I was sorry to hear of the death
of William H. Gass this week. He has been America's most important
philosophical novelist, not in the discursive sense by which we identify other
novelists with a freight of ideology to illustrate, but rather as a philosopher
of language who is also a powerful fiction-maker with the courage of his
convictions.
In his fourth collection of
essays, Finding a Form (1996), Gass remains one of the last unashamed
advocates for the great Greek ideal of form, exploring with the precision
usually reserved for poetry, the relationship between language and mind and the
tension between nature and culture. His
every sentence carefully carved, Gass is the best example of his own belief
that there is music in prose and that language must be carefully crafted so
that it can be heard. Throughout the
book, Gass returns untiringly to his central conviction--that the artist's
fundamental loyalty is to form, not ideology or content. "Every other diddly desire can find
expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness
and mark of malice, may have an hour," says Gass, "but it must never
be allowed to carry the day."
Gass has been singing this song
since his first collection of essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life
(1970), in which he established his primary premise about fiction: "that
stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words as chairs
are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth and metal tubes." His formalist conviction that a novel or short
story is ideally a self-contained meaning system is his most controversial
principle, one that he explores with equal fervor in his other two collections
of essays, The World Within the Word (1978) and Habitations of the
Word (1985).
Gass's first novel, Omensetter's
Luck (1966), was met with almost overwhelming critical success. Reviewers praised its lyrical beauty and its
intellectual depth, calling it an important contribution to the literature of
its time, even the most important work of fiction by an American writer of its
generation. The plot of the novel is
simple, for Gass has never been interested in mere plot. It deals with an old man who tries to tell
about Omensetter, a craftsman who settled in a Ohio town in the late nineteenth
century. However, this voice is less
important than the voice of the Reverend Jethro Furber, Omensetter's
antagonist. A parody of folk legend, the
novel is about how to represent the world in words, the theme of all of Gass's
fiction. A verbal duel between the two
main characters, it explores basic philosophic conflicts between mind and body,
human and object, reason and feeling.
Two years later, Gass published
his second work of fiction, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,
containing a novella, The Pedersen Kid, a hallucinatory detective story
and quest romance about coming of age in the midst of madness and death, and
four short stories. Gass has said that
the best of these pieces is "Order of Insects," a story about a woman
who limits her vision so obsessively that she transforms insects into
metaphoric, mythic, creatures. Her
fascination with the insects centers on their order and wholeness in death,
for, unlike humans, their skeletons are on the outside; thus they retain their
form. Never seeming to decay, they are
perfect geometric shapes of pure order.
The best-known story in the
collection is the title story, a lyrical meditation of thirty-two sections,
that, in between its Yeatsean beginning--"I have sailed the seas and
come...to B...a small...town fastened to a field in Indiana"--and its
transcendent conclusion of "Joy to the World" explores the narrator's
efforts to pull himself together poetically after a failed affair that makes
him feel he has "love left over" that he would like to lose. The story has become a classic anthology
piece, a representative of experimental short fiction of the 1960s, often
placed alongside the stories of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Robert Coover
to illustrate the self-reflexivity of post-modernism.
Gass's most thoroughly experimental,
self-reflexive fiction, however, is his novella Willie Master's Lonesome
Wife (1968), a work that seeks to create the illusion that the book the
reader holds in his hands is indeed the lonesome wife herself and that the
reading process is a sexual encounter--a metaphor Gass calls our attention to
by using different paper textures, photographs, and a variety of typographical
devices to suggest that words are sensuous objects that must be encountered
concretely and not merely transparent lens through which we perceive
"reality."
The Tunnel, Gass's master work, on which he
labored for twenty-five years, creates the voice of William Frederick Kohler, a
history professor, who while trying to write a simple, self-congratulatory
preface to his own magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany,
becomes blocked and writes about his own life instead. Filled with bitterness, hatred, lies,
self-pity, and self-indulgence, Kohler resents his hard-fisted father and his
self-pitying mother, loathes his fat, slothful wife, and has nothing but
contempt for his nondescript adolescent sons, his pedantic colleagues, and his
superficial lovers. However, in spite of
such an abhorrent personality, because the voice of Kohler is expressed in
Gass's highly polished prose, wonderfully sustained for over six hundred pages,
the novel is not a self-indulgent diatribe, but a complex philosophic
exploration of the relationship between historical fascism and domestic
solipsism.
William H. Gass has been the most
articulate and forceful contemporary proponent of the importance of aesthetic
beauty and artistic structure, even as critics and writers around him have
caved in to reading literature as a carrier of social message.
