Authors: William H. Gass
A fully felt fictional world must be at least three-dimensional, and bounded by the Real, the Ideal, and the Romantic. But there is, as we know, a fourth dimension, and I tend to emphasize it, not only because of its neglect, but also because it is the country to which I have fled, and that safe haven is the medium itself. There, if we are a Methodologist (my term for my type), we shall have found the other dimensions in miniature already, since the word rests nowhere but on the pedestal of its referent (Gregor Samsa, the bedded bug person); there it measures its mass by the number
and nature of its range of meanings (all the definitions of “metamorphosis,” for instance: the scientific, the poetic, the philosophical, the religious); nor is any word spoken without a speaker, or written without a writer (at least it has a human source); consequently every utterance has a cause and, one presumes, a reason as well, so if we are content to explain the nature of any particular part of a text by appealing to the rest, we nevertheless have to turn to the author for the answer: why did you write
The Metamorphosis
when you could have been engaged in something harmless like a game of golf?
A Methodologist (for whom the medium is the muse) will reformulate traditional esthetic problems in terms of language. Crudely put: in this milieu point of view has to do with the deployment of pronouns, character with the establishment of linguistic centers to which and from which meanings flow; themes are built with universals, and their enrichment depends upon the significance of a text beyond its surface sense; perceptions will appear to be fresh and precise if denotation is managed well; energy is expressed by verbal beat, through sentence length and Anglo-Saxon or Latin vocabulary choice; feeling arises particularly from such things as rhythm and alliteration, although every element of language plays a role; thought is constructed out of concepts and their interconnections; imagination involves the management of metaphor at every level; narrative reliability rises or falls with the influence of modal operators; form can be found in the logic of the language—its grammar, scansion, symmetries, rhetorical schema, and methods of variation; and each of the qualities I have just listed, along with many others, can be used to give to a text its desirable complement of four dimensions.
So even if you hope to find some lasting security inside language, and believe that your powers are at their peak there, if nowhere else, despair and disappointment will dog you still; for neither you nor your weaknesses, nor the world and its villains, will have been banished just because, now, it is in syllables and sentences where they hide; since, oddly enough, while you can confront and denounce
a colleague or a spouse, run from an angry dog, or jump bail and flee your country, you can’t argue with an image; in as much as a badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator, and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul. The unpleasant consequence of every such botch is that your life, as you register your writing, looks back at you as from a dirty mirror, and there you perceive a record of ineptitude, compromise, and failure.
W
hen I was a child I was frequently forced to entertain a malicious little boy two years beneath my notice. He was loud, rude, undisciplined, and entirely too intelligent for his parents, whom he ruled with incontinence and screaming. I remember the time when, at dinner, he spat in the mashed potatoes, and how my father sat in silent smiling fury through the whole affair, since it was the little snot’s house we were visiting, and it was the little snot’s mum who had mashed the spuds he’d spat in, and it was their gold-rimmed dish that continued, untaken, around the table, so that a proper punishment was far outside his jurisdiction. One afternoon, both his parents having to sing in the matinee of something by Gilbert and Sullivan, the Kaiserling (as my father called him) was fobbed off on me. We were playing with trucks and trains in the living room, just at the feet of my father, who was trying to read and at the same time obliterate our presence by opening the evening paper widely across his face, thus disappearing behind its sheets. Suddenly (on what provocation I cannot recall, if there was one) the Kaiserling hurled a cast-iron dump truck through the headlines, piercing them the way a trained tiger leaps through a circle of paper flames, and raising a red welt the precise size of the barrow on my father’s brow, before the entire toy fell against the base of a floor lamp with what seemed to me a terrible crash.
My father rose groggily with the Kaiserling’s collar in his fist, for
he knew without need of knowing who had so directly expressed himself, and his reflexes in those days were still those of the athlete he had been. He swung the brat back and forth by his shirt until, alas, the shirt tore—creating, of course,
evidence
. It was one of those eminently satisfactory incidents that now and then, and always without warning, grace one’s life; for I should have dearly loved to have thrown the truck myself; and the breaching of that wall of indifferent dislike was more than appropriate, as was the thwack of the truck on my father’s forehead, a thump so long deserved, I thought … by fate so long postponed. The comeuppance of the kid, who was no longer sure, as he dangled, of his immunity; the frustration of my father, who could not commit the crime the occasion called for; the quarreling among mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and friends that was soon to come: all were causes of the deepest pleasure for me like a fizz of fine grape soda through the upper nose.
And I’m reminded now, perhaps in a manner not unlike the elaborate, large, and densely populated metaphors of our latest Spanish-speaking novelists, of the appearance in our provincial northern world of other singular movers of earth, of tough heavy untykelike toys, missiles hurled at the brow of a petty almighty. When I consider the image, rather as if Father Freud had designed it, I see how my own point of view shifts, and how I am in all roles like a raisin; for I have scarcely fed a fresh sheet of paper into my IBM and begun some decorous composition when
The Autumn of the Patriarch
bursts through the page, shattering a delicate tea-fumed sentence like a china cup. This is another kind of news, and I am dazed. Or I am sitting quietly in my study, perhaps, considering a bit of brittle characterization (a photographer’s assistant, I think, with hair like the camera’s hood), when I see
The Obscene Bird of Night
perched above my chamber door, or when—
caramba
, as we used to exclaim as kids (
Donnerwetter
and
caramba
, we cried before we learned to roll our
r
’s and growl,
merrrrrde
)—so,
caramba
, then, and
Conversation in the Cathedral
crashes through the pane of my plans like a rioter’s brick. They come from everywhere,
these massive, burning books; new masterpieces hatch like chicks and reach maturity in a matter of weeks. No use to shake the terrible volume till the jacket tears (whichever one it is), not a word will fall out (and I have given
Three Trapped Tigers
a good shaking, I can tell you), although almost daily I receive the galleys of my compatriots from which words, presugared and sufficient for every minimal daily requirement, spill like Cheerios from their cereal box. Perhaps when the books are bound and cleverly promo’d, with testimonials from
The New York Times
on their flaps and backs, the words stay put. I haven’t looked.
It wasn’t long ago that literature, at least the novel, seemed safely in gringo hands; we could look down along the slope of the world with the arrogance of the higher climber at the silly specks below: those clumsy countries not even the Balkans would have borrowed for their operettas. Let them have their Hemingway as he had their bulls; let them follow Faulkner if they liked. The wiser among us would do neither. Besides, Spanish was the language of etiquette and euphemism, and to follow Faulkner through his narrative loops and ellipses merely by inverting his question marks; to sing the heart dark, as he had, in a sweetly melodious and lisping Latin, was to leave the soft nest of your lady’s lap to yap after the hounds … misguided, hopeless, absurd.
All the same, prose went secretly south. Prose, the cold northern art, began to journey like the Germans to Venice, or wash up, like blond Scandinavian girls are supposed to, on the shores of the Aegean; even Spain had its Mexico just across the straits, as France its several Egypts. It proved always possible to go south, to Tangier, into some interior, up a Conradian river as we once went west; but how different those old expeditions were, because our wagons, our wants, our humble household wealth, our hardy women, always went
out
in that west they went to; it was seen as a place to replace life, to alter both circumstance and nature, to begin anew; whereas to go south was to go dangerously downhill, as Malcolm Lowry’s metaphors persistently suggest. We went there only for a visit, for we knew that if we ventured far enough, down south became deep.
With the way west blocked by the Pacific, it was still possible for us (it proved necessary for us) (it was our fate) to turn left and make the descent. If Africa went endlessly
in
, Central America went endlessly
down
like some twisted pipe driven angrily into the continent below, or conversely like some whirlwind rising from a lower land to suck the heavens in. First there were the deserts, and then the jungles began: the heat, the snakes, the carnivorous fish, the orchids, the butterflies, the blowgun’s bite. There was fecundity, and the fear of what that implied; there was raw life like a split-open fruit, the sweet taste of death in a soft chocolate skull. Space slowly became time, and around that different clock customs collided like car and cycle in a traffic circle. As though they were Semites, each tick fought its following tock.
One found oneself in noisy fumeous bazaars, beggar-crowded, dream-strewn streets, such as those we’ve been transported through in Juan Goytisolo’s unequaled imagery; or, going south, where cultures, like transvestites, swap one another’s clothes and clichés, we might stroll in ancient worlds one hour and hurtle down new-laid highways the next, through cities that are like a great stage, everything not alive the same pale age; or yet encounter pagan Christs and Negroid Marys; hobnob with savage Christians, crosses of dried bones tied about their waists; to shout, hold it! and catch seven contradictions in one snapshot like a shark; or vomit from a bus and buy (what luck!) the sort of shrunken head with which Virginia Woolf so dramatically began
Orlando
. Yes, going south we could find the whole cheap crazy gimcracky paraphernalia of our advertised life transformed: Andy Warhol, Coca-Cola, rock, and religion, blue jeans, movies, comic books, and cars, mingling madly like auto horns and strummed guitars with the crude clay pots and garish colors of the Indians; down there where everyone wears serapes and too many rings, and writes upon the dry adobe walls with penis piss, and feathers metal roosters with wings of hammered tin, and fights cocks, foments revolution, cooks and eats corn and black beans exclusively, with calamitous effects, including black teeth; where all ambition has melted in the heat, and
sleep is sought under any shade—tables, trees, and hats, clouds, skirts—and waking is slow and deliberate, the way a bandito shakes the scorpion from his summer sandals before going forth in bandoliers like trouser braces to grin a toothy untrustworthy grin at the plaintive tourists or brisk corporation agents he’s about to rob, the ungrateful wretch; in countries where poverty is an art, and wealth (whoopee! as we exclaimed when we were kids;
olé
and whoopee), wealth is what of that world
we
own; and isn’t that the detritus of Disney out there washing about like swill against rotting jungle-river wharves? civilizing, although slowly, these lands of magic and mystery and brutality and decay, even of “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / and the green freedom of a cockatoo”; down south where we might sample exotic alcohols and pleasure-promising drugs, and then return home with an altered consciousness like a duty-free souvenir, our sensuality aroused like the princess from her woodsy sleep, our sex upset like Gide’s; going down—with all its sexual suggestion—to fall at the feet of the world, eventually to reach the floor of Dante’s hell, the heartless Antarctic ice, the cold still lifeless eye of the inferno which, while falling, we took photos of.
I have just recited a list of myths, of course, made by movies mostly (that light of darkness in a palace of liars), yet it is a list containing real fears, a few flat-out truths, some honest hope … dreams of a place where prose might loosen its pants; and now, indeed, it has sprung up at us; it has come back to us in a series of powerful orgasmic bursts. Having tarried in Paris, perhaps, like Odysseus with Calypso, it has returned to the new world, having circled the old, in the guise of symbol and allegory, transmogrified history, felt fact and passionate observation, colorful tapestry, subtle arrangement and thunderous rhetoric, or more purely and completely, to calculate the sum, as exuberant, exact, and angry poetry. It is a literature of exile, as often happens, but an exile forced, not chosen, as ours were chosen for a time. Americans often attended Europe as they would a college. Their leave-taking was not a bloody severance, like a lost limb. Yet paradoxically, it
was as though the language had to be roughly sent away like an intractable child to grow great, for nothing could be more dialectical than the way the Spanish-speaking people have objectified themselves and their carefully duenna’d inner life by driving out their artists. What petty bourgeois princelings and corporate connivance could not anticipate was the overall effect of this distance, this view of the homeland, in effect, across some strait; and that language which ancient religious certainties and royalist pretensions had made stilted and stuffy, which foreign interference had abused, internal tyranny had stilled, and death had chosen, has wonderfully revived; because there is a substantial body of novels now that constitute what I want to call, in grateful celebration, the miracle of the risen word.