Writer, Critic, Poet, Educator, Artist — Reflecting on the William H. Gass Centenary
I was invited to deliver this paper at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, Feb. 2025, but unfortunately a bout of influenza prevented my attending. I had written the paper ahead of time, so I post it here, as an undelivered address. I did not finely tune as I normally would (given my weakened condition).
This past year, 2024, marked the centenary of William H. Gass (1924-2017), who is perhaps best known as the author of the postmodern mega-novel The Tunnel, both revered and reviled by reviewers when it landed in 1995. Via conferences here in Louisville and the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, a day-long program at Washington University in St. Louis, and the forthcoming collection William H. Gass at 100: Essays, the many aspects of Gass’s literary contributions to both American and international letters were emphasized and examined. This paper will survey some of the most vital takeaways regarding Gass’s work, especially in areas not typically addressed, like Gass the poet, Gass the teacher, Gass the mentor, and Gass the photographer. The centenary made clear that William Gass has admirers around the world, and this paper offers a plethora of little-explored avenues for continued Gass scholarship. What is more, translations of various Gass texts are underway, and this paper will speak to some of that work as well (especially the project of translating Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas into the Greek language, detailing some of the specific issues raised by the translator).
Before talking about 2024 and beyond, I would like to go backward … to 2020, which marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Tunnel. That year was the abyss of the Covid pandemic, and nearly everyone was hunkered down in their homes. It occurred to me that the 25th anniversary should be noted, and it could be done online as well as during an in-person event; thus, I conceived of thetunnelat25.com, a website that would publish various contributions by Gass scholars, aficionados and fans regarding the 650-page, postmodern behemoth. Working with Mary Henderson Gass and Catherine Gass (the author’s widow and daughter), I assembled a list of “Gass people” and reached out via email. Responses were enthusiastic, although not everyone felt that they could contribute. Nevertheless, the project took shape. I was actually supposed to deliver a paper on The Tunnel at 25 project at this conference in 2022, but a conflict prevented my attendance. Let me take you on a quick tour of thetunnelat25.com, and highlight some material that is appropriate to our topic today. (You’ll have to tour on your own.)
One of the pieces I contributed to the project was “Stripping the Master of Kohler’s Rags,” and here is an excerpt:
[Begin excerpt]
“People, in my view, are many people. It’s not that we fall apart all the time into separate personalities, but under certain circumstances we display different values and feelings and modes of thinking” (Ziegler, “WHG in Germany” 115). Thus said William H. Gass when asked about the department colleagues of William Kohler, the narrator of The Tunnel. That is, Kohler’s fellow historians (Culp, Governali, Herschel and Planmantee) “each represents a theory of history, and each gets his own little story.” Like so much else in The Tunnel, it is not clear whether Kohler is describing actual colleagues, or, rather, projections of his own multifaceted personality. “I wanted to leave the ontological status of these characters in doubt,” said Gass. “Either these are real people in his world […] or they are simply aspects of his own personality mildly at war with one another” (115).
Given that one of the consistent complaints about The Tunnel when it appeared in 1995 was that its protagonist, Kohler, seemed uncomfortably similar to the author himself, the idea of multidimensional personalities is well worth exploring in a symposium that hopes to re-introduce the reading public to Gass’s magnum opus. There was the name, of course: the given name of William paired with a family name of German ancestry. There was the occupation: a professor at a Midwestern university, one quite like Purdue, where Gass was teaching when he began writing the novel. There was the affinity for many of the same writers: most notably the German poet Marie Rainer Rilke, perhaps Gass’s greatest influence. Over time, another similarity became the length of time Kohler took to write his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany: thirty years, four more than the number Gass required to complete a book he imagined finishing in just a fraction of that time. These are only some of the correspondences between the author and his narrative creation, William Frederick Kohler.
The similarities became troubling for readers and reviewers because Kohler is, well, not nice. In fact, he’s something of a monster. He is mean-spirited toward essentially everyone who has the misfortune of inhabiting his sphere, and he’s downright hateful to his wife, Martha, whom he thinks of as a “guard” that is confining him within the prison of his unhappiness. She has become essentially a non-person to him: “Martha’s face fades as her torso solidifies, her Aryan blood surfacing like lard. I work on her features, but I’ve forgotten what they are[.…] Without a mouth she’ll still talk back, from her crack like as not” (150-51). Worst of all, Kohler’s scholarly work on the Nazis appears more sympathetic toward them than many would like, including the administrators at his university (“those shit-resembling administrators,” he calls them) who overlook him for promotion because they consider him a “Nazi-nuzzler” (133). If Kohler seems to have a soft spot for Nazis and refers flippantly to the Holocaust, he must therefore be anti-Semitic; and if Kohler is an avatar for Gass himself, then the author, too, must be … so went the logic.
Gass anticipated readers who didn’t know how to read well would conflate the persona of the protagonist with the person of the author: “The resemblances between myself and my narrator are wholly trivial, I think, but I did emphasize them in order to test the reader’s sophistication (a test many reviewers failed). […] Unfriendly reviewers delight in the opportunity to clothe me in Kohler’s rags.” Against such charges, Gass pushed back, saying, “[T]he record will show, I believe, that I do not belong in Kohler’s camp” (Ziegler, “WHG in Germany” 116). (You will find the Works Cited at project site.)
The distinction between the author and his creation is a vital one to make as we attempt to read The Tunnel afresh in 2020, on its twenty-fifth anniversary.
[End excerpt]
As you will see in today’s talk, The Tunnel remains a special focus of Gass scholarship and appreciation. In light of that I will also call your attention to another of my contributions to the website: “The Tunnel: A Chronology & Bibliography,” (link) which documents Gass’s progress from its conception in 1966 to its publication in 1995 and beyond. The novel has a complicated publishing history, and my hope is that I will save scholars time and trouble tracking when attempting to piece together and track down the scattered excerpts of The Tunnel. As a writer myself, I always found it interesting that Gass seemed to have concept of how long the writing of the novel would take; so I’ve included quotes from Gass over time as he continued to reassess where he was in the process. Even from the start, completion of the novel always seemed to him a few years away. A complimentary piece at the website is Joel Minor’s “The Tunnel: A Survey of Published Excerpts,” [link] which takes a more scholarly, strictly bibliographic approach to the same sort of information I provide in my “Chronology & Bibliography.”
Let me return to 2024 … or rather December 2023, which is when I posted my first “William H. Gass at 100: A Reading Journal,” [link] in which I describe how I first encountered Gass via his novella (or long story) “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” I begin by saying, “As a Gass scholar and devotee (disciple isn’t too strong of a word), I have various projects in the works to mark the Master’s 100th year — all part of my ‘preaching the Gass-pel,’ an evangelism I embarked on more than a decade ago. No doubt I will use this forum to talk about some of those Gass Centenary projects, which tend to be formal and scholarly. It occurred to me that I also wanted to do something less formal, and more personal. It is not an overstatement to say that William H. Gass changed my life. His writing, his theories, his example as torchbearer in the cause of literature: everything has impacted me in ways that I can name and, doubtless, in ways that I cannot.”
My intention was to post a new reading journal, including a new video, periodically throughout 2024. It didn’t quite workout that way (as I feared). I included my various contributions to the Gass Centenary as journal entries, although that isn’t what I had in mind back in December 2023. One such contribution was my paper delivered here a year ago: “William H. Gass at 100: Looking Forward, Looking Backward” [link], which focuses mainly on the backward part as I provide a biography of Gass and his most notable works for the majority of the paper. Sadly, I’ve discovered that Gass is not especially well known, even in literary circles, so describing his career and achievements is necessary.
After the Louisville Conference paper, the next significant event was a panel at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago in May 2024. In the panel, Joel Minor presented his Tunnel bibliography from thetunnelat25.com project; Ali Chetwynd (American University of Iraq, Sulaimani) presented “Literary Theory Teaching: Founded on William Gass”; and I presented “Let Us Now Praise William Gass’s Greatest Work – And It’s Not the One You Think” [link]. While I am, of course, a fan of The Tunnel, and I’ve presented several papers and published a few on Gass’s magnum opus, I don’t believe it was the most masterful of the master’s work. Rather, artistically, I feel that Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas represents the pinnacle of his literary achievements. I’ll share the final paragraphs of that paper:
[Begin excerpt]
Though my catalog is incomplete, I’ll end where I began, with The (large, loose, baggie) Tunnel. Gass’s ambitions for the novel were epic, and it took him far longer—far longer—to write than he anticipated. He imagined, maybe, three years or so … let’s say, then, a publication date around 1970. But time marched on and the Master aged along with his aim for the book. He had about 600 manuscript pages in hand when, in 1991 (age 67), he went for an extended stay at The Getty Center in Santa Monica to devote himself fully to finishing the legendary book. Working into 1992, he doubled the size of the novel, completing it at about 1,200 manuscript pages. Begun in the sunny summer of literary postmodernism, the first half of the book displays many of the tropes and tricks that interested Gass in the 1960s and 70s—it resembles in many ways Gass’s wildly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)—an experiment that Gass himself deemed a failure in retrospect.5 Though The Tunnel doesn’t quite conform to the chronology of its composition, the latter half doesn’t display the same fondness for postmodern play as the beginning sections do. Released at last in 1995, it was as if the postmodern novel had arrived at the party after practically all the guests had collected their coats and gone home to sleep it off.
Perhaps Gass wittily but unwittingly anticipated the fate of The Tunnel when he wrote the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (revised 1981):
“I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder … hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; … and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell …” (xxxii).
We still ought to attend service in William Gass’s great cathedral, but our warmest words of worship should be reserved for Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas.
[End excerpt]
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, though he moved from there to Warren, Ohio, when still a baby. Nevertheless connections to North Dakota remained, and I attempted to organize some sort of event or conference in Fargo or nearby in the summer of 2024, ideally around Gass’s birthday, July 30. Unfortunately no one locally seemed to have the time or money or interest. Perhaps one day I’ll resume my efforts. Therefore, the next significant event was at Washington University in St. Louis October 3, “William H. Gass Centenary Celebration” [link]. The main event was a panel discussion that I had the honor of moderating. It included Patrick Davis (Unbound Press), Michelle Komie (Princeton University Press), and Gerhild Williams (Washington University German Department, retired). Much of the informal discussion focused on Gass’s founding and directing of the International Writers Center (1990-2000).
One of the more intriguing revelations from the panel discussion was that Patrick Davis, of Unbound Press, plans to republish The Tunnel in the form that Gass always had in mind: a loose collection of about 1,200 manuscript pages, and stuffed with things like paper bags, business cards, and crossword puzzles. Its publication may coincide with the novel’s 35th anniversary. I hope that it comes to pass.
Interest in Gass’s work persists, if not as robustly as enthusiasts like me would prefer. Last year I was contacted by Apostolis Pritsas, who was translating Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas into Greek, and he requested my informal consultation. I was happy to do it, and we exchanged a few emails over the summer and fall. The two novellas that generated the most questions were “Cartesian Sonata” and “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s”—both highly experimental works in terms of structure and narrative chronology. The Greek edition is slated for an early March release. Meanwhile, a Spanish-language edition of Cartesian Sonata appeared [link], which changes the order of the novellas, totally undercutting Gass’s concept of the collection.
Finally, I plan to edit, contribute to, and publish William H. Gass at 100: Essays later this year. Contributions include the following: “‘Inward Toward the Other’: The Dancing Minds of William H. Gass and Toni Morrison” by Jose Miguel Alvarado Mendoza; “In Search of William Gass” by Zachary Fine; “William Gass and the Power of Baroque Fictionality” by Yonina Hoffman; “The Meta-Novel as a Container of Self-Consciousness: Linguistic Order and Fascism of the Heart in William H. Gass’s The Tunnel” by Abbie Saunders; “Broken Windows and Dirty Mirrors: Metaphor and Mind in The Tunnel” by Jonathan Moreland; “Defying Form” by Nathan King; “To Create or Capture Consciousness: Reconsidering William H. Gass as ‘The Father of Metafiction’” by Alex Lanz; and “Medium-Specific Foundations: Teaching Literary Theory Across the Gass-Axis” by Ali Chetwynd.
I will draw from several of my Gass conference papers to put together a constellation of pieces, and I also will include a selection of Gass’s photographs. He was a serious photographer, but that aspect of his artistic life has received little attention.
Popular Fiction – An Historical Perspective
(The following lecture was presented remotely to students and faculty at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan, on February 12, 2025. It was at the invitation of and organized by Ms. Ambrina Qayyum, Dr. Amina Ghazanfar, and Ms. Farihatulaen Rizvi; with student organizers Moazzam Ali and Minha Iman.)
I begin with a quotation:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” – the “Notice” that appears on the title page of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884), considered by many the quintessential American novel. As you may know, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel narrated by the title character, Huck, who is about 13 years old. Huck and the escaped slave Jim travel down the Mississippi River on a raft, having a series of adventures along the way. I feel like beginning with this quotation is appropriate to our purposes here because the Notice seems to be the author’s warning to the reader not to take the book too seriously. Its purpose is entertainment, and thinking about loftier things, like the novel’s meaning, will not be tolerated. Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was a master storyteller and satirist. So how serious was Clemens in his Notice? Did he truly not want readers to search for motive, moral, and plot in his book? If there was some sincerity to his Notice, it may have been because he anticipated that Huckleberry Finn would be a highly controversial book.
Sincere or not, his Notice was disregarded, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been one of the most studied and discussed novels in American (and world) literature. And in spite of the seriousness that readers have found in the text, it became a fabulously popular novel and contributed to Mark Twain (aka, Samuel Clemens) becoming the most popular author in the U.S. by the end of the nineteenth century.
Let me leave Samuel Clemens and Huckleberry Finn for now.
I’ve been asked to speak on “popular fiction,” and I agreed even though at the time I realized the term was malleable in my mind. That is, I wasn’t completely sure what the term even meant. In the last month or so I’ve been looking into the topic – browsing the internet, reading articles, giving it some quasi-serious thought – and I can say with confidence that I’m still not sure what it means. I have, however, stumbled across a lot of interesting ideas associated with the concept of “popular fiction,” so I’ll share them with you (in the hope that you’ll find them interesting too). What is more, largely due to my roles as a writer and publisher, but also as a teacher of writing, I’ve been interested in the history of the publishing industry (in the West, and in particular the United States), and I’ve presented some conference papers on the topic. I will draw from these as well.
Let me begin with some assumptions and/or questions that first came to mind when considering this topic:
What do we mean by popular?
What is the measuring stick for determining popularity?
That is, how popular does a novel have to be to be considered “popular fiction”?
Can a novel be “popular fiction” without actually being popular?
Is popular code, or a kind of euphemism, for bad?
Is the previous question elitist?
How do we determine good versus bad fiction?
For that matter, who determines it?
If popular does mean bad fiction, what is the term for good fiction?
Again, how do we judge?
Again, who judges?
And if the fiction is so darn good, why isn’t it popular?
When did the idea of a book being a “bestseller” begin?
How is bestselling determined?
Ok, I’ll stop there for now. Let’s begin to consider these questions.
From one perspective, popular fiction is fiction (probably in the form of novels) that is read by a lot of people in a given culture. A book gains the label “popular fiction” by attracting a significant number of readers. From this perspective, books are not published as “popular fiction,” but they may become popular over time. Nowadays we call such books “bestsellers,” but that itself is a nebulous term. Quite honestly, until I started researching for this talk I didn’t know much about how a book (or an author) earns the epithet “bestselling.” For the last quarter century I’ve also worked as a librarian, and every week we add new titles to our shelves that are said to be bestsellers or by bestselling authors—books and authors, oftentimes, I’ve never heard of, which suggests that the standard for determining bestselling is fairly low. Low, of course, is relative, but my research has determined that the standard is both nonstandard and mysterious. What I mean by nonstandard is that different organizations will disseminate “bestseller” lists, and each will use its own criteria. In the U.S., we tend to think of The New York Times newspaper and its The New York Times Book Review as the arbiter of bestseller status, but, really, there are many bestsellers lists: Publishers Weekly, USA Today and Indiebound are among the more common publications that provide lists of bestsellers. Moreover, booksellers, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, will put out their own lists of bestsellers. Complicating things further is the fact that each will put out multiple lists, based on categories of books and types of book (hardback versus paperback versus ebook).
Each entity and each list generated will have its own criteria for determining bestseller status. They’re all based on sales, kind of, but on data that comes from a wide variety of sources. I say “kind of” because the sales data can be rather fluid and open to interpretation, so that, in some lists more than others, the accolade of “bestseller” may be as much subjective impression as empirical conclusion. (Indiebound, for example, tends to rely more on booksellers’ hunches than actual hard sales figures.) Another nonstandard element is sales period. One list may be based on a week’s worth of sales, Monday to Sunday, say, (reported from here versus there), while another list considers data drawn from a different period of time, longer or shorter, or simply a different bracketing of time.
Even though numbers have nebulous meanings, for a frame of reference let’s look at The New York Times bestseller list. To make the list in a given week, a novel must sell between 1,000 and 10,000 copies. However, such sales do not guarantee inclusion on the list because it also depends on other factors, like the total number of books that achieve those sales figures for a single week. Earlier I said the standards were both nonstandard and mysterious; here is where the mystery comes in. The New York Times won’t reveal precisely how they determine the bestseller lists. Sales are an important factor, but there are others that are closely held secrets. Allegedly even the editors of The NYT Book Review aren’t privy to the exact methodology. Their secrecy, they say, is partly in an effort to prevent people from manipulating the system. Nevertheless, people (like authors, agents and publishers) do try to manipulate the system, and if the NYT suspects such manipulation they’ll mark a title on the list as suspicious, printing a dagger symbol next to it.
Another aspect of popularity is the number of weeks that a book remains on the bestseller list. About a quarter of novels make the NYT list for a single week. Incidentally, it seems the idea of a bestsellers list, as we think of it, began in 1895 with the New York-based journal The Bookman. The New York Times began publishing its list in 1936 (based only on New York City sales). The list, resembling its current form, became established by the 1950s.
I said that people will try to manipulate the bestseller lists, and the reason for that is that appearing on a bestseller list can be a major boon for sales, especially for “new” and little-known authors. So, appearing on a bestseller list reflects some level of popularity, and it further promotes popularity. Said differently, bestsellers sales are self-perpetuating. [In addition to Wikipedia entries, information for these last few paragraphs was taken from “The Convoluted World of Best-Seller Lists, Explained” by Constance Grady.]
In recent years another route to popularity has emerged, namely social media. I would like to speak to this phenomenon, but I find such a discussion will have to wait for another occasion.
For now, let’s shift our perspective on the term “popular fiction,” away from a status based (obliquely) on sales, to a term we use to describe a kind of fiction. One can find many definitions of popular fiction as a kind of writing. I like Britannica.com’s definition:
“[S]ome common attributes of popular literature have been defined. First, it is crafted primarily to entertain the reader, as entertainment is a quality that attracts and appeals to a wide audience. To promote a pleasurable reading experience, works of popular fiction are usually written in a simple and straightforward style. They are largely plot-driven, rather than character-driven, and adhere to conventional narrative structures. As such, they are intended less to provoke deep reflection or aesthetic appreciation than to be read casually and quickly. Books that are successful at this aim, especially through their employment of techniques that stimulate readers’ interest and compel them to continue reading, are praised as ‘page-turners.’”
Popular fiction tends toward escapism rather than self-reflection. That is, readers of popular fiction often want to be distracted from their cares and concerns, not prompted to think deeply about them. As a consequence, popular fiction frequently falls into various genre categories: romance, Western, science fiction, mysteries, so-called “chic lit.” All in all, popular fiction is written to be accessible to the average reader. Literary fiction, meanwhile, (sometimes just called “literature” among other synonyms) tends to require more of the reader: more careful attention, more time, more cognitive effort, a broader working vocabulary.
Nowadays, we tend to think of a wide schism between popular fiction and literary fiction. Writers must be either fish or fowl. Indeed, many earlier texts—let’s say, pre-twentieth century—are studied today because of their seriousness; that is, their author’s attention to significant issues, and the book’s facilitation of meaningful analysis and discourse. Whether it’s Mary Shelley’s meditations on society and the individual, Jane Austen’s examination of unequal inheritance laws, Charles Dickens’s depiction of the mechanisms of poverty, Charlotte Brontë’s proto-feminism, or Joseph Conrad’s indictment of colonialism—the writers and their works were unquestionably popular. That is, they sold well, were widely reviewed, and frequently discussed across social strata.
These writers, of course, benefited from the popularity of reading in general. Authors competed with playwrights (who often adapted authors’ works to the stage, without necessarily paying for the privilege), but reading for pleasure was a major pastime for both men and women, across socioeconomic lines. Periodicals were hugely popular. These were newspapers and magazines that printed stories and excerpts from novels and sold them quite inexpensively. It was common practice for a novel to appear in a periodical serially, and then later be brought together for book publication. Serialization didn’t seem to negatively impact eventual book sales. One can find examples of authors or publishers shying away from periodical publication to begin with for fear of it diminishing the sales potential of the book version. Nevertheless, serialization was an effective way for the reading public to become familiar with an author and their work.
Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836) is often cited as the work that popularized the approach of serialization, first, followed by the book publication. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, magazine publication (either of serial installments of a longer work, or stand-alone stories) was the vehicle that brought mass popularity to authors. Popularity gained through magazine publication was not limited to England, where authors like Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Arthur Conan Doyle thrived. In France, a notable example is Alexander Dumas, whose The Three Muskateers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-1846) were widely read serials. Another would be Gustave Flaubert and his serial publication of Madame Bovary (1856). In Russia, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky found readers via the serialization of Anna Karenina (1875-1877), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880), respectively. In the U.S., publishers were quick to follow Dickens’s example, and many writers found popularity via magazine publication and serialization, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, and Herman Melville. Across Europe and into Asia and Australia, having their work appear in magazines was vital for authors achieving popularity.
Obviously not everything published in this time period combined popularity with serious literary merit. For that matter, it’s difficult to know how serious authors were when writing the books that became popular. Their literary quality—and their ability to generate in-depth study and discourse—may be in part due to our projections. That is, we recognize the significance of their work when they, perhaps, did not. They were merely trying to tell an entertaining tale, but because of the milieu in which they were writing, and their own inherent insightfulness, they wove into the telling significant issues. I think, for example, of a writer like Jane Austen and her series of drawing-room romances, like Sense and Sensibility (1811), and Pride and Prejudice (1813), where the plots mainly center on the marriageability of young women without financial means. They are in some ways extensions of Samuel Richardson’s rather vapid Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Yet Austen also examines the unequal roles of men and women in marriage, the unfairness of English law when it came to inheritance and gender, the hypocrisy of the Church, and myriad other significant issues, including family dynamics and the interrelationships of siblings.
From almost precisely the same period, an antithetical example would be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). On the one hand, it is a fantastical Gothic tale about a creature who has been constructed from body parts, both human and animal, brought to life, then left to fend for himself in a harsh and unsympathetic world. From the start of its composition, however, the teenage author saw the potential for her novel to be so much more than a sensational page-turner. Throughout she alludes to numerous books—which she had thoroughly digested, often in their original language and not in translation—regarding science, history, geography, philosophy, religion, and ethics. Like all authors I suppose, Mary Shelley hoped that her book would be popular, but she did not expect it. She and her husband, Percy Shelley, and their children left for the Continent before Frankenstein was published, and Mary was quite surprised several months later when she heard, while in Italy, that her strange book was the talk of London. It has never been out of print.
What all of these pre-twentieth-century books—the merely popular and the popular while also being serious—have in common is accessibility. That is, they are highly readable regardless of one’s educational background. Frankenstein, for all the complex issues that it raises, remains a novel that can be read and understood by practically anyone who is functionally literate. Whether they recognize the complex issues in the book and whether they consider them deeply, those are other matters.
It is worth noting that there were authors in the nineteenth century who became canonized in academic circles, but they were not especially accessible in their day. Nor, then, were they popular. Two well-known examples are Nathaniel Hawthorne and his friend and neighbor Herman Melville. Both are considered giants of the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth century they were staples on high school and college syllabi in the U.S. Hawthorne—famous now for such novels as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables—was frustrated and perplexed by his slow book sales. Meanwhile, authors whom he considered inferior enjoyed wide popularity. He was especially annoyed by the status enjoyed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, someone he knew in their younger days as a fellow student at Bowdoin College. To compare, 10,000 copies of The Scarlet Letter were printed, and during Hawthorne’s lifetime only 7,800 copies were sold. Meanwhile, Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha sold 50,000 copies in its first year, 1857. It was just one of Longfellow’s highly popular publications. It’s estimated that during his lifetime, Longfellow wrote more than 20,000 letters in response to the fan mail that he received. (One close friend speculated that Longfellow’s dedication to responding to his fans led to exhaustion and a too-early grave.) [For this section, I relied on various Wikipedia entries as well as the article by Lauren Gatti “Seriously Popular: Rethinking 19th-Century American Literature through the Teaching of Popular Fiction,” published in The English Journal, vol. 100, no. 5, 2011, pp. 47–53, available via JSTOR.]
Hawthorne’s friend and neighbor, Melville, is another interesting case when discussing authorial popularity. Melville’s first novels were page-turning sea adventures, based on his real-life adventures as a seaman. However, he longed to write something more complex, more artistic, even though he knew such a book wouldn’t be popular. In a famous letter to Hawthorne (May 1851), Melville spelled out his dilemma: “Dollars damn me … What I feel most moved to write [Moby Dick], that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a hash, and all my books are botches.” In other words, writing simple sea adventures was profitable but they bored him; instead, he wanted to write a book that was much more complex and artistically challenging, even though it likely wouldn’t sell. In the end, he chose artistic satisfaction over popularity. There were 3,000 copies of Moby Dick printed, and copies were left unsold forty years later at Melville’s death. Both Hawthorne and Melville had to support their families by taking low-paying government jobs.
In retrospect, we can see that writers like Hawthorne and (especially) Melville were ahead of their time. A novel like Moby Dick has much more in common with the modernist experimental books produced seventy years later by James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. In fact, Moby Dick was essentially rediscovered in the 1920s (thirty years after its author’s death), which led to its becoming a classic and a staple on college syllabi by the 1950s. Hawthorne and his works were also canonized in the twentieth century, while Longfellow and other popular writers of the nineteenth century became marginalized in the academy.
So, if depth of thought and the poetic quality of the language do not lead to popularity, what is the key? I’ve already used the word several times: accessibility. In essence, a book has to be easily comprehensible for it to be widely read and have the potential to become a bestseller. In other words, to become “popular fiction” a book must be written in the style of “popular fiction.” To cement this idea, let me repeat Britannica’s definition: “First, it is crafted primarily to entertain the reader, as entertainment is a quality that attracts and appeals to a wide audience. To promote a pleasurable reading experience, works of popular fiction are usually written in a simple and straightforward style. They are largely plot-driven, rather than character-driven, and adhere to conventional narrative structures. As such, they are intended less to provoke deep reflection or aesthetic appreciation than to be read casually and quickly. Books that are successful at this aim, especially through their employment of techniques that stimulate readers’ interest and compel them to continue reading, are praised as ‘page-turners.’”
I began this talk with a reference to Mark Twain and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, a novel that has the patina of a simple tale of adventure, perhaps even one for younger readers, but in fact is packed with serious and controversial ideas, especially regarding the institution of slavery (which had been abolished two decades before, but its aftermath was still very much a part of American society … as, sadly, it is today). It is a gross overgeneralization, but we could think of Huckleberry Finn as a kind of temporal marker: a delineation between a time when authors could be both serious and popular, and a time when authors had to choose between the two. Herman Melville’s conundrum of the 1850s (to write Moby Dick and forfeit his growing popularity, or not) foreshadowed the dilemma that increasing numbers of writers would face in the twentieth century and beyond: To be either a writer of popular fiction (read by the masses) or to be a writer of serious fiction (read mainly in academic circles)?
The so-called modernist writers who began publishing after the First World War—Pound, Eliot, Stein, Woolf, Joyce, Forster, Lawrence, et al.—were rejecting accessibility for deeper (especially psychological) meaning. They were grappling with the horrors of the War and developing styles of narration and poetics that responded to both personal and cultural trauma. While the modernists may not have been bestselling authors, they were known and therefore influential. Some of their less challenging work (especially stories and individual poems) appeared in popular magazines (while their more challenging work came out in literary journals, including via serialization—all three of James Joyce’s high-modernist novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, were first published serially). But even if people weren’t reading Joyce, Stein, Woolf, etc., they knew who they were and what kind of writing they were doing because the popular press closely covered the modernist movement. As an example, when Gertrude Stein, one of the least comprehensible modernists, returned to the United States after a self-imposed thirty-year exile in France, she was met by a group of reporters at the New York City docks, and lights in Times Square announced “Gertrude Stein Has Arrived.” Next to no one in the U.S. had actually read Stein’s highly experimental work (and even fewer understood it), yet she had gained celebrity status among the general public. Stein was, in a word, popular. I must acknowledge that the previous year, 1933, Stein had published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which was by far her most readable book, and its accessibility and popularity contributed to her surprisingly warm welcome home.
During this period, while writers like Stein, Joyce and Eliot prided themselves on the difficulty of their texts, there were many writers who sought both kinds of attention. They thought of themselves as serious literary artists, but they also wanted to be widely read (and well paid). There could be many examples, of course, but two that come to mind are Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though they had very different personalities, they took similar approaches to achieving both popularity and respect from the high-literary establishment. Again, I oversimplify, but Hemingway saw his short fiction and his novels as products of his highest literary aspirations; while his nonfiction, especially his journalism and newspaper reporting, helped to fund his adventurous lifestyle. Similarly, Fitzgerald devoted great time and energy to his novels, wanting them to be as complex and as literary as possible, but at the same time he churned out one lackluster short story after another to sell to magazines and support his dizzyingly wild lifestyle (his and his wife Zelda’s).
Writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald were able to aim for both kinds of writing—popular and serious—because the periodical industry was still thriving in the U.S. and elsewhere. Allow me to share a quote from Theodore Peterson’s Magazines in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1956):
“Despite pessimistic forecasts from time to time … magazines had a tremendous growth between 1900 and 1955. The number of magazine readers increased remarkably. When Frank Munsey brought out his Mimsey’s Magazine in 1893, he later estimated, there were about 250,000 magazine purchasers in the United States. By 1899, the ten-cent magazine, he further estimated, had increased the number to 750,000. In 1947, in its nationwide audience study, the Magazine Advertising Bureau found 32,300,000 magazine reading families—those in which members could identify specific items from recent issues. The number of individual magazines also increased; there were well over a thousand more magazines in the United States in 1955 than in 1900. The aggregate circulation of all magazines in the United States mounted steadily, and the sales of individual publications soared from thousands to millions. In 1900 there seems to have been no magazine with a circulation of a million; in 1955 there were at least forty-six general and farm magazines with circulations of one million or more, and one of them had a circulation of more than ten million for its domestic edition alone.”
While not all of these magazines published short fiction, I will risk saying that the majority did. Many, in fact, specialized in publishing fiction in the form of short stories and serialized novels. Moreover, they paid writers well. Let me quote from my introduction to Delta of Cassiopeia (which is available online at Twelve Winters Miscellany):
“There had been a Golden Age of magazine publication for much of the twentieth century, when fiction writers could make a good living selling stories to magazines. In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda lived their legendary high life almost solely from Fitz’s short stories, which could fetch as much as $4,000 each (nearly $60,000 in 2023 money). It’s estimated that during the 1920s and 30s Fitzgerald made almost a quarter of a million dollars from 164 magazine stories (more than $3.25 million today). A generation later, in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sold four stories to magazines in the course of about eighteen months, allowing him to quit his job in the marketing department at General Electric and devote himself fully to writing. At the time, Vonnegut was supporting a wife [who didn’t work] and six children.”
I continue from my introduction:
“By the 1960s, however, television had begun turning the Golden Age into lead. And by the time I started to write effectively enough to publish, the Golden Age was a rapidly receding memory. In sum, television had superseded book reading as a popular pastime, and nationally distributed magazines had either severely cut back or eliminated space for short stories altogether, thus closing a crucial avenue for new writers to build an audience—let alone make a living.”
From then on it’s been a succession of inventions and developments that have made reading books a lower and lower priority for mass culture: the microcomputer (1980s); the internet and World Wide Web (1990s-2000s); social media and streaming services (2000s-present). Concurrent with these technological arrivals, the publishing industry was consolidated into a handful of multinational entertainment conglomerates. Here I’ll draw from my paper “The Loss of the Literary Voice and Its Consequences” (available at tedmorrissey.blog):
“[T]he corporate takeover of the publishing industry … was largely undocumented when André Schiffrin wrote The Business of Books (2000). ‘In Europe and in America,’ writes Schiffrin, ‘publishing has a long tradition as an intellectually and politically engaged profession. Publishers have always prided themselves on their ability to balance the imperative of making money with that of issuing worthwhile books.’ However, in the turbulent sixties, large conglomerates began acquiring publishing houses. Schiffrin continues, ‘It is now increasingly the case that the owner’s only interest is in making money and as much as possible’ (emphasis in original). Schiffrin’s study is wide-ranging and thorough, but he focuses particular attention on the demise of Pantheon, where he’d been managing director for a number of years when it was acquired by Random House, which in turn was purchased by media mogul S. I. Newhouse, who inevitably insisted on changes to try to increase profits, unreasonably and unrealistically so, according to Schiffrin: ‘As one publishing house after another has been taken over by conglomerates, the owners insist that their new book arm bring in the kind of revenue their newspapers, cable television networks, and films do. … New targets have therefore been set in the range of 12-15 percent, three to four times what publishing houses have made in the past.’”
The only way for these remaining commercial publishers to achieve the sort of profits that are expected by their parent companies (and the companies’ shareholders) is to only publish fiction that has the potential to become popular. In other words, it must be easily accessible to the small percentage of the public that continues to read fiction. The internet is full of statistics that highlight the rapid decline of reading (and therefore in people’s ability to read well). One reliable source in the U.S. is the National Endowment for the Arts. NEA’s report from October 2024 said that in its most-recent surveyed year, 2022, just over a third of American adults reported reading a novel or a short story in the previous year. Let me emphasize: a novel or a short story, singular. And practically every survey from practically every organization confirms a downward trend over several decades. Test Prep Insight published a less thorough but even more recent report (January 2025) that confirms this same kind of decline in reading. The report cites several factors:
- The fast pace of the modern world: With the demands of work, family, and social obligations, many people feel they simply don’t have time to read.
- The rise of digital media: In our constantly connected world, it’s easy to get your news and entertainment from sources other than books.
- The cost of books: Books can be expensive, especially if you’re buying them new. Used books are a cheaper option, but many people simply don’t have the time to hunt for them.
- The declining popularity of reading: As fewer people read, it becomes less socially acceptable to do so. This can create a vicious cycle that leads to even fewer people reading.
So what does all this mean in terms of our topic, “popular fiction”? For one thing, in the West at least, there are fewer and fewer authors who can achieve popularity. Also, for those writers who desire mass appeal, they must make sure their books are easily accessible (that is, as easy to read and comprehend as possible).
There are many interesting issues associated with the idea of fiction’s popularity, like the following:
How has social media, especially TikTok, impacted popular fiction?
How do contemporary authors navigate writing for popularity versus writing for artistic satisfaction?
Why, in the U.S., are we seeing an explosion in creative writing programs at universities (and an explosion in the number of creative writers) during the same period that we see a steady decrease in the number of readers?
How do factors like the age and gender of readers affect what books are being published by the few remaining commercial publishers?
I will have to leave these and other questions unanswered for now.
Trauma theory as an approach to analyzing literary texts
The following is the primary text of a presentation for academics in Kabul and Tehran, arranged by Dr. Nasir Arian, Assistant Professor of Persian Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at Penn State University. It was conducted via Zoom December 5, 2024. This text is excerpted and updated from a much longer article published by Eclectica Magazine, “Cultural Trauma and the Postmodern Voice” (April/May 2021), which was itself excerpted and updated from my book Trauma Theory as an Approach to Analyzing Literary Texts (2021).
In a writers’ symposium on postmodern literature at Brown University in 1989, Robert Coover, in his welcoming remarks, gave the impression the writing style that 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 noted other writers who certainly would have fit in but were not in attendance, including John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, and Gunter Grass. Coover said, “[T]his group sought out some form, some means by which to express what seemed to them new realities.” However, Coover went 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 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.
Joe David Bellamy, in his preface to The New Fiction (1974), expresses a similar notion as to the origins of postmodern narrative style. Bellamy cites an essay by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who “described his sense that the most interesting writers (at that hour of the world [mid 1960s]) were in the process of struggling against a ‘whole way of using language . . . a whole way of giving order to experience,’ which had been imposed on the sensibility of the times by the great writers of the immediate past.” Again, Bellamy appears to support the idea that postmodern writers simply decided to rebel against modernist literary convention.
A more cogent explanation, I believe, rests with trauma theory. The trauma of the nuclear age, experienced by the entirety of Western culture, affected the psyches of these writers in a way that resulted in postmodern literary style—a style reflecting the traumatized voice. (More on this in a moment.) Historians Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, in Hiroshima in America (1995), make several assertions regarding the 20th-century’s zeitgeist as it suddenly evolved after the Second World War. One is 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.” Another is Americans were deeply and immediately conflicted with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They experienced the “contradictory emotions of approval and fear the bomb evoked, a combination that has continued to disturb and confuse Americans ever since.” A third assertion is “[or]dinary people [. . .] experienced their own post-Hiroshima entrapment—mixtures of nuclearism and nuclear terror, of weapons advocacy and fearful anticipation of death and extinction.” 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.” Similarly, literary critic Ihab Hassan sees a connection between the horrors of the Second World War and postmodernism: “Postmodernism may be a response, direct or oblique, to the Unimaginable that Modernism glimpsed only in its most prophetic moments. Certainly it is not the Dehumanization of the Arts that concerns us now [1987]; it is rather the Denaturalization of the Planet and the End of Man.”
It is quite possible Coover and the other postmodernists at the Brown University symposium experienced the same sort of repression and dissociation individual trauma victims frequently do. We know it is common for people suffering the symptomology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to have no conscious recollection whatsoever of the traumatizing event, or to have a dissociated recollection, so that trauma can be simultaneously indelible and forgettable. While the symposium participants did not seem to recognize post-nuclear cultural trauma as the source of their collective postmodern style, they inadvertently came near the mark—so much so that reading their comments from here in the 21st century, with our growing understanding of trauma theory, one experiences a sort of dramatic irony. An example is this exchange between Fiedler and Elkin regarding the role of the unconscious in narrative production:
Fiedler: [. . . The writer’s] possessed with certain hallucinations that he would like other people to take as real and to weep over and laugh over and shiver over. [. . .] One of the marvelous things about being a writer is many of the things you do you don’t know you’re doing until you get somebody’s response to it.
Elkin: I don’t believe that.
Fiedler: You don’t believe anything’s out of control in a writer?
Elkin: There’s plenty out of control, yes. Absolutely. But I don’t think there’s any such thing as serendipitous meaning.
Fiedler: Well, there’s meaning that comes from writers who are gifted, especially in writers who please many and please long—and it comes from levels deep within their unconsciousness.
I would call attention to Fiedler’s use of the word “possessed,” as we know trauma tends to possess its victim, distorting reality in numerous ways; and “hallucinations” of course are among the symptomology of the traumatized. Also, while Fiedler and Elkin disagree on specific points, they concur fiction is harvested in large part from the writer’s unconscious mind. Moreover, William Gass cited Gertrude Stein’s theory of composition and applied it to Elkin’s earlier statement where he imagined William Faulkner peering over his shoulder as he composed: “[Stein] wrote, she said, finally, for the human mind, which was the same in some remote, abstract sense. When Stanley [Elkin] says he’s writing with Faulkner looking over his shoulder, that’s the superego who’s telling you that your paragraphs are lousy.” Stein’s assessment gets at the notion of a collective unconsciousness, where writers and their readers are able to connect because all are tapping into the same neuropsychic substructures. Coover, meanwhile, referenced the nuclear-age zeitgeist of the 1960s:
I also wanted to get involved in telling stories. But we were in that period of time in the 1960s when telling stories was no longer so simple. A lot of people were telling stories, and it was getting us into wars. It didn’t seem to stop the growth of nuclear armaments in the world. The stories seemed to be contributing in some way to all those activities.
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.” 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 postmodern techniques are akin to victims’ struggling to transform traumatic memory into narrative memory. Even the Rubin quote Bellamy cites in The New Fiction—about writers “struggling” to find a “way of giving order to experience”—sounds very much like the difficult transformation from traumatic into narrative memory.
Characteristics of the Traumatized Voice
Before going further, let me take a step back to discuss, in brief, the correspondences between the postmodern narrative voice and the struggles facing the traumatized when trying to articulate the events surrounding their traumatic experience. To avoid the trap of making “postmodernism” into such an enormous net that, when cast into literary history, it ensnares virtually everything, I turn to the work of contemporary trauma theorists and limit, quite definitively, what it means to say a text is postmodern. Cathy Caruth and others have looked to psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan to illustrate the close connections between trauma and literature. Caruth writes, “If PTSD must be understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history. The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.”
I want to call particular attention to Caruth’s statement that the traumatized “become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” as it implies a duality. The traumatized usually have a conscious awareness of the causal event, but it also colonizes their subconscious in a way beyond their control and quite possibly even their awareness (a common phenomenon, according to neuropsychologists). As a result of the trauma, points out Anne Whitehead, there are “[u]nsettling temporal structures and disturbing relations between the individual and the world.” That is, the victim of trauma is unable to perceive time and space normally. And, as psychologists Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart explain, the impediment to processing time and space perceptions normally are not limited to the traumatic event itself (if, indeed, there was a specific and singular event), but rather affect non-traumatic events as well (until such time that the PTSD can be effectively treated). Here, too, we must recall the group psyche operates much the same as the individual psyche. Whitehead reiterates, “[Traumatic] crisis extends beyond the individual to affect the ways in which historical experience can be accessed at a cultural level.” Ronald Granofsky is among critics who have studied the close ties between the traumatic events of the Second World War and the literature that emerged in its aftermath, with Granofsky coining the term “the trauma novel” to refer to the work of writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Thomas Pynchon. Moreover, Laura Di Prete explains, “all of these writers tackle the issue of trauma by depicting imagined collective disasters that only indirectly relate to real historical or personal traumas.”
Indeed, the emergence of postmodernism seems a direct reflection of cultural PTSD. Writes Whitehead,
[Postmodernism’s] innovative forms and techniques critique the notion of history as grand narratives, and it calls attention to the complexity of memory. Trauma fiction emerges out of postmodernist fiction and shares its tendency to bring conventional narrative techniques to their limit. In testing formal boundaries, trauma fiction seeks to foreground the nature and limitations of narrative and to convey the damaging and distorting impact of the traumatic event.
Professionals working with victims of trauma in an attempt to help them articulate and come to terms with their traumatizing event(s)—to relocate their “traumatic memory” to “narrative memory”—note the traumatized voice mirrors narrative techniques of postmodern writers. “[T]raumatic knowledge cannot be fully communicated or retrieved without distortion,” says Whitehead, who has identified key features of postmodern texts reflecting aspects of the traumatized voice: “intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice.” Here, then, is the vehicle for limiting my examination of “postmodern” texts. Or, said differently, the intersection of trauma and postmodern literature is at these key points:
1) intertextuality, that is, the use of various “texts” to create meanings when contextualized together that are somehow different from the meanings of those same texts when read independently
2) repetition, that is, the compulsion to return to images and events, particularly ones that at first blush may seem relatively insignificant but that gain significance(s) with each return, with each echo
3) a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice, that is, a style of narration that employs multiple authorial voices/perspectives, and/or a decidedly nonlinear emplotment (or even a decidedly “non-plotted” emplotment)
Whitehead explicitly names these three aspects of postmodern technique that mirror the traumatized voice, but I would augment the list with a fourth (implied) aspect: a search for language—if you will, for powerful, indeed, almost magical words—that will uncouple the traumatized from the traumatizing event. One significant aspect of this language-power is the act of testimony; in fact, some trauma theorists have dubbed the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st the Age of Testimony. Shoshana Felman writes, “It has been suggested that testimony is the literary—or discursive—mode par excellence of our times, and that our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony.” She goes on to compare writing about trauma in a testimonial mode as akin to psychoanalysis, in which patients confide to their therapist.
Development of the Apocalyptic Temper
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.” Citing the work of Paul Boyer, 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.” 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.” Dewey speculates 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 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 Dewey suggests corresponds with the way many individuals respond to a traumatic event. As Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane explain,
[p]eople’s interpretations of the meaning of the trauma continue to evolve well after the trauma itself has ceased. This is well illustrated by a case of delayed PTSD reported by Kilpatrick et al. (1989): A woman who was raped did not develop PTSD symptoms until some months later, when she learned that her attacker had killed another rape victim. It was only when she received this information that she reinterpreted her rape as a life-threatening attack and developed full-blown PTSD.
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 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.
The Leading Voices of American Postmodernism
There is more to be said regarding “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” and, indeed, the rest of Gass’s fiction, but in closing I would like to turn, more broadly, to other postmodern writers who emerged at about the same time as William Gass. As stated earlier, my choice to focus on the fiction of Gass is because of all the postmodernists I have studied, his work most readily and most consistently reveals the connective tissue between cultural trauma and postmodern narrative style. It is worth noting that among the leading voices of American postmodernism, narratives about the Second World War are plentiful. A short list includes Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). Interestingly, bombs and bombing play pivotal parts in nearly all of these novels: Gravity’s Rainbow centers on the rockets Germany is aiming toward the West, and the title itself refers to the parabolic arc of a rocket; the central event of Slaughterhouse-Five is the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, the site of an American POW camp; and Catch-22 focuses on an American bomber squadron stationed in Italy, and the kernel of the narrative returned to again and again happens on a bomber during a mission. So it seems these postmodernists are not only concerned with the events of the Second World War, but they are especially interested in bombs. None of the narratives mentioned deals directly with the bombings of Japan, but it is provocative that in each case Americans are harmed or even killed by the bombs. This indirect engagement of nuclear threat could be a dissociative response. “Avoidance may take many different forms,” write van der Kolk and McFarlane, “such as keeping away from reminders [. . .] or utilizing dissociation to keep unpleasant experiences from conscious awareness.”
In addition to these novels, there appeared a second wave of significant postmodern novels dealing with United States nuclearism, Cold War anxiety, and/or profound government mistrust. On that list would be books like Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), John Barth’s Sabbatical (1982), and Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997). The Public Burning focuses on the Rosenberg espionage trial of 1951 in which Julius and Ethel Rosenburg were charged with selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Barth’s Sabbatical tells the tale of an ex-CIA analyst who has retired from the agency and written a book about government subterfuge, and who also suspects a cover-up of the murder of his brother and other former colleagues at the CIA. Libra, meanwhile, centers on Lee Harvey Oswald and his dealings with the Soviets and Cubans leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and Underworld involves a government nuclear testing facility and focuses in part on one of its employees.
Current Perspective
Sadly, 2024, on the brink of 2025, finds no shortage of trauma in the world, on both a personal level and a cultural level, which may explain the steady interest in my trauma-theory book. In addition to my academic work, I’m also a novelist, publisher, podcaster, librarian, and educator of new writers. As a consequence I’m very interested in and very aware of current trends in the writing and publishing world, as least in the U.S., where there are fewer and fewer readers of any sort, but especially the sort of writing that we may call “trauma texts.” Therefore, agents and commercial publishers are not interested in novels and story collections that may be written from a place of trauma. The writers and the books I have discussed here are mid- to late-twentieth-century authors. They had significant (even bestseller) readerships; they won literary awards; they gave readings and lectures; they taught young writers and offered workshops. All of which may have provided a kind of cultural catharsis, mass treatment of cultural posttraumatic stress.
As a writer and teacher of new writers, I know trauma texts are being produced, here in 2024; however, most such texts are not being published (unless they’re self-published), and they’re not finding a wide readership. Moreover, new writers who may be drawn to writing trauma-inspired texts could ignore those psychic impulses because of market pressures. The only writers who are being widely read now are producing simplistic, repetitive plots—escapist fiction composed with fast, shallow consumption in mind. If the writing and reading of trauma literature does act as a therapeutic response to posttraumatic stress, what will be the consequences to stifling the traumatized voice?
What is more, I wonder if future scholars will be able to gauge the amount of cultural trauma being experienced in the beginning decades of the twenty-first century if there is a dearth of trauma texts being published (and read, reviewed, critiqued, judged, promoted, etc.). Will scholars develop a skewed sense of our reality because of market pressures and readers’ tastes?
I also fully anticipate artificial intelligence taking over the production of popular fiction (which is already essentially the only kind of fiction being published by the five remaining major houses in the U.S.). How will AI-produced texts respond to our personal and cultural needs to voice and to process trauma?
Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Creative Writer
The following is the principal lecture of a seminar on psychoanalytic criticism delivered remotely to students at the National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan. It was hosted by the Department of English and arranged by Dr. Amina Ghazanfar. The seminar was held November 19, 2024.
My plan is to speak to you about psychoanalytic criticism along four axes: one set stretching from the past to the future; and the other set running from reader to writer. Even though these two sets exist on different planes of thought, their data points will no doubt cross paths and even bump into one another at times. Mixed in with all the theorizing, I hope to impart some actual useful information now and again. And let us start with that (just in case there is no more to be had).
When asked to discuss psychoanalytic criticism, the immediate response is to focus on the adjective, psychoanalytic, and to regard the noun as a given. But let’s not. Criticism and especially its related word critic tend to have bad connotations, especially in everyday English. One definition of criticism, in fact the most prominent one, means to offer an unfavorable opinion about someone or something. A fed-up spouse may say to their partner (or child to their parent, employee to their employer), “I’m tired of your constant criticism!” Or the person who finds themselves surrounded by people who feel free to judge them may say, “Sure, everyone’s a critic!”
These negative connotations associated with criticism and with the critic have drifted over to the words as they’re used in the arts, meaning to evaluate a work of art, and the one doing the evaluation. In fact, there seems to be a natural antagonistic, even adversarial, relationship between the artist and the critic, perhaps because so much of an artist’s reputation (and possibly, in turn, their livelihood) depends on the critic’s opinion. A good or bad review, in a prominent place, could make or break an artist’s standing.
In the academy, criticism has managed to avoid the most negative associations and survives more on par with the neutral critique, which is less about passing judgment and more about asking interesting questions and stimulating interesting discussion. Criticism is about opening up possibilities regarding a work of art; it’s about multiplying potential interpretations. It’s not about identifying truths regarding the art; it’s not about solving the art, as a mathematician may solve a complicated equation.
This may be the first important thing I’ve said: Budding critics must guard against the sense that they’ve said something definitive about the work under consideration. Everything is speculative, and they should manage their rhetoric to make that clear. When writing criticism, there should be a lot of hedging. Not “Shakespeare clearly had a troubled relationship with his mother”; rather, “Shakespeare may have had a troubled relationship with his mother.” In the sciences, they strive for declarative statements. In the humanities, we almost always avoid them. We happily traffic in ambiguity.
All of this brings me round (finally) to the adjective, psychoanalytic, which is an especially intriguing critical approach because it is a kind of hybrid school of criticism, marrying science with humanism (although it may be an unhappy or at least unequal marriage). The term of course means that we, psychoanalytic critics, are about analyzing (examining, testing, dissecting) the psyche. That seems straightforward enough. But since we love ambiguity, let’s ask “What do we mean by the psyche?” Are we examining the mind? The soul? The personality? The spirit? These are all synonyms for psyche. If this were a question on a multiple-choice exam, and we could only choose one answer, nearly all of us would probably choose A) The mind. But I think each of the choices is potentially correct, depending on factors like the work being critiqued and the working thesis of the critic. For example, my first monograph—The “Beowulf” Poet and His Real Monsters—was, yes, an examination of the poet’s mind, but also (equally) an examination of the poet’s culture and community, its zeitgeist, which comes closer to psyche as “spirit,” as geist is German for “ghost” or “spirit.” (Zeit, if you’re curious, means “time.”)
So, upon a closer look, psychoanalytic has a broader sense than just an examination of the mind. “Whose mind?” we of course need to ask—and we will.
Before going there, though, let’s spend some time on the origins of psychoanalysis itself. Note the plural: origins. Returning to that simplistic multiple-choice exam, if there were a question about the origin of psychoanalysis, being brilliant students, we would look for “Sigmund Freud.” But in truth it’s not that simple. I do want to talk about Freud—because he was a crucial theorist, a foundational theorist—but he wasn’t the first human being to notice that people have a lot of complicated things happening under the hood. Ancient storytellers had a sense of multi-faceted personalities, of “good” versus “evil,” of twins (Romulus and Remus, for example), of trios forged into a single entity (the Fates); in more contemporary times, of doppelgangers, of Jekyll-and-Hyde personas.
Freud’s masterstroke was to take the sense of an unconscious part of the mind to a much further point, theorizing that people’s behavior is chiefly due to their unconscious. They may believe, consciously, that their decisions and their subsequent actions are due to a, b and c. But in reality their actions are, unconsciously, due to x, y and z. Nearly all of the time, said Freud, people are unaware—oblivious even—to their own true motivations, their own true reasoning. Moreover, Freud said the dominance of the unconscious mind is completely natural. Finally, in his theorizing (and in his prolific publishing) Freud provided a vocabulary for discussing the workings of the unconscious mind: terms like Id, Ego and Superego, as well as processes drawn from literature like Oedipal complex, Electra complex, and narcissism.
In essence, Freud theorized that the unconscious drivers of human behavior are our unexpressed fears and our unacknowledged wishes. Our fears and wishes find expression in four ways: neurotic behaviors (like anger, anxiety, depression, paranoia); dreams and nightmares; accidental vocalization and diction (so-called “Freudian slips”); and the creative arts. It is of course this last kind of expression that is our main interest. In other words, when artists create (when writers write, painters paint, music composers compose, dance choreographers choreograph), they are accessing their hidden fears and wishes, usually unwittingly.
I don’t want to be overly technical, but Freud used the concepts of condensation and displacement to describe the processes by which the mind obfuscates its fears and wishes. With condensation, the writer, let’s say, brings together several ideas or personas into a single representation. With displacement, a fear or wish may be moved from its true origin to become associated with someone or something else. It must be underscored that the mind conceals its fears and wishes because it would be unbecoming or downright taboo to discuss them openly, that is, consciously.
Just as Freud did not develop his theories in isolation, other psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts either accepted them, modified them, or rejected them in favor of competing theories, during Freud’s lifetime (he died in 1939) and up to the present. It is a cast of thousands, and even the most significant are too numerous to mention even in the briefest summary. Nevertheless, I want to mention one psychoanalyst who, for our purposes, provided the most useful clarifications and extensions of Freud: Frenchman Jacques Lacan.
Like Freud, with whom he was somewhat of a contemporary (Lacan, 1901-1981), the Frenchman was a prolific writer and lecturer; therefore, his discussion of Freud’s theories takes up many volumes, and he was oftentimes at odds with Freud, tinkering, extending, or frequently outright disagreeing. From my perspective, there are two Lacanian concepts that are crucial to our effectiveness as psychoanalytic critics. First, while Freud certainly believed in the significance of language, Lacan took that belief further to the point of making careful attention to language paramount. In fact, he believed that psychoanalysts must work with language just as literary critics do, microscopically and all-encompassingly. No word-choice, no word-order-choice can be taken for granted. Each has significant bearing on interpretation. (I suppose one could go further and say that each word-omission and word-order-not-taken is worthy of attention, too.)
Second, a major criticism (there’s that word) of Freud had to do with causation. Lacan felt that Freud tended to oversimplify the relationship between cause and effect. What appears to be the cause is not the real cause at all. Or it may be more accurate to say that anything attributed to a single cause is misleading because for everything there are multiple causes, with some causes being more significant than others. The analyst—and by extension, the critic—who is satisfied with a one-to-one causal relationship is almost certainly overlooking important facets of cause.
These two Lacanian concepts are so crucial I want to repeat them. Let’s call them important points two and three: The psychoanalytic critic must consider every aspect of the text’s language as significant—diction, syntax, rhetorical posture, everything. Also, psychoanalytic critics must approach each effect as having multiple causes, and therefore they must be dissatisfied with analyses that suggest a facile, single cause, no matter how logical, no matter how well supported by the critique. Causes are always multiple and/or multilayered.
By stopping with Lacan I don’t want to imply that he represents the last word in psychoanalysis. Far from it. Advances in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and perhaps especially neuropsychology have continued apace for the last half century. Consequently, literary critics inclined toward psychoanalytic interpretation should be aware of the latest advances in our study of the mind. I was recently asked to peer-review an article using trauma theory (a branch of psychoanalytic critique), and the writer only cited pioneers in the field, as if there has been no advancement in our understanding of the mind in decades. I recommended against publication without significant revision to include the work of contemporary (living and practicing) psychologists and psychological theorists. I was gratified to read a later draft that made good use of some of the names I suggested. I was happy to greenlight publication as a useful contribution to the field (and not just a well-written rehash of what has come before).
Let’s call that important point number four: Our understanding of the human psyche and how it relates to behavior is constantly evolving and improving. Psychoanalytic critics must make an effort to stay abreast of new knowledge, at least new knowledge that is directly relevant to the critique they have in mind.
It is also worth noting that we sometimes hear “psychoanalytic criticism” and “Freudian criticism” as synonymous terms, but it’s probably best to think of them as somewhat different. Psychoanalytic criticism is any critique that deals with the unconscious, whereas Freudian criticism makes use specifically of terms and concepts developed by Freud. By the same measure, we may employ Lacanian criticism or Jungian criticism, which are types of psychoanalytic criticism, but as one may imagine they make use of Lacan’s or Jung’s theories and terminologies.
So, then, what is the mission of psychoanalytic criticism? I want to suggest that psychoanalytic criticism has two broad agendas. Through careful examination the critic seeks to find at work the author’s unconscious fears and wishes as they are represented in a literary text. Or (and/or) the critic seeks to find at work a character’s unconscious fears and wishes. With some texts, we can do one or the other or both because we know the author; that is, we have access to their biographies and therefore, to a degree, their personalities. With other texts we are limited to the analysis of the fictional characters (or other literary elements) because we do not have access to the author’s personality. Either the author is unknown, or there is so little known about them that nothing of use can be definitively said. A third approach would be to critique a text psychoanalytically in an effort to reconstruct an unknown or little-known author’s persona. What fears and wishes may be operating in the text, and what may they tell us about the person who created the text? Referencing again my Beowulf monograph, my objective was this last one: I attempt to reconstruct the persona of the anonymous poet by psychoanalyzing the text of the poem.
What does it matter? Why bother to critique a text psychoanalytically, or any other way? T. S. Eliot, considered one of the most astute critics of the twentieth century, put it simply (I paraphrase): The ultimate goal of criticism is to understand a work of art better. We psychoanalytic critics may say our goal is to better understand the relationship between the artist and their art, and in so doing understand the work of art better. Is criticism, then, simply an academic pastime, using academic in both its meanings? Is criticism a behavior of the academy, something done by scholars as a function of their scholarship? And is criticism of no practical value?
Regarding the first meaning of academic, I would say yes, probably: It primarily happens in the academy. That is, it is primarily scholars who engage in criticism as we are thinking of it here, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Regarding the second meaning, I hope and believe the answer is no. Criticism does have practical value. Since art is a product of human beings, and a reflection of all that it means to be human, then I think we can modify Eliot’s assessment to say that the ultimate goal of criticism is to understand ourselves better: ourselves as a species, ourselves as a society, and our each individual selves. Important point number five. What could be of greater value? We hardly have time here for a meaningful discussion of whether or not the value is practical. Going back to Plato at least, we have debated the usefulness of knowledge—and if there is a difference between knowledge and understanding. In a contemporary, real-world sense of practicality, understanding human beings is essential to modifying human behavior, whether individually or en masse, including behaviors that are either constructive or destructive.
My literary idol William Gass believed that art (including literature) could impact consciousness, that it could assemble ethical paradigms that would lead individuals and societies to behave more humanely, more empathically. I would direct you in particular to his essay “The Artist and Society,” which I know is not easily available. There is an insightful discussion of the essay, with several block quotes, available online. (here) I am beginning to stray far afield, so I will end this line of thought by simply reiterating that if art has value, practical or ethereal, then criticism of that art is at least equally valuable.
Let me return to psychoanalytic criticism’s mission and restate how we may use it: Through careful examination the critic seeks to find at work the author’s unconscious fears and wishes as they are represented in a literary text. Or (and/or) the critic seeks to find at work a character’s unconscious fears and wishes. With some texts, we can do one or the other or both because we know the author; that is, we have access to their biographies and therefore, to a degree, their personalities. With other texts we are limited to analysis of the fictional characters (or other literary elements) because we do not have access to the author’s personality. Either the author is unknown, or there is so little known about them that nothing of use can be definitively said. A third approach would be to critique a text psychoanalytically in an effort to reconstruct an unknown or little-known author’s persona. What fears and wishes may be operating in the text, and what may they tell us about the person who created the text?
Of the first order would be a text like Henry James’s novella “The Turn of the Screw” (1898). In brief, it is the first-person account of an English governess who comes to believe that her two young charges, a brother and sister, are being harassed or even possessed by the ghosts of two adults who worked at the estate before their deaths. The employees, who were lovers, had an oddly close relationship with the children in life, and are perhaps continuing the relationships as ghosts. In fact, they may have had inappropriate relationships with the children. In the novella, Henry James is always highly suggestive and lightly clear. His vagueness has left a great deal to our imaginations, and to the ingenuity of critics. Via plot details, via characterization, and via a host of symbols (some rather heavy-handed), critics have penned copious readings over the past 125 years. Many of those critiques are based on our understanding of the author, who was a lifelong bachelor. It is believed that James was attracted to men at a time when that would have been an impossible situation in England: perhaps this is reflected in the same-sex relationships between the adults and the children in the story—the wholly inappropriate same-sex relationships. Some critics have speculated that James was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, and that fact has found its way into the novella. What is more, the vagueness of the novella, James’s seeming inability to state anything plainly and directly, may represent his inability to discuss his sexuality and (possibly) the abuse he experienced as a child. “The Turn of the Screw” (with the suggestive imagery of its title) is, above all, a story of psychological repression.
Another interesting example from the same time period is the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, of which he ultimately wrote four novels and sixty short stories. The apparently platonic relationship of Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson has of course been the subject of countless critiques. The fictional character Holmes, like the real Henry James, never marries. Perhaps of greater interest is the fact that the danger in the Holmes stories is always associated with British colonization. Conan Doyle was writing during an expansionary period of the Empire. Britain’s global influence was steadily increasing from about 1815 to 1915, adding 10 million square miles of territory and subjugating as many as 400 million people. Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story appeared in 1886, the last in 1927—all but the final twelve were published during the height of British colonial expansion prior to the First World War. Again, the antagonist or antagonistic element consistently comes from one of the colonies. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, the murders are connected to Mormonism, a religion that originated in the United States. In the second story, The Sign of Four, the murder is provoked by treasure brought back from India. In the third, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” again it is an American, an opera singer, who is at the root of an extortion plot. In the fourth, “The Red-Headed League,” an American millionaire is behind a robbery that is to unfold in the heart of London. Plot after plot hinges on someone or something that has returned to England from a colony or former colony: The U.S., Canada, South America, Asia, Africa. Critics have suggested that the guilt associated with the subjugation and exploitation of millions led Conan Doyle to enact revenge on British citizens at the hands of the colonized. The guilt, as well as the fear of retribution. Conan Doyle was staunchly and outspokenly pro-Queen Victoria, pro-King Edward VII, and pro-Empire, which contributed greatly to his being knighted in 1901.
At the most fundamental Freudian level, we can see that both Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle were motivated, on some level, by fear and/or inappropriate wish fulfillment.
This time period—around 1900, which we also associate with the writings of Sigmund Freud—is important to our interests, but for now let me go back a bit further.
Of course all of Shakespeare’s plays have been fertile ground for a wide variety of critical analyses. In terms of psychological criticism, his most famous play, Hamlet, has lent itself to discussions of the Oedipal complex: young Hamlet fosters a desire to kill his uncle and stepfather, Claudius, upon marrying Gertrude after what may appear an inappropriately short period of mourning the death of King Hamlet. Young Hamlet had been in love with Ophelia, but he rejects her after developing his obsession to kill Claudius, who has usurped King Hamlet’s status.
William Shakespeare, as a person, is much more of a mystery than authors like Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle, for whom we have extensive biographical accounts as well as diaries, letters, and other documents directly attached to their lives. It is difficult to say anything with certainty when it comes to the life of Shakespeare. There are no letters, no diaries, and scant official documentation. We have the texts of the plays and the poems, and we have a great deal of documentary evidence from the time period. We can’t say for certain what may have motivated Shakespeare based on his personal history, but we do know about the outbreaks of plague, the assassinations and attempted assassinations of monarchs, and we know about the fear of invasion by Spain, France and other European powers. Psychoanalytic critics can make educated guesses about how this cultural milieu may have impacted Shakespeare’s writing.
I have done similar guesswork when it comes to the Old English poem Beowulf and its anonymous poet, composed around AD 725. We know nothing of the poet himself (assuming a male poet), not even his name, but we know quite a lot about his time period. It isn’t nearly as well documented as Shakespeare’s day, almost a thousand years later, but there is a considerable record, including numerous firsthand, eyewitness accounts. Drawing from this material, I theorized in The “Beowulf” Poet and His Real Monsters that the three monsters in the poem may have represented specific sources of anxiety for the poet and his audience: continual armed violence, the dangers of reproduction, and illnesses that were caused by agents beyond people’s comprehension—manifested in Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, and the dragon.
I want to return to the year 1900. It has been noted that creative writers in the twentieth century and beyond have been more concerned with character motivation than writers in the past. Let’s take as one example a writer I’ve already alluded to—considered by many the greatest writer in the English language, Shakespeare. As great as Shakespeare was, his treatment of character motivation was consistently cursory. Why is Hamlet so quick to turn against his mother and his girlfriend, based on the urgings of a ghost? In The Winter’s Tale, why does Leontes turn against his wife, Hermione, based solely on the friendly hospitality she shows her husband’s oldest friend? How can Othello move so easily from adoring Desdemona to murdering her? The examples are abundant. We could explore any number of explanations, but the important point is that Shakespeare’s audience didn’t seem to care much about character motivation, a token effort is all they required of their playwrights. Said differently, the early modern audiences appeared to have little interest in the psychology of their fictional characters. Of course, Shakespeare was interested in his characters’ psychology. It was often the element he added to his revisions of previously existing plays: a focus on his characters’ tendency toward introspection. Yet it was still minimal compared to the psychological novels and plays (and films) as they developed in the twentieth century. One theory is that the wide dissemination of Freud’s theories—which began in the 1890s, but not until the 1920s were his works widely translated and read—made twentieth-century readers and theatergoers much more interested in the psychology (i.e. the motivation) of the fictional characters they were seeing on the page, the stage, and ultimately the screen. Important point number six.
It may be worth noting that in the United States the first college to establish a course in “psychology” was Harvard, in 1873, taught by Henry James’s older brother William, who eventually wrote the first psychology textbook, The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. It was the primary college psychology textbook for decades, and greatly influenced thought in other disciplines as well.
I want to turn now from one side of the page to the other, from psychoanalytic critic to writer of fiction, which has been my chief interest since childhood. As a writer, I’m not mindful of my characters’ psychology—and certainly not of my own. It sounds like a simple goal, but when I put pen to paper I’m trying to tell an interesting story in an interesting way. I know there are elements at work beneath the surface of my awareness, but when I’m writing a story or a novel or a poem (my poetry tends to be strongly narrative), I’m not thinking about what those influential elements may be. Similarly, I’m not even thinking about what the text I’m writing may mean. Long ago I decided that meaning was the reader’s purview. In fact, when I let go of my concern for meaning in my stories, my stories became much, much better—more interesting and probably more meaningful.
William Gass said it well: “You hope that the amount of meaning you can pack into a book will always be more than you are capable of consciously understanding…. You have to trick your medium into doing far better than you, as a conscious and clearheaded person, might manage” (my italics).
That is, Gass understood that while he was writing consciously—making deliberate choices about plot, characterization, setting, word choice, and so on—his unconscious mind was at work as well, perhaps operating on a more symbolic level; and because of the influence of his unconscious thoughts, the work would turn out more complex, more engaging, and more interesting than it would if just his consciousness was directing the narrative.
When I write, I deliberately (i.e. consciously) put what I think of as “constellations of images” into the work: repeated words, phrases, ideas (much as we do in poetry, even when I’m writing prose), as well as allusions to the great, classical repositories of narrative. In the west, writers have tended to allude to four narrative sources: the Bible, classical mythology, history, and Shakespeare. I don’t limit myself to these sources for allusions, but I do draw from them copiously. These techniques are not done at random. I have intentions, but I also know that each reader is going to bring their own perspective, their own experiences to my text, and therefore read it and interpret it idiosyncratically. By using these “constellations of images” I’m feeding their imaginations as readers, giving them a lot of handholds for scaling their own personal understanding of the text (and perhaps their own personal understanding of me as the author of the text).
I have experienced two phenomena as a writer that I want to share because they relate directly to our interest in psychology and the unconscious mind. For more than thirty years my process has been to write in the morning, Monday through Friday. When I taught full-time, I would only manage about 30 minutes per morning writing session (now it’s somewhat more). Some mornings I sat down to write knowing precisely where I was in the narrative I was working on. That is, I’d left off the previous morning with a clear sense of what to write next (I’d just run out of time). On those mornings, the writing tended to produce a fine enough first draft. The writing session was satisfactory. Other mornings, I wasn’t sure where to take the narrative. I would sit with my coffee and a blank sheet of paper staring at me. Some writers, I knew, would say at that point “Well, I don’t have anything today. I’ll try again tomorrow.” I, on the other hand, had learned that if I just start writing—put pen to paper and begin producing text—the ideas would come. Not only that, the writing tended to be much, much better on those days that began so aimlessly. More interesting, more creative, more linguistically complex. I have a theory as to why.
On the mornings when I had a clear sense of what I wanted to write, the composing of text was directed primarily by my conscious mind, whereas on the mornings when I had a fuzzy sense or no sense at all, the composing of text was directed by my unconscious mind. And, lo and behold, it turns out my unconscious mind is a much better writer than my conscious mind. Said differently, my conscious mind operates in the real, and my unconscious mind operates in the surreal. And most of us would agree that surrealistic images are more engaging, more captivating than realistic ones.
The other phenomenon has to do with not writing. I’m dedicated to my creative writing, but I will have stretches when I’m not writing for several days—generally this happens when I’m traveling or on vacation. I have had a few occasions where a significant illness or injury has prevented me from writing for several days. I notice that I begin to get anxious, I have difficulty concentrating, I become impatient, and generally I just feel uneasy. These symptoms of my not-writing correspond precisely with sleep deprivation. Returning to Freud, he compared creative writing to daytime dreaming. He theorized that the mind of the creative writer is functioning in much the same way as the brain does when we’re sleeping and dreaming. I feel that my experience gives credence to Freud’s theory. By not writing for several days I’m depriving my mind of its process for analyzing and interpreting my world. I’ve often said that my writing is a kind of meditation. It keeps me centered. It may also be keeping me mentally healthy.
I will end on a note about a possible future for psychoanalytic criticism. As we know, a dominant topic in the academy is artificial intelligence: how is it reshaping society, how is it reshaping education, how is it reshaping us? It is a broad and constantly changing subject, so I want to focus on a very narrow sliver: AI’s production of narrative text. I have no doubt that commercial publishers in the U.S. and elsewhere will start marketing books written by artificial-intelligence “authors.” There will be no need for royalty payments, no authorial egos for editors to bruise (really, no need for editors), no missed deadlines by unpredictable human writers, who become sick, who become distracted, who become blocked.
If you follow developments in artificial intelligence, you’re probably familiar with the “black box problem.” AI is autodidactic, gathering data and “learning” from that data of its own mysterious volition. When AI begins doing things that its programmers didn’t program it to do, demonstrating processes and outcomes the programmers themselves don’t understand, the AI is operating in a so-called black box. AI that is composing narratives—telling stories, writing novels, etc.—is essentially drawing from its unconscious, its impenetrable black box. At that point, computer scientists are unable to untangle and understand the AI author’s complex programming, but perhaps psychoanalytic critics can employ their skill sets, analyzing the language of the narrative itself to perceive the artificial author’s unconscious mind. Such a process was predicted by science fiction writers. In Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), computer technicians are essentially psychoanalysts who diagnose and fix problems by talking to the computer, asking it questions, and analyzing its responses. Similarly, in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the computer, HAL, has what amounts to a nervous breakdown when faced with an ethical dilemma.
As the new generation of critics, you may well be at the forefront of working with artificial intelligences, reading their output, analyzing their language, and assessing their unconscious programming. If so, I encourage you not to ignore the old, human-produced texts, for they are the gateway to comprehending the artificial authors of the very near future, and humanity will likely depend on that comprehension. Humanity will likely depend on you. Vitally important point number seven.
On the Whale Road (Beowulf)
Introduction to the translation-in-progress
I’ve been fascinated by the Old English poem Beowulf since I was a teenager. Even though my primary focus was American postmodernism and the work of William H. Gass, my doctoral dissertation (2010) included chapters concerned with Beowulf. For my dissertation, however, I relied on modern-English translations of the poem. In 2012, I wrote my monograph, The “Beowulf” Poet and His Real Monsters, and tried my hand at translating the Old English for the first time. It was difficult, to put it mildly, but also invigorating. My translating for the monograph was primarily literal. Being a novelist, I wanted to try a literary translation, and I finally got around to it in 2019, focusing on the central section of the poem, the Grendel’s mother episode. The editors at EKL Review published my translation. Then in 2022, upon retiring from teaching full-time, I returned to the poem, and began translating it from the beginning.
Rather than searching for publishers as I completed each section, I decided to use the Kindle Vella platform and put the poem-in-progress out into the world myself. I managed six installments before Kindle Direct Publishing announced the closing of their Vella platform as of February 2025. At that time I migrated my translation-in-progress to this blog. The translation here appears in two parts, as I’m in the process of joining the beginning sections with the central section that I translated in 2019.
You’ll notice that I’ve changed the title from the typical, simply, Beowulf. That title is one of custom. In the codex that contains the one and only manuscript of the poem, it is untitled. We have no idea what name the story may have carried in the, likely, eighth and ninth centuries when it was perhaps a standard tale in Anglo-Saxon halls. Since I want my translation to be unique (among the approximately 350 other modern-English translations currently on record), I decided to give it a unique title, On the Whale Road, which includes a homage to Jack Kerouac and the Beats.
My secondary title — “A New & True Translation of the Poem Known as ‘Beowulf'” — reflects that my objective is to create a prose poetry version of the poem that has fidelity with the original poet’s intentions. That is, my translation is rooted in the poem’s original language, but I always have an eye (and ear) on the story’s narrative energy. The poem would be performed for a hall filled with probably boozy listeners, likely heavily armed — not to mention the capricious king himself. The poet had a vested interest in keeping his audience on the edge of their benches. So at every turn of the translation, when there are choices to be made among equally enigmatic options of Anglo-Saxon, I always choose the most captivating, or as we would say today, the most page-turning.
+ + +
BOOK I: DENMARK
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Prologue (ll. 1-52)
A Leader for the Leaderless
Halt! – And recall the spear-wielding Danes of old, whose kings gifted greatness to their people and whose princes played the role of hero time and again.
Scyld Scefing served fear to his many enemies in their very own halls, unseated the terror-struck lords and murdered their mercenary bands, even the dread Eruli. He was a foundling forlorn, though consolation would come his way as he flourished beneath the sky, rising in fame and forcing tribute from foes near at hand whose misfortune arrived via the whale road. That was a virtuous king!
After a time, a son came to court, God-sent and a tremendous comfort to the community. He sensed the distress the leaderless Danes had long endured. Thus the Lord of Life, Warden of the Wide World, granted him glory, and the renown of Scyld’s son, Beaw, burst across his father’s land. Thus a young leader, while still at his father’s hearth and privy to his wealth, would do well to lavish gifts upon his close companions so that when war erupts their loyalty can be counted on. It’s true everywhere that noble deeds enrich a man’s name.
When destiny declared Scyld’s departure, the old man, still imbued with youthful strength, was called into the Lord’s keeping. He’d commanded his companions to carry his cherished body to the surging sea, which lapped at a land he had long ruled.
A regal ring-prowed ship – ice-adorned and eager – waited impatiently at the water’s edge. The beloved leader, illustrious ring-giver, was laid by the main mast, the beating heart of the breathtaking bark. Fabulous treasures from far-away lands were brought forth. Never have I heard of a ship so fulsomely equipped with weapons of war: swords made of malice and finely crafted mail. On his breast they heaped many a marvelous treasure to travel with him far onto the frothing flood. Their great gifts – finery of a faithful flock – were no less fantastic than those given him in the beginning when he embarked upon the waves, a little child alone.
High above his head they erected a gold-bright banner and allowed the sea to guide him, giving him back to the gaping ocean. They watched with sunken spirits and heavy hearts. No one can say precisely – neither hall councilors nor noble men under heaven – who received that precious cargo.
I (ll. 53-114)
The Hell-Born Fiend
Beaw, beloved leader of his people, held the land firmly and famously for a long time after his noble father had reached another realm – then he himself fathered highborn Healfdene, who ruled the glory-greedy Scyldings, becoming ancient and battle-hardened by the end. In time, four children were born to that unrivaled ruler of troops – Heorogar, Hrothgar and Halga the Good. I’ve heard that the daughter (Yrse, I think) was Onela’s queen, or at least the War-Scylfing’s favored bed companion.
Then Hrothgar became known for his war-glory and battle-savvy so that his novice followers blossomed into a mighty warrior band. A plan came to mind: he would command that a wondrous hall be built, a marvel to outlive memory for mead-drinking and the division of war booty among young and old alike – everything God had bestowed, save for common ground and men’s lives. I’ve heard that work orders spread widely across the region summoning craftsmen of every skill to build the people’s beautiful hall. As such, it was completed in no time, this grandest of greathalls. He whose words were not questioned anywhere said the hall’s name was Hereot. True to his boasts, at banquet he gave gifts of rings, treasure galore. The hall towered tall, gabled with horns and beckoning the unholy flames of war-wrath. The day of the blade-hate had not yet been born between son- and father-in-law, sown by a long-buried hostility.
A darkness-dwelling demon, powerful with pain, had long endured the din of debauched merrymaking in the meadhall. The harpstrings sang stingingly, as did the song-shaping poet, who could keenly recount the creation of men from long ago. He declaimed how the Almighty made the earth, a lovely land ringed with water and a triumph of design when the sun and moon were set in motion there; and how He ornamented every corner with branches and leaves while animating myriad forms of life.
They lived prosperously, a chosen people, until the hell-born fiend burned with rage, became fixed on their ruin. Grendel, the grim outcast was called, infamous guardian of lonely haunts, fens and forsaken wastes. The mournful monster had dwelt for a time among his kind, all expelled by God, the marked kin of the murderer Cain. For the slaying of Abel, the Lord exacted revenge. Indeed, he extracted no joy from that evil act, only the Lord’s hostility and banishment from humankind. Thereafter were born all manner of monstrous things – ogres and evil-minded elves and ghouls who go among the dead, as well as the giants that waged war against God for ages (an outrage for which they were fully compensated).
II (ll. 115-188)
The Burning Embrace
At nightfall, the Ring-Danes’ foe fell upon the awe-inspiring house, after the beer-drinking was done. Inside he beheld the noble band abed amid their abandoned banquet – their sleep was carefree, with no thoughts of the misery men must sometimes endure. The unclean creature, cruel and ruthless, was ready at once for a savage assault and wrested thirty thanes from their rest. Proud of his plunder, he left for his lair, his hellish home, bearing on his shoulders the bloody slaughter.
In the predawn twilight, Grendel’s war prowess was revealed, and the night’s raucous feasting was replaced by woeful wailing. The famous king, long-known for his nobility, sat stunned by sorrow. The great one grieved for his taken thanes as they beheld the track of that hated haint, that soulless specter. The fight proved fierce, pernicious and persistent. The very next night he resumed his murderous rampage, dedicated as he was to death and devastation, to unmitigated malice, doling out not a morsel of remorse. Many were the men, then, who found sleeping quarters elsewhere, a room removed from the hall and its unwelcome guest, once the unmistakable signs of his savagery were made abundantly clear. To escape the fiend, the deft sought safety via distance. Thus did Grendel ravage right, ruling over all until the hallowed hall was hollow.
The Scyldings’ patriarch suffered the pain of misfortune, the misery of unimaginable woe, for an interminable time, twelve withering winters. Reports of Grendel’s crimes were recited far from the site of his unending war on Hrothgar, so that a generation of children grew up hearing of his wicked and wrathful ways. He sought no substitute for his feud with the Danes – no pact, no price could curtail this deadly curse. Hrothgar’s hall councilors needn’t hope for a radiant reprieve from the death-dealer’s claws. On the contrary, the monster – shadow-cloaked and death-draped – continued to hunt whomever he pleased, from battle-weary warriors to dewey youths, plotting and pouncing from the mist-covered wastes where he presided over a never-ending night. No one can say where hell’s messengers may meet them on their meandering path.
So, mankind’s menace, always alone, committed uncountable crimes, unending acts of evil that caused unbearable anguish. On lead-dark nights he would occupy Heorot’s lonely treasure-laden halls. Unworthy, he avoided the hallowed throne, which was to be occupied by men deemed godlike — and never would he know such adoration. The Scyldings’ heartbroken lord suffered a misery that was acute. Men granted authority debated strategems by which the courageous could defend against the sudden assaults. Desperate, they would seek out heathen shrines and make pledges to the stealer of souls, soliciting diabolical assistance in hopes of halting the nation’s destruction.
Such was the heathens’ habit of mind, their misguided hope: they imagined that turning toward hell would be their salvation. They knew nothing of God, the Maker of everything who would judge their deeds. Their ignorance didn’t allow them to ask for the Lord’s protection – He whose glory gilded the world. Woe to those who throw their souls into hatred’s burning embrace, a sacrifice that will effect nothing no matter how desperate their desire. Well, though, will it be for those who find the enfolding arms of the Lord. A protective father’s comfort and security will be theirs!
III (ll. 189-257)
Across the Waves
So Healfdene’s son suffered ceaselessly, his sorrow seething without end, the best of princes unable to move past the perpetual grief. Nothing could overturn the trouble that had been wrought, that pernicious night-evil. It clung to him, loathsome and cruel.
In his distant home, a great man among the Geats, Hygelac’s thane, heard of Grendel’s misdeeds. Among men, back then, his might was unmatched, so too his nobility and his strength of character. He commanded that a sturdy seaworthy ship be outfitted for a crossing upon the swan-road to the war-king, the worthy prince who was in need of equally worthy warriors. Clever-headed men declined to dissuade him, though he was dear to them. Rather, they hailed him a hero, confident in the signs they studied. The born-leader selected from among the Geats the best and boldest – fourteen seasoned soldiers – and led his troops to the heavy-timbered ship. The warrior knew the ways of the sea and marched them to the water’s edge.
The time had come, and the boat waited upon the water. Floating just beyond the high beachhead. The eager warriors, noisy in their excited chatter, leaped above the twisting tide onto the boat. Each bore a splendid array of war-gear, stowing it in the bosom of the stout-timbered ship. The glad warriors were launched, then, on their glorious journey.
Wind-driven across the waves, the ship flew like a foam-plumed bird for a full day – until the sea-voyagers sighted land. Before the curved prow rose glimmering cliffs, abrupt bluffs, and fanning forelands. Then their sea-crossing had come to an end. The Weder Geats hastened to the hard ground, tying tight their ship, shaking out their mail-shirts, and gathering their war-gear. The crossing was easy, and, pleased, they thanked God.
From the high seawall, a Scylding watchman, charged with guarding the coast, counted as gleaming shields were carried across the gangway, followed by other worthy war-gear. Worry threatened to wreck him: he must know the minds of these well-armed men. Heavy shaft in hand, Hrothgar’s man boldly rode down to the strand to interrogate this newly arrived band:
Halt and identify yourselves! You chain-mailed men who have steered your ship here along the sea-path, skillfully crossing the deep. Long has it been my duty to dwell at land’s end and monitor the sea for hostile mariners who mean harm to the Danes. No shieldbearing warriors have disembarked so boldly, not without displaying some sign that they’d been granted permission. I have never beheld a man in battle-gear of greater stature – nowhere on earth is there such a fearsome figure. Unless his physique and even his fine face deceive, he is no mere hall hanger-on propped up with battle panoply. Now, before you advance farther into the land of the Danes, I must know where you came from – I must be convinced you are not false-hearted spies. Don’t hesitate, seafaring foreigners, and take me seriously when I say I must know your place of origin.
IV (ll. 258-319)
The Shining Hall
Their leader, who was eldest and wisest, unlatched his lockbox of language and answered: We are from Geat-land, hearth-guardians of our lord, Hygelac. My father’s name, Edgtheow, was synonymous with nobility, and known by people of many nations for his bravery in battle. He outlasted many bitter winters, proving their better, before leaving his home deep into old age. His memory lives on among the wisest advisers everywhere. We seek your leader, Healfdane’s son, lord and protector of his people. Our intentions are noble. Provide us your wise advice. We are on an errand of great import to the legendary leader of the Danes; and have nothing to hide, I assure you.
You must confirm if what we have heard is true, that among the Scyldings dwells some sort of destroyer, an enigmatic enemy who reveals his rage in the terror he brings on dark-black nights, unspeakable acts resulting in shame and slaughter. I have advice for Hrothgar that comes from a kindred spirit, a way for he who is wise and good to vanquish this villain and cool his accumulated cares, a remedy that will bring sweet relief. Otherwise he will eternally endure this troubled time, this everlasting season of distress, dwelling there in that high hall, gleaming emblem of his greatness.
Before speaking, the coast-warden, stalwart servant upon his steed, considered that a shrewd shield-warrior must be able to distinguish between words and deeds. Said: My sense is that your war-band is here on behalf of the lord of the Scyldings. Go forth, then, bearing weapons and armor. I shall be your guide. What is more, I shall command my young men, on their honor, to keep safe your ship against any ne’er-do-wells – this freshly tarred vessel on the beach – so that the stout timbers of its curved keel can easily return you, esteemed sea-farers, over the deep currents to your home coast in Wederland. May your noble intentions buy you protection in battle so that each of you comes through unharmed.
They then proceeded. Their boat floated quietly. The broad-beamed ship was at anchor and firmly secured with ropes. Golden boar images gleamed above their cheek-guards. The fire-hardened ornament was an added protection, and the grim masks were a reflection of their war-ready hearts. The troop hurried as one and soon beheld the high, timbered hall, magnificently trimmed in gold. Earthbound men held that it was the best-known building under heaven. Home of a powerful king, its brilliance beamed across many lands. The brave-hearted guard pointed out the straightest way to the shining hall, pride of the people. Turning his horse, the singular watchman shared these words: The time has come for me to depart. May Father Almighty look upon you all with favor in times of strife and bring you through it whole. I return to the seaside to resume my duty guarding against hostile troops.
V (ll. 320-370)
Audience with the King
The road, paved in stone, showed the group the way. Their iron mail was hard, hand-linked, and that shining war-gear made an unmistakable statement. Outfitted as they were, in their terrifying gear, they went directly to the hall and straight away placed their shields, which were wide, circular and sturdy, against the outside wall of the building. Weary from the sea, they rested on benches, their armor loudly announcing the arrival of brave men. These men of the sea stood their ash-wood weapons together, gray tips pointing up. The troop was impressively armed.
A fellow, uncowed, inquired of their origin: From where have you carried these gilded shields, these gray shirts of mail and grim-looking helmets, an armory of battle-ready spears? I am Hrothgar’s herald and servant. Never have I seen a gathering of men, foreigners too, whose deportment was so daring. I trust your motives in seeking Hrothgar are honorable, an expression of courage – not because you are needy exiles. The clear leader of the Weders, he of noble bearing, speaking firmly from beneath his helmet, answered with these well-chosen words: We are Hygelac’s close companions, table-mates. Beowulf is my name. I desire to explain my errand to Healfdane’s famous son, your lord, if he would be gracious enough to grant the time and allow an audience. Wulfgar – a leader of the Wendals, well-known for his war-skills and wisdom – replied: I shall approach the friend of the Danes, the Scyldings’ chief and ring-giver, and communicate your quest, as you ask, then quickly bring back whatever response the best of men cares to give.
With that, he went confidently to the place where Hrothgar, haggard and gray-headed, sat among his most-trusted men. The stalwart messenger, shoulders squared, stood before the lord of the Danes. He knew the ways of these noble people. Wulfgar spoke to his lord as one does who is a reliable retainer: Standing just outside, come from across the wide sea, are men of the Geats. This warrior band calls Beowulf their leader. They seek, my lord, a conference. I encourage you to grant their request, gracious Hrothgar. By the worth of their war-gear they warrant consideration. Their chief, without question, is a warrior worthy of respect.
VI (ll. 371-455)
A Single Request
Hrothgar, defender of the Scyldings, declared: I last saw him when he was but a boy. His honored father was named Ecgtheow, and it was to him that the Geat Hrethel gave his only daughter. Now the son, grown strong, is calling on a dependable friend. Those who have traveled across the sea, delivering gifts to the Geats to demonstrate our goodwill, report his hand-grip to be that of thirty men, giving him great advantage in battle. My hope is that he has been sent to us, the West Danes, by the grace of God to contend with Grendel’s terror. This good man shall receive great rewards for his courageous spirit. Quickly now, bring them in to see the assembled kinsmen. Say to them also, the words meaning they are welcome among the Danes.
Wulfgar went to the hall door and issued this summons: I have been instructed by the leader of the East Danes, a victorious king, to say he knows your noble lineage, and, stout-hearted seafarers, you are welcome guests. You may now go – in battle-gear, face-plates raised – to see Hrothgar. Leave behind your war-shields and -shafts until the conversation is concluded.
The powerful one rose from among his many powerful men, a loyal band. Some were instructed by their savvy leader to stay and watch the weapons. Promptly they walked as one, guided under Heorot’s roof. The bold one, stone-faced beneath his helmet, went forward until he stood in the center of the room. Beowulf spoke – his chain-mail shone, a war-net artfully woven by a master smith:
Hail to you, Hrothgar. I am Hygelac’s kinsman and subject. I have performed many magnificent feats in my youth. In my fatherland this affair with Grendel became well known to me. Seafarers say that this hall, the finest of such strongholds, stands vacant and worthless to warriors after the light hides in the night sky. All of my people, from the noblest to the most common, said I must place my uncommon strength at your service, great Hrothgar. They witnessed my return wearing my enemies’ blood after capturing a clan of giants, five strong, and slaughtering them, as I had water-monsters in night-waves. The Weders’ strife was mine to remedy, whoever meant them harm. They deserved utter destruction. And now with Grendel, that fiercest of fighters, shall I alone settle the score with the ogre.
To you now, prince of the Bright-Danes, shelter of the Scyldings, I must make a single request – do not deny me, fortress of fighting-men, proud prince of the people, now that I have come so far, I be allowed alone to purge Heorot, beside my band of worthy warriors. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the fierce foe brazenly forsakes weapons. Thus, in the spirit of honorable Hygelac I shall bear into battle neither shining sword nor gleaming shield. Rather, I shall wrestle the hateful wraith, grip against grasp, a fight that will leave only one of us living. Then he who is taken in death must trust in the Lord’s judgment.
I suspect, should he succeed, he will eat us Geats with gusto, as he has so often done the bravest Danes. No, my head shall not require a shroud, should death seize me, for it will be covered in blood as he carries off my gory corpse, intending, I should think, to make a meal of me. The solitary swamp-walker will eat it heartily, fouling his fen-hollow with the feast. My body then will be beyond your care, and, too, your worry. Should I be taken in battle, send to Hygelac my war-shirt, a finely wrought garment that has faithfully guarded my breast. It was handed down from Hrethel, the legendary work of Weland. It shall go as fate intends.
VII (ll. 456-498)
A Gathering of Heroes
Hrothgar, guardian of the Scyldings, said: You have assumed this quest, Beowulf my friend, from a sense of obligation, as well as kindness. Your father provoked a pestilent feud when he murdered Heatholaf, guest of the Wylfings. Then, afraid of war, his Weder clan was wary of having him. So over the swelling waves he came, seeking the people of the South Danes, the honorable Scyldings. I was a new ruler of the Danes at that time – yet my youthful hand held a wide-ranging realm, a land rich with heroes. Heorogar, my elder brother, had died–Healfdene’s heir, my better, dead! I paid the price of ancient treasure to settle the feud. The sea’s back bore it to the Wylfings, and he pledged an oath to me as repayment.
It is dispiriting to acknowledge to anyone how my heart is weighted with humiliation, sunken with shame to think what devastation Grendel’s attacks have brought to Heorot, laced with his hatred and hostility. My hall-troop has been decimated, my personal guard diminished, their fate to be swept away by Grendel’s grasping hate. God could quickly quell this deadly enemy’s deeds.
Often, drunk and full of beer-boasts, warriors would declare over cups their intention to await combat in the hall, meeting the horror of Grendel with their own horrible blades. Come morning, daylight revealed the noble hall’s benches dripping with blood, wound-gore everywhere. Death dispatched my dearest companions, taken from me one by one, diminishing the courageous band. Rest now, feast – feed your spirit in the hall where noble warriors like you have celebrated great victories. At once space was made for the Geatish men, a bench all their own in the beerhall, and the bold band took their seats, preening their strength. Then a serving-thane performed his duty to bring forth a decorated cup brimming with bright drink. The court poet sang clearly in Heorot as the sizable company of heroes, Geats and Weders, enjoyed themselves.
VIII (ll. 499-558)
A Public Challenge
Ecglaf’s son spoke, Unferth, seated at the feet of the Scyldings’ king, words weighted with provocation. Beowulf’s courageous coming here from across the sea irritated him in the extreme because he desired that no other man in middle-earth should accrue more daring deeds under heaven than himself. Aren’t you the Beowulf that competed with Breca on the open sea, the two of you quick to settle your quarrel, pride placing you in the deep water and risking your lives? No one, confidante or crank, could convince you two of the recklessness of your plan to row upon the open sea. There you both would accept the assessment of the sea-path, drawing the water with your arms, slipping over the surface that stretched before you: chaotic tides enkindled with winter’s temper. For seven long nights you labored against the water’s powerful pull. He bested you, Breca did, demonstrated mightier drive on the sea. Then the morning’s tide cast him upon the shore of the Heathoræmes. From there, well-loved by his people, the Brondings, he set out for his cherished homeland, where he ruled in its handsome citadel, keeping safe its citizens and its resources. Beanstan’s son followed through on his boast to beat you. So I imagine you will get the worst of it – even though elsewhere you met with success the rush of oncoming battle, grim warfare – should you dare to wait through the long night for Grendel’s grim hour.
Beowulf, Ecgtheow’s son, replied: Gee, Unferth my friend, you’ve said a lot about Breca and his harrowing time – with your beer-bathed tongue. I maintain, as a matter of truth, that I possessed mightier sea-strength, overcame more adversity on the waves, than any other man. The two of us vowed, when we were just boys, brimming with youth, that we would wager our lives out on the open ocean – thus we did. As we rowed at sea, we had at hand hardened swords, thinking we would use them to ward off whales. He was unable to drift beyond me, to float faster on the wicked waves. And I wouldn’t abandon him. Five nights we managed to stay together, until the turbulent sea tore us apart, separated by the surging swells. We battled bone-chilling storms, deepening night and a vicious north wind – everything turned against us.
The waves were wrathful. Outrage riled the sea-fish. Against their hatred I had my handmade mail, hard-woven war-gear threaded with gold, spread protectively across my breast. An especially angry beast hooked me in its horrible grip, pulling me to the depths. Nevertheless it was granted me that my sword-point should pierce the vile fighter. By my hand, the mighty ocean menace was dispatched in the frothing melee.
IX (ll. 559-661)
A Passing of the Torch
Again and again the hateful haints set upon me savagely. I repaid them appropriately with my most-trusted sword. The devious demons were disappointed in their design to devour me ’round a banquet-table near the bottom of the sea. But by morning they lay upon the beach – blade wounds from my sword had them resting peacefully. Afterward mariners could cross the high sea unhindered by their harassment. Light, God’s bright beacon, came in the east. Then the sea calmed and the wind-whipped cliffs of a cape appeared. Fate will often favor the brave, as yet unmarked for death, if their courage doesn’t falter. Thus it befell me to slay with my sword nine sea-beasts. I know of no more bitter combat contested by night beneath heaven’s arching buttresses, nor of a man in more dire circumstances caught in the ocean’s current. Nonetheless, I slipped their treacherous grip, saving my life, but worn out from the struggle. Then the sea’s surging current carried me to the land of the Finns – its frothing flood.
There are no such tales of your clashing combat, not that I have heard. Nothing at all about your dread sword. Neither you nor Breca ever achieved impressive deeds in battleplay, with swords gory with glory. My boast is no exaggeration. You, on the other hand, became the killer of your brothers, your own close kin. Your punishment will be to suffer in hell, and no amount of cleverness will save you.
I speak the truth, son of Ecglaf, when I say that menacing monster, Grendel, would never have inflicted such misery on your chief, painted Heorot in the hue of humiliation, if your mind and your fighting-spirit were as grim in battle as you yourself proclaim. But he has discovered he need not greatly fear a feud – no storm of swords – from the Victory-Scyldings. He levies his toll on the Victory-Scyldings without a tittle of mercy for the Danish people; indeed he satisfies his appetite, putting them to sleep and sending them off with no fear of fight from spear-fierce Danes. But very soon now I shall reveal to him the Geats’ strength and valor in battle. Go then boldly, those who so desire, to drink mead, once morning light – a new day’s gold-draped sun – rises in the south to shine over the children of men.
The giver of riches was rewarded with happiness then. The grayhaired and battle-savvy ruler of the Bright-Danes, shepherd of his people, believed that help had finally arrived in Beowulf, whose boasts showed his resolve.
Among and around the warriors a pleasant din developed: music, laughter, convivial conversation. Wealtheow then came forth, Hrothgar’s queen, well known for her courtesy. Glittering in gold, she greeted the men in the hall, and the dutiful wife gave the drinking-cup first to her husband, guardian of the East-Danes’ homeland – and wished him happiness in his beer-drinking, loved as he was by his people. Delighted, the king who was famous for his conquests accepted the ceremonial cup and thus initiated the feast. The lady of the Helmings then went around serving old and young (warriors all), tipping the precious pitcher herself, until the treasure-attired queen, true of heart, carried the container of mirth to Beowulf. She greeted the Geats’ leader with well-chosen words, thanking God that her desperate plea had been answered: that some noble soul would bring comfort by defeating their tormentor.
The battlefield killer, keen for the fight, accepted the brimful cup from Wealtheow and made a declaration. Beowulf, born of Ecgtheow, said, My intention when I boarded the boat with my brothers-in-arms and we launched upon the sea was that I would at once render complete relief to your kingdom, or fall a bloodied corpse in the baneful clutches of my foe. I shall accomplish this feat, marked with courage, or meet my end in this meadhall. The Geat’s speech, his well-chosen words, well pleased the queen. Aglow in gold, the cherished wife went to sit at her husband’s side.
It was then as before in the hall – the happy noise of an again brave nation, again recounting proudly (and loudly) their countless victories – until Healfdene’s son suddenly needed to seek his evening rest. No longer able to see the sun’s light, he knew the monster meant to hit the exalted hall, now that day had surrendered to night’s all-encompassing darkness, allowing shadow-draped shapes to approach unmolested. The hall-troops rose all. Then one guardian to the next, Hrothgar to Beowulf, offered him as good omen the wish for safe stewardship of the stately winehall, uttering these words: Never before have I entrusted to any other man the security of the Danes’ great hall – since raising my own hand and shield – that is, until now to you. Now have and hold this good house. Be mindful of glory, demonstrate your might, be ready for the coming wrath. Reward beyond your most ardent desires is forthcoming should you come through this courageous undertaking alive.
To be continued
+ + +
XX (ll. 1321-1382)
Retribution
Hrothgar, helmet of the Scyldings, replied [to Beowulf]: Ask not after our happiness—for sorrow again lurks in our luckless land. Aeschere, Yrmenlaf’s elder brother, is lost, my keeper of secrets and wellspring of wisdom. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder striking as one when clashing footsoldiers tried to remove our boar-crested heads. However bathed in bravery a man should be, demonstrating a nobility from olden times, that was princely Aeshere. But now a wandering blood-thirsty wight has snatched him from Hereot hoping for a rich reward. The bold terror has fled somewhere, perhaps to devour her hapless victim, I cannot say. She has avenged the crushing grip by which you caught Grendel on his last night, payment for my people’s pernicious annihilation. Something terrible has now befallen Aeschere in this feud, his future likely forfeited, as a new threat, a vicious visitant, has come to continue the deadly quarrel after a death among her clan. Many a thane knows the weight of a heart’s bitter weeping following the loss of a beloved brother-in-arms, a generous bearer of gifts. Now that hand which would have given you—all of you!—your heart’s desire is hidden from us.
It has been reported by those who work the land, and confirmed by my councilors, that two powerful prowlers have been spotted among the marshes, queer characters who rule over the waste-lands. One, according to the most reliable reports, has a feminine form, while the other misshapen outcast seems male, but larger and more powerful than any other . . . man at least: Grendel, or so he was named by the workers of the earth in days long gone. No father for the pair is known, nor whether any other fearsome creatures came before them. They live in a place shrouded in secrecy, a treacherous track thick with wolves, where windy cliffs loom above the waste-land and dark waters cascade into a tumult that races toward the nether-world. Marked off in miles, it is not far, their hoarfrosted fen, where firmly rooted woods darken the wretched water. There, kinsmen claim, flames flicker ominously upon the flood, night after night. No man lives, no matter how old or how wise, who can surmise the mere’s malignant depths. The hard-horned hart, high-stepper of the heath, pushed there by hounds, would rather surrender to the savage pack than hide—it is such an unholy place. Black waves blast toward the heavens when hostile storms further disturb the surge, salting the air as if the sky were weeping. Now you alone can save us, even though you know not this perilous place. You may find her there, this sinister creature. Dare to seek her, and if you survive the fight, I shall again reward you with the worthiest treasure of wound gold.
XXI (ll. 1383-1472)
A Churning Sea
Beowulf, son of ecgtheow, replied: Your wisdom must inform you it is better to punish those who pile sorrow at our door than to be forlorn over a friend’s sad fate. We must all bear knowing our life in this world will end. Allow whoever is able to achieve their glory before death. For afterward, it will be their most enduring memorial. Take heart, wisest watchman of the realm—we shall swiftly take to the track of Grendel’s dam, and on this threat I will make good: She has no chance to lose herself, not in the earth’s embrace, not among the mountain’s forest, not on the sea’s sandy floor—flee where she will. Patience can be excruciating, but I know you will practice it today. The ancient one’s spirit was lifted by this bold speech, and he gave thanks to God, praised the All-Powerful.
Then Hrothgar’s mount was duly dressed, a haughty warhorse with a mane of intricate braids. The wise old king set off in a magnificent manner, leading a fine troop of linden-bearing footsoldiers. The tracks were easily seen where she had borne the best of thanes along the forest floor and directly to her dark domain. The lifeless captive had always helped Hrothgar watch over his home. The king and his company worked their way along the unwelcoming path, at times so narrow they were compelled to squeeze through one by one, then edge along a high seawall where myriad monsters made their home. He went first, with some seasoned soldiers, to spy out the land. Quickly they came to a forbidding forest where mountain trees angled above gray rock. Below, the water was grim with gore. Misery dealt a murderous blow to the Danes on that sea-cliff—to every last warrior, including the friends of the Scyldings—when they came upon Aeschere’s severed head. The bloody sea-surge boiled with gore, upon which all were drawn to gaze. Then battle-horns sounded, singing their readiness for war—and the waiting soldiers stole a moment’s rest.
The water churned with many strange creatures of the sea, while kindred monsters lay upon the rocks, the sorts of sea-serpents and wild beasts that menace mariners as they navigate early-morning channels. The creatures sank away, furious and fulminating, the second they heard the battle-horns’ sharp song. A Geat, their chief archer, used his bow to bury a war-hardened shaft in one such water-beast, cutting short its struggles. It swam slowly in the surf toward the realm of death. A barbed javelin designed for hunting boars hooked the desperate wave-roamer and hauled it onto the rocks. All gaped at the gruesome guest.
Beowulf dressed for battle, not in the least mindful of his mortality. The well-made mail, ample and artfully adorned, must safeguard his body as he searched the sea, shielding his breast when caught in the grip of war, in the malicious grasp of a murderous foe. A rare helmet—refulgent and complete with a curtain of rings covering the neck, created by a master smith of the olden days—would protect the hero’s head; and when the sandy seafloor was churned into a cloud of chaos, a boar-crest amulet would prove impenetrable to any war-sword or battleax. At this critical moment Hrothgar’s humbled advisor, Unferth, lent Beowulf a powerful aid: the specially hilted sword known as Hrunting, a nightmare of a weapon, highly treasured in times of strife. Its ferric edge was festooned with terrible tendrils, poison-laced thorns hard-varnished with the blood of the vanquished. It had proved worthy of every warrior who had wielded it in the stronghold of his enemies. Indeed, this was hardly the first time it would be relied upon to carry out an act of courage. It seemed certain that Unferth, son of Ecglaf, wanted to forget the drunken insults he had hurled at the superior swordsman, skilled in feats of strength, when he lent him the weapon. He would not dare risk his life beneath that turbulent tide—in his failure to seek fame he lost his good name forever. Not so for the other, the man wardrobed in war-gear.
XXII (ll. 1473-1556)
The Mere-Wolf
Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow, said: I am eager to set off, son of Healfdene, wisest of kings and gold-friend to your men. Bear in mind our arrangement, of which we spoke before, that should I fall in fulfilling my promise, you will embrace the role of my father. Likewise, grant your guardianship to my young comrades, closest of companions, if this battle carries me off. Furthermore, beloved Hrothgar, forward to Hygelac the spectacular gifts you have showered upon me. Thus the great leader of the Geats, Hrethel’s son, when he is struck by the magnificence of the treasure, will realize that I have made the most of my time here and was richly rewarded by a gracious ring-giver. And you, Unferth, man widely known, have this revered heirloom—this hard-edged sword with its perfect blade expertly patterned after the sea. I shall bear Hrunting in my hunt for fame, or be borne away by death.
After these bold words, the much-loved leader of the Weather-Geats rushed away without awaiting reply, and the swirling sea accepted the impetuous warrior. Then daylight helped him discover the dim bottom.
Soon the grim and greedy one who had ruled that watery realm with a ravenous ferocity for some fifty years sensed that a man from above was penetrating her unwelcoming place. She clutched the warrior in her wicked claws, hoping to pierce the woven rings of his shirt, but it saved his body and his life from her searching, sickening fingers. Coming to the bottom, the mere-wolf managed the ring-clad prince toward her warren, and, in spite of his resolve, he was restrained from freeing his weapon. All the while a bevy of mysterious sea-beasts beat at his battle-mail and tore at it with their tusks as they pursued the tangled pair. Then the hero discovered he had entered some kind of hostile hall, cut off from the water and the current’s cruel grip, due to the hall’s high roof. He saw the white light of a fire, its flames flickering brightly.
The valiant visitor also saw the sickening lake-wife, duchess of this lepers’ den. He swung the ring-embellished war-sword, saving nothing back, and its aria was a hideous battle-song against her head. But the guest found that the gleaming blade would not bite, let alone prove baneful, its edge failing the imperiled prince. That precious treasure had prevailed countless times in hand-to-hand conflict, cutting helmets, hewing harnesses, delivering enemies to their doom—this was its debut failure.
Recalling his fame and retaining his courage, the determination of Hyglac’s kinsman was intact. The enraged warrior tossed to the ground the artfully adorned sword, though rigid and razor-edged. He must trust in his own tireless grip. Such is required of a man if his reputation in battle is to become legendary. He must be willing to forfeit his life.
The War-Geats’ great prince grasped Grendel’s mother by her hair, harboring no remorse for the move. Many a hard battle helped him to keep his head, and he used his swelling rage to force his lethal lover to the floor. She instantly retaliated with the grasp of her terrible talons, clawing at him. The relentless onslaught wearied the strongest of warriors, the surest of foot, so that he stumbled and fell. She put her full weight upon the visitor to her hall and brandished a short sword, its blade broad and biting, meaning to avenge her only son, her sole offspring. Across his shoulder and breast lay the braided mail, and it protected his body from being pierced or hacked. The Geats’ guardian, Ecgtheow’s son, would have perished there, beneath the wide earth, if not for his battle-tested gear, true to its purpose in helping holy God determine the contest’s victor. The Ruler of the heavens easily foresaw the right result when Beowulf again was upright.
XXIII (ll. 1557-1590 )
Striking with Fury
Then he spotted among the scattered war-gear a blade imbued with countless victories in battle, an ancient sword, strong-edged and worthy of the finest fighters. It was a choice weapon but far more than most men could wield in combat—only the hardiest of heroes could harness its special might, manufactured, as it was, by giants. The Scyldings’ bold savior drew the ring-marked blade and struck with fury, breaking the bone-rings of her neck, the ancient blade slicing straight through, her body doomed. Lifeless, it crumpled to the floor. The sword-blade glinted with gore—the swordsman with satisfaction.
A light flared, illuminating the interior, as if heaven’s own candle had pierced the pall. He surveyed the chamber, quickly turning to the wall. Hygelac’s thane, still furiously focused, took up his weapon by its heavy hilt. The blade would prove its worth once more as the warrior wished to repay Grendel for the vicious work he performed on the West-Danes. Hrothgar’s hearth-friends, fifteen dozing Danes, were devoured during a recent attack, and as many carried off as a loathsome prize for later. The fierce champion had rewarded him for that, as was evident when he found Grendel, battle-worn, in his final resting-place. He lay dead, obviously drained of life, fatally injured as he was in Heorot. His shattered corpse split wide open, suffering a sort of second brutal death upon Beowulf’s merciless sword-stroke, severing completely his head.
To be continued
Note: All artwork by the author. All rights reserved.
Let Us Now Praise William Gass’s Greatest Work
This paper was presented at the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, May 2024, as part of the “William H. Gass at 100” panel. Other papers were “Surveying The Tunnel“ by Joel Minor (Washington University in St. Louis) and “Literary Theory Teaching: Founded on William Gass” by Ali Chetwynd (American University of Iraq, Sulaimani). The panel was chaired by Benjamin Seigle (University of Illinois, Chicago).
“I should like to return to my real love, the novella. I think that is what I should have been doing all along, writing storyless stories,” thus spake William H. Gass in 1995 in response to the question, in essence, what would he be working on now that his novel The Tunnel was out in the world, all 650 pages of it, after a legendary gestation of 26 years? Over those nearly three decades of its composition, Gass, as a writer of fiction, became identified with the project as excerpts of it appeared more than 30 times, between 1969 (New American Review, No. 6) and 1995 (Esquire, March), including as reprints in anthologies of award-winners, limited-edition books by boutique presses, and even as a stage play. When finally released in 1995, The Tunnel proved controversial, provoking as much condemnation as praise (as well as a sizable percentage of ambivalence). Nevertheless, its brilliance was recognized with the American Book Award and a nomination for the Pen-Faulkner Prize, both in 1996.
Gass seemed to take the mixed reviews in stride, content that “the past ha[d] been laid to rest,” as he expressed it to Heide Ziegler (119). He was free at last to focus on his real love.
Because of the infamy of The Tunnel—its seemingly never-ending composition, its accolade-earning surface-breaches, its much-anticipated publication, and its ire-inspired critiques—those who know William Gass as a fiction writer almost always connect him to his infamous magnum opus. My purpose here is to posit that of all Gass’s works of fiction—three novels, one stand-alone novella, and three collections—he ought to be known for, and lauded for, the book that came out in the shadow of The Tunnel, while the behemoth’s radioactive dust was still settling: Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998). Gass, who wore like epaulets the epithets stylist and experimentalist, was always in pursuit of the perfect book, the perfect work of literary art. I believe that Gass achieved that perfection, according to his own standards, in the four novellas brought together as Cartesian Sonata, a work that has not received nearly the attention of Gass’s first four books.1 By the end of the twentieth century, postmodernism had run its course, and there wasn’t a lot of critical attention being paid to its master practitioners (though Gass resisted the label postmodernist).
Fortunately for us, Gass also wrote copious amounts of nonfiction, much of which is devoted to narrative theory, either directly or indirectly. By indirectly, I mean that he was a masterful critic in how own right and wrote illuminatingly about numerous authors, like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Malcom Lowery, William Gaddis—and of course Gass’s literary idol, Rainier Maria Rilke. He was also a generous granter of interviews, the subjects of which often turned to his thoughts and theories regarding fiction. So, between his essays, his analyses of other authors, and his interview responses, we have a significant body of material regarding his aspirations for a work of fiction.
First, though, some background on the Cartesian Sonata collection. It consists of the title novella (divided into three distinct parts), plus “Bed and Breakfast,” “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” and “The Master of Secret Revenges.” As Gass explained in 1998, “Cartesian Sonata” “was written a long time ago in rough draft” and “The Master of Secret Revenges” had been “an idea maybe 35-40 years ago,” while the remaining novellas “were much more recent and don’t appear to have had any lengthy sort of time in my unconscious” (Abowitz 143). Pieces of “Cartesian Sonata” appeared here and there beginning as early as 1964 (Location No. 2). In other words, the beginning and concluding pieces of the novella collection had been on Gass’s mind (and partly on paper) during the same years that he worked in fits and starts on The Tunnel (as well as many other writing projects). However, the middle two novellas were written after The Tunnel was completed. “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” first appeared in 1994 (Iowa Review 24.2)—before the publication of The Tunnel, but after its completed composition, in 1992. (For a bibliography and chronology of The Tunnel’s composition see this link.) I want to underscore, then, that when Gass was at last able to return to his first love, the fruits of that impassioned homecoming were the reworking of “Cartesian Sonata” and the writing of the other three novellas—all within the context of a clearly envisioned theme and tightly imagined structure.
No guesswork is needed when it comes to understanding Gass’s agenda for the collection. He spelled it out in a conversation with Michael Silverblatt for the Lannan Foundation reading on November 5, 1998 (happily available via video).2 Gass explains that “the conception was to take the Cartesian problem of the three substances—the uncreated substance, God, which has always existed, and then the created substances, mind and matter [and explore] the problem of Descartes metaphysics: How do you get mind and matter to interact, because they have nothing to do with one another . . . [Silverblatt interjects, ‘So it’s a failure of God …’] Yes.” The title novella is divided into three sections corresponding to the three substances. “Then,” continues Gass, “I decided to write three other novellas. Each would be parallel to that initial sonata. So this [first novella] is a sonata played this way [Gass gestures], then a sonata played that way [opposing gesture], as each one of these others lines up behind one of the sections” (starts around the 13:00 mark).
Like this:
“Cartesian Sonata”
—‘The Writing on the Wall’ [God]
—‘The Clairvoyant’ [Mind]
—‘I Wish You Wouldn’t’ [Matter]
“Bed and Breakfast” [Matter]
“Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” [Mind]
“The Master of Secret Revenges” [God’s opposite, “a tinhorn Lucifer,” says Gass]
Gass, for whom nothing was sacred,3 presents, as he explains, not “God the great and glorious” and not “God the dead and gone,” but “God the incompetent—the real God, in my opinion.” Taking a familiar self-deprecating posture, ‘The Writing on the Wall’ begins in a (familiar) metafictional mode with Gass, as narrator, speaking directly to the reader about the creation of the main character, Ella Bend Hess, who was a briefly mentioned character in Gass’s earlier novella, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (earlier, though contemporary with the original writing of this story). Gass writes, “Is it right or honest? After all—Ellla Bend—where is she? Isn’t she as much in all those scraps I threw away as in the scraps I saved? Threw away, mind you, when they held her name. Where else did she have her life?” Gass then goes about discussing Ella’s original description and how he is rewriting (recreating) her for this story: “I’d given her a long nose, I remember—no good reason why. Now her nose is middling” (4). So this incompetent God is the author: Gass, the creator of the text, the rearranger of matter from all those scraps.
The section continues in a metafictional mode as we are introduced to other characters in the story. Ella is the focus of the second section, ‘The Clairvoyant.’ Through the gift (or curse) of her clairvoyance Ella lives in a world of spiritual essence, seeing the dead, sensing the lingering presence of the past, and hearing the voices trapped inside inanimate objects: “She possessed an abnormal number of sensitive receivers. She was almost totally attention and antennae” (37). The final section, ‘I Wish You Wouldn’t,’ shifts the focus to Ella’s husband, Edgar Hess, who sees her as sick due to the clairvoyance he doesn’t understand. He becomes abusive, believing “[i]t helped her to hit her” (53), and “he solemnly prayed for his wife’s demise” (45). H. L. Hix describes the problem of Descartes metaphysics as represented in the novella this way: “His wish for her death arises between the disparity between their modes of being. She is almost pure spirit, and he almost pure body. . . . Her gift meant that he was far too material for her, and she was not material enough for him” (143).
In brief, the next novella, “Bed and Breakfast”(representing matter), is about an itinerant accountant, Walt Riff, who specializes in helping business owners cheat on their taxes by creating fraudulent records for them (an act of fiction not terribly far removed from the role of storyteller). However, Walt begins to see the error of his ways when he stays in a bed and breakfast and becomes enchanted by the innumerable homey objects therein. Put simply, Walt begins to see the value of real things, as opposed to the value of imaginary things, like the figures he writes in clients’ ledgers. In “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (representing mind), the main character, Emma Bishop, attempts to escape her abusive and neglectful parents by not eating (thus making her material self disappear little by little) and by immersing herself in books of poetry, by Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, Emily Dickinson and others (feeding her mind while denying her body). Finally, “The Master of Secret Revenges” returns to the subject of God, but through the twisted theology of Luther Penner, who devises a philosophy and then a religion based on the fulfillment of retribution.
Though I have only provided the sketchiest of sketches here, I submit that in its form Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas is perfect (or as close to perfection as any work of art can achieve). It has a mathematical symmetry that is apropos to Descartes’ philosophy, which is based in mathematics. And form represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement for Gass: “The form. That is what the long search is for; because form, as Aristotle instructed us, is the soul itself, the life in any thing, and of any immortal thing the whole” (Preface xliv; italics in original). Earlier in his career, Gass expressed another guiding principle of his art to an editor who wanted him to consider revisions to a piece that would eventually become part of Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck. In essence, the editor’s notes were designed to make the narrative more readable, more traditional. Gass wrote, “[T]he writer [has no] responsibility to the reader. . . . He has a responsibility to the thing he is making. . . . [T]here is no story. There remain but words—the continuous exploration of concepts” (Saltzman 66-67). So even then, in 1958, Gass had decided what his chief objective would be as a writer of fiction: the continuous exploration of concepts, which is perhaps the best way to describe the four novellas that comprise Cartesian Sonata.
However, I hold up Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas as Gass’s greatest work not just because of its ideal form and its sustained exploration of Decartes’ metaphysics. The four novellas are woven together via the intricate repetition of images, ideas and language. A thorough examination would be the stuff of a doctoral dissertation, but perhaps I can give some sense of these kinds of connections here. For example, the corresponding Cartesian representations are reinforced by the names of the characters. The two narratives that explore the concept of mind feature the main characters Ella and Emma, both abused by men (Ella’s husband and Emma’s father). Early in ‘The Writing on the Wall,’ when we are introduced to Ella Bend, the narrator-writer becomes fixated on the letter m: “I wonder if you understand about that m. The other day I idly scribbled twelve of them in the margin of a canceled page: mmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . Look at them again: mmmmmmmmmmmm. Hear them hum. Isn’t that the purply dove? the witches’ mist? It’s Ella Bend in receipt of her gift” (5). But it also foreshadows the subtle shift in the alphabet from Ella to Emma, who will further explore the concept of mind later in the collection. Gass is similarly playful when it comes to the opening and closing novellas that delve into the two sides of the divine coin. The godlike author-narrator of “Cartesian Sonata” is set alongside tinpot Lucifer Luther Penner, who spreads his gospel of revenge via the written word, “The Moral Self Wears a White Shirt” and “An Immodest Proposal”—“his only public and published document[s]” (244).
Perhaps it goes without saying, but throughout the novellas Gass gives us his trademarks: stunningly superb sentences, magisterial metaphors, and similes whose smiles are as smooth as brie.4
To close, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of stating why Cartesian Sonata outshines, by a fraction, Gass’s other works fiction. Regarding the other collections, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968) offers five fabulous stories in an impressive variety of styles, which means that as a whole they do not proffer the cohesion, the continuous exploration of a concept that we find in Cartesian Sonata; and Eyes: Novellas & Stories (2016) is once again a fabulous gathering of fiction, but it is even more of a potpourri than the first collection. Gass had in mind a collection of three novellas that may have rivaled Cartesian Sonata in terms of artistic concept and execution, but one of the novellas grew beyond his expectation and was published as his third novel, Middle C (2013)—an incredible book and winner of the William Dean Howells Medal. However, its creation almost by accident seems to disqualify it as a masterwork from conception to completion.
Though my catalog is incomplete, I’ll end where I began, with The (large, loose, baggie) Tunnel. Gass’s ambitions for the novel were epic, and it took him far longer—far longer—to write than he anticipated. He imagined, maybe, three years or so … let’s say, then, a publication date around 1970. But time marched on and the Master aged along with his aim for the book. He had about 600 manuscript pages in hand when, in 1991 (age 67), he went for an extended stay at The Getty Center in Santa Monica to devote himself fully to finishing the legendary book. Working into 1992, he doubled the size of the novel, completing it at about 1,200 manuscript pages. Begun in the sunny summer of literary postmodernism, the first half of the book displays many of the tropes and tricks that interested Gass in the 1960s and 70s—it resembles in many ways Gass’s wildly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)—an experiment that Gass himself deemed a failure in retrospect.5 Though The Tunnel doesn’t quite conform to the chronology of its composition, the latter half doesn’t display the same fondness for postmodern play as the beginning sections do. Released at last in 1995, it was as if the postmodern novel had arrived at the party after practically all the guests had collected their coats and gone home to sleep it off.
Perhaps Gass wittily but unwittingly anticipated the fate of The Tunnel when he wrote the preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (revised 1981):
“I write down these dates, now, and gaze across these temporal gaps with a kind of dumb wonder … hodge against podge, like those cathedrals which have Baroque porches, Gothic naves, and Romanesque crypts; time passed, then passed again, bishops and princes lost interest; funds ran out; men died; … and because they were put in service while they were still being built, the pavement was gone, the pillars in a state of lurch, by the time the dome was ready for its gilt or the tower for its tolling bell …” (xxxii).
We still ought to attend service in William Gass’s great cathedral, but our warmest words of worship should be reserved for Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas.
Notes
- Chapter 7 of H.L. Hix’s Understanding William H. Gass focuses on Cartesian Sonata as a whole, but it is a relatively brief chapter. Hix’s emphases are on comparing the novellas to previous Gass fiction, and on the Christian elements found throughout the collection. Otherwise, there are noteworthy discussions of individual novellas (or their genitive pieces). In The Metafictional Muse (U of Pittsburgh P, 1982) Larry McCaffery includes early versions of “Cartesian Sonata” in his analysis of Gass’s work. Another interesting article is “About Reading” by Sally Ball, who makes the case that William Gass is more like Emma Bishop (of “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s”) than William Kohler (of The Tunnel). See The Review of Contemporary Fiction 24.3 (Fall 2001), pp. 40-45. This note is not intended as an exhaustive list of sources.
- For the Lannon Foundation reading, Gass primarily drew from the The Tunnel. He did, however, also read an excerpt from “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s.” This part begins at about the 4:30 mark. Of the four novellas in the collection, Gass seemed to think most highly of “Emma.” It was published in Conjunctions No. 30 accompanied by photos by Michael Eastman; and it is the only novella from Cartesian Sonata that Gass included in The William H. Gass Reader (Knopf, 2018).
- In the interview with Richard Abowitz, speaking of hostile reactions to The Tunnel, Gass said, “I don’t think anything is sacred and therefore I am prepared to extol or make fun of anything” (144).
- Due to the necessity of brevity, I am not discussing in detail Gass’s literary techniques in the collection. It must be noted, however, that it is not just the book’s form and continuous exploration of concepts that elevate its status to the most masterful of the Master’s works. Throughout the four novellas, Gass’s virtuosity with the written word is on full display: the metaphors, the similes, the catalogs, the playfulness with typography, and what Gass described as “jingling”—a poetic use of language that emphasizes alliteration, rhyming, repetition and other aural techniques that are not usually so enthusiastically employed in works of prose.
- See Gass’s interview with Thomas LeClair in Conversations, in which he said about Willie Masters’, “I was trying out some things. Didn’t work. Most of them didn’t work…. Too many of my ideas turned out to be only ideas—situations where the reader says: ‘Oh yeah, I get the idea,’ but that’s all there is to get, the idea. I don’t give a shit for ideas—which in fiction represent inadequately embodied projects—I care only for affective effects” (22).
Works Cited
Abowitz, Richard. “Still Digging: A William Gass Interview.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 142-148.
Gass, William H. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. 1998. Dalkey Archive, 2009.
—. “A Revised & Expanded Preface.” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. 1968. Godine, 2007, pp. xiii-xlvi.
Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass, U of South Carolina P, 2002.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “William H. Gass: Selected Correspondence.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 11, no. 3, fall 1991, pp. 65-70.
“William Gass with Michael Silverblatt: Readings and Conversations.” Lannan Foundation, 5 Nov. 1998, https://lannan.org/media/william-gass-with-michael-silverblatt.
Ziegler, Heide. “William H. Gass in Germany.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 111-19.
William H. Gass at 100: Looking backward, Looking forward
This paper was presented at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, held Feb. 22-24, 2024, at the University of Louisville. Another paper in the “Novel Focus” panel were “Emma Donoghue’s Hunger Aesthetic” by Carey Mickalites (University of Memphis). The panel was chaired by Marie Pruitt (University of Louisville).
• • •
Where to begin?
I suppose with this quote: “William H. Gass is not an easy man to grasp; and, like the man, his work is beautiful, formidable, and troubling all at once,” wrote Theodore G. Ammon in the introduction to Conversations with William H. Gass (2003). There is no shortage of opinions of and therefore quotes pertaining to him and his work, which, thankfully, is copious: fiction ranging from brief sketches to the epic novel The Tunnel; nonfiction in the form of essays, criticism, lectures, and reviews, much of which collected in ten volumes over more than forty years; plus translations, interviews, and the thousands of pages of letters, early drafts, publication proofs, teaching notes, and even his doctoral dissertation (archived at Washington University in St. Louis, where he spent the last 32 years of his professional life).
I like this quote from Ammon, though, to begin this paper because it’s in conjunction with the William H. Gass centenary. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1924, Gass was a prolific author (despite the difficulty he always claimed to have in composing, and the slow pace by which much of his work—especially his fiction—emerged), toiling away with words almost until his death in 2017 at the age of 93. It seems to me that one of the goals of this year, 2024, and perhaps its chief goal, is to try to capture and honor the essence of Gass’s contributions to not just American literature but also to literature beyond the borders of the United States (Gass dedicated the last decade of his time at Washington University to founding and directing the International Writers Center). I’ll ape Ammon’s quote by saying that this Gass-focused goal is not an easy one to achieve.
I mean the title of this paper to be quite literal. I will devote a good deal of it to looking backward by outlining (if only superficially) Gass’s many interests and accomplishments over the decades; and I will end by looking forward, both in the short term (what else is happening this year as part of the Gass centenary) and the long term (where might scholarly energies be devoted over time). I apologize to anyone who is already quite familiar with Gass: the first part of this presentation may seem basic and unnecessary. However, I’m always a little ashamed to acknowledge that I was in my mid-forties when I first read Gass’s work, and I was not alone in my ignorance. For the past fifteen years I’ve devoted myself to what one of my students dubbed “preaching the Gass-pel,” and I have encountered many well-read scholars and devoted readers who have never heard of Gass, or who only have a passing familiarity with him and his work.
Looking backward.
Gass was always doing everything all at once. That is to say, he didn’t devote himself to a kind of writing for a certain period of his life; then to another kind for a time; then another and so on. Like so many of the writers that Gass admired—Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges—his interests were wide-ranging, and he was forever juggling multiple projects. For convenience, I’ll give an overview organized by kind of writing. His varying interests are illustrated by the journal that was the first to publish his fiction. Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (published by University of Illinois, Urbana), included the short story “Mrs. Mean” and the opening section of what would become his debut novel, “The Triumph of Israbestis Tott.” In the same issue, Accent also brought out “The High Brutality of Good Intentions,” an essay on Henry James.
“Mrs. Mean” (Accent, winter 1958, later collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) was reprinted in Best American Short Stories (1959), which may have begun the process of having Gass’s fiction read by a broader national audience. The 1961 edition of Best American Short Stories included Gass’s “The Love and Death of Henry Pimber” (Accent, spring 1960); and the 1962 edition included “The Pedersen Kid” (MSS [Mt. Shasta Selections], no. 1, 1961). Throughout this period, Gass was regularly publishing short fiction, scholarly essays, and book reviews in academic journals. However, it was the publication of his debut novel, Omensetter’s Luck, in 1966 (New American Library) that really put his name on the national literary map. The novel won high praise from a host of reviewers. The fact that it was published by New American Library was significant because it brought Gass to the attention of Theodore Solotaroff, editor of New American Review literary journal, which was published by New American Library and was launched in 1967. Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” was in the inaugural issue—the first of four appearances in the journal.
As you may know, New American Review was published as a mass market paperback, and distributed nationally via bookstores and newsstands, but also drug stores, supermarkets, and other places where literary journals were not commonly available. In the beginning (when Gass’s work was included), 100,000 copies of each issue were printed, and there were three issues annually. Gass’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, was appearing alongside writers and poets like Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, Russell Banks, Jorge Luis Borges, Marvin Bell and Louise Gluck.
Other important book publications were soon to follow: in 1968, both the wildly experimental novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (originally TriQuarterly in a limited edition, then reprinted by Knopf, 1971), and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (Harper & Row). Gass’s first collection of nonfiction was released in 1970 by Knopf, Fiction and the Figures of Life.
It was also during the late 1960s that Gass began writing The Tunnel. In fact, it first began to appear in print in New American Review, with “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” (no. 6, 1969). The novel would not be published until 1995, and over the more than quarter century that Gass worked on it, excerpts would appear in a host of noteworthy journals and magazines, including The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Salmagundi, and Esquire. Meanwhile, the excerpts were reprinted numerous times as part of “best of” anthologies and as Pushcart and Best American Short Stories prizewinners. Nevertheless, Gass said in 1971, half jokingly and half seriously, that he hoped The Tunnel “will be such a good book no one will want to publish it” (McCauley 12); and his wish nearly came true. The book had been under contract to Boston-based Ticknor and Fields, but once the manuscript was finally complete in 1992, they withdrew the contract. Dalkey Archive Press entertained the idea of publishing what Steven Moore described as a “huge manuscript, along with a lengthy set of design and typesetting instructions.” Ultimately Knopf brought out the first edition in 1995, only to let it go out of print shortly thereafter. Dalkey stepped in to publish a paperback edition in 1999.
The Tunnel won the American Book Award in 1996, and it had its fervent admirers, but it also generated many reviews that ranged from tepid to hostile. The Tunnel turned 25 in 2020, during the pandemic, so I initiated an online symposium, available at thetunnelat25.com. I encourage you to check out all of the site’s contributions, but since I’m focused at the moment on the novel’s publishing history I’ll highlight two pieces in particular: “The Tunnel: A Survey of Published Excerpts” by Joel Minor; and my own “The Tunnel: A Chronology & Bibliography.” The two papers have similar aims, yet contain different information. Joel’s important contribution focuses in great detail on the publishing history of the various excerpts, and cross-references them with material that is available at Washington University in the William H. Gass papers (of which Joel is the curator). My paper, on the other hand, is more interested in Gass’s writing process, and tracks the composition of the novel alongside Gass’s biography. For example, I’ve integrated some of Gass’s comments about the novel year by year, drawing from the many interviews he granted.
While Gass was writing The Tunnel, he was also working on a series of novellas that was ultimately published as Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (Knopf, 1998), but the title novella began to appear in 1964, as “The Clairvoyant” in Location, volume 1, number 2. During the same period that parts of The Tunnel were appearing in journals, being reprinted and winning prizes, bits and pieces of Cartesian Sonata were taking similar paths, coming out in places like Art and Literature, The Partisan Review, and the Iowa Review, being anthologized here and there, and winning a Pushcart Prize in 1976. As a side note, I feel like the Cartesian Sonata collection is Gass’s most masterful masterpiece (even though The Tunnel tends to overshadow the rest of Gass’s fiction in terms of scholars’ attention and cultural memory), and I’ll make my case when I deliver a paper at the American Literature Association Conference in May.
In the interest of time, I’ll summarize the remainder of Gass’s output of fiction: the novel Middle C (Knopf, 2013) and Eyes, a collection of novellas and stories (Knopf, 2015). Much of these final two works appeared in Conjunctions, which became an important outlet for Gass’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction, starting in the early 1980s and lasting until his death in 2017. He eventually became a contributing editor of the journal and was a central figure in several Conjunctions projects.
Fiction, of course, is only part of Gass’s legacy. For the remainder of my time I’ll discuss the “looking forward” aspect of my title—and in so doing also provide a sense of other facets of William Gass’s voluminous output and his far-reaching influence on the literary community, including the global literary community.
While Gass was writing stories, novellas and novels, he was also prolifically producing nonfiction in the form of essays, reviews, book introductions, and lectures. He published seven works of fiction, and he published ten works of nonfiction (if one counts the collection of interviews edited by Theodore Ammon in 2003). Moreover, he served as co-editor of three collections of nonfiction, including The Writer and Politics (1996) and The Writer and Religion (2000). Broadly speaking, Gass’s nonfiction has not received nearly as much critical attention as his fiction, even though his work was highly influential, including among his peers. We know, for instance, that Fiction and the Figures of Life—which includes several “craft” essays—was acquired by Cormac McCarthy while he was at work on Child of God, published in 1973, three years after the release of Gass’s essay collection (King 31).
In addition to the eight collections of nonfiction (here not counting the book-length essay On Being Blue), Gass’s vita lists about 100 uncollected essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures. Fortunately, Washington University in St. Louis started archiving Gass’s work even before he began teaching there in 1969. It’s difficult to say, but the Gass collection, begun in the mid-60s but reaching back as far as 1948, consists of thousands of items, and it keeps expanding as Gass’s widow, Mary Henderson Gass, continues the work of sorting and cataloging her late husband’s papers and contributing them to the archive in batches.
Besides the possibility of posthumous publications, there is limitless potential here for scholarly research and writing. William Gass has been the main focus of my scholarship for the past 15 years, and I’ve visited the Gass archive several times, which has proven to be the epitome of scratching the surface.
In addition to Gass’s fiction and nonfiction, other rich veins of scholarship could include the following abbreviated list:
Gass’s support and promotion of other writers, including and perhaps especially writers outside the U.S. For the final decade of his professional career, Gass directed the International Writers Center at Washington University, a Center that he founded in 1990. Its mission was to “build on the strengths of its resident and visiting faculty writers; to serve as a focal point for writing excellence in all disciplines and in all cultures; to be a directory for writers and writing programs at Washington University, in St. Louis, in the United States, and around the world; and to present the writer to the reader” (“William H. Gass”).
Gass’s frequent writing of book reviews. He penned both reviews of scholarly books (especially early in his career) as well as more mainstream books. He was a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, but also The Times Literary Supplement and other venues. Furthermore, Gass established a reputation as a writer of introductions for others’ books—perhaps most famously his introduction to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (Penguin Classics edition). Michael Millman, senior editor at Viking Penguin, wrote to Gass on January 21, 1993: “I can’t remember another time when we had an essay of this caliber as an introduction to one of our volumes. . . .” But the list is long and includes introductions to books by or about Gertrude Stein, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Gass as educator. Gass’s primary teaching posts were at Purdue University and Washington University, and he proved to be an award-winning educator at both institutions. Beyond that direct influence on countless students, Gass’s writings serve as teaching material for an untold number of educators. His fiction and essays have been widely anthologized (I first encountered Gass in an anthology), thus serving as models. Moreover, his essays—particularly his craft-focused essays—are the bases for others’ lectures and teaching notes. Plus Gass was a generous granter of interviews, nearly all of which contain discussion of tecnique that ranges from the practical to the theoretical. Fourteen interviews are collected in Conversations with William H. Gass, but this book represents the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There are many interviews online, as text, video and audio, in addition to copious uncollected interviews in print. All of these interviews are rich sources of material for teachers and students of writing.
I’ll end by mentioning that in this, Gass’s centenary year, I’ll be editing and publishing a collection of essays—and there is ample time to contribute to that project. See the CFP here. Also, this fall there will be a conference at Washington University in St. Louis. The specifics are still being worked out, but it will likely focus on Gass’s On Being Blue, which was re-released by New York Review Books in 2014. And as a footnote, another resource for Gass studies is this blog, where all of my Gass conference papers are archived. One can get hold of a significant chunk of Gass’s writing in The William H. Gass Reader (Knopf, 2018), writing that was handpicked and annotated by Gass before his death. For a detailed overview, see my rather lengthy review of the Reader at the North American Review website.
Works Cited
Ammon, Theodore G., editor. Conversations with William H. Gass. UP of Mississippi, 2003.
King, Daniel Robert. Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author, The U of Tennessee P, 2016.
McCauley, Carole Spearin. “William H. Gass.” Ammon, pp. 3-12.
Moore, Steven. Dalkey Days: A Memoir. Zerogram Press, 2023.
“William H. Gass.” University Libraries, Washington University in St. Louis, 16 Feb. 2024, https://library.wustl.edu/spec/william-h-gass/.
In the Heart of the Heart of William Gass Country
For me 2024 marks a special year: the centenary of William H. Gass (1924-2017). As a Gass scholar and devotee (disciple isn’t too strong of a word), I have various projects in the works to mark the Master’s 100th year — all part of my “preaching the Gass-pel,” an evangelism I embarked on more than a decade ago. No doubt I will use this forum to talk about some of those Gass Centenary projects, which tend to be formal and scholarly. It occurred to me that I also wanted to do something less formal, and more personal. It is not an overstatement to say that William H. Gass changed my life. His writing, his theories, his example as torchbearer in the cause of literature: everything has impacted me in ways that I can name and, doubtless, in ways that I cannot.
Thus, “William H. Gass at 100: A Reading Journal.”
My intention is that throughout 2024 I will post to my blog impressions and musings regarding Gass’s works and words: his fiction, his essays, his reviews, his translations, his thankfully copious interviews. I probably won’t post as frequently as I would like (for one thing, those other Gass Centenary projects are going to be time-consuming and labor-intensive), but hopefully I will be able to share some of the wisdom and insights that have been so meaningful to me, and in the process reflect on how they have affected me: my writing certainly, my teaching definitely, and, most profoundly so therefore also most elusively, my thinking.
I don’t have a set agenda for these posts. The various foci will be organically chosen. Nevertheless, there are some topics that I feel deserve particular attention: Gass’s philosophy when it comes to composing narratives; his magnum opus The Tunnel, which took him more than a quarter century to write; the influence of the German poet Rilke on Gass’s work; his innovative prose techniques; his unflagging support of other writers; and the late work, which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves.
That’s a lot, and I will almost certainly fall short of my ambitions. If this reading journal has any success it will be measured in the number of readers who, because of it, have their curiosity piqued and as such will read the Master, perhaps for the first time.
For this journal, I will begin where William Gass began for me, with my almost accidental reading of his long story (some say novella) “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” I have told the tale elsewhere. The year was 2009, and I was in the process of amassing as many books as I could afford having to do with postmodernism. I was in the final stages of a Ph.D. in English studies at Illinois State University, rather late in life (46 at the time). Over the previous seven years, chipping away as a part-time student, I had completed my coursework, passed the comprehensive exams, and had my dissertation topic approved. I was looking at the psychological origins of postmodernism, and my plan all along had been to focus on the work of Thomas Pynchon and, especially, William Gaddis.
One of the many books I’d purchased was a (very) used copy of Norton’s Postmodern American Fiction. The well-worn book had recently arrived, and one afternoon, after a day of teaching high school, I decided to thumb through it, briefly. One piece in particular arrested my attention because it was heavily highlighted in yellow by a previous owner of the anthology. Upon further inspection, I saw that it had a strangely long and redundant title, and it was broken up into small sections, each with its own heading.
I began reading the opening, subtitled “A Place,” which starts more in the shape of a poem than a short story: “So I have sailed the seas and come . . . / to B . . . / a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” I was instantly ensorcelled by the writer’s prose, and I think it was this early set of sentences that hooked me, and hooked me for life: “It’s true there are moments — foolish moments — ecstasy on a tree stump — when I’m all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for 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 now to me, candy ungiven after Halloween?”
I quickly discerned that “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” didn’t have a plot per se, at least not in a traditional sense, and it barely had a central character. If it did, it was an aging poet who has come alone to this small Midwestern town, a place that is described in poetic bursts: “Where sparrows sit like fists. Doves fly the steeple. In mist the wires change perspective, rise and twist. If they led to you, I would know what they were. Thoughts passing often, like the starlings who flock these fields at evening to sleep in the fields beyond . . .”
Like so many readers, I knew this place. I’d grown up in the Midwest, and when I encountered “In the Heart” I’d been teaching in a tiny town that reminded me in so many (unpleasant) ways of the fictional “B.” Moreover, I knew these feelings, especially of “having love left over.” I’d been surviving a miserable marriage for two decades, and the plan was to divorce as soon as I completed my doctorate (an agreement we’d reached to put off the inevitable).
As I said, my intention that fateful day was to only skim through the book to get a sense of its contents and what may be of use (I probably mainly bought the book for its introduction). But I couldn’t stop reading “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In Gass I detected a kindred soul, and it was dawning on me that perhaps he would be a better focus for my dissertation than Pynchon and Gaddis. As good fortune would have it, within a week or two I attended the AWP Conference in Chicago. When I arrived at the hotel, late one frigid February night, I perused the conference program and discovered there would be a special program in honor of William H. Gass, a tribute, at which he would give a reading. What luck!
Again, this was 2009. Yet I recall the event and his reading with amazing vividness. It was in a ballroom that seemed suited for a thousand revelers, enormous chandeliers illuminated the room like a rugby pitch, revealing what appeared to be only a handful of audience members. I (im)patiently waited for three speakers to proclaim Gass’s greatness in frustrating detail. Finally the Master was allowed to speak. He had opted for an entomologically themed reading, beginning with his classic short story “Order of Insects,” followed by excerpts from other works that involve insects. I wasn’t yet familiar with Gass’s oeuvre, so I didn’t securely connect the passages to their works, but I know he read the swarm-of-grasshoppers scene from The Tunnel. Always self-deprecating, Gass joked that his reading demonstrated how little he had evolved as a writer over the decades.
Whatever had begun in me with the reading of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” it was amplified, intensified and made permanent by the Master’s serendipitous reading at the AWP Conference. I went about collecting all of his works of fiction (at the time), as well as some of the nonfiction; and I changed my dissertation’s focus to Gass. Fortunately my dissertation director, Bob McLaughlin, was quite familiar with Gass, which proved a great asset as I retooled my approach.
Thus began my mission to spread the word about our greatest writer, William H. Gass. My evangelism has mainly taken the form of conference papers (with the majority of them delivered at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900); but I have preached the Gass-pel elsewhere, including in Portugal and (in 2023) Singapore. Plus at the peak of the pandemic I organized an online symposium focused on The Tunnel, which turned 25 in 2020. For 2024, I plan to edit and publish William H. Gass at 100: Essays (currently just a Call for Papers).
I feel like I should say so much more about “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Perhaps, instead, I will direct the curious to papers I’ve presented previously: “In the Heart of the Heart of the Cold War” (Louisville Conference, 2013); “In the Heart of the Heart of Despair” (American Literature Association Conference, Boston, 2017); and “From Tender Buttons to the ‘Heart of the Country'” (Louisville Conference, 2019). Note that this last paper includes images of early drafts of “In the Heart” from the Gass Papers at Washington University in St. Louis.
I’ll conclude by referring to the title of this post, “In the Heart of the Heart of William Gass Country.” What I mean by it, at least, is that Gass was known as a Midwestern writer. He was born in Fargo, North Dakota, but his parents soon moved to Warren, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 1942. His undergraduate degree was from Kenyon College. His teaching posts were the College of Wooster (in Ohio), Purdue University, University of Illinois (Urbana), and Washington University in St. Louis. The settings of his stories, novellas and novels were consistently in the Midwest, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.
Though it likely proved a barrier to his work being embraced by the New York literary establishment, Gass had a great appreciation for the Midwest and how it could function in his fiction. He said in 1997, “The landscape that I work with — the weather and the geography — are designed to be projections of the interior state of the individual or the meaning of the scene. The actual Midwest landscape is by turns cold and beautiful, and like fall here now . . . the leaves are just drifting down, and it’s 72 degrees and gorgeous.” Then he added, “But, of course, you know it may rain in the heart if it rains in the town. That’s the idea. So if my scenery is bleak, it’s because the meaning or the characters’ souls are. It doesn’t mean the Midwest is.”
Thank you for reading my first William Gass reading journal. If I’ve whetted your appetite, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is available in both the collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (1968) and The William H. Gass Reader (2018). Or, like me, the ambitious could track down a copy of New American Review No. 1, where the story first appeared in 1967.
Here’s a video I made in conjunction with this blog post:
Beauty Must Come First: The Short Story as Art Made of Language
[This paper was presented at the 16th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held June 20-24, Singapore. It was part of the panel “The Short Story and the Aesthetics of Narration.” Other papers were “A Lot Like Joy: Fractured fragments represented within a composite narrative” by Sarah Giles, and “‘Writing back’—The Sideways Progress of Ideasthetic Imagining” by Julia Prendergast.]
“A second rate writer has no reason to exist unless he is on his way to being a first rate writer, and there is no point at all in doing pleasant easy things, or altering one’s conception of how a story ought to be to get it into print” (Saltzman, “Selected Correspondence” 66).
William H. Gass wrote this statement in a letter, in 1958, to an editor who was considering publishing his fiction, which would have been its first appearance in print. The editor was balking at Gass’s elaborate prose style. Gass, age 34 at the time, preferred to remain unpublished than have his words changed. It was an attitude he maintained – that to be edited was to be rejected – throughout what became a long and illustrious career that claimed numerous awards and distinctions, including Pushcart Prizes, Best American Stories, an O. Henry, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the American Book Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. Gass – novelist, novella-ist, story-writer, critic, translator, and teacher – passed away in 2017 at the age of 93, working on his final project until he no longer had the energy to continue.
This paper is about Gass’s aesthetic theories when it came to producing narrative, and specifically fiction. Luckily, Gass was a generous granter of interviews, so we have a substantial amount of material in which he discusses his ideas about plot, character, setting, theme, symbolism … all of the elements we associate with storytelling (we have printed material, plus video and audio recordings that are available online). He also wrote numerous “craft” essays in which he goes into detail about his writing, as well as the writing techniques of others (among them Henry James, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein). Such essays were included in his nine nonfiction collections, beginning with Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970) and concluding, for now, with Life Sentences (2012). And we have copious letters, which are carefully archived at Washington University in St. Louis.
To be clear, Gass’s theories are not designed to make one popular, that is, to make one a bestselling author. On the contrary, Gass never achieved that brand of success. In fact, he said (in another letter to the same editor, Charles Shattuck): “[S]uccess is merely failure at another level” (Saltzman 65), by which he meant that a writer must compromise their artistic principles in order to gain the public attention and financial rewards we (in the United States at least) usually associate with literary success. Gass’s primary goal was to create a work of literary art that he himself was satisfied with; if he had secondary goals they were to earn the respect of writers he admired, and to be read beyond his own lifetime. “I don’t write for a public,” Gass said. “[. . .] It’s the good book that all of us are after. I’ve been fortunate in that I think I have the respect of the writers whom I admire” (Saltzman, “Language and Conscience” 24). He did indeed as his work was praised by authors such as John Barth, Susan Sontag, John Gardner, Stanley Elkin, Joy Williams, and William Gaddis, who called Gass “our foremost writer, a magician with language” (Gaddis 629).
Regarding the goal of having his work read beyond his lifetime, it’s been my mission to make that a reality for more than a decade, during which time I’ve been “preaching the Gass-pel” (an expression coined by one of my students that I immediately filched). I’ve presented dozens of conference paper (all available at my blog, and some elsewhere); I’ve included readings of Gass’s work in my book Trauma Theory as an Approach to Analyzing Literary Texts (2021 edition); and I organized the website thetunnelat25.com, an online symposium devoted to Gass’s magnum opus. In my teaching I regularly place Gass’s books on my syllabi, and I share pearls of his writing wisdom with my students regularly (they may say obsessively). Many of these pearls I also share via social media in the form of memes that I’ve created. Like this one:
[This meme has to do with a topic I’ve recently written about: “To Plan or Not to Plan,” available here.]
And this:
[During the presentation I talked briefly about the inherent problem of writing workshops or writing groups: No matter how well-intentioned, peers’ critiques are oftentimes wrongheaded, and an offhanded criticism can send the unwary writer down a frustrating and fruitless rabbit hole. Instead, writers must accept the unavoidable subjectivity of reader response and stay true to their artistic vision.]
And this:
[I felt this was an especially apropos sentiment to share since the conference was comprised of writers from across the globe — but mainly Asia, Australia and Europe — who compose in English, even though for many it’s not their first language.]
I want to touch on some specific ideas Gass had about writing narrative, but before we get there I’m inclined to discuss the cornerstone of his aesthetic philosophy – as well as my primary focus here: Throughout his long writing career, Gass’s main interest was language, and he sought to use it as a painter uses paint, a sculptor uses marble or metal, a composer uses musical notes, or a photographer uses light and shadow. He stated, in a 1976 interview, “As a writer I only have one responsibility, and that’s to the language I’m using and to the thing I’m trying to make” (Duncan 53). He elaborated elsewhere, “Old romantic that I am, I would like to add objects to the world worthy of love. . . . My particular aim is that it be loved because it is so beautiful in itself, something that exists simply to be experienced. So the beauty has to come first” (LeClair 48).
Allow me to restate Gass’s central tenet: The beauty of the language must come first. By extension, then, everything else – all the other elements associated with fictional narrative, plot, characterization, setting, etc. – are subordinate to the quality of the language, to the beauty of the language. Gass’s devotion to beautiful language took many forms. For example, he regularly employed literary devices we normally associate with poetry: alliteration, assonance, rhyming, repetition. As such, Gass considered himself a stylist, meaning that his main interest was the writing itself. “I’ve always been interested in writing as writing. My interest in the various forms is dominated by an interest in style as such” (Duncan 64). Though Gass considered himself an abysmal poet, his use of poetic language was, he said, “compulsive” and “turns up in almost every line of prose, in sound patterns that get pushy, even domineering” (“Retrospection” 43-44).
Gass’s drive to create art made of language led him away from using narrative elements in traditional ways. Mind you, not ways that are utterly unique – I’m a supporter of Adorno’s assertion that when it comes to art, there is nothing new under the sun, yet the true artist must strive for the new nevertheless – but ways that are certainly unusual in modern American fiction, especially popular fiction. For instance, we normally think of characters in fiction as people, or possibly animals or machines (generally, though, personified animals or machines). However, for Gass a character was “any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier” (LeClair 53). Gass’s ideas about characters and characterization were complex, and he wrote and spoke frequently about those ideas (I direct you, especially, to his essay “The Concept of Character in Fiction”), but I will try to communicate the essence of his thinking.
Drawing from the essay above: He wrote, “[T]here 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. Characters are those primary substances to which everything else is attached . . . anything, 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). As such, physical objects can be characters (everything from Lowry’s volcano to Gogol’s overcoat); symbols can be characters; ideas; concepts; situations. All can function a characters.
If we think of plot as what happens to a narrative’s central character (its protagonist), commonly how the character changes during the course of the narrative, we must be prepared to modify our sense of conflict, resolution and denouement when other things besides people operate as protagonists (and antagonists). A volcano or an overcoat or a crucifix or a bombing or fascism cannot have epiphanies (as Joyce would have phrased it). They do not change as, we hope, people change. No matter how many ghosts visit a volcano on Christmas Eve, it’s still a volcano on Christmas morning, with all the capricious and explosive qualities its kind is known to have.
To be clear, nearly all of Gass’s fiction is populated with human characters as their ostensible narrative focus (two exceptions are the brief stories “Don’t Even Try, Sam” and “Soliloquy for a Chair” in which the protagonist of the former is the legendary piano in the film Casablanca, while it is a folding chair in a barbershop that soliloquizes in the latter – both are collected in Eyes [2013]). However, the human characters’ primary function is to provide a scaffolding on which Gass can develop his thematic interests, and, perhaps chiefly, play with language. “For me,” he said, “a character is really a voice and a source of language. . . . Words are going to come out from that source either as direct speech or as a means of dictating the language you use in the third person to describe scenes or that individual from outside” (Saltzman 85). So, functionally speaking, human characters are providing the means (structurally and linguistically) by which Gass can explore other characters in the narrative: a concept, an attitude, a place, an object.
One may ask at this point: If in Gass’s fiction he was disinclined to maneuver his characters toward epiphanies, toward traditional, Aristotelean kinds of resolutions, how did he develop his narratives? What was their aim? In one sense, Gass developed a piece of fiction as one might develop an expository essay, with the objective being to more fully realize a particular subject. Ultimately, though, and overarchingly, Gass’s interest was to create a beautiful piece of writing: a work of art made of language. Perhaps he expressed his philosophy most clearly and most forcefully in a series of debates with fellow writer (and friend) John Gardner in the 1970s (audio recordings of one such debate session can be accessed here). Gardner believed that fiction should have a moral component, that it should teach the reader something important about how to behave in the world. Gass vehemently disagreed: “John wants a message, some kind of communication to the world. I want to plant some object in the world. . . . I want to add something to the world which the world can ponder the same way it ponders the world” (LeClair 48). Elsewhere Gass bluntly asserted that “literature in not a form of communication” (Duncan 49).
Since we are a gathering of writers, I want to end on what Gass believed to be a kind of side benefit of using artful language, a utilitarian additional advantage. He said, “Shakespeare succeed[s] mainly because the rhetoric succeeds. Psychological shifts, changes of heart, all sorts of things happen which are inexplicable, except that if the speech is good enough, it works. The same is true in the way I go at things” (Saltzman 83-4). To put it plainly, certain weaknesses in a narrative can be bolstered by using language beautifully. Readers can be distracted from fissures in the foundation if the architecture is elaborate and enchanting. May we all build such mesmerizing abodes with our material of choice: the English language.
Works Cited
Duncan, Jeffrey L. “A Conversation with Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass.” The Iowa Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1976, pp. 48-77.
Gaddis, William. The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore, New York Review Books, 2023.
Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. Knopf, 1970.
LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass and John Gardner: A Debate in Fiction.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 46-55.
Saltzman, Arthur M. “An Interview with William H. Gass.” Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 81-95.
—. “William H. Gass: Selected Correspondence.” Review of Contemporary Fiction,
vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, pp. 65-70.
—. “Language and Conscience: An Interview with William H. Gass.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, pp. 15-28.
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.
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