was pointed out by some anal observer [Larry McCaffery] that the sections of the story and the lines of the poem are the same [thirty-six]. And that’s true . . . That’s a little kind of imposed formality that I did to help shape the work” (qtd. in Hix 48). However, Gass’s acknowledgment is troublesome for a few reasons. McCaffery’s counting is based on the version of the story which appeared in the 1968 collection of the same title, a version which has been subsequently reprinted on numerous occasions, including in The William H. Gass Reader this past year. Yet in its original published form, in New American Review in 1967, the story had significantly fewer sections, only thirty. It’s possible that the difference in the number of sections (and other differences) are the result of editorial intervention; that is, perhaps the changes were necessary for its inclusion in the journal, to pare it back, for example, due to space limitations. The definitive answer to that question may lie in the massive Gass archive at Washington University in St. Louis, an archive which contains tens of thousands of pages (or more) of manuscript drafts, letters, and other material. I have visited the archive a handful of times and have spent perhaps a dozen hours seriously reading through the material there, but suffice it to say I’ve barely scratched proverbial surface.
Nevertheless, the archive’s contents provide the other reason I’m dubious about Gass’s acknowledgment that the number of lines of Yeats’s poem provided a guiding structure for “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Among Gass’s papers are myriad drafts of the story which suggest his initial writing of the piece was fairly conventional, meaning that he composed long chunks of text, and then later he cut up and rearranged these smaller chunks until the story achieved its final form (well, one of its final forms). What is more, Gass played with numerous versions of the structure that resulted in its having fewer than thirty-six sections, the number necessary to match Yeats’s number of lines. Gass made numbered lists and plugged in the various fragmented vignettes; then toyed with moving around the pieces. Some of these numbered lists suggest he had in mind twenty-four subtitled pieces (see figures 1, 2 and 3). Another list, more detailed and messier, reveals that Gass considered the pieces falling into four broad categories, A through D, (reminiscent of Stein’s three categories) of eight vignettes each for a grand total of thirty-two, four short of Yeats’s thirty-six lines (figure 4).
Fig. 1. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 2. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 3. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 4. Photograph of a handwritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
Fig. 5. Photograph of a manually typewritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
At this point in his career Gass wrote on a manual typewriter, so the rough drafts of “In the Heart” are on full-size sheets of paper; however, while revising he might rewrite the same paragraph, or part of a paragraph, multiple times on the same sheet (see figure 5, which became part of a long vignette subtitled “Education” in the latter half of the story, in both the 1967 and ’68 versions, section 21/32 and 16/30, respectively). Each of these pieces is suggestive of the index cards Gertrude Stein used to write, by hand, and arrange Tender Buttons (see Appendix B of Diepeveen’s critical edition). So it isn’t that their writing processes were similar while originally drafting their poem and story, but through the process of revision Gass seems to have pared down his longer chunks of text to crystalline bite-size bits of a similar heft to Stein’s index cards, at least in some cases. Gass invested a significant amount of time in considering and rearranging these bits of text, as evidenced by the numberings and revised numberings in the margins of the drafts (figure 6). Without further examination of his papers, I can’t say how pervasive this kind of paring down was in the process of writing “In the Heart,” but I can say it wasn’t wholly unique to this short story. His technique of isolating single paragraphs or parts of paragraphs and revising them again and again, often on the same sheet of typing paper, can be seen in the archive for other works. I can attest to the novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) and parts of The Tunnel (1995). For that matter, a kindred technique became part of the published draft of Middle C (2013), whereby the protagonist, Joseph Skizzen, works on rewriting the same brief paragraph throughout the novel, rearranging sentences, substituting words, until he has it perfect. In fact, the reaching of the paragraph’s final form is a kind of climax in the novel.
Fig. 6. Photograph of a manually typewritten page by William H. Gass as part of the drafting of “In the Heart of Heart of the Country.” Washington University Archives. Photo by the Author.
I want to return to Stein’s profound influence on Gass, which he made no bones about. In his “Fifty Literary Pillars,” in which Gass identified the books (and authors) who were most influential on his development as a writer, he listed Stein’s Three Lives and said, “I knew I had found the woman my work would marry” (54). Anyone who knows Gass at all probably knows that his greatest influence was the German poet Rilke. It’s true that Rilke is everywhere in Gass’s work, and he wrote a book about the difficulty of translating Rilke (Reading Rilke, 1999), which he tried his hand at himself. Gass said that Rilke helped to solidify ideas he’d had for years which he’d gotten from other great writers, like Stein: “. . . I had certainly come across and become enamored of Gertrude Stein a lot earlier and Flaubert somewhat, also—they all came together; Rilke just brought them together. . . . He sort of coalesced it all for me.” In particular “Rilke discovers that the poet’s aim is to add something to reality rather than comment on it or express something, to be something” (Ammon 161). Ultimately, said Gass, “you have an [art] object sitting there which is the result of this big cycle from objects observed by the poet or painter and it’s not that the painting is about anything; it is a transformation and a new object in the world” (162).
This concept is key to understanding Gass’s work. His stories, novellas and novels are not interested in advancing a plot via narration—as one would normally think of as the defining feature of fiction—but rather his stories, novellas and novels are interested in being works of art. The characters and their actions (the term plot doesn’t really apply) are a means to an end, and that end is to create a unique piece of literary art. This core artistic aim in Gass can be traced to Gertrude Stein’s philosophy of aesthetics, and Tender Buttons may be her most pure expression of that aesthetic. By the same token, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” may be Gass’s starkest example of the sort of fiction he would become infamous for, fiction which downplayed the typical foci on character development and plot, and instead emphasized stylistic components and thematic repetition.
Stein spoke of her narrative philosophy on numerous occasions, but her second lecture at the University of Chicago in 1935 zeroed in on this aspect of her writing process most directly. “Lecture 2” deals with the distinction between prose and poetry as they had been evolving in the modernist movement after the First World War, a movement of which Stein had been the vanguard for more than twenty years by the time she delivered her Chicago lectures. She said, as only she could,
When one used to think of narrative one meant telling of what is happening in successive moments of its happening the quality of telling depending upon the conviction of the one telling that there was a distinct succession in happening, that one thing happened after something else and since that happening in succession was a profound conviction in every one then really there was no difference whether any one began in the beginning or the middle or the ending because since narrative was a progressive telling of things that were progressively happening it really did not make any difference where you were at what moment you were in your happening since the important part of telling anything was the conviction that anything that everything was progressively happening. But now we have changed all that we really have. (17)
If I may, before modernism prose was defined by the narrative quality of cause and effect, of one event leading to another and then another and another in a story or novel, say. In modernism, however, prose has become like poetry in that there is “not a sense of anything being successively happening” (19). Prose is no longer “being a successive thing but being something existing. That is then the difference between narrative as it has been and narrative as it is now,” explained Stein (20). Or as Liesl M. Olson paraphrases the key idea in her foreword to Narration: “A ‘modern’ narrative need not have an event, according to Stein; nothing need ‘happen’” (ix-x). Thus, Stein called Tender Buttons poetry because even though it has the outward trappings of prose (sentences and paragraphs), ontologically it is poetry in that each piece stands alone as a carefully crafted, multilayered thing of linguistic art. There is no traditional narrative substructure of things happening to characters via cause and effect.
In his essay “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence,” Gass said that Tender Buttons is written “in a kind of code . . . a coding which dangerously confounds the surface . . . [which often] effects a concealment.” This concealment, though, is key to understanding Stein’s genius, “because the object of art is to make more beautiful that which is, and since that which is is rarely beautiful, often awkward and ugly and ill-arranged, it must be sometimes sheeted like a corpse, or dissolved into its elements and put together afresh, aright, and originally” (105). This objective of art was embraced by Gass throughout his career as he frequently tried to make the ugly beautiful via the beauty of his language. In The Tunnel, the centerpiece of oeuvre, for example, Gass wrote beautifully about the Holocaust, and attempted to redeem his deplorable first-person narrator through the loveliness of his language.
Gass’s emphasis on language over plot, on style over characterization has made some readers consider his novellas and novels long prose poems, placing them in the same arena as Tender Buttons. Unlike Stein, however, Gass insisted he was not adept at writing poetry. He did say, though, that the best poets of his generation were writers of fiction, naming in particular John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin and William Gaddis (Saltzman 91). It would’ve been the height of egotism to list himself, but his was a name that often appeared among them. He readily acknowledged his frequent use of devices more typically attached to poetry. Among his “quirks” he listed in his essay “Retrospection” are “whoring and metaphoring” and “jingling,” which includes his love of alliteration and limericks.
I’ll end where I began. One of the reasons it’s worth considering if Tender Buttons was a model of sorts for “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is because Gass stated explicitly that the short story’s structure led him to his most ambitious work, The Tunnel. He said in an interview with Bradford Morrow, “[The Tunnel] also elaborates the structure of the story in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. [The novel’s] in sections roughly seventy pages long, instead of paragraphs. These are musically organized. There are sections within sections: It’s sectioned up like an insect or a worm.” I believe there is much more to learn about the story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by reading it alongside Stein’s techniques in Tender Buttons; therefore, by extension, Stein’s enigmatic experimental poem may also whisper some clues in our ears, sibyl-like, to help us better comprehend the many levels of The Tunnel.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G. “Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 149-170.
Gass, William H. “Fifty Literary Pillars.” A Temple of Texts, Dalkey Archive, 2007, pp. 29-60.
—. “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence.” The World within the Word. Basic Books, 1978, pp. 63-123.
—. “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. Godine, 1981, pp. 172-206.
—. “Retrospection.” Life Sentences, Knopf, 2012, pp. 36-55.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass, U of South Carolina P, 2002.
Morrow, Bradford. “An Interview: William H. Gass.” Conjunctions, no. 4, 1983, pp. 14-29. Available online http://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/william-h-gass-c4.
Olson, Liesl M. Foreword. Narration by Gertrude Stein, The U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. vii-xii.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 81-95.
Stein, Gertrude. Narration. The U of Chicago P, 2010.
—. Tender Buttons. Edited by Leonard Diepeveen, Broadview, 2018.
Modernism’s Last Gasp and the Architecture of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel
This paper, “Modernism’s Last Gasp and the Architecture of William H. Gass’s The Tunnel,” was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 on 23 Feb. 2017 as part of the panel titled “Imagining Space: Experiments in Narrative Form.” The paper veered from its original intent and perhaps a suitable secondary title may be “A Text Suddenly of Our Time.” The panel was chaired by Liana Babayan, Augusta University. Other papers presented were “Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant and Architectural Liminality” by Adam McKee, Queensborough Community College, CUNY; “Haunted Houses from House of Leaves to House of Fiction” by Amanda Davis, University of Chicago; and “Contrasting Spaces in Jean Genet’s Miracle de la Rose” by Maria Slocum, Missouri University of Science and Technology. Other papers on William H. Gass’s work can be found at this site by searching “gass.”
“For me a book tends to exist in a metaphorical relationship to a building. For me architecture represents best the basic metaphorical image of the way a text exists, say, metaphorically or philosophically” (Janssens 66). Thus spake William H. Gass in a 1979 interview, about midway through the composition process of his magnum opus The Tunnel, which was published in 1995 after a nearly thirty-year gestation. Sections began appearing in print as early as 1969 and continued off and on for almost two decades, garnering numerous accolades (for example, inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1980), and in two instances being released as stand-alone, limited-edition books by art presses. In 1996 Gass’s massive book (over 650 pages of dense prose, riddled with myriad experimental techniques, a host of fonts, amateurish doodles, and other graphic representations) won the American Book Award. Meanwhile, it spawned copious reviews which ranged from fawning to furious. Even some of the novel’s harshest critics, however, acknowledged that it would take decades of scholarly work to fully come to terms with Gass’s achievement—no matter whether one believes he achieved a masterpiece or a monstrosity. Sadly, that work remains largely undone.
This is at least the third paper I’ve presented at this conference chiefly focused on Gass’s The Tunnel. When his next novel appeared in 2013, Middle C, that much more manageable book led me away from The Tunnel for a paper or two; and I also did some work on Gass’s earlier publications: one of his earliest pieces of published fiction, the novella The Pedersen Kid, and then a paper focused mainly on Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife and On Being Blue. Pondering possibilities for this year’s conference, I decided it was time to return to the excavation site and say something further about The Tunnel. I’ve been coming here for more than a decade, and I can only recall one other Gass paper being presented in that time (a Willie Masters’ paper). (When I first started attending the conference I was a William Gaddis guy; I hadn’t yet fallen under the Master’s spell.) My hope has been that by keeping the spark of scholarly interest alive others will join the conversation—and that hope has rested mainly on the book’s artistic merits. However, between the time that I proposed this particular paper topic and now, something historically monumental happened which makes The Tunnel vitally relevant: the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States (and the rise of the alt-right in general). That is to say, the overarching theme of The Tunnel—which Gass has described as “the fascism of the heart”—makes the book amazingly and unfortunately up-to-date. Perhaps an appropriate secondary title for my paper would be “A Text Suddenly of Our Time.”
Our times have led to a rekindled interest in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian books. For the same reasons it is worthwhile to descend into William Gass’s tunnel, a place whose squalidness has turned away many readers—but these, my friends, are squalid times. So, in the interest of truth in advertising, I am going to discuss (to some degree) the structure of The Tunnel and its relationship to architecture; but I’m also going to talk about the fascism of the heart and what the book has to say about the Trump phenomenon.
The basic plot of the novel is fairly straightforward (although plot doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Gass’s world as it does in most fiction writer’s): The first-person narrator, William Kohler, is a middle-aged history professor at a Midwestern university who has finally completed his magnum opus, prophetically thirty years in the writing, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. He has sat down in his basement office to write the book’s preface (the final nail in this towering edifice, so to speak) when he finds himself blocked and therefore begins writing, instead, a very personal memoir about his unhappy childhood, lackluster career, loveless marriage, lost loves, disappointing children, and irritating colleagues. He slips the pages of this tell-all autobiography in between the manuscript pages of Guilt and Innocence so that his wife won’t see them (having no interest whatsoever in his life’s work), and, meanwhile, he begins to dig a tunnel out of his basement—or at least so we’re told. Gass himself has written in the liner notes of the audiobook edition of The Tunnel (45 hours of listening pleasure) that his narrator is “wholly unreliable”: “That does not mean he never tells the truth. He may always tell the truth. He may never. But he can’t be trusted. So he may not be digging a tunnel out of his basement” (emphasis added). Either way, writes Gass, “[t]he pointlessness of this activity has to be stressed.”
Returning to my opening quote, Gass has said that “architecture represents best the basic metaphorical image of the way a text exists.” He has had a long-standing interest in architecture. It is difficult to say which came first, the chicken or the egg, as Gass married Mary Henderson in 1968. Mary Henderson Gass has had a distinguished career as an architect in St. Louis since moving there with her husband in 1979 when he accepted a professorship at Washington University. (He retired from the university in 2000.) Gass has found the experimental designs of architect Peter Eisenman especially akin to his own literary aesthetic. “He does crazy things in one sense,” said Gass, “but he is really a serious artist, first rank, I think. He is not just doing things to shock people, or surprise them or be different” (Janssens 68). Gass’s statement about Eisenman and his work sounds a lot like what defenders of Gass and especially The Tunnel have been saying for years.
In explaining how The Tunnel functions architecturally, Gass has contrasted his work to James Joyce’s, especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Gass said,
Now, the idea of a book as fundamentally or conceptually a structure in which you are being taken on a tour by the author—I think a lot of modern works are constructed this way, Joyce, for instance, makes Ulysses in such a way that it is not possible for you to conceive the book and hold it in your head at the same time, you have to go back and forth in it. He takes you through the first time; you may jump around in it later as you wish—and Finnegans Wake is certainly constructed that way. (Janssens 66)
Gass continued,
Joyce demands total recall, an ideal total recall. […] I am like I would be when I went through a building: I am putting the pieces together to compose the building which exists ontologically all at the same time, and which I can only know experientially one at the time, and therefore I can only conceive or conceptualize the way it actually exists; I can have an idea of how this house exists. (67)
In other words, when one reads Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, both of which are structurally linear (a second by second account of a single day in Dublin, Ireland, or the unconscious mind’s progression through a single night of sleep [perhaps]), one is at a different point on the overall timeline with each passing word, and one has to be mindful of that progression to make sense of the experience. In other words, how have we gotten from point A to point B . . . to point Z? Metaphorical connections must be made by recalling earlier parts of the text.
The brutally nonlinear construction of The Tunnel operates differently. To illustrate that difference, Gass referenced Eisenman:
Now in Peter Eisenman’s work, what he wants to do often is to make one experientially aware of other parts of the house at the same time [emphasis added]. So in one of his houses, called House Six, there is, for instance, in the second-floor bedroom a strip of glass that goes across the floor, from which you can perceive the living-room below, and vice versa. Similarly, there are holes in various parts, openings which allow you […] to look through the house. So I am always aware in that house of other parts. (67)
In the execution of this theory, Gass constructed The Tunnel in twelve parts (which he describes as phillipics, or bitter denunciations), and each consists of twelve “fundamental themes and a lot of minor ones would be sounded in different arrangements so that a central aspect or meaning of the text would emerge at the beginning; then sink down and be relatively innocuous or weak at a certain point”—all of which would be “superimposed on a completely different structure: the tunnel itself” (“William Gass”). Gass, incidentally, is simultaneously using a mimetic musical structure—Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system—but we don’t have time to go there too. Thus, while Gass’s narrator Kohler pinballs between his childhood, his career in the army, his grad school days in Germany, his various love affairs, his current life, etc., the author returns again and again to these major and minor motifs. In an artfully designed building each room, each hallway, each alcove, each stairway, and even outdoor spaces reflect certain colors, shapes, themes, and moods that tie them together as being parts of a consistently constructed whole. There are variations of course. A dominant color in the entryway may return as complementary accent color in the master bath, for example. A sailboat model in the library may be echoed by a nautically themed kitchen. So forth and so on. Thus it is with The Tunnel.
As illustration of this technique, I will focus on one of the novel’s major motifs and its juxtaposed doppelgänger: windows and mirrors. Gass seems to want us to pay special attention to windows as he titled the sixth phillipic “Why Windows Are Important to Me,” and it takes up the literal center of his book, pages 282 to 333 out of 652. Also, windows have been metaphorically important throughout Gass’s career. As H. L. Hix points out, “The window, which represents the ambiguity of our connection to the world, our looking out on a world from which the very looking out separates us, has appeared as a metaphor regularly in Gass’s previous fiction” (124). Hix’s observation is a valid one, but I think Gass takes the metaphor further in The Tunnel by pairing it with almost equally numerous references to mirrors. More regarding that in a moment. What follows are only a few examples of window references in the text. The first comes just a few pages into the book when Kohler recalls a car ride with his lost love, Lou: “The window of the car would not roll up and Lou’s face looked warm from the cold wind as if freshly slapped or shamed or elsewhere loved” (7). This car ride, only briefly mentioned here, foreshadows an episode titled “A Sunday Drive,” which describes in detail a family outing from Kohler’s childhood that is referenced repeatedly in the novel and also prefigures the narrator’s own family outings when he becomes husband and father (always with Gass, repetition, variation, point, counterpoint).
In the central section of the novel, Gass compares a blackboard to a window, writing, “The board is at once the surface of a pit-black sea and a bleak opening onto all our inner spaces. It is the brink of what we are, and hence a horror. […] unlike a window which is always full of the flitter of images […]” (311). Discussing the blackboard’s “opening onto all our inner spaces” (in that professors, like Kohler, use the blackboard to broadcast their beliefs to their students), Gass also connects blackboards to mirrors—both being framed objects antithetical to windows in their own ways. The book’s final reference to windows is about as far from the end as the first reference is from the start, and it’s in an imagined scene with Kohler’s hated wife Martha wherein “[I] lead her to the window [hand in hand … and] put our gazes on together” (650). Kohler imagines trying to get Martha to see the world as profoundly as he does, “but she would interrupt me with a snort from her derision because she despises oratory, wants to slap cheeks when they puff.” We notice the mirror opposites of the first window reference being a recollection of Kohler’s lost true love, Lou, and the final reference being an imagined scene with Kohler’s despised wife. Further linking the two scenes are references to face slapping, one metaphorical, the other imagined but likely. These examples constitute just a tiny taste of the repetitions, echoes, foreshadowings, and prismatic reflections, complications and contradictions that appear in some form or another on every page of the novel.
What then of the mirrors? Again, there are a plethora of references, the first being on page 10 and it is immediately paired with a window (via negation), as Kohler describes his dingy basement work space: “I’ve no mirror, cockeyed or otherwise. One wrinkled window. Above: a worn lace curtain like a rusted screen.” I believe that the pairing of windows with mirrors (and Kohler’s professorial blackboard) is related to the overarching theme of the book as delineated by one of Gass’s most adept readers, Heide Ziegler, a long-time friend and collaborator of William Gass (next to Gass in the photo from a 1991 symposium on postmodernism in Stuttgart, Germany). In response to reviews of the The Tunnel that ran from lukewarm to hostile, Ziegler wrote, in essence, a defense of the book which appeared in Into The Tunnel: Readings of Gass’s Novel (1998). In the interest of my waning time, I shall cut to the chase of Ziegler’s reading, which unknowingly anticipated the novel’s connections to our own desperate times. The key to understanding the book is in the phrase that Gass identified as its “fundamental subject”: the fascism of the heart. Ziegler writes, “[G]iven the pervasiveness of his message […] it is dangerous to miss the point. His message is not that all of us are fascists, but that there is always the danger that the fascism that lurks in our hearts might erupt, that we will become fascists” (80). She suggests that the nostalgically tender (and rare) recollections from Kohler’s boyhood contribute to the idea that anyone is capable of being lured into the dark tunnel of fascism. That same boy—who relished dime-store candy and wanted nothing more in this world than a dog of his own to play with—became the young man who succumbed to the mob mentality of Kristallnacht in 1938 and threw a stone through a Jewish storekeeper’s window. I’ll supplement Ziegler’s fine reading by asserting that Gass’s frequent references to mirrors also emphasize Kohler’s (and everyone’s) potential for becoming the same sort of people he spent his academic life studying (gazing upon, if you will, as if through a window): the innocent German citizens who were transformed into the Nazis who were guilty of exterminating six million Jews. Ziegler writes further,
Given the right historical circumstances—economic insecurity, a time of depression—and given the right seducer […] your Everyman will follow that leader simply in order to flee his own loneliness, as well as what he believes to be undeserved misfortune. […] Since […] political agitators possess no true authority, they need to create scapegoats—the Jews in Germany, minorities all over the world. What Gass attempts, and obviously achieves, judging by the emotional responses to his book, is to change the Holocaust from a horrifying, unforgivable, yet singular European spectacle into a general historical possibility. That is the reason that The Tunnel is not about Germany or about Hitler. It is—potentially—about all of us. (80-81)
Referring specifically to the sort of finely tuned brainwashing the military is able to achieve but meaning more broadly the way anyone can be manipulated, Gass writes, “Eventually they compel you to act against your conscience, contrary to your nature, in defiance of every precept of morality and religion, until all that remains of you is your past, your prehensile tale [spelled t-a-l-e], your history. Then they begin on that” (242-43).
I hardly need to point out the parallels between Gass’s description of the Holocaust and our own time, with the rise of Trump and the rhetoric of the alt-right, especially their scapegoating of Muslims, immigrants, liberals, the press, and even the judiciary as reasons for our alleged decreased safety and floundering economy. What is more, on a personal note I’ll say how surprising and discouraging it’s been over the past year to view friends, neighbors and family via the window of Facebook and other social media and discover the fascism of their hearts—their willingness to believe Trump’s lies and to support his undemocratic, unpatriotic and unconstitutional schemes. How best to resist, other than simply by putting a hashtag in front of the word, is a question that millions have been wrestling with. Obviously political action is a necessary part of resistance to this wave of fascism. William Gass dealt with this question, too, in a powerful essay, “The Artist and Society” (first published in The New Republic, July 17, 1968). In it Gass suggests that the artist shouldn’t become involved in a revolution in the typical sorts of ways, but rather he must become involved through his art. He writes, “The artist’s revolutionary activity is of a different kind. He is concerned with consciousness, and he makes his changes there. His inaction is only a blind, for his books and buildings go off under everything—not once but a thousand times. How often has Homer remade men’s minds?” (288). Artists must resist, then, through their art. It is via their art that they can have a greater impact than a mere bomb’s momentary blast.
My original concept of this paper was to discuss how Gass’s techniques align his book with the intentions of aesthetically minded architects—how their conceived ideas, drafted as blueprints and 3D models, are transformed into lived physical spaces, and, similarly, how Gass attempts to make William Kohler’s surreptitiously written memoir materialize in the hands of the reader via the book known as The Tunnel. I planned to make good use of an interesting article coauthored by Gass and his wife, Mary, about the artistic principles of architectural design and their analogues in other forms of art, like writing. And I planned to talk about Gass’s hopes for the publication of his novel, what the publisher and printer were able and willing to execute, and what they weren’t. I also meant to explain my paper’s title regarding “modernism’s last gasp,” comparing, say, Joyce’s efforts to mimic a conscious or unconscious mind versus Gass’s efforts to create a consciousness. But alas those discussions will have to wait for another paper and another day. I encourage you, meanwhile, to risk a visit to The Tunnel, a book suddenly very much for our time.
Works Referenced
Gass, William H. “The Artist and Society.” Fiction and the Figures of Life, Godine, 1979, pp. 276-88.
—-. The Tunnel. 1995. Dalkey Archive, 2007.
—-. William H. Gass Reads The Tunnel. [liner notes for the audio book written by the author] Clayton Studios, 2005.
Gass, William H., and Mary Gass. “The Architecture of the Sentence.” Conjunctions, 1999, pp. 93-108. [Available online]
Hix, H. L. “Twenty Questions on The Tunnel.” Understanding William H. Gass, University of South Carolina Press, 2002, pp. 76-139.
Janssens, G. A. M. “An Interview with William Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 56-70.
“William Gass with Michael Silverblatt” (5 Nov. 1998). Vimeo, uploaded by Lannan Foundation, 2011, https://vimeo.com/12812717.
Ziegler, Heide. “William H. Gass: Is There Light at the End of The Tunnel?” Into The Tunnel: Readings of Gass’s Novel, edited by Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin, University of Delaware Press, 1998, pp. 71-83.
Accidental Poets: Paul Valéry’s influence on William Gass
The following paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held at the University of Louisville February 18-20. Others papers presented were “The Poet Philosopher and the Young Modernist: Fredrich Nietzshe’s Influence on T.S. Eliot’s Early Poetry” by Elysia C. Balavage, and “Selections from ‘The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927-1937’” by Yuki Tanaka. Other papers on William H. Gass are available at this blog site; search “Gass.”
In William H. Gass’s “Art of Fiction” interview, in 1976, he declared two writers to be his guiding lights—the “two horses” he was now “try[ing] to manage”: Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Valéry. He added, “Intellectually, Valéry is still the person I admire most among artists I admire most; but when it comes to the fashioning of my own work now, I am aiming at a Rilkean kind of celebrational object, thing, Dinge” (LeClair 18). That interview for The Paris Review was exactly forty years ago, and viewing Gass’s writing career from the vantage point of 2016, I am here to suggest that, yes, Rilke has been a major influence, but Valéry’s has been far greater than what Gass anticipated; and in fact may have been even greater than Rilke’s in the final analysis. Assessing influence, however, is complicated in this case, I believe, because a large part of Gass’s attraction to Valéry’s work in the first place was due to his finding the Frenchman to be a kindred spirit. Hence it is difficult to say how much of Gass is like Valéry because of Valéry’s influence and how much is because of their inherent like-mindedness.
A quick survey of Gass’s work since 1976—which includes two novels, a collection of novellas, a collection of novellas and stories, and eight books of nonfiction—may imply that Rilke has been the greater influence, as Gass intended. After all, Gass’s magnum opus, The Tunnel (1995), for which he won the American Book Award, centers on a history professor of German ancestry who specializes in Nazi Germany (Rilke allusions abound); and his other post-1976 novel, Middle C (2013), for which he won the William Dean Howells Medal, centers on a music professor born in Vienna whose special interest is Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg; and, glaringly, there is Gass’s Reading Rilke (1999), his book-length study of the problems associated with translating Rilke into English. However, a more in-depth look at Gass’s work over these past four decades reveals numerous correspondences with Valéry, some of which I will touch upon in this paper. The correspondence that I will pay particular attention to, though, is that between the title character of Valéry’s experimental novella The Evening with Monsieur Teste (1896) and the protagonist of Gass’s Middle C, Joseph Skizzen.
Before I go further, a brief biographical sketch of Paul Valéry: He was born in 1871, and published two notable works in his twenties, the essay “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci” and Monsieur Teste; then he stopped publishing altogether for nearly twenty years—emerging from his “great silence” with the long poem “The Young Fate” in 1917 at the age of forty-six. During his “silence,” while he didn’t write for publication, he did write, practically every day, filling his notebooks. Once his silence was over, he was catapulted into the literary limelight, publishing poems, essays, and dramas, becoming perhaps the most celebrated man of letters in France. By the end of his life in 1945 he’d been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a dozen times.
The title for this paper comes from Gass himself. In his 1972 review of Valéry’s collected works, in the New York Times Book Review, he wrote that Valéry “invariably . . . [pretended] he wasn’t a poet; that he came to poetry by accident” (The World Within the Word 162). By the same token, Gass has insisted in numerous interviews (and he’s given many, many interviews) that he’s not a poet, that the best he can achieve is an amusing limerick. Others, however, have asserted that Gass’s fiction is more akin to poetry than prose, that his novellas and novels are in essence extremely long prose poems; and in spite of his insistence on his not being a poet, he would seem to agree with this view of his work. In a 1998 interview, for instance, Gass said, “I tend to employ a lot of devices associated with poetry. Not only metrical, but also rhyme, alliteration, all kinds of sound patterning” (Abowitz 144). Moreover, about a decade earlier he said that “all the really fine poets now are writing fiction. I would stack up paragraphs of Hawkes, Coover, Elkin, or Gaddis against the better poets writing now. Just from the power of the poetic impulse itself, the ‘poets’ wouldn’t stand a chance” (Saltzman 91). Critics have tended to include Gass in the group of writers whom Gass described as poet-novelists.
For your consideration, from The Tunnel:
A smile, then, like the glassine window in a yellow envelope. I smiled. In that selfsame instant, too, I thought of the brown, redly stenciled paper bag we had the grocer refill with our breakfast oranges during the splendid summer of sex and sleep just past—of sweetly sweating together, I would have dared to describe it then, for we were wonderfully foolish and full of ourselves, and nothing existed but your parted knees, my sighs, the torpid air. It was a bag—that bag—we’d become sentimental about because (its neck still twisted where we held it) you said it was wrinkled and brown as my balls, and resembled an old cocoon, too, out of which we would both emerge as juicy and new as the oranges, like “Monarchs of Melody,” and so on, and I said to you simply, Dance the orange (a quotation from Rilke), and you said, What? There was a pause full of café clatter. (160-61)
And beyond Gass’s poetic prose, he has written actual poems, besides the off-color limericks that populate The Tunnel. In Middle C, for example, there is a longish, single-stanza poem written via the persona of the protagonist, Joseph Skizzen. It begins, “The Catacombs contain so many hollow heads: / thighbones armbones backbones piled like wood, / some bones bleached, some a bit liverish instead: / bones which once confidently stood / on the floor of the world” (337). And, perhaps more significantly, there are the translated poems in Reading Rilke. There was a celebration held at Washington University in St. Louis in honor of Gass’s ninetieth birthday, Passages of Time, and he read from each of his works in chronological order, except he broke chronology to end with his translation of Rilke’s “The Death of the Poet,” which concludes,
Oh, his face embraced this vast expanse,
which seeks him still and woos him yet;
now his last mask squeamishly dying there,
tender and open, has no more resistance,
than a fruit’s flesh spoiling in the air. (187)
It was a dramatic finale, especially since the event was supposed to be in July, near Gass’s birthday, but he was too ill to read then; so it was rescheduled for October, and the author had to arrive via wheelchair, and deliver the reading while seated. Happily, he was able to give another reading, a year later, when his new book, Eyes, came out. (I wasn’t able to attend the Eyes reading, so I’m not sure how he appeared, healthwise, compared to the Wash U. reading.)
My point is that, like Valéry, Gass has downplayed his abilities as a poet, yet his literary record begs to differ. The fact that he broke the chronology of his birthday celebration reading to conclude with a poem—and he had to consider that it may be his final public reading, held on the campus where he’d spent the lion’s share of his academic life—suggests, perhaps, the importance he has placed on his work as a poet, and also, of course, it may have been a final homage to one of his heroes. In spite of Gass’s frailness, his wit was as lively as ever. When he finished reading “The Death of the Poet,” and thus the reading, he received an enthusiastic standing ovation. Once the crowd settled, he said, “Rilke is good.”
Evidence of the earliness of Valéry’s influence or at least recognized kinship is the preface to Gass’s iconic essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), which Gass devotes almost entirely to the connection between the collection’s contents and the way that Valéry had assembled his oeuvre. Gass writes, “It is embarrassing to recall that most of Paul Valéry’s prose pieces were replies to requests and invitations. . . . [H]e turned the occasions completely to his account, and made from them some of his profoundest and most beautiful performances” (xi). Gass continues, “The recollection is embarrassing because the reviews and essays gathered here are responses too—ideas ordered up as, in emergency, militias are”; and then he describes his book as a “strange spectacle” in which he tries “to be both philosopher and critic by striving to be neither” (xii). So, Gass recognizes the parallel between the forces at work in Valéry’s literary life and his own. Gass has readily acknowledged the slowness with which his fiction has appeared (notably, it took him some twenty-six years to write The Tunnel), citing two reasons: the slowness with which he writes, and rewrites, and rewrites; but also the fact that he regularly received opportunities to contribute nonfiction pieces to magazines and anthologies, and to give guest lectures, and they tended to pay real money, unlike his fiction, which garnered much praise but little cash over his career.
This parallel between the circumstances of their output is interesting; however, the correspondences between Valéry’s creative process and his primary artistic focus, and Gass’s, is what is truly significant. In his creative work, Valéry was almost exclusively interested in describing the workings of the mind, of consciousness; and developing complex artistic structures to reflect those workings. T. S. Eliot noted Valéry’s dismissiveness of the idea of inspiration as the font of poetic creation. In Eliot’s introduction to Valéry’s collection The Art of Poetry, he writes, “The insistence, in Valéry’s poetics, upon the small part played [by ‘inspiration’ . . .] and upon the subsequent process of deliberate, conscious, arduous labor, is a most wholesome reminder to the young poet” (xii). Eliot goes on to compare Valéry’s technique and the resulting work to that done by artists in other media, most notably music composers: “[Valéry] always maintained that assimilation Poetry to Music which was a Symbolist tenet” (xiv). James R. Lawler echoes Eliot when he writes that Valéry “makes much of the comparison of poetry to the sexual act, the organicity of the tree, the freedom of the dance, and the richness of music—especially that of Wagner” (x).
The wellspring of music composition as a source of structural principles for poetry (or highly poetic prose) is arguably the greatest correspondence between Valéry as artist and Gass as artist. Examples abound, but The Tunnel and Middle C offer the most radiant ones. For the The Tunnel Gass developed a highly synthetic structure based on Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School’s musical theory of a twelve-tone system. Consequently there are twelve sections or chapters, and in each Gass develops twelve primary themes or images. He said, “[T]hat is how I began working out the way the various themes come in and out. It’s layered that way too. . . .” (Kaposi 135). In The Tunnel, Gass’s methodology is difficult to discern because Gass gave it a “chaotic and wild” look while in fact it is, he said, “as tightly bound as a body in a corset” (134). He achieved the appearance of chaos by “deliberately dishevel[ing]” the narrative with “all kinds of other things like repetitions [and] contradictions.” He said, “[T]he larger structure must mimic human memory, human consciousness. It lies, it forgets and contradicts. It’s fragmentary, it doesn’t explain everything, doesn’t even know everything” (134). For Middle C, the use of the Schoenberg system is much more overt, with Skizzen, its protagonist, being a music professor whose specialty is Schoenberg and Skizzen’s obsession with getting a statement about humans’ unworthiness to survive just right. Skizzen believes he is on the right track when he writes the sentence in twelve beats, and near the end of the novel he feels he has the sentence perfect:
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
The Professor sums up his perfect creation: “Twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hours from twilight to dawn” (352). Gass, through his narrator, does not discuss the sentence’s direct correlation to the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone system, but it does match it exactly.
Let me return to another Valéry-Gass correspondence which I touched on earlier: their concern with the workings of the mind or, said differently, consciousness. Jackson Mathews, arguably the most herculean of Valéry’s translators into English, begins his introduction to Monsieur Teste with the statement that “Valéry saw everything from the point of view of the intellect. The mind has been said to be his only subject. His preoccupation was the pursuit of consciousness, and no one knew better than he that this pursuit led through man into the world” (vii). Valéry’s interest in the mind was present in his earliest published work, the essay on Leonardo’s method and, even more obviously, Monsieur Teste, that is, “Mr. Head” or “Mr. Brain as Organ of Observation” or something to that effect. However, it was during Valéry’s twenty-year “silence” that he delved into the phenomenon of consciousness most critically. Gass writes, “Valéry began keeping notebooks in earnest, rising at dawn every day like a priest at his observances to record the onset of consciousness, and devoting several hours then to the minutest study of his own mind” (“Paul Valéry” 163). As noted earlier, Gass fashioned The Tunnel, all 800 or so pages of it, to mimic the human mind in its intricate workings. In Middle C, Gass pays much attention to Skizzen’s thought processes, especially his copious writing, revising, critique of, and further revising of his statement about humans’ unworthiness for survival. Such concerns are everywhere in Gass’s work, including his most recently published, the collection of novellas and stories, Eyes. I would point in particular to the novella Charity, a challenging stream-of-consciousness narrative, all a single paragraph, that mercilessly bounces between the main character’s childhood and his present, and, chaotically, various times in between, all the while sorting through his feelings about the act of charity and how he came to feel about it as he does in the now of the story.
In the limited time remaining, I’ll turn to the correspondence between Valéry’s character Monsieur Teste and Gass’s Joseph Skizzen (though I think William Kohler, the narrator of The Tunnel, has significant Teste-esque qualities as well). The convention of The Evening with Monsieur Teste is that the narrator is a friend of Edmond Teste’s, and he goes about attempting to describe his friend’s character. There is very little action per se, and as such almost nothing in the way of plot, in a conventional sense at least (very Gassian in that regard). He tells us that he came to “believe that Monsieur Teste had managed to discover laws of the mind we know nothing of. Certainly he must have devoted years to his research” (11). In Middle C, Joseph Skizzen is obsessed with what he calls his Inhumanity Museum, essentially a record, largely in the form of newspaper clippings and personal notes, of humans’ ceaseless cruelty to one another. The collection is associated with his ongoing struggle to word just so his statement about humans’ unworthiness to survive. Monsieur Teste becomes almost a recluse, desiring little contact with other people. He is married, but the narrator suggests that Monsieur and Madam Teste’s relationship is more platonic than passionate, due to Edmond’s preference for the intellectual over the emotional. Similarly, Skizzen never marries in Middle C, and in fact never has sex—he flees as if terrified at the two attempts to seduce him, both by older women, in the novel. Ultimately he ends up living with his mother in a house on the campus where he teaches music history and theory, his few “pleasures” consisting of listening to Schoenberg, assembling his Inhumanity Museum, and revising his pet statement. What is more, Teste’s friend describe Edmond’s understanding of “the importance of what might be called human plasticity. He had investigated its mechanics and its limits. How deeply he must have reflected on his own malleability!” (11-12). Skizzen’s malleability is central to his persona in Middle C. He goes through several name changes, moving from Austria to England to America, and eventually fabricates a false identity, one which includes that he has an advanced degree in musical composition, when in fact his knowledge of music is wholly self-taught. One of the reasons he gravitates toward Schoenberg as his special interest is because of the composer’s obscurity and therefore the decreased likelihood that another Schoenberg scholar would be able to question Skizzen’s understanding of the Austrian’s theories. But over time Skizzen molds himself into a genuine expert on Schoenberg and a respected teacher at the college—though his fear of being found out as a fraud haunts him throughout the novel.
To utter the cliché that I have only scratched the surface of this topic would be a generous overstatement. Perhaps I have eyed the spot where one may strike the first blow. Yet I hope that I have demonstrated the Valéry-Gass scholarly vein to be a rich one, and that an even richer one is the Valéry-Rilke-Gass vein. A couple of years ago I hoped to edit a series of critical studies on Gass, and I put out the call for abstracts far and wide; however, I had to abandon the project as I only received one email of inquiry about the project, and then not even an abstract followed. Nevertheless, I will continue my campaign to bring attention to Gass’s work in hopes that others will follow me up the hill, or, better still, down the tunnel. Meanwhile, if interested, you can find several papers on Gass’s work at my blog.
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” 1998. Ammon 142-48.
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Eliot, T. S. Introduction. The Art of Poetry. By Paul Valéry. Trans. Denise Folliot. New York: Pantheon, 1958. vii-xxiv. Print.
Gass, William H. Charity. Eyes: Novellas and Short Stories. New York: Knopf, 2015. 77-149. Print.
—. Preface. Fiction and the Figures of Life. 1970. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. xi-xiii. Print.
—. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. 1999. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
—. The Tunnel. 1995. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2007. Print.
—. The World Within the Word. 1978. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print.
Kaposi, Idiko. “A Talk with William H. Gass.” 1995. Ammon 120-37.
Lawler, James R. Introduction. Paul Valéry: An Anthology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. vii-xxiii. Print.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass: The Art of Fiction LXV.” 1976. Ammon 46-55. [online]
Mathews, Jackson. Introduction. Monsieur Teste. By Valéry. Trans. Jackson Mathews. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. vii-ix. Print.
Valéry, Paul. Monsieur Teste. 1896. Trans. Jackson Mathew. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989. Print.
Notes on images: The photo of Paul Valéry was found at amoeba.com via Google image. The photo of William H. Gass was found at 3ammagazine.com via Google image.
The Celibacy of Joseph Skizzen and the Principles of “On Being Blue”
The following paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Feb. 26-28, 2015, as part of the panel “Sexual Manners,” chaired by Mariah Douglas, University of Louisville. Other papers presented were “‘A world of bottle-glass colours’: Defining Sexual Manners in Subversive Spaces,” by Bonnie McLean, Marquette University; and “Sex as Border Crossing in Anglophone Labanese Fiction,” by Syrine Hout, American University in Beruit. For other Gass papers at this blog, search “gass.”
The Celibacy of Joseph Skizzen and the Principles of On Being Blue
One of William H. Gass’s first publications was the highly experimental novella (?) Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, which appeared as a special supplement in TriQuarterly literary journal in 1968 and was republished in book form by Dalkey Archive in 1989. The experiment revolves around the titular character Babs Masters, whose sexual history and growing sexual arousal are represented via a variety of signifiers, including bawdy and explicit diction, typographical features and nude pictures. In fact, the book’s cover features a neck-to-navel photograph of the nude model portraying Babs with the title and author’s name projected onto her pale chest: the word “Wife” is distorted in the cleavage between her breasts, and “BY WILLIAM H. GASS” runs in a straight line beneath them. Appropriately the back cover features a close-up of Babs’ nude backside above a paragraph-length synopsis of the book which reads in part: “Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice both her new lover and the reader.” Every page of the book features either an erotic photograph of Babs and/or sexually charged language, both explicit and implicit. (As an aside, earlier I called Babs the titular character. I don’t find that funny, but I wanted to point it out for those of you who are less evolved than I am.)
By Gass’s own reckoning, Willie Masters’ was for the most part a failure. “I was trying out some things,” Gass said in a 1976 interview. “Didn’t work. Most of them didn’t work. . . . Too many of my ideas turned out to be only ideas. . . . I don’t give a shit for ideas—which in fiction represent inadequately embodied projects” (LeClair 22). It so happens that 1976 was also the year that he published his novella-like essay (or essay-like novella) On Being Blue, subtitled “A Philosophical Inquiry,” in which he discusses at length various manifestations of the word and concept of blue, especially so-called blue language. It seems that one of the chief lessons he learned from writing Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife was that writers should avoid at all cost writing about sex:
Art, like light, needs distance, and anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writhings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content, that the intensity of that content quickly outruns its apparent cause, that the full experience becomes finally inarticulate, and that there is no major art that works close in. (19)
He concludes the section by saying “a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken’s wing” (20). What is more, “the sexual, in most works, disrupts the form; there is an almost immediate dishevelment, the proportion of events is lost” (16-17). In sum, according to Gass, an explicit description of sex is inherently unartful, and the insertion (sorry) of an actual sexual climax in a story counterbalances and therefore diminishes the plot’s narrative climax. (Since the Louisville Conference is devoted to literature and culture, I will make the rather low-brow observation that Gass’s analysis may be borne out by the number of television series that quickly fizzle after the flirtatious main characters finally have sex, dubbed “the Moonlighting curse.” Recent examples include Bones, Castle and New Girl.)
Allow me to raise my brow again to critic H.L. Hix, who has suggested Gass’s fiction writing since Willie Masters’ “can be read as an attempt to restore events to proper proportion” (72). Writing in 2002, Hix cites Gass’s mammoth novel The Tunnel in particular. I agree with Hix’s assessment. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that Gass’s most recent—and presumably his final—novel, Middle C, is an even more overt representation of the principles that the author delineated in On Being Blue. In 2013’s Middle C, the protagonist Joseph Skizzen has several opportunities to pursue romantic relationships with female characters, but in each case he retreats into his safely insulated academic life as a professor of music theory. What is more, Gass frequently alludes to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, and the sin-bearing serpent could be seen as sex attempting to slither its way into Gass’s narrative and corrupt the pristine text. Indeed, in On Being Blue Gass discusses the “five common methods by which sex gains entrance into literature . . . as through French doors and jimmied windows”; and the “commonest, of course” is “the direct depiction of sexual material—thoughts, acts, wishes” (10).
Middle C keeps its focus on Joseph Skizzen from his birth to retirement age, and twice in Joey’s youth older women attempt to seduce him. Joey’s reaction in both cases suggests perhaps the level of alarm serious writers ought to exhibit when their narratives begin to flirt with describing sexual scenes. The first such episode in the novel involves Joey’s college French teacher Madame Mieux, whose “laughter preceded her like a warning siren” (100). In the word siren, of course, Gass describes Madame Mieux as both a temptress and a warning. Joey’s grades are mediocre, but Madame Mieux invites him to her house on the pretense of listening to music, promising him a “trombone concerto,” and Gass writes, “He made a mistake. He accepted her invitation” (103). Madame Mieux beckons him into a room filled with pillows, where she is lying at its center smoking a joint. She invites him to make himself “comfy,” but instead he flees from her. Outside, “[h]e realized already that he was not embarrassed or repulsed, he was terrified, and that terror was not the appropriate response: amusement maybe, disdain perhaps, a sense of superiority or a feeling of pity” (104). Metaphorically, Joey is akin to the writer who is tempted to narrate a sexual scene but saves himself from the absurd—what Gass calls “Madame Mieux’s pillow party.”
Later, Joseph lands a job as a librarian at a public library run by Miss Marjorie Bruss, a middle-aged woman who also has a room to rent next to her house, so she becomes both Joey’s boss and his landlady. Marjorie gets in the habit of leaving milk and cookies for Joey in his room. One night, Marjorie comes to him wearing only a robe. Gass writes, “She seemed zipped into a towel, her wild hair terrible to behold, and sat upon the bed with the familiarity of one who has made it” (286). Joseph stares at her, “transfixed.” She rises from the bed, telling him that he is a “[g]ood boy . . . [who] deserve[s] a nice surprise.” She then bends over Joseph and puts her hands on his face. Joseph says, “Unhand me, Madame, you forget yourself, . . . frightened from the world into a novel; and Marjorie recoiled as though struck by the book from which he had unconsciously taken the phrase” (286-87). The comically melodramatic scene continues to unfold, becoming more and more ridiculous. Joey’s milk is knocked over when Marjorie is repulsed, and she begins screaming the cliché phrase “Unhand me” louder and louder. She goes outside in her robe and scuffs and removes the blocks from beneath the wheels of Joey’s beat-up car so that it rolls down the drive into a utility pole. At which point the humiliated woman orders him to leave, both his rented residence and his job.
Again, Joseph Skizzen’s extreme reaction to a woman’s attempt to seduce him reflects how authors might best respond when their characters try to seduce them into writing a sexual scene. In the case of Madame Mieux, Joey was invited into her pillow-filled boudoir, whereas Marjorie Bruss invited herself into Joey’s room. In both cases they are women who have power over him, his teacher and his employer/landlady, suggestive at some level perhaps of the strong draw toward the sexual in fiction. In On Being Blue, Gass points out that other extreme acts which are often the stuff of fiction can be controlled by the author—but not so with sex once that path is chosen. He writes, “As writers we don’t hesitate to interrupt murders, stand time on its tail, put back to front, and otherwise arrange events in our chosen aesthetic order, but how many instances of such coitus interruptus are there in the books which speak to us so frankly of the life we never frankly lead?” (20). The comedic nature of the scenes that result from Madame Mieux’s and Miss Bruss’s attempted seductions are deliberate on Gass’s part, but perhaps no more comedic than if he had attempted to render serious sexual scenes—or maybe it would be more accurate to say Gass would find such scenes tragic as far as his success at fashioning them into literary art.
Combining the sexual with the comic has been typical for Gass since the writing of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. In particular, he’s interested in the writing of bawdy limericks. His ponderous novel The Tunnel is filled with limericks of the bluest sort. For example,
A nun went to bed with a sailor
Who said he had come from a whaler.
It was like Moby’s dick—
His blubberous prick—
with which he promptly assailed her. (172)
There’s a second verse to this particular limerick, but I imagine you’re trusting me on this point. Gass has said that he writes limericks because he’s unable to write longer poems. He told LeClair in the 1976 interview, “I can get away with a limerick because it is a very short form. I can turn out couplets, too, but not enough of them to make a whole poem” (31). More significantly, the limerick encapsulates Gass’s attitudes toward writing that involves sexual language. In another interview, Gass said that he’s not interested in writing about sex, but he’s very interested in “the language of sex”: “[T]here’s very little sexuality in my work, but there are a lot of sexual words. I have very few steamy sexual scenes, if any. The metaphor is fundamental, sure. But my interest in the subject and my use of a character’s sexuality are almost invariably either symptomatic or metaphorical, whereas for a great number of writers sex is the direct object” (Brans 107-8). By symptomatic he means that the sexual references represent “some larger quality in the character that isn’t directly sexual at all—dominance, power, or what might be called the verbal sexualization of the mind” (108). These statements were made nearly thirty years prior to the publication of Middle C, but his approach is clearly represented by Joseph Skizzen, who finds himself the locus of female domination throughout the novel: Madame Mieux, Marjorie Bruss, his sister Debbie, his mother Miriam, among several other female characters. In fact, Joey dreams of a pre-Eve Eden, an Eden before the Fall. Gass writes, “He did dream of strolling naked as Adam through a garden [. . .] No . . . rethink that . . . he would be more naked than Adam, leafless as a winter tree, untroubled by any companion, Eve or angel. [. . . H]e’d be free to do whatever he chose to do, to his blame or to his credit [. . .]” (254). Joey’s Edenic daydream ends, and he returns to the real world in which every woman in his life is the cause of some sort of anxiety. He ticks off a list of them and the troubles they cause him.
The prelapsarian world that Skizzen fantasizes about would be one free of the absurdity of sexual situations, and he creates the closest thing he can manage, eventually living with his mother in a rambling and poorly maintained house on the college campus where he teaches. Here, free of any opportunity for a romantic encounter, Professor Skizzen pursues two of his favorite hobbies: collecting newspaper clippings and making notecards that record the daily atrocities of humankind, and writing and revising a sentence regarding the human race. Gass, via his main character, returns to the sentence he is composing and reworking repeatedly throughout the novel, which he finally perfects near the end: “First Skizzen felt mankind must perish, then he feared it might survive” (352). The evolving sentence is in fact a sort of central character in Middle C, which reflects one of Gass’s unusual theories regarding writing fiction: that anything can be a character and people don’t make for the most interesting ones. In his essay “The Concept of Character,” he writes, “Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. [. . . A]nything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point like a stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom’s pocket, functions as a character” (49, 50). Skizzen’s finally perfecting his sentence about the inhumanity of man serves as a kind of climax for the novel. It is obviously an understated sort of climax compared to most works of fiction, and one can see that scenes of sexual climax would certainly tend to eclipse a music professor’s perfectly worded, perfectly balanced sentence—thus bearing out H.L. Hix’s observation that since Willie Masters’ Gass has been working to “restore events to proper proportion.”
Given the subject of my paper and its timing—with all the hubbub in recent weeks about the release of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey—it seems appropriate to refer to E.L. James’s mega bestseller, which has a sexual scene on virtually every page. Last fall, I read through most of Fifty Shades in about an hour in anticipation of teaching a workshop on writing about sex—or rather on not writing about sex—and based on that experience I was loathe to return to the book for this paper, so I’ll rely on Anthony Lane’s review of the movie in the February 23 issue of The New Yorker. In comparing the film to the novel, Lane writes,
Above all, we are denied James’s personifications, which are so much livelier than her characters. . . . No new reader, however charitable, could open “Fifty Shades of Grey,” browse a few paragraphs, and reasonably conclude that the author was writing in her first language, or even her fourth. There are poignant moments when the plainest of physical actions is left dangling beyond the reach of [James’s] prose.
Beyond the vapid prose, James’s problem, according to Gass’s theory, is that it is impossible to create an effective narrative climax when there is a sexual climax described in detail on every other page. As Gass said in one of his most recent interviews, “[T]hat’s what ninety percent of bad literature is. It’s just referring to these scenes in so-called real life that would be quite shattering, or pornographic, or whatever. And it isn’t art” (Gerke 43). Sadly, more than a hundred million people have bought copies of Fifty Shades of Grey (Andrew Lane’s figure)—which helps to explain why it’s so difficult to publish a literary novel in the United States, and if one does, it’s a challenge to get a hundred people to read it, let alone buy a copy.
Middle C will almost certainly be William Gass’s final novel, but the ninety-year-old author has a new collection of novellas and stories coming out in October, titled Eyes, which will no doubt include material that he said he was working on in the mid-1990s. In fact, Middle C was titled that in part because it was supposed to be the second of a trio of novellas, all with titles beginning with “C,” but the story of Joseph Skizzen kept expanding until Gass had a complete novel on his hands. Presumably the novellas included in Eyes will be the companion pieces to Middle C. Very little of that work has seen the light of publication, so not much is known about it. One can rest fairly certain, however, that it will feature sexual language but no sexual scenes—unless they are absurdly comedic ones.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Brans, Jo. “Games of the Extremes: An Interview with William Gass.” Ammon 96-110.
Gass, William H. “The Concept of Character in Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 34-54. Print.
—-. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—-. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. 1976. Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2007. Print.
—-. The Tunnel. 1995. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2007. Print.
—-. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. 1968. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1998. Print.
Gerke, Greg. “Many-Layered Anger: A Conversation with William Gass.” Tin House 14.2 (Dec. 2012): 30-45. Print.
Hix, H.L. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Print.
Lane, Anthony. “No Pain, No Gain: Fifty Shades of Grey.” The New Yorker. 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 15 Feb. 2015. [link]
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass: The Art of Fiction LXV.” 1976. Ammon 17-38. [link]
Note: I would like to thank Craig Saper, who sent me a pdf of his art book On Being Read, published in a limited edition by Diane Fine in 1985, as it was inspired by Gass’s On Being Blue.
Interview with J.D. Schraffenberger: The Waxen Poor
I don’t recall the exact year that I met Jeremy Schraffenberger (2005? — give or take), but it was definitely at the University of Louisville during its annual literature and culture conference. I chaired a critical panel on which Jeremy was presenting a paper. As the day progressed and we ran into each other here and there, we discovered that while we both enjoyed academic writing, creative writing was our true passion — mine, specifically, fiction, and his poetry. Over the years we often met up in Louisville, and when my first novel, Men of Winter, came out in 2010, Jeremy was kind enough to help me set up a reading in Cedar Falls, Iowa, as part of Jim O’Laughlin’s Final Thursday Reading Series. By then Jeremy (who publishes and edits under the initials J.D.) was on the tenure track in the English Department at the University of Northern Iowa and part of the editorial masthead of the North American Review. In the summer of 2013 I was able to return the favor and arranged for Jeremy to come to Springfield, Illinois, to be a “Poet in the Parlor” at the historic Vachel Lindsay Home; while he was in town, he also gave a fascinating talk on the history of the North American Review and its fast-approaching bicentennial (in 2015) — the talk was hosted by Adam Nicholson at The Pharmacy Art Center.
In 2012, I established Twelve Winters Press with the intention of using it to bring out my books, or keep them in print, and to bring out the literary work of others. Last winter I contacted Jeremy about possibly working with the Press on some sort of project under his editorial direction — and much to my delight he informed me he had a collection, The Waxen Poor, that he was interested in publishing. He sent me the manuscript, which I was able to read (again, much to my delight) before meeting him in Louisville for the conference this past February. After his reading in the beautiful Bingham Poetry Room in Ekstrom Library, we sat down to cups of coffee in the Library’s Tulip Tree Café and discussed his collection and made plans to bring it out this summer.
I’m happy to report that The Waxen Poor is indeed out. See Twelve Winters Press’s Poetry Titles page for full details.
I interviewed Jeremy via email about his intriguing collection, which includes poems published in such notable journals as Brevity, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre Dame Review, and Prairie Schooner, among many others. What follows are his unedited responses to my questions. When I had the honor of introducing Jeremy at the Vachel Lindsay Home, I said that I always enjoyed his readings because he was the sort of poet that I respected most: one who takes his poetry seriously but not himself. I believe this engaging combination of qualities is apparent here.
What’s the time span represented by the poems in The Waxen Poor? That is, how early is the earliest poem and how recent the most recent?
The earliest piece in the collection — and the one that really sparked this whole project — is the prose poem “Full Gospel,” which was originally published in the summer of 2006 in Brevity and was later reprinted in Best Creative Nonfiction. I bring this up only because I find the question of genre interesting. I originally wrote “Full Gospel” as a poem, but then as I started to revise, I became less and less interested in lines and line breaks and more and more interested in segmentation or braiding as a way to craft the piece. I can’t say that I was consciously blurring generic boundaries — I was just trying to write something true — but I’m still not quite sure how to categorize it. Is it an essay? A poem? A prose poem? In the end, I suppose, that’s not terribly important, but insofar as it might reveal something about the composition process — in this case, I think, how memory is organized — I think it’s an intriguing question.
Two other early pieces are the first one in the collection, “Brother Tom,” and the last, “Born for Adversity.” It was important, I think, that I knew where I was heading as I wrote and revised. I would certainly not consider The Waxen Poor a novel in verse, but I did feel that there was something of a narrative arc, if not an actual plot — even if it remained subtextual — that guided me along as I worked. I had a clear sense of the beginning and I knew the end, and so the challenge became what to do with the long expansive middle. As Margaret Atwood wrote, “True connoisseurs … are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.”
The most recent poem in the collection is the sequence of “Judas” poems, which came as something of a surprise to me as I wrote them. I hadn’t expected to cast “Brother Tom” as a Judas character, but there it is. Sometimes you can’t — and maybe you shouldn’t — control your characters. You can see that I’m trying to complicate Judas/Tom, though, by calling him “A man of tradition, assassin of the ages, / My translator, my traitor, my Judas, my friend” — the same kind of complication I’m attempting to bring to the entire collection. These “Judas” poems came to me about three years ago, and so The Waxen Poor represents five years of work.
Did you set out to write a collection around the topic of “Brother Tom,” or did the concept of collecting them develop over time? Either way, can you describe the thought process behind the collection?
In my mind The Waxen Poor was always a cohesive project. After “Full Gospel” I began organizing individual pieces around the character of “Brother Tom.” I wanted to explore this fraught relationship between two brothers, each of whom is like the other but also quite different — one a poet, the other struggling with mental illness. The poems are meant to be both personal and more broadly mythological, and I’ve tried to balance (or “harmonize” might be a better word) the experiential with the imagined, the everyday with the elevated. You could also say that the project is in some ways a coping mechanism, like Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” That is, how are we to deal with the pain and suffering in the world but through our art? When trying to understand and contend with something like mental illness, some of us turn to art, to poetry, for answers.
Many of the poems seem to be highly personal in their subject matter. Can you discuss the process of tapping into those emotions via the creative process?
As I said, I see the collection as something of a coping mechanism — but then in some ways, all art functions as a mechanism of this kind, even if you’re not dealing with emotionally fraught subjects. What do we make of this world around us and all of the various experiences we have? How do we give our lives any kind of meaning but by forming it, shaping it? Even the most experimental, appropriative forms of conceptualism in which all subjectivity has been evacuated are ways to cope.
That said, there are some poems in The Waxen Poor I can’t read in public anymore because they’re too emotionally difficult for me to get through, but I think that probably means something important is happening. I try to tell this to my creative writing students, that if something is too painful to write, you should write it, not for the sake of therapy — though that might end up being part of it — but because when a poem is difficult in this way, you’re getting near something that you care deeply about, even if it’s in ways that you can’t quite articulate yet. When we find a form for our pain or confusions, we’re allowing others to identify with it, with us. We’re letting our readers in.
The form of these poems varies considerably, and there are even some prose poems included in the collection. Can you discuss the interplay between subject and form for you as a poet? For example, how much one influences the other?
I’m a formalist insofar as I believe that form is meaning. To sever the two is to do a deep violence to the poem — and to misread it entirely. I think it takes a long time before this insight, which is easy enough to say and understand intellectually, sinks in deeply enough for it to be true as a writer. Or at least this has been the case for me. The prose poem is a perfect example of this fusion between form and meaning. I never set out to write the prose poem sequences you find in this collection. Rather, I discovered that this was the form the poem had to take — especially the somewhat surreal ones in which the thoughts and images and phenomena all seem to tumble forth, like consciousness itself. Likewise, some of the unrhymed sonnets in the collection were discovered. That is, as I began writing, I felt the rhetorical movement of the sonnet happening, the turn, and so I began shaping it accordingly. This means paying attention to more than just the “subject,” more than what the poem is supposedly “about,” and opening yourself up to different ways of knowing.
But there are a handful of exceptions. The poem “Abecedarian Advice” is a received form that I didn’t “discover” but rather imposed on myself as a challenge. And the four “Meds” poems are acrostics that spell out the names of the antipsychotic drugs “Haldol,” “Thorazine,” “Zyprexa,” and “Lithium” down the left margins of the poems. I like the way these formal experiments turned out because I found that I ended up thinking about things I never would have thought about before. The somewhat arbitrary restraint can ironically be very liberating. In fact, I think the acrostic is the most underrated form. With other forms, like the sonnet, for example, you’re dealing not only with external characteristics like rhyme and meter but also an internal rhetorical shape that isn’t always the right fit for the poem. The acrostic, though, can accommodate absolutely anything. It gets a bad rap and seems unsophisticated because we’ve all written them in elementary school. But I think there’s something refreshing about the form’s simplicity.
Several of the poems in the collection had been published individually, but it seemed that you hadn’t been circulating the collection for a while. Can you discuss the history of the collection in terms of your thoughts on its publication as a whole?
Well, I did send this manuscript out into the world for a while, entering it into contests and open reading periods at a handful of presses that I like. But I’m a constant and somewhat obsessive reviser, so I pulled it back and have been working on it periodically for a few years. I’d add a poem, remove a poem, tinker with the chronology, worry over line breaks. Was it Valéry who said that a poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned? I guess that feeling had something to do with it — a desire not to abandon the poems. And because it’s a collection that I care deeply about and is in some ways very personal, I felt it had to be just right — and it had to find the right place, too, that would present it in the way I think it needs to be presented. I’d say it’s finally ready for the world, and so I’m excited now that it’s found a great home with Twelve Winters.
You play with both Christian and Classical allusions (and bring these together in the title and cover illustration, which you found). Why overtly connect these two traditions? What do you think is the effect of their interplay in the collection?
First, I’d say that even though I am not a Christian, Christian symbols and metaphors are culturally inescapable. And so these stories and images live with us and inform our very identities quite deeply. To deny them is to deny a rich vein of cultural and personal meaning. So, too, with the Greeks. As much as the Christian bible, the Iliad is a foundational text that we should allow to enter and affect our work, even today. In this way, I’d call myself a traditional poet — though that word “tradition” rings vaguely conservative, doesn’t it? What I mean to suggest is that I’m traditional in that I attend to the past — this great gift of literature that has been left to us — and try to make meaning of and from it. I’m reminded of something Barry Lopez wrote: “If art is merely decorative or entertaining, or even just aesthetically brilliant, if it does not elicit hope or a sense of the sacred, if it does not speak to our fear and confusion, or to the capacities for memory and passion that imbue us with our humanity, then the artist has only sent us a letter that requires no answer.” I suppose I’d say that what I’m trying to do is in this collection — and in all of my work, really — is to respond to the letter that’s been sent to us from the past, while writing a letter of my own in the present. Not to mix my metaphors, but I believe artists are not so much influenced by tradition as they exist at a confluence, where the past meets the present, like two rivers meeting.
With your wife Adrianne Finlay being a novelist, you’re a two-writer household. I suspect that creates an interesting dynamic. Can you discuss what that is like, and how it may affect your own creativity?
My wife is always my first reader — and my best. Having another writer in the house is always beneficial for when you want to know if something makes sense or sounds right. But also because there’s a mutual understanding that we each need time to do our work, and so we make time for each other in that way. Of course, a big difference is that she deals with long narratives while I deal with shorter lyrical pieces, and so we’re often trying to accomplish much different things. For Adrianne, I think, clarity is very important — as is plot — whereas I might value strangeness or obscurity in a poem. As a poet, I also think the form is just as important as the meaning — as I said before, it is the meaning — but writers of novels I think tend to be less interested — not uninterested, just less interested — in the overt music of language. Or they want to foreground something else. To dwell too decidedly on sound and language might interfere with the story. That said, we both teach fiction and poetry, and so we’re each well enough acquainted with the other’s genre to be good readers. And so, while The Waxen Poor is, indeed, a collection of lyrical poems, I do think that my work slips in and out of narrative and dramatic modes, too. That’s something I think I pay more attention to because of Adrianne.
What projects are you working on now?
What’s been occupying a lot of my creative energies lately is my work as associate editor of the North American Review. The magazine was founded in 1815, so we’re about to celebrate our bicentennial, which is really quite remarkable. I mean, how many things in the United States get to celebrate a bicentennial? It’s exciting but humbling. At any rate, I’m directing a conference to mark the occasion. We have so many great events planned, including keynote readings by Martín Espada, Patricia Hampl, and Steven Schwartz. People can find the call for papers here.
I’m also editing a book called Walt Whitman and the North American Review, which collects the seven essays Whitman published in the NAR in the last decade of his life, along with the many reviews, essays, and articles on him and his work that appeared in the magazine’s pages. Editorial work is challenging but also deeply gratifying.
J.D. Schraffenberger is the associate editor of the North American Review and an associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He’s the author of the collection of poems Saint Joe’s Passion (Etruscan), and his other work has appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his two daughters and his wife, the novelist Adrianne Finlay.
(Author Photo by Adrianne Finlay)
Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C
My paper, “Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C,” was presented Feb. 20, 2014, at the Louisville Conference on Literature Culture Since 1900 as part of the panel “The New Adventures of Old Debates: Postmodernism and the New Sincerity,” chaired by Nick Curry, University of Louisville. Other papers presented were “‘Everything is ending but not yet’: Post-Modern Irony and the New Sincerity in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Katherine Leake Weese, Hampden-Sydney College; and “Liminality and Dialogism: Dreamscape Narratives in Donald Barthelme’s Postmodern Paradise” by Nicholas Sloboda, University of Wisconsin-Superior. (A much abridged version of this paper appeared as a review in North American Review, 298.4. Search this blog for other Gass papers.)
Theory into Praxis: William H. Gass’s Middle C
by Ted Morrissey, University of Illinois Springfield
A long and complex novel, or series of novels . . . may present us with a world complete through every principle and consequence, rivaling in its comprehensiveness the most grandiose philosophical systems. (Gass, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” 9)
With the release of Middle C in 2013, William H. Gass’s third novel, one imagines that Gass has attempted to do just that: present us with a world complete. For the past half century, William Gass has been one of America’s most prolific essayists and literary critics, as well as one of its most receptive interviewees. Consequently, his ideas about writing, especially about writing the novel and what makes a great one, are well documented, and they’ve remained amazingly consistent decade after decade. Middle C, even more so than his previous two novels, is a praxis of his most heartfelt theories—which makes it a deliberately challenging read, deliberately aimed at a rapidly disappearing readership. What is more, given Gass’s age, Middle C may prove to be the final argument in his legendary debate with John Gardner in which aesthetics was pitted against morality as the rubric for assessing great literature.
Gass, who was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, is a self-acknowledged slow writer of his own fiction. Therefore, his novels have appeared with great gaps of time in between: Omensetter’s Luck (1966), The Tunnel (1995), and now Middle C—with an iconic collection of stories, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a highly experimental novella (?), Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), and a collection of novellas, Cartesian Sonata (1998), rounding out his books of fiction. Meanwhile, the professor of philosophy, retired from Washington University in St. Louis, has published ten collections of essays and criticism between 1970 and 2012. Conversations with William H. Gass, a compendium of just some of his copious interviews, was released by University Press of Mississippi in 2003.
This paper will deal with Gass’s concept of narrative structure that he refers to as layering, his views on characterization, and his sense of morality’s proper place in fiction.
In Middle C, via the novel’s singular focus, music professor Joseph Skizzen, Gass demonstrates the narrative elements he believes to be essential to great fiction, but also the ones that have prevented him from being a best-selling author—though they have garnered him numerous honors and accolades, including the American Book Award for The Tunnel, a ponderous novel twenty-six years in the writing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Though not a musician himself, Gass has long been fascinated with musical composition and has tried to structure his novels as if they were orchestral arrangements. More important, Gass’s nonlinear structural technique that he refers to as layering mimics musical composition, he believes, because the goal of a great novel is to affect the reader as a whole creation: “[T]he linear element in fiction is inescapable and must be dealt with, used just as it is in music, but there are other elements too, equally important. So I have a kind of view of a work as being layered: certain layers, or certain aspects of it, are nonlinear and certain aspects are linear. Then what becomes interesting is the tension, the contrasts, contradictions between the layers” (Janssens 60-61).
The result of layering is a narrative that shifts relentlessly between Skizzen’s childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and beyond to nearing retirement age, forcing readers to acquire their temporal bearings with each new section. It is useful that each phase of Skizzen’s life tends to take place in a distinct setting with different casts of characters (except for the professor’s mother, Miriam, as she is a constant throughout). Gass also provides some assistance in how he references Skizzen as either Joey or Joseph, but ultimately the two names appear side by side in the novel as if the young and old versions of his character become conjoined twins and experience the world through dual perceptions.
The merciless shifting in time is due to the thematic elements in the book. Gass writes in “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” “But there are some points in a narrative which remain relatively fixed; we may depart from them, but soon we return, as music returns to its theme” (49). In The Tunnel, Gass employed a twelve-part structure suggestive of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone pattern. “That is how I began working out the way for the various themes to come in and out,” said Gass. “It’s layered that way too” (Kaposi 135). In Middle C, Gass has returned to the concept of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system but even more overtly. For one thing, Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, like Alan Berg and Anton Webern, are discussed at various points in the novel via Professor Skizzen’s lectures; and Skizzen himself effects the aura of a Viennese intellectual, reflective of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School of musical composers. Also, throughout the novel Skizzen wrestles with a sentence, or series of sentences, having to do with the destructive nature of the human race, as he continually composes the thought, critiques it, and revises it. Skizzen believes he is on the right track when he writes the sentence in twelve beats, and near the end of the novel he feels he has the sentence perfect:
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
The Professor sums up his perfect creation: “Twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hours from twilight to dawn” (352). Gass, through his narrator, does not discuss the sentence’s direct correlation to the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone system, but it does match it exactly. The twelve-tone system has four parts, described as Prime—Retrograde—Inverse—Retrograde Inverse. As such, the primacy of “First Skizzen felt” is represented literally with the word First, while “mankind must perish” suggests the retrograde movement of the species from existence to extinction. “Then he feared” marks the inverse of Skizzen’s initial impression, and “it might survive” is the retrograde inverse because it reverses his belief that mankind will become extinct and concludes that it will actually persist.
In a microcosmic sense, Skizzen’s capturing of the perfect expression of his fears about the human race reflect Gass’s overarching strategy of novel composition, which he expressed in a 2012 Tin House interview: “You want to organize and make sense out of it on a conceptual level as well as a physical, or musical, level. And indeed, a spatial level. Like a parking garage, there are a bunch of levels” (Gerke 41). On the page, Gass, as he often has, uses typographical features to suggest the multilayered nature of Skizzen’s expression, by indenting, tabbing and boldfacing the words, so that visually they draw attention to their deeper meanings and associations. This evolving thought about humanity is associated with another reoccurring element in the novel, Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum, which is a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings, and handwritten notecards that detail horrific human actions:
The gothic house he and his mother shared had several attic rooms, and Joseph Skizzen had decided to devote one of them to the books and clippings that composed his other hobby: the Inhumanity Museum. . . . Sometimes he changed the [name] placard to an announcement that called it the Apocalypse Museum. . . . Daily, he would escape his sentence to enter yesterday’s clippings into the scrapbooks that constituted the continuing record. (55)
And just as Gass returns to the evolving sentence throughout the novel, he also references the Inhumanity Museum and its growing record of atrocities. Hence, the motif of humans’ inhumanity to other humans demonstrates one of Gass’s other important theories about fictional narrative: that anything can be a character and people don’t make for the most interesting ones. He writes, “Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached. [. . . A]nything, indeed, which serves as a fixed point like a stone in a stream or that soap in Bloom’s pocket, functions as a character” (“The Concept of Character” 49, 50). Perhaps Gass’s interest in developing ideas as characters and not people stems from his most fundamental affections. In the Tin House interview, he acknowledged that he “hate[s] the species” and aligns himself with Spinoza’s advocacy of “lov[ing] ideas” (Gerke 33, 36). People, he says, are less trustworthy than objects, and the singular focus of Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, reflects that lack of trustworthiness in that the music professor is a complete fraud who constructs his career, and his very life, from forged documents and fabricated CVs.
Gass said that Skizzen was based on a real history professor at Wooster College in Ohio who was living under a false identity and on the run from both the English and Canadian authorities. Gass remarked, “I want to talk about—or deal with—somebody who’s a counterfeit of that sort. Professor Skizzen obtains his position with false CVs [. . .] but he gradually expands his dreamland to include the classes he starts to teach” (Gerke 37-8). Skizzen’s falseness even extends to his supposed admiration of Schoenberg, whom he chose as a pet topic because no one knew much about him. Perhaps Skizzen’s irreverent strategy reflects to some degree Gass’s own choice of Schoenberg’s twelve-part system to use as a controlling structure for his fiction. In writing criticism, Gass had to stay within the boundaries of expectation, he said, but for his fiction, which has been more important to him, “there are no expectations, there is no job to fulfill,” allowing him “to be more outrageous, or daring” (32).
Gass’s emphases in Middle C on inhumane behavior and on Skizzen’s profound falseness represent another of his theories about artistic, versus popular, writing. On the one hand, Gass has said that significant novels need to be about significant themes. In the essay “Fiction and the Figures of Life,” Gass writes, “[T]he form and method of metaphor are very much like the form and method of the novel. . . . [T]he artist is able to organize whole areas of human thought and feeling, and to organize them concretely, giving to his model the quality of sensuous display.” He goes on,
[T]hen imagine the Oriental deviousness, the rich rearrangement, the endless complications of the novel conceived as I suggest it should be, as a monumental metaphor, a metaphor we move at length through, the construction of a mountain with its views, a different, figured history to stretch beside our own, a brand-new ordering both of the world and our understanding. (68-9)
Yet this world-altering effect must be executed via mundane plot details. Gass said, “. . . I want to avoid as much as possible situations, extreme situations whose reality is strong because then the reader is reading it like a newspaper or something. If you’re going to write aesthetically about it, you have to defuse its power in order to get anybody to pay any attention to the nature of the prose” (Gerke 42-3). He said that “ninety percent of bad literature” was due to writers focusing on the sensational act itself, the part of real life that is “quite shattering, or pornographic, or whatever. And it isn’t art” (43). As such, Professor Skizzen’s achievement of the perfect twelve-part sentence about humans’ inhumanity acts as a kind of climax for Middle C, and Skizzen’s feared defrocking, which occupies the final pages of the novel, is a sort of anticlimax juxtaposed against the truly climactic narrative event.
This avoidance of the extreme situation has been practiced by Gass ever since his very first written narrative, from about 1951, the novella “The Pedersen Kid,” which carefully sidesteps descriptions of child abuse, molestation, kidnapping, rape and murder, leaving them merely implied on the fringes of the plot. And in The Tunnel, Gass’s most ambitious work, the Holocaust remains in the background while the novel’s protagonist secretly digs a hole to nowhere in his basement.
Gass is in his ninetieth year, and it’s all but certain that he will not write any other novels. He’s said that more novellas, stories, essays and literary criticism could be forthcoming, so Middle C may well be his closing argument in his famous debate with John Gardner, who died in 1982. Gass and Gardner’s debate regarding the chief aim of fiction was often carried out in private, but it also became very public, being transcribed in various interviews and even fictionalized by Larry McCaffery in The Literary Review as a Point-Counterpoint-style “confrontation” (135). At the risk of oversimplifying their positions … Gardner believed that literature’s highest calling was to put forward a moral, life-affirming message, while Gass believed that literature’s highest calling was to be something beautiful, a work of linguistic art. Gass said in a 1978 interview, “There is a fundamental divergence about what literature is. I don’t want to subordinate beauty to truth and goodness. John and others have values which they think are important. Beauty, after all, is not very vital for people. I think it is very important . . .” (LeClair 55). Gardner’s view was that “you create in the reader’s mind a vivid and continuous dream . . . living a virtual life, making moral judgments in a virtual state” (49-50).
More than a decade after Gardner’s death, with the publication of The Tunnel, whose narrator, history professor Frederick Kohler, seems to sympathize with the Nazis, Gass was still clarifying his position on morality versus art in literature. He said that his “position [had] been frequently misunderstood, almost invariably” (Kaposi 122). He went on,
Ethical, political, and social concerns will be present in every writer’s work at every point. The question is not that; the question is how you write about them. . . . My view is that you don’t judge a work to be beautiful because it’s morally uplifting or tells the truth about things. And it’s perfectly possible for a work to be beautiful and not tell the truth, and in fact to be morally not a very nice thing. Ideally of course it would be all these things at once. (122)
Unlike Kohler, Joseph Skizzen is clearly appalled by human behavior, like the Holocaust. In his lectures on Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron, Skizzen contemplates how Jews were able to reconcile “the Almighty’s malevolence . . . a punishment long in coming and therefore most deserved” (209). Thus, in the context of a novel in which nothing much happens, certainly nothing earthshattering, Gass interjects significant moral issues, especially involving humakind’s inhumane treatment of itself. In The Tunnel, Gass created a character and a book who were “morally not a very nice thing,” and it seemed to distract many readers from its artfulness, its literary beauty. In a 1998 interview, Gass responded to critic Robert Atler’s assertion that The Tunnel was an immoral book because of the way it treated the Holocaust by saying that it must be “to some sorts of reader an immoral book. I want it to be for them. I want it misread in a certain way by certain people. It’s for me the proof in the pudding” (Abowitz 144). Gass said that he considers Middle C “a much lighter” book (Gerke 38), even though he deals with many of the same issues as in The Tunnel. What makes it seem lighter, perhaps, is the first-person narrator’s posture toward atrocities like the Holocaust.
In the end, then, Gass has found a way to create a work of literary art while also taking the higher moral ground that his friend John Gardner advocated. Gardner said in 1978 that his “ambition in life is to outlive Bill Gass and change all of his books” (LeClair 55)—maybe he managed to change Gass’s final novel from beyond the grave.
Gass is adamant that he’s written his last novel as a matter of practicality—after all, eighteen years elapsed between The Tunnel and Middle C (“I can’t live forever,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)—but he’s working on a collection of essays, a collection short stories (alluded to in the mid-1990s and still not complete apparently), and he’s planning another novella or two.
Let me end on a personal and professional note: I’m planning to edit a series of books on Gass’s work through Twelve Winters Press, and about a week ago I put out a call for submissions (of abstracts) for the first anthology, titled Critical Perspectives on William H. Gass: The Novellas. Please visit TwelveWinters.com/submissions for details and to access the submissions portal. You can also follow my 12 Winters Blog and ReadingGass.org for updates on the project.
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” 1998. Ammon 142-48.
Ammon, Theodore G., ed. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
Gass, William H. “The Concept of Character in Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 34-54. Print.
—. “In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 55-76. Print.
—. Middle C. New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.
—. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 2000. 3-26. Print.
Gerke, Greg. “Many-Layered Anger: A Conversation with William Gass.” Tin House 14.2 (Dec. 2012): 30-45. Print.
Janssens, G. A. M. “An Interview with William Gass.” 1979. Ammon 56-70.
Kaposi, Idiko. “A Talk with William H. Gass.” 1995. Ammon 120-37.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate on Fiction.” 1978. Ammon 46-55.
McCaffery, Larry. “The Gass-Gardner Debate: Showdown on Main Street.” The Literary Review 23.1 (fall 1979): 134-144. Print.
William H. Gass’s “Very Cold Winter”
In celebration of the release of William H. Gass’s novel Middle C, I decided to post a couple of the conference papers I’ve presented on Gass’s work in recent years–something I’ve been meaning to do but have put off for one reason or another. Following is the paper I presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in 2012 as part of the PsyArt Foundation panel, chaired by Andrew Gordon, “William H. Gass’s ‘Very Cold Winter’: The Trauma of the Fallout Shelter Frenzy as Expressed in The Tunnel.”
William H. Gass’s “Very Cold Winter”:
The Trauma of the Fallout Shelter Frenzy as Expressed in The Tunnel
William H. Gass’s long and densely postmodern novel The Tunnel, which won the American Book Award in 1996, has perplexed both casual readers and literary critics, whose reactions and readings have varied widely, to say the least. Indeed, H. L. Hix, author of Understanding William H. Gass, writes that the “early responses [of which there were many] ranged from wildly enthusiastic to contemptuous” (77). Moreover, not only is The Tunnel an odd novel—bringing together just about every postmodern trope (“cram[med] together like [rush-hour] commuters,” Gass has said [Ziegler 14])—but its writing and publishing history is equally strange in the saga of American letters as Gass worked on the project for nearly thirty years, publishing excerpts from it in literary journals, commercial periodicals, and as small-press monograms on nineteen occasions from 1969 to 1988. Regardless of whether their opinion fell on the “wildly enthusiastic” or the “contemptuous” end of the spectrum, most critics agreed that The Tunnel warranted multiple readings and extensive excavation. When that work has been undertaken, Irving Malin has conjectured that Gass’s magnum opus will be hailed, along with Nabokov’s Pale Fire, as “the most significant novel written since World War II” (11).
Hence, with pick and shovel in hand, I arrive bearing some finds from the dig—a dig, by the way, which has not been especially extensive thus far: A review of the MLA International Database yielded only 30 articles dealing with The Tunnel since its publication, and the majority were generated by the same handful of Gass devotees. What’s more, apparently there have been no scholarly publications on The Tunnel in nearly seven years. Perhaps because Gass himself has been so concerned with language (especially metaphor, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, completed at Cornell in 1954), the readings of his work have often focused on its textual complexities, and only a very few have treated The Tunnel, especially, as an expression of trauma. And if traumatic experience is cited as a wellspring of Gass’s writing, it is generally his well-known miserable childhood that is named as the culprit. In fact, Hix’s essential understanding of Gass is that he “writes to get even for his childhood, his resentment for which he has clearly stated” (1). However, no one seems to have noticed that Gass’s writing career falls perfectly in line with the extreme anxiety caused in Western culture by the United States’ unleashing of atomic weapons and the initiation of the Cold War—events about which Gass has written directly numerous times. What is more, no one that I’ve read has made the, what I consider, obvious connection between the fact that Gass began writing The Tunnel at the height of the U.S.’s fallout shelter frenzy, which was initiated, according to Kenneth D. Rose, in 1961 by John F. Kennedy’s Berlin speech, wherein the President called for an aggressive shelter-building program in response to the Soviet Union’s threats that there would be war if the West did not withdraw from the German capital. Kennedy’s response to Khrushchev was “Then let there be war, Mr. Chairman. It’s going to be a very cold winter” (2).
Given the publishing history of the The Tunnel, not to mention the brevity of this presentation, I’m going to focus my analysis on the first two sections of the novel to appear in print—“We Have Not Lived the Right Life” in New American Review in 1969, and “Why Windows Are Important To Me” in TriQuarterly in 1971—and I’m also going to draw from a paper I presented at the conference in 2010 which provides my study’s trauma-theory underpinnings. That paper, which looks more broadly at the effects of the threat of nuclear annihilation on Gass’s writing, particularly his classic short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” is posted on my blog.
First, however, it’s necessary to reflect on the fallout shelter phenomenon and its myriad effects on the American people’s psyches—effects that I believe often manifest themselves in Gass’s narrative in which the first-person protagonist, history professor William Kohler, goes to his basement to write the final piece of his masterwork on Nazi Germany, thirty years in the making, but instead begins a meandering autobiography of his painful childhood, lackluster career, and loveless marriage; and, meanwhile, for reasons that are never quite clear, Kohler starts digging a surreptitious and superfluous tunnel behind his basement furnace. While Kennedy’s 1961 speech may mark the beginning of the United States’ frenzy over fallout shelter-building, it was the previous administration, under Eisenhower, that first broached the topic. For about a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government and consequently its people were able to convince themselves that nuclear warfare wasn’t all that different from more traditional forms of warfare; however, atomic tests in the mid-fifties demonstrated just how catastrophic a nuclear attack could be on the United States. Ralph Lapp, civil defense editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote in 1954 that “the new peril from radioactive fall-out is more than just a threat to civil defense—it is a peril to humanity” (Rose 25-26). In the following issue of the Bulletin, Val Peterson, Eisenhower’s chief civil defense administrator, was quoted as saying that life after a nuclear war would “be stark, elemental, brutal, filthy, and miserable [. . . a] kind of hell” that no one was prepared for (26).
At first, the Eisenhower administration promoted the idea of a government-led program to build fallout shelters in cities throughout the country, but when the estimated costs proved astronomical and the logistics all but impossible, they shifted their emphasis to home-based shelter projects undertaken by private citizens. In spite of efforts to publicize the dangers of nuclear fallout and to cast home shelter-building as an act of patriotism, a 1960 Senate subcommittee study concluded that “few shelters of any description have been constructed in the United States” (Rose 35). However, Kennedy’s Berlin speech a year later dramatically changed national sentiment as it “was made in an atmosphere of crisis and produced an immediate public clamoring for information on how citizens could protect themselves and their families” (37). Responding to this public sentiment, a tidal wave of published material (both factual and fictive, and some a confusing hybrid of each) kept the topics of nuclear annihilation and fallout shelter-building fresh in the American psyche for years to come. As Rose puts it, of possibly “great[est] significance were the numerous nuclear apocalyptic scenarios that appeared in the mainstream magazines and newspapers, often incorporated as part of a feature story on the fallout shelter controversy [. . . as] these descriptions would reach a very wide swath of the public” (40).
The controversy as it quickly emerged was multifaceted, to put it lightly, but in brief it consisted of questions like the following: How would a typical homeowner go about building and supplying a fallout shelter for his family? Could a well-built shelter truly protect a family from the initial bombing and from radioactive fallout? Would a homeowner be prepared to use deadly force against ill-prepared friends and neighbors wanting inside his shelter at the moment of crisis? Would a postapocalyptic life be worth living even if one did survive in the shelter? Was building a shelter courageously patriotic or was it a cowardly act in direct opposition to the American fighting spirit? How would a community that had survived essentially intact respond to homeless and desperate refugees arriving from neighboring towns and cities? Were the shelter-building and -supplying businessmen who suddenly appeared on the landscape genuine professionals who had their clients’ best interests at heart, or were they conmen out to make a quick dollar off of people’s fears and confusion (many swimming-pool builders, for example, recast themselves as fallout-shelter experts)?
Before looking at Gass’s narrative in more detail, let me draw upon my earlier work for a brief discussion of literary trauma theory. In a writers’ symposium on postmodern literature held at Brown University in 1989, Robert Coover, in his welcoming remarks, gave the impression that the writing style which became known as postmodernism sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s almost by sheer coincidence; essentially that individuals writing in isolation on various continents just all happened to begin writing in the same sorts of ways, all in a narrow time span of about fifteen years. According to Coover, writers, with virtual simultaneity, decided to abandon modernist realism for something fragmented, repetitive, largely unrealistic and illogical, and highly intertextual.
A more cogent explanation, I believe, rests with trauma theory: The trauma of the nuclear age, which was experienced by the entirety of Western culture (not to mention Eastern), affected the psyches of these writers in a way that resulted in postmodern literary style—a style, according to theorists like Anne Whitehead, Cathy Caruth, and Laura Di Prete, that reflects the traumatized voice. Meanwhile, historians Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell have made several provocative assertions regarding twentieth-century zeitgeist as it suddenly evolved after the Second World War. For example, Americans were deeply and immediately conflicted with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; that is, they experienced the “contradictory emotions of approval and fear the bomb evoked, a combination that has continued to disturb and confuse Americans ever since” (33). And all of this internal conflict, much of which resides in the unconscious, has contributed to a “sense of the world as deeply absurd and dangerous” (335).
In not recognizing the emergence of postmodern literary style as being connected to the nuclear age, it is quite possible that Coover and the other postmodernists at the Brown University symposium experienced the same sort of repression and dissociation that individual trauma victims frequently do. It is not uncommon for people suffering the symptomology of posttraumatic stress disorder to have no conscious recollection whatsoever of the traumatizing event, or to have a dissociated recollection. Coover also discussed writing as “a kind of therapy.” He said, “There are things you have to work your way through. There are issues that have to be confronted[. . . .] So you work that out in fictional forms, and you do feel that Freudian answer, that kind of power over what would otherwise be your impotent life” (“‘Nothing’” 242). Hence Coover recognized the unsettling cultural climate of post-Hiroshima America and how it contributed to narrative style; also, his view of writing-as-therapy is consistent with trauma theorists who suggest that postmodern techniques are akin to victims’ struggling to transform traumatic memory into narrative memory.
In his examination of the apocalyptic temper in the American novel, Joseph Dewey theorizes about the literary community’s response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he describes as “slow in coming.” Dewey writes, “[T]he literary conscience of America did not seem ready in the 1940s and even in the 1950s to engage the menace of the mushroom cloud” (8). At first, writers, along with the rest of their culture, experienced a “psychic numbing [. . .] in the face of such catastrophe.” In the ’50s, notes Dewey, “the American literary community pondered the bomb only in tentative ways.” He references “a glut of forgettable speculative fiction” that appeared during the decade. In the early ’60s, however, “the American novel began to work with the implications of the nuclear age” (9). Dewey speculates that the Cuban Missile Crisis—“the nuclear High Noon over Cuba”—may have acted as a catalyst for writers in general to “begin to think about the unthinkable.” Dewey does not approach his subject in this way, but he seems to be accounting for the dual starting point for American postmodern literary style, which some trace to the mid-1940s and others to the ’60s. Nor does Dewey tend to speak in psychological terms, but he seems to be suggesting that American writers were by and large repressing the atomic blasts for nearly two decades, until nuclear Armageddon loomed in 1962, which caused the cultural literary psyche to begin to confront the source of its trauma, if only dissociatively. The scenario that Dewey suggests corresponds with the way many individuals respond to a traumatic event. Perhaps the fear of nuclear Apocalypse was part of the American psyche since 1945, but it seemed unreal until 1962’s standoff with Cuba and its ally the Soviet Union. It is also useful to note that groups—entire nations even—can respond to trauma just as individuals do. In fact, Neil J. Smelser, in his work on cultural trauma in particular, notes that societies can undergo a delayed response to trauma akin to the Freudian notion of a breakdown in repression, which “only succeeded in incubating, not obliterating the threat”—though he qualifies the analogy as not being perfect (Alexander et al. 51).
I’ll note that while Rose and Dewey are offering different years, 1961 versus 1962, as the catalytic year for American culture’s traumatic response to atomic annihilation, they are both citing the same source: the sudden heating up of the Cold War.
While evidence of a link between post-Hiroshima trauma and postmodern technique can be found, with greater or lesser conspicuousness, in the work of all writers who occupy the established pantheon of postmodernists, I think the connective tissue is most apparent in the fiction of William H. Gass, one of the writers at the Brown symposium, and, interestingly, the writer Coover called “our real living biographer of the human mind” (242). In his work, which was begun in the early 1950s (when Gass was in his late twenties) but did not start to appear in print consistently until the 1960s, Gass often alludes to trauma and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (though not specifically by these labels), and he cites directly and indirectly the nuclear age as the source of widespread anxiety. As noted earlier, Gass’s childhood was, by his own description, miserable, raised by an alcoholic mother and an agonistic father; and one could certainly point to these influences for his prose’s negativity. There is no question that these facts have affected Gass’s writing, much of which is overtly autobiographical; however, I believe that the Cold War zeitgeist had an even greater impact on his storytelling. One might even conjecture that the insecurities caused by Gass’s childhood made the fear associated with that zeitgeist even more potent. The psychological community has long recognized that individuals respond differently to trauma due to a variety of factors, including their mental health when they experience the trauma, and even their genetic predisposition to dealing with traumatic stress.
Now, in the brief time remaining, to look at some of Gass’s text. The paper that I presented in 2010, which I’ve archived at my blog, deals with apocalyptic images in Gass—mushroom-cloud shapes, cyclones, extreme heat, deadly winds, and in general destruction raining down from above—and such images are certainly abundant in early excerpts from The Tunnel. To bring my discussion from above to below ground, I’ll draw attention to a snatch of song lyric that is frequently repeated in 1969’s “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” in which a crow represents death. The narrator, William Kohler (“Kohler,” by the way, is German for miner), recalls the song from his youth, and the line goes, “Crow—O crow— / don’t cross my path, / so my life lasts / a little longer” (8 et al.). This notion of extending life “a little longer” was central to the fallout shelter issue: Would a shelter merely extend life for a few weeks or months as survivors of atomic attack would eventually have to come above ground, only to die from residual radiation or starvation? The song continues, “Crow—O crow— / each time you pass, / my sickness grows / a little stronger” (10, 12). The song continues with images of protracted and painful death. There are references to enclosure throughout this early published excerpt, especially enclosure within one’s own or another’s body, but the imagery becomes most concentrated late in the piece when Kohler contemplates his sitting in his basement day after day pondering and writing about his wasted life. He says, “I know there are worse ways of living—deeper, darker, damper dungeons—than my own. [. . .] And yet I hold my head and groan and wish these books had fallen in upon me years ago” (30). Furthermore, he posits that “a man who brings his own walls with him is in prison”—perhaps reflective on some level of the fact that the United States has brought this dilemma upon itself with its creation of and unleashing of atomic weapons. This reading is bolstered by other elements in the text that I don’t have time to discuss here.
Instead, I’d like to look at “Why Windows Are Important to Me,” published in 1971, which is even thicker with images of enclosure and the complex psychology associated with becoming hidden. In this excerpt, Kohler discusses his obsession with “trenches, castles, dugouts, outposts, [and] graves” (58), relating several episodes from his childhood and early adult years in which he either created hiding places or discovered such places behind walls and inside maintenance shafts. Kohler describes “that powerful out of the world feeling” (61) he experienced whenever he hid away because, when not hiding, the world of “out there” made him “an ordinary mortal” and “erod[ed him] like rain” (60). Here is a lengthy passage about the “bliss” of hiding that is especially rich in ambiguity when examined closely:
[To hide is t]o enter yourself so completely that you’re like a peeled-off glove; to become to the world invisible, entirely out of touch, no longer defined by the eyes of others, unanswering to anyone; to go away with such utterness behind a curtain or beneath a tented table, in the unfamiliar angles of an attic or the menace of a basement; to be swallowed by a chest or hamper as the whale-god swallowed Jonah, and then to find yourself alive, and even well, in the belly of your own being—in a barn loft, under a porch, anywhere out of the mob’s middle distance like a Stuart Little, a Tom Thumb, or a Tinker Bell—unnoticed and therefore all the more noticing [. . .] to go supremely away like this was to re-enter through another atmosphere [. . .] (57)
Here we get the joy of hiding and surviving, and even the sense of superiority that those who hide feel over those who are not hidden, characterized as a “mob.” To hide is a kind of mystical experience by which one comes to fully understand oneself. Yet there is also present in the passage a sense of extreme isolation and alienation from the world, and there is the frightful image of being swallowed; moreover, we note that of all the hiding places mentioned the only underground one, the basement, is also the only one overtly described negative, as menacing in fact. It is also interesting that when Kohler hides he feels tiny—like Stuart Little, Tom Thumb, Tinker Bell—perhaps suggestive of the cowardliness that many associated with shelter-building. Finally, I’ll point out the idea of transcendence, that via hiding one seems to enter an entirely new realm: maybe the difference between the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds shelter-builders would experience. In fact, the word bliss itself carries with it the notion of transcendence in addition to simply being joyful—but of course to transcend into bliss, one must die.
In this paper I have only begun to scratch the surface of a rich vein in William H. Gass’s writing—indeed a vein that runs throughout American postmodern literature. In my way of thinking, it’s no coincidence that the vogue of postmodernism fizzled with the end of the Cold War. That is to say, the reading public and publishers in general seemed to suddenly change their tastes, and stopped being attracted to the tropes of postmodern literary style when the threat of nuclear Armageddon no longer seemed imminent. Giants of postmodernism, like Gass and Pynchon, have continued to write as they did in the sixties, seventies and eighties—but honors and accolades, once so numerous, have been far fewer with slumping book sales and contemporary critics who often find them out of step, and perhaps something like curious relics of the Cold War.
Works Cited
Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1990. Print.
Gass, William H. “We Have Not Lived the Right Life.” New American Review 6 (1969): 7-32. Print.
—. “Why Windows Are Important to Me.” The Best of TriQuarterly. Ed. Jonathan Brent. New York: Washington Square P, 1982. 49-69. Print.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Print.
Lifton, Robert Jay, and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995. Print.
Malin, Irving. “Anti-Introduction.” Into The Tunnel: Readings of Gass’s Novel. Ed. Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin. Newark: U of Deleware P, 1998. 11. Print.
“‘Nothing but Darkness and Talk?’: Writers’ Symposium on Traditional Values and Iconoclastic Fiction.” Critique 31.4 (1990): 235-55. Print.
Rose, Kenneth D. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York: New York UP, 2001. Print.
Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 31-59. Print.
In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War
In celebration of the release of William H. Gass’s novel Middle C, I decided to post a couple of the conference papers I’ve presented on Gass’s work in recent years–something I’ve been meaning to do but have put off for one reason or another. Following is the paper I presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in 2010, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War: Cultural Trauma and the Fiction of William H. Gass.”
In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War:
Cultural Trauma and the Fiction of William H. Gass
In a writers’ symposium on postmodern literature held at Brown University in 1989, Robert Coover, in his welcoming remarks, gave the impression that the writing style which became known as postmodernism sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s almost by sheer coincidence. Among the symposium participants were Leslie Fiedler, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, and William Gaddis. Coover said, “[T]his group sought out some form, some means by which to express what seemed to them new realities” (“‘Nothing’” 233). However, Coover goes on to suggest a remarkably thin theory as to why so many writers, all working in relative isolation, began constructing narrative in uncannily similar styles:
We felt we were all alone. No one was reading us, nor was anyone writing remotely like the sort of writing we were doing until, in the little magazines, we began slowly to discover one another. Few of us knew one another at the time we began writing. There was a uniform feeling among writers at that time that something had to change, something had to break, some structure had to go. And that was, I think, what most united us.
Even though the panel was intended to be a debate, and not merely a discussion, not a single writer challenged Coover’s explanation for the emergence of postmodern style. At first this assessment may seem startling—that some of the keenest and best-educated minds who were at the forefront of producing and (many) critiquing literary postmodernism accepted the premise that postmodern narrative style more or less just happened; essentially that individuals writing in isolation on various continents, including North and South America, and Europe, just all happened to begin writing in the same sorts of ways, all in a narrow time span, from about 1950 to 1965. According to Coover, writers, with virtual simultaneity, decided to abandon modernist realism for something fragmented, repetitive, largely unrealistic and illogical, and highly intertextual.
A more cogent explanation, I believe, rests with trauma theory: The trauma of the nuclear age, which was experienced by the entirety of Western culture (not to mention Eastern), affected the psyches of these writers in a way that resulted in postmodern literary style—a style, according to theorists like Anne Whitehead, Cathy Caruth, and Laura Di Prete, that reflects the traumatized voice. Meanwhile, historians Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell have made several provocative assertions regarding twentieth-century zeitgeist as it suddenly evolved after the Second World War. One is that the “[s]truggles with the Hiroshima narrative have to do with a sense of meaning in a nuclear age, with our vision of America and our sense of ourselves” (xvi). Another is that Americans were deeply and immediately conflicted with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that they experienced the “contradictory emotions of approval and fear the bomb evoked, a combination that has continued to disturb and confuse Americans ever since” (33). A third assertion is that “[o]dinary people [. . .] experienced their own post-Hiroshima entrapment—mixtures of nuclearism and nuclear terror, of weapons advocacy and fearful anticipation of death and extinction” (306). And all of this internal conflict, much of which resides in the unconscious, has contributed to a “sense of the world as deeply absurd and dangerous” (335).
It is quite possible that Coover and the other postmodernists at the Brown University symposium experienced the same sort of repression and dissociation that individual trauma victims frequently do. It is not uncommon for people suffering the symptomology of posttraumatic stress disorder to have no conscious recollection whatsoever of the traumatizing event, or to have a dissociated recollection. Coover also discussed writing as “a kind of therapy.” He said, “There are things you have to work your way through. There are issues that have to be confronted[. . . .] So you work that out in fictional forms, and you do feel that Freudian answer, that kind of power over what would otherwise be your impotent life” (242). Hence Coover recognized the unsettling cultural climate of post-Hiroshima America and how it contributed to narrative style; also, his view of writing-as-therapy is consistent with trauma theorists who suggest that postmodern techniques are akin to victims’ struggling to transform traumatic memory into narrative memory.
In his examination of the apocalyptic temper in the American novel, Joseph Dewey theorizes about the literary community’s response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he describes as “slow in coming.” Dewey writes, “[T]he literary conscience of America did not seem ready in the 1940s and even in the 1950s to engage the menace of the mushroom cloud” (8). At first, writers, along with the rest of their culture, experienced a “psychic numbing [. . .] in the face of such catastrophe.” In the ’50s, notes Dewey, “the American literary community pondered the bomb only in tentative ways.” He references “a glut of forgettable speculative fiction” that appeared during the decade. In the early ‘60s, however, “the American novel began to work with the implications of the nuclear age” (9). Dewey speculates that the Cuban Missile Crisis—“the nuclear High Noon over Cuba”—may have acted as a catalyst for writers in general to “begin to think about the unthinkable.” Dewey does not approach his subject in this way, but he seems to be accounting for the dual starting point for American postmodern literary style, which some trace to the mid 1940s and others to the ’60s. Nor does Dewey tend to speak in psychological terms, but he seems to be suggesting that American writers were by and large repressing the atomic blasts for nearly two decades, until nuclear Armageddon loomed in 1962, which caused the cultural literary psyche to begin to confront the source of its trauma, if only dissociatively. The scenario that Dewey suggests corresponds with the way many individuals respond to a traumatic event. Perhaps the fear of nuclear Apocalypse was part of the American psyche since 1945, but it seemed unreal until 1962’s standoff with Cuba and its ally the Soviet Union. It is also useful to recall that groups—entire nations even—can respond to trauma just as individuals do. In fact, Neil J. Smelser, in his work on cultural trauma in particular, notes that societies can undergo a delayed response to trauma akin to the Freudian notion of a breakdown in repression, which “only succeeded in incubating, not obliterating the threat”—though he qualifies the analogy as not being perfect (Alexander et al. 51).
While evidence of a link between post-Hiroshima trauma and postmodern technique can be found, with greater or lesser conspicuousness, in the work of all writers who occupy the established pantheon of postmodernists, I think the connective tissue is most apparent in the fiction of William H. Gass, one of the writers at the Brown symposium, and, interestingly, the writer Coover called “our real living biographer of the human mind” (242). In his work, which was begun in the early 1950s (when Gass was in his late twenties) but did not start to appear in print consistently until the 1960s, Gass often alludes to trauma and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (though not specifically by these labels), and he cites directly and indirectly the nuclear age as the source of widespread anxiety. It must be stated upfront that Gass’s childhood was, by his own description, miserable, raised by an alcoholic mother and an agonistic father; and one could certainly point to these influences for his prose’s negativity. There is no question that these facts have affected Gass’s writing, much of which is overtly autobiographical; however, I believe that the Cold War zeitgeist had an even greater impact on his storytelling. One might even conjecture that the insecurities caused by Gass’s childhood made the fear associated with that zeitgeist even more potent. The psychological community has long recognized that individuals respond differently to trauma due to a variety of factors, including their mental health when they experience the trauma, and even their genetic predisposition to dealing with traumatic stress.
In any event, a good place to begin is Gass’s well-known short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” which appeared in New American Review and then in a collection by the same title in 1968 (though Gass says that it was written much earlier, implying the beginning of the decade (Bellamy 39)). The oddly and disjointedly segmented story features a disillusioned poet-teacher narrator living in a small Indiana town, called simply “B,” a town which represents (it has been widely noted and in fact acknowledged by Gass) W. B. Yeats’s Byzantium from the poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927). The short story has generated a fair amount of critical attention over the past forty years, and much of that criticism examines the psychological underpinnings of the narrative. In one of the earliest studies, in 1973, Frederick Busch writes, “[Gass’s poet-narrator] is caught in the heart of the country, he is fallen. And the country he has come to is his mind. [. . .] This little story is a saga of the mind” (99, 100). Similarly, Charlotte Byrd Hadella says that the “narrator/poet is miserable, lonely, and lost in a fragmented world, much like the world of Eliot’s The Waste Land, because he fails to participate fully in either art or life” (49). As such, “the narrator has left one world and entered another—the world of his own imagination.” What is more, Hadella claims that “[w]ith the fragmented structure of his story, Gass conveys a subliminal message of isolation, loneliness, and departmentalized perception of his narrator” (50). Both critics are unwittingly keying on psychological components of the story that are mimetic of posttraumatic stress disorder—the unbidden merging of real and unreal worlds, profound feelings of disconnectedness with one’s self and others.
These analyses are useful to be sure, and in fact I want to look at some of the same passages in the story that these critics cite, but I believe even more can be gleaned from the story via a trauma-theory paradigm. Given the insightfulness of these critics’ observations, I am struck by an omission that they and other commentators have committed in their readings of the narrative. No one has paid any attention whatsoever to a passage that I see as key to understanding the narrator’s disjointed psyche. In a section subtitled “Politics,” the narrator criticizes his fellow townspeople (and Americans in general I would say) by stating, “I have known men [. . .] who for years have voted squarely against their interests. Nor have I ever noticed that their surly Christian views prevented them from urging forward the smithereening, say, of Russia, China, Cuba, or Korea” (197). Here the narrator makes direct reference to using nuclear weapons against Cold War enemies—attacks which would be squarely against American interests (as it would provoke retaliation, including nuclear retaliation) and which contradict the Christian morality that the majority of Americans claim to advocate. This atomic-bombing reference does not come out of the blue, so to speak. In an earlier section also subtitled “Politics,” the narrator alludes to “the Russians [. . .] launching [. . .] their satellite” (186), and in “Education” he says that at school “children will be taught to read and warned against Communism” (187). Taking into account these Cold War references, the narrator’s disposition and the townspeople he describes sound very much like the divided, post-Hiroshima psyches that Lifton and Mitchell discuss: “By the 1960s, Americans were living a nuclear ‘double life’: aware that any moment each of us and everything around us could be suddenly annihilated, yet at the same time proceeding with our everyday, nitty-gritty lives and conducting ‘business as usual’” (351). Americans, in short, were divided in two, with their measured self (which was interested in making a comfortable and meaningful life) being in constant conflict with their apocalyptic self (which accepted that the nuclear end was at hand and therefore every action was irrelevant). Hadella is noting this conflicted duality in the story when she writes that “the narrator’s mood is a perpetual winter. The poet/narrator avoids thinking of spring as the season of rebirth and renewal. Thus, even when he does mention spring rain, the rain mentioned is only a memory, and it is not associated with desire or awakening to life” (51). It is as if Gass’s narrator, with his measured self, desires a future (the coming of spring rains), but will not allow himself to believe it will arrive because of his apocalyptic self, the self that envisions a spring rain that causes “the trees [to] fill with ice” (181).
Hadella’s careful study is mainly concerned with Gass’s use of weather imagery, especially winter. In the context I am framing, the winter and its snow become even more psychologically significant as mimetic of a nuclear winter and its radioactive (or dirty) snow. Before looking at winter/snow references in way of support, I want to turn to the “Weather” section that describes a summer heatwave in B as Gass uses language suggestive, I think, of a nuclear blast. The passage is lengthy but well worth examining:
In the summer light, too, the sky darkens a moment when you open your eyes. The heat is pure distraction. Steeped in our fluids, miserable in the folds of our bodies, we can scarcely think of anything but our sticky parts. Hot cyclonic winds and storms of dust crisscross the country. In many places, given an indifferent push, the wind will still coast for miles, gather resource and edge as it goes, cunning and force. [. . .] Sometimes I think the land is flat because the winds have leveled it, they blow so constantly. In any case, a gale can grow in a field of corn that’s as hot as a draft from hell, and to receive it is one of the most dismaying experiences of this life, though the smart of the same wind in winter is more humiliating, and in that sense even worse. (180-81)
On the one hand, this is a wonderfully apt description of a Midwestern heatwave, but Gass’s language as it relates to a nuclear blast cannot be easily dismissed: melting, even liquefying “bodies”; widespread devastation by “hot cyclonic winds and storms of dust” driven by “cunning and force”; a flattened landscape, “leveled” by “a draft from hell”; a “dismaying” life experience, but the “wind in winter” to follow is in a “sense even worse.” Then there is the winter and its snow that are so closely linked to death. The narrator says, “I would rather it were the weather that was to blame for what I am and what my friends and neighbors are—we who live here in the heart of the country. Better the weather, the wind, the pale dying snow . . . the snow—why not the snow?” (191). Images of winter/snow connected to death continue in this “Weather” section. He says, “Still I suspect the secret’s in this snow, the secret of our sickness, if we could only diagnose it, for we are all dying like the elms in Urbana” (192). The passage ends with the narrator’s assertion “[. . .] what a desert we could make of ourselves—from Chicago to Cairo, from Hammond to Columbus—what beautiful DeathValleys.” Again, viewed through the prism of the Cold War mentality and how the unconscious must have been affected by the sense of impending nuclear doom, it is reasonable that at some level Gass is describing atomic annihilation and the aftermath for those lucky or unlucky enough to survive the attacks.
An important aspect of the conflicted post-Hiroshima psyche is the sense of responsibility and guilt associated with bombing Japan, combined with pride in American resolve and ingenuity, and an acceptance of the “Hiroshima narrative” propaganda that claimed the attack to be necessary, even justified—and Hadella picks up on these vibes in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” as well. She writes, “Through the narrator’s obsessive attention to weather, Gass emphasizes a controlling irony in the story: though the narrator complains about the weather, he is the one who is responsible for the world in which he lives. His complaints suggest that he does not accept this responsibility” (51). Hadella’s analysis reflects to the letter the psychological turmoil Americans found themselves grappling with, according to the research of historians Lifton and Mitchell.
There is much more that could be said of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” (indeed, all of Gass’s work) via a trauma-theory paradigm, but in the interest of time I want to shift my focus to the author’s masterwork, the long and difficult novel The Tunnel, published in 1995 but begun in 1966. The plot of the novel, in a nutshell, involves the narrator, history professor William Kohler, sitting down to write the introduction to his masterwork, a book titled Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, but instead writing a memoir about his unhappy childhood, mediocre career, and loveless marriage. He writes in his basement and at some point, for reasons that are never crystal clear, decides to start digging a tunnel beneath his house to make a surreptitious and superfluous escape. The novel is especially intriguing when viewed through the lens of trauma theory, but in the interest of brevity I’ll focus mainly on a section of The Tunnel that appeared as a stand-alone piece in The Kenyon Review in 1979, titled “The Old Folks”; it was retitled “The Ghost Folks” in a section of the novel (on pages 128-142, Dalkey Archive edition) with few, but significant, changes. Kohler and his wife, Marty/Martha, along with their two sons visit his parents, returning to his childhood home and all of its unpleasant memories and associations. Kohler’s mother is an alcoholic and his father a quarrelsome racist.
The story is set in approximately 1950, and Kohler says that the emotion he feels when he sets foot in his childhood home is rage. When his boys act up, for which he can’t blame them, he says, “[W]hat I need is total obliteration, now—now that we have the bomb, we can all be blown back into our original pieces with one clean disintegration, instead of being pulled apart slowly with dental pliers” (161; 130 in the novel). He goes on to speak of the inevitability of nuclear annihilation, saying that when a child, “I believed in doom in those days. Now, when the world ends, I doubt it will even whimper” (167; 135). Interestingly, the latter sentence, expressing the inevitability of annihilation, is deleted from the novel, which may reflect Gass’s, as well as the country’s, waning certainty that nuclear war with the Soviets was just a matter of time. In fact, direct references to the Second World War, to Japan, to Hiroshima, to the bomb, and so forth are frequent in the first half or so of the novel, and virtually nonexistent in the last half. I am attempting to determine the stages of development of the book, but it seems, at this point, that the overall structure of The Tunnel does follow, by and large, the chronology of Gass’s composing it. This study is aided by the fact that several parts of the book appeared in print as stand-alone pieces over the decades. Also, in a 1971 interview, Gass claimed to have written 300 manuscript pages of The Tunnel (McCauley 11).
The idea of responsibility, especially shared responsibility, for a ruined future (or perhaps no future at all) is expressed in various ways in “The Old Folks.” As Kohler and Marty are traveling with their children to his parents’ home, he says that the children “cannot realize to what profound degree the adults are conspiring against them” (159; 128). Specifically, Kohler is referring to himself and his wife, but much of the story deals with human history on a broad scale, as Kohler mixes in sparring theoretical conversations he’s had with his colleagues in the history department, so there is a sense that humanity in the twentieth century has conspired against itself. Twice in the story, including its opening words, Kohler asks, rhetorically, “Who is not in league?” (159, 172; 128, 139). On the most superficial level, Kohler is suggesting in the first reference that he and his wife are in league against their unsuspecting children. But given the facts that the question is repeated in connection with a conversation between Kohler’s history department colleagues and that Gass’s attention to linguistic nuance is second to none, the iteration is especially provocative. The word league of course means, among other definitions, conspiring with others for questionable purposes; but in the context of the story, league may be suggestive of the League of Nations, formed in 1920 in an effort to strive for world peace. Even though Woodrow Wilson put forward the initial idea, the United States never officially joined the League. So one way of interpreting Kohler’s question may be “Who is not working toward world peace?” and one legitimate answer would be “the United States.” This reading is bolstered by the fact that immediately after the repetition of the question Kohler morbidly describes his colleagues as mere “skulls [whose shadows] drifted across the opaque glass” (172; 139).
My final point concerns the image of the atomic mushroom cloud, which Joseph Dewey calls a representation of “the last crisis in human history,” as “humans [. . . rather than God] would plot, construct, and then execute their own demise” (7). Gass seems to dissociate the mushroom-cloud shape as tornadic rather than atomic, meaning that he often writes of tornadoes, cyclones, and whirlwinds, and of their destructive abilities. Kohler refers frequently to a childhood episode when a tornado passed so near the house that it blew the shattered windows inward. In “The Old Folks,” Kohler refers to himself and his wife as “whirlwinds” who have taken their children from a place of happiness and contentment to set them down here in his parents’ cheerless home (161; 130). More interesting, still, is Kohler’s discussion of a reoccurring nightmare in which he is falling toward the sea, anticipating his own painful death. In the novel, Kohler visually represents his falling—bomb-like—via text that takes the shape of a tornado, or a mushroom cloud:
it was like falling into the sea
to pass that open door
a wind like cold water
space a cold glass
flights of fish
surprise
my nose
my ah!
breath
goes
f
a
s
s
s
t
and all this has happened before (86)
The “terror” of the dream “wakes” Kohler, who feels “as if I were back in the army and my fall were a part of my duty” (85). It seems significant that Kohler connects the image to the military, the arm of the government most associated with the use of atomic weapons. There is no time to develop the idea further, but this tornado/mushroom-cloud shape also seems to represent the process of moving from chaos (life) to entropic order (death) that Kohler alludes to throughout, directly or indirectly, and it also suggests the overall shape of the novel’s narrative structure, as we move from broad, global, historical issues toward an ending section that focuses quite concretely on Kohler’s tunneling project in his basement, and his wife’s discovery of what he’s been doing these many months behind her back.
To bring this to a close, I will remind us that the first-wave of postmodern writers seemed preoccupied with bombs and the act of bombing. A few examples would be Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow; Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night; Heller’s Catch-22; and DeLillo’s Underworld. These and other postmodernists may have been responding to their culture’s traumatized psyche—a psyche that was conflicted between nuclearism and nuclear terror, a psyche that was attempting to move the Hiroshima narrative from traumatic memory to narrative memory, and thus come to terms with what the United States had unleashed on the world . . . and on itself. Kohler seems to conclude that the most optimistic thing that could be said about the bomb is that it “will probably bring neither extermination nor peace, but prolong the life and use of conventional arms” (515)—an idea that he sums up in the limerick:
There was a professor of history
who explained to his class every misery
of our human state:
1 war is man’s fate;
2 hate pays for hate;
3 all help comes too late;
4 our lives don’t relate;
but why this is so stays a mystery. (535)
Works Cited
Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1974. Print.
Busch, Frederick. “But This Is What It Is to Live in Hell: William Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.’” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 97-109. Microfilm.
Dewey, Joseph. In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1990. Print.
Gass, William H. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. 1968. Boston, MA: Godine, 1981. Print.
—. “The Old Folks.” The Best American Short Stories of 1980. Ed. Stanley Elkin. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Print.
—. The Tunnel. 1995. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 2007. Print.
Hadella, Charlotte Byrd. “The Winter Wasteland of William Gass’s ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.’” Critique 30.1 (1998): 49-58. Print.
Lifton, Robert Jay, and Greg Mitchell. Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995. Print.
McCauley, Carole Spearin. “William H. Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass. Ed. Theodore G. Ammon. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Print.
“‘Nothing but Darkness and Talk?’: Writers’ Symposium on Traditional Values and Iconoclastic Fiction.” Critique 31.4 (1990): 235-55. Print.
Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 31-59. Print.
The True Intruder in William H. Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid”
The following paper — “The Trauma of Alcohol Abuse: The True Intruder in William H. Gass’s ‘The Pedersen Kid'” — was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, University of Louisville, Feb. 23, as part of the panel “Barthelme & Gass: Postmodern Fiction,” chaired by Hoang Thi Hue, Hue University, Vietnam. The other presenters on the panel were Nicholas Sloboda, University of Wisconsin-Superior, whose paper was “Image and Textual Play: Adventures in Donald Barthelme’s Alternative and Liminal Narratives”; and Jonathan Imber Shaw, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, whose paper was “Executive Function in Donald Barthelme’s Early Fiction.”
The Trauma of Alcohol Abuse:
The True Intruder in William H. Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid”
Though written in 1951 and therefore constituting one of William H. Gass’s earliest works of fiction, the novella “The Pedersen Kid” did not appear in print until a full decade later in John Gardner’s short-lived journal MSS. This paper is based specifically on the version of the novella that appeared in Gass’s seminal collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country in 1968. The title story of that collection and Gass’s long, dense novel The Tunnel (which appeared in 1995) have received the lion’s share of critical attention over the decades, while discussion of “The Pedersen Kid” has been meager to put it mildly. Some writers have noted the connection between Gass’s well-known miserable childhood—made miserable by Gass’s alcoholic mother and hateful bigot of a father—and the fact that the novella’s first-person protagonist is leading his own miserable life thanks mainly to his abusive and alcoholic “Pa”; but they have failed to go much beyond that obvious surface connection.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest that understanding the trauma of alcohol abuse within the context of a family is key to more fully understanding the enigmatic novella, whose final section in particular has left both casual readers and critics scratching their heads in puzzlement for more than forty years. In fact, Arthur M. Saltzman said that attempting to gain a clear view of the plot is “self-defeating” because “Gass steers us into cul-de-sacs, lets loose ends dangle, and plunges without warning into subjective distortions,” thereby leaving the two most suspenseful narrative questions unresolved and unrelieved (60).
Set in mid twentieth-century North Dakota, at the conclusion of a terrible blizzard, the novella begins with the farmhand Big Hans finding the boy from the neighboring Pedersen farm in the yard unconscious and nearly frozen to death as he apparently walked there through the previous night’s storm. Later, partially revived, the boy tells Big Hans (allegedly) that an intruder broke into their house and forced his parents into the frigid root-cellar, but somehow the boy escaped and managed to make it on foot all the way to the Segren farm in spite of the blizzard. Most of the novella centers around the three males of the Segren family—Big Hans, Pa Segren, and the young narrator (12 or 13?), Jorge Segren—making their way to the Pedersen farm through the frozen landscape to see if the boy’s story is true, though the act is more about Pa’s punishing Hans and Jorge than trying to do a neighbor a good turn; in fact, Pa seems to hate Pedersen even more than he hates everyone else around him, referring to him as a “cock,” a “bastard,” a “fool,” and a “shit”; and blaming Pedersen for every bad turn of events, including the previous summer’s grasshopper infestation and even the previous day’s blizzard.
At the root of Pa’s punishment, in addition to his natural mean-spiritedness, is the fact that some of his precious whiskey was found in what he thought was a secure hiding place and used to resuscitate the Pedersen kid without Pa’s permission. That seems to be the reason he keeps driving them forward, toward the Pedersen farm and its possible danger, in a horse-drawn wagon that can barely make it through the all but impassable roads and fields. The motivation is freshened part way there, when they are all so miserable with cold they are thinking of turning back, Pa’s whiskey bottle falls out of the wagon and is eventually broken by a wagon wheel. Even though he had nothing to do with breaking the bottle, Hans apologizes but to no avail: “Pa squinted at the snow [. . . and] drove” (44).
There have been several theories put forward to explain the novella, which at first suggests a distinct and straightforward narrative arc—namely answering the questions “Did an intruder break into the Pedersen house?” and “Are the Pedersens alive or dead?”—but which disintegrates by the end into ambiguity and downright confusion. Saltzman says it well: “Relentlessly convoluted in design, as though the all-compassing blizzard in the story were rendering all perception hesitant and indistinct, ‘The Pedersen Kid’ is replete with allegorical options for the discerning reader and is equally accommodating to Freudian, Christian, and heraldic archetypes” (59). Also well put, Patricia Kane writes, “One can locate several points in the story at which Jorge may have hallucinated the rest. Such alternatives provide semi-rational explanations, but the story remains enigmatic and fails to lend itself to neat exegesis” (90).
In a moment, I will put forward a theory based on the findings of professionals who work with families coping with the trauma of alcohol abuse—families which must have resembled Gass’s own growing up—and it is a theory that can account for some of the novella’s eccentricities, especially its seemingly unresolved resolution. First, though, it is worth looking at how the Segren family exhibits many of the characteristics of families traumatized by alcohol abuse, which adds credence to my use of the substance-abuse theory to examine this work of literary art. Even though alcohol abuse no doubt began almost as soon as the process of fermentation was discovered, culture by culture, seeing it as a “family disease” has been a common practice for only the last twenty to thirty years. In 1985, Stephanie Brown defined alcohol addiction as a family disease “with all family members suffering the consequences of one member’s alcoholism and all seen to play a role in maintaining the destructive interactional patterns that result from alcoholism” (qtd. in Brooks and Rice 92). Indeed, these destructive interactional patterns could easily account for Gass’s “miserable and damaging” childhood, as characterized by H. L. Hix, who quotes Gass as saying, “For a long time I was simply emotionally unable to handle my parents’ illnesses. [. . .] I just fled. [. . .] All along one principal motivation behind my writing has been to be other than the person I am. To cancel the consequences of the past” (2).
G. Harold Smith and his colleagues discuss various types of family structures that form around alcoholic parents, and we can see aspects of these structures in the Segren family. The “enmeshed family,” for example, seems especially applicable as it is extremely isolated and wants little to do with outsiders: “Within these highly self-involved families, children’s needs may be ignored because the family’s attention is focused on the parent who is abusing substances” (Smith et al. 47). The Segren family, of course, is isolated by the very fact they live on a farm in North Dakota, but Pa’s attitude toward the Pedersens suggests that the two families have been kept apart, thus exacerbating the geography’s tendency toward isolation. In spite of the tragic nature of the occurrence (the Pedersen kid nearly died in the blizzard and may die yet), the mother, Hed Segren, seems excited at the possibility of having company, wanting to put out coffee and fresh biscuits with elderberry jelly for Mr. Pedersen and his eldest son when they come to collect the kid. Pa, of course, ridicules her for her intentions.
However, an even more tragic trait of the enmeshed family is the alcoholic’s tendency toward violence. Smith and his colleagues write, “Often that parent’s behavior has to be monitored carefully to avoid negative consequences. For example, much family effort may be expended to avoid provoking a violent reaction from a parent who is intoxicated” (47). Clearly, all three members of Pa Segren’s household are afraid of him, and several instances of his cruel and violent nature are recounted at various points in the story, including references to his emptying a chamber-pot filled with diarrhea on Hans’s head and his destroying Jorge’s favorite picture book and dropping the pieces of torn paper in the privy. In our very first view of Pa in the novella, Jorge is struck in the neck for waking his father to inquire where there is some whiskey with which to try to revive the nearly frozen Pedersen kid. And poor Hed Segren is as skittish and defeated as an abused wife can be; she may even have turned to drinking, too, to cope with her miserable existence.
Because of the enmeshed family’s preoccupation with the alcohol abuser, children are often neglected and fall prey to all sorts of deprivations and depravations. Smith and his colleagues report that sexual abuse is “common” in households where substances are abused by one or both parents (48). In “The Pedersen Kid,” sexual abuse is not obvious, but Big Hans’s relationship with Jorge is questionable and even highly suspicious at times, showing him pornographic magazines, telling him stories about Japanese prostitutes, and even measuring the length of Jorge’s penis. As Ripatrazone puts it, “Jorge stops short of claiming physical abuse, but the actions are grossly inappropriate, perhaps the reason why ‘pa took a dislike to Hans.’” However, Gass may imply that Jorge—our omnisciently very limited, first-person narrator—is repressing more than he is telling as he seems fixated on penises: the Pedersen kid’s, his father’s, his own; and he imagines the intruder’s assault on his mother as more of a sexual assault as the stranger “wav[es his gun barrel] up and down in front of ma’s face real slow and quiet” (19).
There isn’t time to go further into detail here, but there are numerous other elements of the novella that seem to reflect the experiences of someone growing up in a household traumatically affected by alcohol abuse. For example, the creation of the narrative about the Pedersen family’s intruder, which is pulled together from mere scraps of details, may suggest a family’s inclination to invent an alternate narrative about their traumatized existence to fit into their community more easily. Also, there are several spaces brought up in the story that have a duality about them, usually coldness versus warmth, which may suggest the duality of an alcoholic’s home that is supposed to provide familial warmth and comfort (and may even do so at times), but that also breeds hostility, mistrust, and often emotional and physical abuse.
Throughout my paper I refer to the trauma of alcohol abuse, but trauma is a subjective term. At what point, in other words, does a really terrible situation become a genuinely traumatic one? From the Greek for “wound,” trauma originally meant a physical wound. Over time, and especially with the horrors of the First World War, our sense of trauma was extended to include a wound of the mind or psyche as well. Even more recently, the definition of trauma has been expanded to include being subjected to an oppressive and reoccurring situation, like being married to an abusive or potentially abusive spouse, who may have never actually become violent, but whose constant threat of violence creates a traumatic environment. Certainly being a member of a family with a parent who abuses alcohol or other substances constitutes a traumatic situation, and in “The Pedersen Kid” William Gass gives us one of the most poignantly accurate extended metaphors of trauma in American literature:
It’s more than a make-up; it’s more than a dream. It’s like something you see once and it hits you so hard you never forget it even if you want to; lies, dreams, pass—this has you; it’s like something that sticks to you like burrs, burrs you try to brush off while you’re doing something else, but they never brush off, they just roll a little, and the first thing you know you ain’t doing what you set out to, you’re just trying to get them burrs off. I know. I got things stuck to me like that. Everybody has. Pretty soon you get tired of trying to pick them off. (17)
This passage illustrates the intrusive and haunting nature of trauma, its tenaciousness, its ability to disrupt your concentration, and ultimately your life—and the fact that from Hans’s perspective, everyone is traumatized, which makes sense since the novella implies that Hans is a veteran of the First World War. Moreover, this passage suggests that Pa’s drinking has, indeed, traumatized the Segren family, and perhaps especially Jorge, who has grown up with his father’s capricious personality due to the whiskey that is ubiquitous in the novella, from nearly the first page to the last.
Now for that substance-abuse theory that seems to help us to understand “The Pedersen Kid,” especially the ambiguities of its final section.
In 1979, Sharon Wegscheider identified four roles that are often played by children of alcoholics, and it seems that Jorge has assumed each of these roles at some point in “The Pedersen Kid,” with the final one casting light on the novella’s enigmatic ending. The roles identified by Wegscheider are family hero, scapegoat, lost child, and mascot (Ackerman 52-53). The family hero “displays behaviors that are extremely mature” (53), and this role is manifested when Jorge is given the responsibility of making sure the Pedersen kid is still alive before they begin their journey to the Pedersen farm, and especially when Jorge is given Hans’s .45-caliber pistol to load, which he then carries in his belt, even though “the gun felt like a chunk of ice against [his] belly and the barrel dug” (34). Because of the adventure they are about to embark on, Jorge thinks, “It was like I was setting out to do something special and big—like a knight setting out—worth remembering” (32-33). Later, Jorge wants a drink of Pa’s whiskey to warm him, claiming that he has drunk whiskey before; but the request only provokes his father’s sarcasm: “Ain’t you growed up—a man—since yesterday!” (38). In a truly heroic vein, Jorge dreams about confronting the Pedersens’ intruder, wrestling him to the ground and “beating the stocking cap off his head with the barrel of the gun” (33).
An only child, like Gass, Jorge also embodies the family scapegoat, who is often the target of “frustrations and confusions” and as a result may “outwardly [display …] negative behavior” (Ackerman 53). Jorge is often ridiculed by both Pa and Hans; examples are copious in the novella. In the scene mentioned earlier, when the whiskey bottle falls from the wagon, Jorge is forced to search for the bottle in the snow in spite of his being painfully cold already. Frustrated at Jorge’s not finding the bottle, Pa calls him a “smart-talking snot” and threatens to hold him down under the snow until he drowns (37). Meanwhile, Jorge’s negative behaviors are varied, and perhaps his most negative behavior comes in the hallucinatory final section and may or may not happen. An example in the beginning of the story, though, is Jorge’s resentment of the attention being paid to the half-frozen Pedersen kid, especially by his mother. Jorge imagines the boy is actually dead and not just near death, consequently dropping him so that his head hits the kitchen table hard (10). In the final section of the novella, however, it seems that Pa is shot dead just outside the Pedersen house. It may have been the intruder who shot Pa, or it may have been Jorge paying Pa back for years of cruelty and abuse. Patricia Kane seems to lean toward the latter interpretation, thinking that Jorge has become mad by the end of the novella (90); while Nick Ripatrzone, writing in The Quarterly Conversation, believes that Jorge only wishes his father dead and does not actually shoot him.
Jorge also resembles the lost child, who suffers “the most role inconsistency” in the family of an alcoholic (Ackerman 53). At times, Jorge tries to shield his mother from Pa’s abuse, but she also scolds Hans for “pester[ing] the boy” (19)—so when it comes to his mother, he is both a mature protector and a child who needs protection. Even still, he imagines his mother coming to harm, and her fantasized death completes his sense of freedom from his oppressively abusive family. But it is via metaphor that we can see Jorge’s lost child status most clearly. In the beginning of the novella, it is, quite literally, the Pedersen kid who is lost. In fact, the Segrens entertain the idea that the kid merely wandered off in the blizzard of his own accord, and the Pedersens will come looking for him now that the blizzard has stopped. By the end, however, Jorge, now occupying the Pedersen farmhouse by himself, believes that he and the Pedersen kid have “been exchanged, and we were both in our new lands” (73). And by the very end, Jorge and the Pedersen kid are more than exchanged; it is as if they are living parallel lives in their new lands. Thus, Jorge has in essence become the novella’s original lost boy.
It is also via this exchange that we can see Jorge as the mascot, the child who “may be overly protected from the family problems” (Ackerman 53). After Pa has been killed, Jorge takes refuge in the Pedersens’ root-cellar, waiting to be killed himself by the intruder (assuming the version of the story that there is an intruder who has killed the Pedersens and now Pa too). After what seems a long time, the intruder stops waiting for Jorge and leaves the Pedersen house with a slam of the front door (66). So, from this perspective, both Jorge and the Pedersen kid have been spared by the intruder, and in fact Jorge has been protected in a sense because the source of his misery—his alcoholic father—has been permanently removed from his life.
Throughout the novella, the intruder is a vague but ominous figure, with only a handful of descriptors attached to him which are repeated again and again (the black stocking cap, the yellow gloves, the green mackinaw, the gun), just as the whiskey is an object known chiefly by its fecal color, its omnipresence, and its desirability as all the Segrens (even the mother) seem to thirst for it, or at least for the power it lends tyrannical Pa. Thus in my reading of “The Pedersen Kid” the true intruder, the true menace is the whiskey-induced alcoholism. We note that it is en route to the Pedersen farm that whiskey, as an object, disappears from the narrative as Horse Simon shatters Pa’s bottle, which had fallen from the wagon, into the snow. Its destruction propels Pa toward his own demise, empowering or at least enabling Jorge to overcome him in the end. The intruder (whiskey) and his minion (Pa) destroyed, Jorge is overjoyed at the end of the novella; he is “burning up, inside and out with joy,” and joy is, in fact, the novella’s final word (79).
In addition to Wegscheider’s four roles, Norman Garmezy also coined the category of invulnerables: “These are the children, that despite all the family problems, have not only survived, but also have grown into healthy adults” (Ackerman 53). Garmezy estimated that about ten percent of children in homes with an alcoholic parent prove to be invulnerable. It seems that perhaps Gass himself fits this category in that he managed to take his miserable childhood and create from it an illustrious writing and teaching career. What will almost certainly be his last work of fiction and perhaps his last book-length publication, period, the novel Middle C, will be released March 12, and no doubt it will draw on many of the same images and themes his creative genius has tapped into for more than half a century. I preordered the book several months ago and rest assured that I will be watching my mailbox hawkishly come the 12th.
Works Cited
Ackerman, Robert J. Children of Alcoholics: A Guidebook for Educators, Therapists, and Parents. 2nd ed. Holmes Beach, FL: Learning Publications, 1983. Print.
Brooks, Carolyn Seval, and Kathleen Fitzgerald Rice. Families in Recovery: Coming Full Circle. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes, 1997. Print.
Gass, William H. “The Pedersen Kid.” 1961. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. Boston, MA: Nonpareil, 1981. Print. 1-79.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Print.
Kane, Patricia. “The Sun Burned on the Snow: Gass’s ‘The Pedersen Kid.’” Critique 14.2 (1972): 89-96. Print.
Saltzman, Arthur M. The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986. Print.
Smith, G. Harold, et al. Children, Families, and Substance Abuse: Challenges for Changing Educational and Social Outcomes. Baltimore, MD: Paul. H. Brookes, 1995. Print.
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