Troubling Company: On "The William H. Gass Reader"
William H. Gass | The William H. Gass Reader | Knopf | 2018 | 928 Pages
From childhood the Reverend Jethro Furber “sought out terror as though it were a sweetly scented flower.” The protagonist of the last, longest, and best part of William H. Gass’ 1966 novel Omensetter’s Luck, Furber had “an affinity for fear so pronounced that he had driven his parents nearly out of their wits with it.” Worried about their son’s proclivity, they only allow him to read books they’ve vetted, but since “to forbid him the Bible was unthinkable,” young Furber reads the Bible and gravitates naturally to its stories of stonings, beheadings, and other sundry smitings. (He prefers the Hebrew Bible; as for the Christian Scriptures, “Furber did not stay long with the later books.”) Obsessing over Absalom caught in the branches of a tree, and how Joab came along and “bled his heart for the dogs like darts,” Furber also reads in Numbers “how they stoned a man for gathering sticks on the sabbath,” and imagines the whole scene of the execution including the condemned man’s words to his “good friends, my kinsmen” as they ready to kill him. “Come now who shall be the first? And then: well thrown, good Korah, son of Izhar, playmate of my youth, friend in my manhood, neighbor and love.” What do their faces look like as, stones in hand, they approach? Do they smile? Is there malice in their miens, or merely determination, sadness even, only dutifully doing what they must to uphold the law? Furber, in any case, is dizzy, delirious with fear, exactly as he will be at the novel’s terrifying denouement, one of Gass’ many tours de force, its resonances not only biblical but Sophoclean.
Certainly Gass’ complete work is topically diverse, and his voluminous essays (a good number of them anthologized in The William H. Gass Reader) are largely devoted to the exploration, celebration, and theory of literature, modernist literature above all. Gass wrote essays on Nietzsche, Henry James, Rilke, Kafka, Pound, Colette, Valéry, Stein, Borges, Beckett, and many others. Rilke in particular drew his prolonged admiration, which over the years bodied forth a medley of essays as well as the book Reading Rilke (1999), a loving meditation on Rilke’s life and art that also concerns the question of translation, particularly delicate in the case of poetry. (Reading Rilke features Gass’ own translations of many of Rilke’s poems, including the complete Duino Elegies.) A teacher of philosophy for over fifty years, Gass also wrote many essays on philosophers and philosophical topics, though he eschewed the house style of academic philosophy in favor of his own unique voice and sensibility. Plato, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein (Gass trained as an analytic philosopher at Cornell, and was there in 1949 when Wittgenstein spent time in the department), figure prominently in his work, and he has written intensively about questions of moral philosophy as well as the problem of evil. His copious writings on language, meaning, metaphor, and writing itself are informed not only by his own experience as a writer but also by his ongoing engagement with philosophy. The essay “Habitations of the Word” (included in The William H. Gass Reader, hereafter WGR), for example, presents an insightful reading of Plato’s Phaedrus but also a defense of writing against the dialogue’s preference for the spoken word. “Writing,” Gass opines, “has freed the mind (as it did Plato’s) to consider far more complex matters than it ever could while operating orally.” Inviting a “scrupulosity of expression” and “refinement of idea” that oral speech for the most part lacks, the written word can bring to light a more nuanced and intricate reality than near anything we might merely utter.
Yet for all the undeniable variety of Gass’ work, his oeuvre shares Jethro Furber’s affinity for evil and terror, returning again and again to seek out, linger over, and contemplate the matter of human malice and misdoing. Where Furber is giddy, however, Gass is by turns sardonic, resigned, and angry, though mostly his ire burns steady and low. Gass spent 30 years writing his magnum opus, The Tunnel (1995), which meant three decades of inhabiting the consciousness of its narrator, William Frederick Kohler, a sad, embittered, and bigoted professor of history who specializes in Nazi Germany. Full of nostalgia (“In the present, the past is always picturesque,”), regret, and confusion, even verging at times on madness, Kohler is nonetheless an expierienced botanist of the flowers of evil and is capable of both finer feelings and lucid insights into human nature and history, even as he writes “a style which murder made.” The Tunnel concerns the Holocaust but also the mystery of human murderousness as such. Like Gass, who gave him a goodly helping of his own biography, Kohler can say that “I write to indict mankind” (WGR p. 12 and T p. 457, respectively). Everywhere a pariah, Kohler’s principal claim to infamy comes from trying to see things from the perspective of the murderers, most of whom were average people like anyone. Why do everyday people become murderers? A perennial question, to be sure, but Kohler thinks he knows the reason, sees the seed of evil in disappointment and resentment, its fetid bloom There are many reasons, grievous as disease and death, banal as monthly bills, harrowing as heartbreak, to feel let down by life. Kohler’s thesis is that by a slow but sure process such myriad disappointments give birth to resentment, which looks for an object on which to vent its wrath and awaits an opportunity to do so. When things fall apart, and some people begin actually to will what resentment only wishes, “the good go bad, and the bad get worse.”
The William H. Gass Reader attests to Gass’ prolonged preoccupation with the problem of evil, both in the selected fiction and in the essays such as the one on the Third Reich as well as “On Evil: The Ragged Core of a Sweet Apple” (a review of Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought). Seven, by Gass’ reckoning, turns out to have been a lowball estimate of the number of deadly sins. Even worse, each of us without exception has all the bad things in us, though like the substances of Anaxagoras they predominate more or less, depending on the person and, Gass insists, their circumstances. That the enemy is inside everyone is an old idea, even older than Erasmus who observed that “within the most private recesses of our consciousness, we carry a foe more intimate” than all external enemies, “…and just as nothing in us is more secret, so nothing can be more dangerous.” One of our common little ruses, however, is to deny our own complicity in evil, to think we are somehow exempt and don’t need to arm ourselves against the foe within. In an essay from Tests of Time, “How German Are We?” Gass writes, “I know now that nothing, ever, has been innocent. In this world, even The Good itself is guilty,” which are strong words indeed from a teacher and student of Plato. The case of Nazi Germany really might make us despair of humanity; nor does Gass subscribe to the comforting belief that the Germans were somehow uniquely bad in human history, itself a Schlachtbank, or slaughterhouse, in Hegel’s all-too-accurate phrase. Gass’ point is that people in America—or anywhere, really—are hardly better, though they may indeed be better off. In the essay “Retrospection” that opens WGR, Gass tells us that he “wrote The Tunnel out of the conviction that no race or nation is better than any other, and that no nation or race is worse; that the evil men do every day far outweighs the good.” And while we may, perhaps must, put our hopes in education to meliorate this bleak picture, Gass reminds us, too, that a German culture “higher than the Alps…failed to prevent the world’s worst moral catastrophe.” America, obviously, is no better off, though we like to think—but who doesn’t?—that we’re the good guys, that the bad guys are over there in dark hats, incomprehensibly malicious. Gass knows otherwise: “How German are we? The Tunnel asks. Its answer has pleased few. Its answer is—very.”
To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, modern science and technology have made humanity immensely more powerful in recent centuries without doing much (or anything) to improve human ethics or morality. What we have, then, is the same old flawed human being, except now with the power to turn the earth into a giant greenhouse or to blow the human race to smithereens, once and for all. In these circumstances, optimism about the future of humanity appears rather foolish. “Who of us is any longer in doubt of our depravity,” Kohler asks, “do we need another demonstration?” Gass and his protagonists nonetheless go on collecting stories, multiplying proofs, curating museums of “man’s inhumanity to man.” In a room of his attic, Joseph Skizzen (the protagonist of Gass’ third and final novel Middle C), works on what he variously calls “The Inhumanity Museum” or “The Apocalypse Museum.” Here he archives clippings such as:
Friday June 18, 1999
Sri Lanka. Municipal workers dug up more bones from a site believed to contain the bodies of hundreds of Tamils murdered by the military.
Same day
Poklek, Jugoslavia. 62 Kosovars are packed into a room into which a grenade is tossed.
Same day
Pristina, Jugoslavia. It is now estimated that 10,000 people were killed in the Serbian ethnic-cleansing pogrom.
It goes on and on, but that is the point. Skizzen finds it increasingly hard, moreover, to make a selection. Later in the novel he realizes he could just save the whole newspaper: “just look at this…and this…and this…and this…and this…”
Gass was not an activist writer in any conventional sense, but he did write, I think, to counter the shallow optimism, triumphalism, and presumption of moral superiority that seem to be as American as hamburgers and Coke. Gass also tried, however, to make art of everything he wrote, and the point of art as he understood it was to alter our consciousness, to deepen and expand it, and thus to get it out of the little caves of complacency and stupidity wherein it all-too-often dwells. In contrast to popular culture, which cunningly and soothingly reinforces the limits of our understanding, “art enlarges consciousness like space in a cathedral, ribboned with light.” But real art, great art, also humbles us, “shows us what beauty, perfection, sensuality, and meaning are; and we feel as we should feel if we’d compared physiques with Hercules.” After the encounter with great works of art and philosophy, moreover, we “cannot unconsciously go on in the old way.” Like Rilke’s “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” great works of philosophy and art see us, take our measure, and tell us unmistakably that “we must change our life.”
It is up to us of course to heed this call, but how to go about it is a question. Fittingly for a philosopher, Gass believes that we have to begin by learning better what we are, which course of action must sooner or later bring us face to face with our own complicity in evil. Speaking of Plato’s and Socrates’ great insight into the origin of human badness, Gass writes:
I have taught philosophy, in one or other of its many modes, for fifty years—Plato my honey in every one of them—yet many of those years had to pass before I began to realize that evil actually was ignorance—ignorance chosen and cultivated—as he and Socrates had so passionately taught; that most beliefs were bunkum, and that the removal of bad belief was as important to a mind as a cancer’s excision was to the body it imperiled.
Paradoxically, this may go some way towards explaining the unpopularity of literature, philosophy, and art in general (see the essay in WGR, “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World”), for such works challenge our beliefs and ways of living and subject the prevailing ethos of the community to critical scrutiny thus threatening to disturb its equine torpor. “Most people,” Gass writes, “do not wish to know their own nothingness—or their own potentialities either,” and it is this willful flight from self-knowledge that allows evil to flourish.
Fiction and philosophy are, on Gass’ account, essentially creative activities and not merely attempts to mirror “things as they are.” Their primary vocation, as he puts it in “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” is to make worlds, worlds that differ from and are more real than the familiar workaday one. In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, the prisoners believe that there is nothing beyond the prison, that the cave itself in which they dwell is identical with reality. Yet Plato maintained that escape from the limiting vision of the cave is possible, and Gass agrees, attesting repeatedly to his belief that novelists, philosophers, and poets are our principal breakout artists. These (as well as painters, sculptors, and others) fashion other worlds, the greatest of which have the power to alter, expand, and deepen consciousness, subjecting its view of “the way things are” to critique (whose etymology means judgment).
The challenges posed to us by Gass’ own soul-stretching art are well represented in The William H. Gass Reader, which consists of selections from Gass’ lifework made by the author himself prior to his death in December, 2017. The book features selected short stories, including “The Pedersen Kid,” an eerie tale of snow and (possibly) murder, as well as “The Order of Insects,” much beloved by Gass himself, which describes a woman’s awakening to the beauty of natural form. The Reader also contains excerpts from Gass’ novels, and although we miss the vast sweep, suspense, and tragic climax engendered by the uncut works, the selection here stands up on its own. In addition to excerpts from The Tunnel, we get the second part of Omensetter’s Luck, “The Love and Sorrow of Henry Pimber,” which explores the enigmatic attraction that Pimber feels toward Omensetter, and how this changes his life and sets him free. We also get “The Piano Lesson” from Middle C, one of Gass’ finer set pieces and a moving meditation on the nature of music and listening. Finally, WGR includes a treasure trove of Gass’ literary-philosophical essays, the bulk of the book, including the aforementioned “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” as well as “The Death of the Author,” Gass’ compelling rejoinder to Roland Barthes. A particular gem, “Fifty Literary Pillars: Texts Influential to My Literary Work” consists of Gass’ laudatory, incisive, and often droll comments on texts (both canonical and otherwise) that he saw as having profoundly shaped his own writerly craft and consciousness.
Again in “Retrospection,” Gass reproduces his account from The Tunnel of the death pit at Dubno, where Nazi death squads murdered Jewish people by the thousands, shooting and burying them in mass graves. Presumably many of the victims, wounded but not killed by the guns’ bullets, were buried alive under heaps of other dead or dying bodies. “The bald facts taken from Holocaust documents,” Gass has Kohler imagine the speech of a father to his son, as amidst “a mile of naked strangers” they await their turn to be murdered:
A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us.
Thus Gass lets us feel the enormity, allows it to enter and shape consciousness. But can it this really be a remedy for evil? It goes on, after all, the murders and the genocides, the petty crimes and vicious harms we daily do each other. How should we not be ashamed of ourselves that this, too, is who we are, our species? Is it delusional to hope that art might inspire us to do better? Might stir us to a decision between connivance with evil and rebellion against it? But who even knows all the places where saying “no” ought to begin, or how far we should go?
In an essay about Henry James, Gass speaks of what he calls “The Moral Passion,” which he describes as a kind of intense conscientiousness, devoted not to pragmatic accomplishment, efficiency, or getting things done any which way, but rather to doing right by ourselves and each other. For all the horrors he confronts us with (Furber would delight to read his creator), Gass, too, is moved by the moral passion he finds in James. Indeed, it is this very scrupulousness and compunction that drives him to look evil in the face.
At the close of his review of Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought, Gass writes:
Evil is as man-made as the motorcar. I suspect that, like the motorcar, evil as a prevalent state of things suits a lot of people. If nature is uneven, we can try to even it, but it is we who have made a habit of injustice, and we who must design the institutions that will discourage resentment, malice, ill will, and ignorance while fostering justice, intelligence, learning, and respect…If we fail (and I wouldn’t bet on our success), there will be one satisfaction: we shall probably be eaten by our own greed, and live on only in our ruins, middens, and the fossil record.
Habituated to injustice as we are, there is still a possibility, slim as corn silk, we might do better. In the meantime, we have art, music, fiction, philosophy, and poetry, works such as those of Gass to measure us, keep us beautiful but troubling company.
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