Authors: William H. Gass
Harmonium
, Wallace Stevens called one of his books.
Harmonica
, I’d like to call mine—rude mouth music. That’s because every mark on the page, apart from its inherent visual interest, is playing its part in the construction of a verbal consciousness, and that means commas must become concepts, pauses need to be performed, even the margins have to be sung, the lips rounded as widely as the widest vowel, round as the edges of the world.
O
h as in “oral.”
For that’s where every good idea should be found, melting like a chocolate in the curl of the tongue, against the roof of the mouth.
If we insist that we write to be spoken (though no one shall speak us; neither time nor training nor custom incline our rare reader to it), then a concept crucial to the understanding of literature and its effects is “voice.” Even when we write in the first person and construct a voice for our invented narrator to speak in, there is always an overvoice in which our character finds a place: the author’s voice, the style which tells us, whoever is speaking—Lear or Hamlet or Juliet—that it is Shakespeare nevertheless, in whose verbal stream they are swimming; or we hear the unmistakable tones of Henry James, of Flaubert or Faulkner, in each rednecked, red-earthed farmer, in every bumbling bourgeois or bewildered American lady.
Who better to speak than Thoreau of the sound around one, for he chose the quietest of woods to inhabit.
I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,—only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want
of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale,—a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,—no gate—no front-yard,—and no path to the civilized world.
Even so, even when we hear the unmistakable voice of our friend in the next room, find the cadences of Colette on the page (as, once again, Plato warned us), we cannot be certain what part of the soul is speaking (the spoken language, like the soul, is triply tiered); because when desire, or
praxis
, says “love,” it is
eros
that is invoked; when the spirited part of the soul, or
doxa
, says “love,” it is
philia
, or friendship, which is suggested; and when reason, the
logos
, says “love,” it is
agape
or contemplation which is meant.
Of course, every philosophical catastrophe is a literary opportunity. Gertrude Stein finally concluded that the “I” who writes masterpieces had to be the “I” of the transcendental ego, the universal “I,” making the text timeless and transcultural. But I am greedy. I like best the “I” that speaks for every layer of the self, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in discord, as the occasion and the project require. I like ideas best, as I’ve said, when they are most concrete; when, when you think them, you fry them like eggs; when, when you eat them, the yoke is runny with the softest of dreams.
If words find comfort in the sentence’s syntactical handclasp, and sentences find their proper place like pieces of furniture in the rhetorical space of the paragraph, what shall control each scene as it develops, form the fiction finally as a whole?
Well, the old answer was always: plot. It’s a terrible word in English, unless one is thinking of some second-rate conspiracy, a meaning it serves very well. Otherwise, it stands for an error for which there’s no longer an excuse. There’s bird drop, horse plop, and novel plot. Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do
to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications. You can buy stories at the store, where they are a dime a dozen. Stories are interesting only when they are floors in buildings. Stories are a bore. What one wants to do with stories is screw them up. Stories ought to be in pictures. They’re wonderful to see.
Still, a little story gets into everything. Thank the Ghost of Fictions Past for that.
My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character. Like most kids, I loved the nineteenth-century novel with its wealth of colorful detail, its heroes and villains, its sympathy for the common and the ordinary, its smarmy coziness, its clear-cut characters, its unambiguous values (I was born bourgeois); I lapped up its sweet sentimentality; I allowed to beat in my chest its vulgar material heart. Implicit in much of the novel’s melodrama, and explicit in the critics and readers who praised it and made it popular, was the idea that its value rested not on its language, its artifice, its drama, but on its representation of reality. I have no problem with Martin Chuzzlewit as a creature caught in a myth. I can believe in the triumph of the orphan and the importance of “doing good,” at least for as many pages as it takes to complete the text.
Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful, because signs were the very materials of their composition. I learned that suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn’t win; that most explanations offered me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn’t clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; most of passion’s pageants were frauds, and human feelings had been faked for so long, no one knew what
the genuine was; furthermore, many of the things I found most satisfactory were everywhere libelously characterized or their very existence was suppressed; and much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance.
Above all, I was struck by the traditional novel’s vanity on behalf of man. When I looked at man, I did not see a piece of noble work, a species whose every member was automatically of infinite worth and the pinnacle of Nature’s efforts. Nor did history, as I read it, support such grandiose claims. Throughout human time, men had been murdering men with an ease that suggested they took a profound pleasure in it, and like the most voracious insect, the entire tribe was, even as I watched, even as I participated, eating its host like a parasite whose foresight did not exceed its greed. Hate, fear, and hunger were the tribal heroes. In Trollope and Thackeray, as skillful as their satire was, flaws became foibles, wickedness the result of poor upbringing, too much port, and a bad digestion. Flaubert saw how things were and told the truth, as if that mattered.
So I, like many others in every art, rejected a realism that wasn’t real and tried to work in a less traditional, less compromised way. I organized my fictions around symbolic centers instead of plotting them out on graph paper; I assigned the exfoliation of these centers to a voice and limited my use of narration, while treating the style and characteristic structure of the sentences that filled the novel, row on row, as microcosmic models for the organization of the whole. I do not pretend to be in the possession of any secrets; I have no cause I espouse; I do not presume to reform my readers, or attempt to flatter their egos either. My loyalty is to my text, for that is what I am composing, and if I change the world, it will be because I’ve added this or that little reality to it; and if I alter any reader’s consciousness, it will be because I have constructed a consciousness of which others may wish to become aware, or even, for a short time, share. The reader’s freedom is a holy thing.
My views are what is popularly pictured as “off the wall,” but it
has seemed to me for a long time that fiction’s principal problem, apart from its allegiance to the middle class, was not to be solved by finding a fascinating or outré subject, by maintaining a narrative suspense that was meaningless if you hoped to be reread, or by being blessed for your possession of the right beliefs; the problem was how to achieve any lasting excellence (in philosophy, mathematics, art, and science, always the same)—that is, it was a problem of form. Writers had once looked everywhere to find the necessary regulating schemes. The novel began by imitating non-fictional genres: histories, biographies, collections of letters, diaries, accounts of travel, records of adventure. Later, novelists looked to other arts for suggestions: they pretended to paint portraits of young men and ladies; they composed pastoral symphonies and other metaphorical musicales; or they used their prose to steal from poetry many of its epical methods and effects, and grandly said (as I once muttered) that the strategies of fiction were the same as the strategies of the long poem.
In every case, wonderful stories, great novels, were written, although against the grain, in forms not fashioned for fiction in the first place, with techniques not meant for the novel, but with methods its middle-class audience saw as comfortingly familiar, factual, realistic, acceptably hypocritical. All the while, like the purloined letter, a possible solution to the problem lay in full view, and had likely been in operation all along: first, the solution was apparent in the actual operations of the prose sentence itself; second, it was readily available in scholarly texts, through the nearly forgotten techniques of rhetoric and oratory, contained in those quaintly out-of-date but meticulously catalogued lists of tropes, schemes, arguments, illustrations, and outlines, in those countless unconsulted volumes on eloquence and public address from Aristotle, Longinus, Cicero, and Quintilian through Priestley, Adam Smith, and De Quincey to Emerson, Hugh Blair, and Edward Channing; and third, in the efforts of linguists and logicians to discover the secrets of syntax and to explain its regulating power.
George Saintsbury’s admirable
History of English Prose Rhythm
told me more about the art of writing than a hundred literary critics, each eager to light like a fly on the latest fad, and soon, predictably, to be abuzz with the energy so secondarily received.
That is, if we understand how prose is put together, not only logically or grammatically, but rhetorically and esthetically as well, then we might understand how an entire tale could be uniformly wagged, or how a whole novel could be unified. Moreover, philosophers have frequently ascribed metaphysical significance to propositional forms, and considered them to be the structural essentials of any conceived world.
This is not the place to dwell upon the course of development of my idiosyncrasies, but it is perhaps appropriate for me to conclude these remarks by looking at some of the reasons why such interests are so rarely shared. There are four dimensions to the writer’s realm, and few occupy all axes equally. If a Realist were lucky enough to begin a piece: “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from an uneasy sleep, he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect,” he would be distressed indeed if we disbelieved him, and thought he was deconstructing
The Faerie Queene
. He would be calculating, as he wrote the line, the matter-of-fact effect such an event would have on the other characters Gregor Samsa would be plotted to encounter, on the consciousness of Gregor himself, and even on the mattress and the springs of the bed. The Idealist would immediately wonder what the event meant, and would be concerned to render it in such a way that it would resonate as the writer wished. The night before, as Gregor’s head hit his pillow, he was merely being treated like a bug, living and acting and feeling like one (as the Idealist might interpret his behavior), but now, this a.m., he was a bug, and the Realist had taken over.
Nothing prevents Kafka from being both, as he undoubtedly is.
Moby-Dick
presents us with a similar tension. Every paragraph of data about the whale—its hunting, its capture, its cutting up—insists on the solidity and importance of daily life, its traumas and its tasks. A whale is a whale, here, white or not, and a big bug in a bed is a bother, especially if it’s your brother. What’ll you feed him?
what will friends think? how will the family fare without the funds the brother/bug brought home? The Realist pores over the world like a lover, and learns to render its qualities to a tee. When the Realist’s “I” perceives, what matters is what the ego sees. The Idealist will insist that this story is not “about” Gregor Samsa and his family, but about sibling rivalry, for if Gregor is transformed into a bug in the beginning, Grete becomes a butterfly at the end. Let the Realist worry about bedbugs and their bite; the Idealist will study Jewish family relations, and he will see that the name “Samsa” contains “sam,” that is, seed, or the cock’s roach.
Meanwhile, the Romantic will have understood the sentence to be really about the author’s own condition, for isn’t he the put-upon person who has to work like a menial when his spirit would be free? Kafka writes about Kafka principally, and only secondarily about Gregor Samsa and his plight; or, if you insist on some theoretical intent, also about the anxieties inherent in the human condition. But of course I have gone too far.
The Metamorphosis
does not reveal Kafka; rather, it delivers to us the consciousness presupposed by its creation. This consciousness is a construction, it must be admitted, and its distance from its swearing, sweating, farting namesake is substantial. This distance—this difference—is also the reason why we often admire an author whom, as a citizen or a biographical subject, we can scarcely endure; or, to point to the problem from its opposite end, why we occasionally wish some dear sweet friend were a better writer, even at the expense of their sweetness, and even if the friendship were to bend.