Taking the Villain’s Part

---

William H. Gass’s 1995 novel The Tunnel, recently reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press, is not a comfortable book. Its narrator, the Iowa-born, German-surnamed history professor William Frederick Kohler, is a bit too friendly toward the Nazi regime. One of Kohler’s previous books, completed before The Tunnel formally begins, argued that the Nuremberg Trials were a “charade.” Now Kohler is trying to write the foreword for his new book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. “It was my intention, when I began, to write an introduction to my work on the Germans,” the novel opens. “Though its thick folders lie beside me now, I know I cannot.” What he writes instead is a confessional autobiography that features every conceivable gripe Kohler has ever had with himself and everyone who’s ever crossed his path. His narration is crude, hateful, and sexually explicit.

Not even fifty pages in, Kohler asserts that Hitler “was probably history’s single most sincere man.” A couple of hundred pages later, we learn that Kohler has no objection to wife-beating. Kohler’s narration drifts between present-day encounters, important figures in his life, past affairs, and flippant contemplations of the Holocaust’s terrifying scope. We learn that he participated in Kristallnacht and sexually assaulted one of his students. We learn that he killed his wife’s cat in cold blood. We learn that he’s a racist, misogynistic, self-obsessed creep who’s so unsatisfied with his dull professional life and sexless marriage that he’s attempting to escape them, literally: he’s digging a tunnel in the floor of his basement. Later, he designs graphics and logos for a self-invented fascist political party: the Party of Disappointed People (PdP). And after decades of being printed in black and white, Dalkey has reprinted the book in full color. Now Kohler’s assholery is now visible in its truest form: fascist graphics are labeled by color; FART is spelled out in multicolored, comic-like, star-shaped bubbles.

The Tunnel forces you to spend 653 pages inside what Kohler himself admits is a “loathsome mind.” And yet, the discomfort we feel while reading derives not from the despicable things Kohler says but from the fact that he’s compelling enough to be worth listening to. In this sense, The Tunnel deftly manages a few contradictions. The first is that Kohler is every bit as loathsome as he claims; yet, at the same time, you have to trust him: his limited consciousness, anchored to his “life in a chair,” is the only one you get. Your opinions of the people he encounters, even the seemingly charming ones like Walter Herschel and Tommaso Governali, are inextricably colored by how Kohler presents them. Some first-person novels carry a sense of objectivity, but The Tunnel’s lack of traditional dialogue formatting means you hear everything in Kohler’s squeaky, forceful, spit-flecked voice (at least, that’s how I imagine his voice). The second contradiction is that Kohler is intelligent, educated, self-aware, and finely attuned to linguistic beauty—yet he stubbornly positions himself against the institutions that have shaped him. These contradictions create a stunning, uncomfortable depiction of a confused, evil, but ultimately pitiable man.

Gass’s goal for the book, as he stated in the Dalkey Archive notes on the novel, was to make readers feel “as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” The Tunnel certainly evokes this sense. It’s perpetually tense and confining. Kohler cycles through personal musings, apostrophes for lost lovers, and remembered conversations with colleagues and relatives, but he uses no quotation marks to distinguish these categories. Though Gass elaborates on motifs when they first emerge, he reintroduces them hundreds of pages later with no warning, often toggling between motifs within the same paragraph: “I have seen hate in an undusted mirror elevate the class like a swollen foot in a carpet slipper. Susu, I approach you in my dreams. No special permit is required for such perceptions. How long has history been hidden from you Herschel?” Though we jump between time periods, conversations, and addressees here, we don’t jump between scenes; indeed, perhaps the only proper “scene” is Kohler’s mind. We long to become fully immersed in the motifs Kohler alludes to, but we’re trapped, like Kohler is trapped in his chair. And the feeling of being trapped is intensified by the repugnance of the consciousness we inhabit—a consciousness that seems, at least at first glance, to be the complete antithesis of how we imagine our own.

But The Tunnel’s harsh subject matter is yet delivered in a prose that sings and swings and borders on poetry. In an introduction penned for Dalkey’s reprint of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, Gass obliquely describes his own prose philosophy, filtering it through a close reading of a writer whom he has often cited as one of his major inspirations: “In one sense Gertrude Stein’s style is very plain, and she uses a severely limited vocabulary, but she also insists upon a colorless, somewhat vague language which is almost always oddly phrased—just far enough out of the ordinary to disconcert.” And while Gass’s own language is far from “colorless,” the “somewhat vague” slipperiness with which he moves between motifs—often within the same paragraph—suggests a similar strategy. Gass’s style disconcerts as much as his content, but these two methods of disconcertment function differently. Kohler’s content may be reprehensible, but his prose, the slippery logic of his sentence, is intoxicating. 

To briefly consider the latter, we can look at Kohler’s reflections on his Uncle Balt: “Yet why should I remember Uncle Balt. He’s dead now. I’m half. He never meant much to me; though back then, I suppose, he meant something. People often have value for you when you’re ten.” Writing “I’m half” instead of “I’m half-dead,” for example, moves the stress of the second sentence—“He’s dead now”—to the next sentence’s “half.” This creates a metric parallelism with “dead,” the subject of the previous sentence’s stress. Through this parallelism, Gass invites us to view “half” as a thing in and of itself rather than an adverbial modifier—something comparable to deadness in its own right. However, these sentences also create a parallelism between Kohler and Uncle Balt, the latter of whom Kohler sees as having lived a wasted life. “Uncle Balt desired the impossible,” Kohler states. “He wanted to live like a mountain man on this endlessly level plain, as out of place in his hopes as a Mongolian. Later in life, I would come to understand the difference between a term and a relation. Uncle Balt was a term.” Kohler, too, has dreams: dreams of freedom, of running away from his colleagues, his family, anyone who’s in any way different from himself. And his dreams, if the eventual collapse of his tunnel is anything to go by, are equally unattainable. 

Kohler’s self-conscious style, though, is defined by a simultaneous adherence to and rejection of tradition. A prime example of this occurs during a conversation about limericks with Kohler’s colleague Culp, when Kohler pokes fun at a poem in which Culp rhymes “barber” with “barber,” and Culp replies that “it’s obviously easier to find two rhymes than three.” Kohler, as if to prove Culp wrong after the fact, narrates for us the following rhyme-happy passage: 

It was a bright and sunny day. I said we met in a sidewalk café. She entered as though in a play. The ash on the wall was gray. We greeted in a formal way. Neither of us could at first find a thing to say. Is it true, what you wrote me, that you’re going away? Yes, I’m going away to stay. I said, Dare I tell you of my dismay? It’s a frightful decision I wish you’d delay. Don’t make a scene, she said, a display. The waiter’s tray slid with his presence between us. A cup clicked in its saucer. My nerves had begun to fray. I feared I might weep and my eyes grew hot, their rims red. No last hurrah, then, no last hurray? I don’t think we should betray all our former feelings. No, my love, she said, it’s really time for me to move on to a new neighborhood. So you’ve had, from your Lou, your last lay.

Notice how the passage begins with a straightforward “ay” rhyme scheme and how the rhyme becomes less frequent as the passage progresses—e.g., “A cup clicked in its saucer” has no “ay” rhyme at all. With this latter line, one can see how Kohler’s self-conscious style becomes a way of retaining control. The rhyme scheme ultimately creates a set of expectations for the reader. But then Gass subverts this expectation, diverging from the scheme right when an outside force pierces the conversation between Kohler and his lost love, Lou. In this sense, we can see that traditional forms of “beauty” are comfortable for Kohler because he can control them. Anything that threatens this order, however, becomes an invasion that interrupts the familiarity of Kohler’s received forms. Such a moment ultimately becomes a synecdoche for Kohler’s entire worldview: Kohler positions himself as an outsider, someone who diverges from institutional norms and liberal niceties. However, he simultaneously adheres to a different set of norms and forms: those received from a historically distant past.

This tug-of-war between adherence and divergence exists at the core of Kohler’s character. On one hand, he prides himself on being a freethinker: on rejecting what he sees as propagandistic doctrines like the public insistence that the Holocaust’s perpetrators ought to be punished. He delights in bad reviews of his books, such as one that claims, “I’ll forgive him [Kohler] no more than I will the Nazis.” He is aware that he’s a bad person, but he views his badness as a virtue—to be a “good” person is to mindlessly adhere to mass doctrine and the error of received wisdom. On the other hand, the novel remains engaging precisely because we can see when and how his resolve wavers and he himself adheres to received wisdom. These prescriptions most frequently play out in a formal register—he writes like an aesthete and cites his inspirations: Gide, Montaigne, Rilke, etc. But these tensions are eventually made over into content proper. 

Though Kohler’s childhood mostly lurks in the novel’s background, Gass devotes the last hundred or so pages almost entirely to Kohler’s upbringing. Here, Gass provides us with the impetus for Kohler’s simultaneous rejection of and adherence to ideological prescription. Take, for instance, a section entitled “Being a Bigot,” where Kohler presents his childhood reasoning for why his Asian-immigrant neighbors hung out exclusively with other Asians; they “felt a reassuring trust for one another they could not yet extend to the sometimes suspicious citizens of their adopted land.” Kohler then directly contrasts it with his father’s reasoning—that they were predisposed to “clannishness.” The adult Kohler goes on to state that while “at first I found my father’s fury foolish, […] he and his neighbors, incompetent as they were in their resistance, were nevertheless right. The strangers were strangers; they were intrusive; they were clannish.” Though readers see his change of heart as adherence to his father’s specifically racist doctrine, Kohler claims that his childish sympathy for immigrants stemmed from brainwashing at school: “I had studied geography and knew how to answer when quizzed.” In other words, Kohler viewed his childhood antiracism as a performance for his superiors, who required that he hold a particular ideology to succeed in school. Thus, he sees his adult racism as a rejection of the doctrine his education hoped to instill—as a refusal to be tricked by institutional prescriptions.

Kohler’s membership in the very academic institution he dismisses, therefore, is one of the book’s core ironies. He reconciles this irony by hating both himself and all his colleagues. Governali is a “wop,” which is “cause enough for killing.” Culp has “no depths.” Planmantee “delighted in the discomfiture of those who mistakenly thought it wise to look into his eyes” and “fancied his Phi Beta Kappa key, which he wore on a fat gold chain.” Kohler resents his colleagues for belonging to the same establishment he despises, but he also resents himself for his divergence from said establishment. Despite Kohler’s insistence to the contrary, his childhood sympathies for those who are unlike him and for the liberal institutions that cultivated them have not fully disappeared. Instead of working through these internal contradictions, Kohler consciously takes the opposite position; he recognizes his bigotry is “loathsome,” yet still opts for bigotry. He knows that he is not just morally stained but also incorrect, his mature bigotry determined by a fiction imposed on him by his father.

As Kohler continues to write about his upbringing, we learn more about his verbally abusive, virulently racist father and alcoholic mother. When Kohler is learning to drive, his father tells him that he should “begin by putting my knob in neutral and turning the key to start the car—give it some gas for god’s sake […] next turning my head around to the right—no, jesus, not to your left,” and it’s hard not to sympathize with the adolescent’s paralysis. We feel a similar sympathy when Kohler’s mom forgets to mail his birthday party invitations and his dad takes it out on Kohler: “He is quietly cursing his wife and his sad situation in life. He is quietly cursing me, of course. And my no-show friends. I am these balloons he is golfing now into the yard.” In these flashbacks, Kohler shrinks in the presence of his father. His father’s overbearing nature leads him to grasp for control later in life—by being racist, by digging his tunnel, by having affairs, and by assaulting students.

Placing these anecdotes at the end of the book, once we already know the depth of Kohler’s depravity, is bold, and poses the question of whether his childhood absolves him. It doesn’t, but it’s easy to see how the basic pettiness and meanness of a mistreated child—a child who once authored a poem containing the lines, “but I had fouled my own sweet nest / and cracked the hearts in their fair chests / […] so they would treat me henceforth as a guest”—could transform into racially-directed violence under the tutelage of a bigoted, controlling father. The Tunnel does not make us see Kohler as a mistreated everyman, but it does lead us to understand him deeply. Read 653 pages about anyone, and you’ll know him almost as well as you know yourself, which also means empathizing with the ways in which he’s like you.

Take me for example: I am not a Nazi sympathizer, but like Kohler, I can be petty and mean. I’m just mentally disturbed enough to recognize the cruel humor in Kohler’s relief that his mother can no longer wear her ugly jewelry because her skin is fraying from liver cancer. I can laugh at Kohler’s attempt to humiliate a pretentious colleague by looking up an obscure word the colleague had misused (“pulvillus,” as an adjective rather than a noun) and his subsequent realization that the colleague would simply claim that “he had put its impressive obscurity to work in every other ode he wrote and could consequently adjectival it any time he wanted to.” And though I’ve never created a fascist party in my name, I have been, from time to time, a Disappointed Person. I am not Kohler, but it’s uncomfortable to occasionally glimpse our similarities. 

One reason this is uncomfortable to think about is that we (and by we I of course mean I and anyone who happens to agree with me) currently share the country with a group of people we struggle to—or simply refuse to—empathize with. It’s certainly easier to imagine these people as soulless monsters driven by hate and greed than as fully developed human beings. The Tunnel gives us just one example of how a smart, conscious, self-aware person might justify unconscionable beliefs and patterns of behavior. And it’s the capacity to elicit pity for those you’d otherwise dehumanize that makes literature so powerful.

In the final act of The Tunnel, Kohler begs (his words falling apart, as if forcing them out is taking as much effort as forcing his way through the tunnel), “don t take your anger and resentment out on me only because I took the villain s part for once and tried to understand him [sic].” Taking the villain’s part is what Gass demands of The Tunnel’s readers. You are being asked, if only temporarily, to inhabit the mind of a villain—to imagine how limiting and lonely and dark and cognitively dissonant and uncomfortable that would be. And though you may have to claw your way through it, you’ll finish The Tunnel feeling as if you’ve finally seen the light.