Authors: William H. Gass
How wrong it is to put a placid, pretty face upon a calm and tragic countenance. How awful also to ignore the essential character, the profounder functions, of the container of consciousness—to think of it even as a box from which words might be taken in or out—for I believe it is a crime against the mind to disgrace the nature of the book with ill-writ words or to compromise well-wrought ones by building for them tawdry spaces in a tacky house. “The book form,” Theodor Adorno writes,
signifies detachment, concentration, continuity: anthropological characteristics that are dying out. The composition of a book as a volume is incompatible with its transformation into momentary presentations of stimuli. When, through its appearance, the book casts off the last reminder of the idea of a text in which truth manifests itself, and instead yields to the primacy of ephemeral responses, the appearance turns against
the book’s essence, that which it announces prior to any specific context … the newest books [have] become questionable, as though they have already passed away. They no longer have any self-confidence; they do not wish themselves well; they act as though no good could come of them.… The autonomy of the work, to which the writer must devote all his energies, is disavowed by the physical form of the work. If the book no longer has the courage of its own form, then the power that could justify that form is attacked within the book itself as well. [“Bibliographical Musings,” translated by S. W. Nicholson,
Grand Street
, 39: 136–7.]
It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about; by singing to themselves the large, round lines they find, at the same time as they applaud their placement on the page, their rich surroundings, and everywhere the show of taste and care and good custom—what a cultivated life is supposed to provide; for if my meal is mistakenly scraped into the garbage, it becomes garbage, and if garbage is served to me on a platter of gold by hands in gloves, it merely results in a sardonic reminder of how little gold can do to rescue ruck when ruck can ruin whatever it rubs against; but if candlelight and glass go well together, and the linens please the eye as though it were a palate, and one’s wit does not water the wine, if one’s dinner companions are pleasing, if the centerpiece does not block the view and its flowers are discreet about their scent, then whatever fine food is placed before us, on an equally completed plate, will be enhanced, will be, in such a context, only another successful element in the making of a satisfactory whole; inasmuch as there is nothing in life better able to justify its follies, its inequities, and its pains (though there may be many its equal) than in getting, at once, a number of fine things right; and when we read, too, with our temper entirely tuned to the text, we become—our heads—we
become the best book of all, where the words are now played, and we are the page where they rest, and we are the hall where they are heard, and we are, by god, Blake, and our mind is moving in that moment as Sir Thomas Browne’s about an urn, or Yeats’s spaded grave; and death can’t be so wrong, to be feared or sent away, the loss of love wept over, or our tragic acts continuously regretted, not when they prompt such lines, not when our rendering of them brings us together in a rare community of joy.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Cambridge University Press:
Excerpt from
Human, All Too Human
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, copyright © 1986 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.:
Excerpts from
Aura
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Lysander Kemp, copyright © 1965 by Carlos Fuentes; excerpts from
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim, copyright © 1989 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Grand Street:
Excerpt from “Bibliographical Musings” by Theodor Adorno (
Grand Street
, vol. 39, pp. 469–70). Reprinted by permission of
Grand Street
.
Harcourt Brace & Company:
Excerpts from “Flowering Judas” in
Flowering Judas and Other Stories
by Katherine Anne Porter, copyright © 1930, copyright renewed 1958 by Katherine Anne Porter. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.:
Excerpt from “Gazebo” in
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver, copyright © 1981 by Raymond Carver; excerpt from “Sunday Morning” in
Collected Poems
by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1923, copyright renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
New Directions Publishing Corp.:
Excerpt from “Portrait d’Une Femme” in
Personae
by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound; excerpt from “Canto XVII” in
The Cantos of Ezra Pound
by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1934, 1938 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Oxford University Press, Inc
., and
Faber and Faber Limited:
Excerpt from “Scotland’s Winter” in
Collected Poems
by Edwin Muir (eight lines, pp. 229–30), copyright © 1960 by Willa Muir. Rights in Canada administered by Faber and Faber Limited, London. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., and Faber and Faber Limited.
Laurence Pollinger Limited:
Excerpts from “The Spinner and the Monks” in
Sea and Sardinia
by D. H. Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
Quartet Books Ltd.:
Excerpts from
Forbidden Territory
by Juan Goytisolo, translated by Peter Bush (London: Quartet Books Ltd., 1989). Reprinted by permission of Quartet Books Ltd.
Random House, Inc.:
Excerpts from “Brussels in Winter” and “Lullaby” in
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright © 1940, copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Viking Penguin:
Excerpts from
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce, copyright © 1939 by James Joyce, copyright renewed 1967 by Giorgio Joyce and Lucia Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Walker and Company:
Excerpt from
At Swim Two-Birds
by Flann O’Brien, copyright © 1951, 1966 by Brian O’Nolan. Reprinted by permission of Walker and Company, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. All rights reserved.