SOURCE: “Where Words Dwell Adored: An Introduction to William Gass,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 7-14.

[In the following essay, Saltzman provides an overview of Gass's postmodern linguistic techniques and theoretical perspective.]

William Gass builds sentences, sentences that are their own best excuse for being, sentences that seduce, like a bold, new Annunciation, through the ear. They can be as delicately suspended as a bridge of web spun by the spider that serves as metaphor for the artist in Omensetter's Luck; or they can be arches of triumph, solid and lasting and right as pillars set in concrete; or they can lie quietly, feeding and fattening on our attention before we notice that we are noticing their tug at the imagination.

Marooned in their own minds, Gass's protagonists find in sentences their only reliable company, and the sentences they discover are sensitive to their environments: they stagger along with Jorge Seagren through the implacable winter landscape of “The Pedersen Kid”; or they endlessly worm through the internal sermons and seethings of the Reverend Jethro Furber in Omensetter's Luck; or they imitate the ubiquitous collapse, in stages, of the nameless narrator of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” as seen in the bitter litany that opens the section entitled “Weather”:

The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gray. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers' bills and touters' posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs—they're gray, quite gray, Cars are gray, Boots, shoes, suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, all are gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of luck who lives here.¹

Characters in their slow death throes find that their sentences are all that is beautiful about them anymore.

For most of us, every other thought is a casualty of distraction, lost in the reckless stammer of the day's other matters; circumstances forever direct us elsewhere, and our “noises … simply leak from us like a washerless tap.”² For Gass, each sentence has its essence, its soul, which is the best exemplification of our own: “If we think it odd the gods should always choose a voice so full and gloriously throated, when they could presumably toot through any instrument,” he declares in “The Soul Inside the Sentence,” “we should remember that it is their choice of such a golden throat, each time, that makes them gods.”³ Language is more than personal expression, it is spiritual investment. If it is not, he admonishes, our utterances are forever flaccid and phatic—“the tongue is like a stale bun in the mouth.”⁴ The unarticulated life is not worth living: “So walk around unrewritten, if you like. Live on broken phrases and syllable gristle, telegraphese and film reviews. No one will suspect … until you speak, and your soul falls out of your mouth like a can of corn from the shelf.”⁵

In fact, Gass argues, we would do well to imitate the rigor of the finest rhetoric, for “Consciousness is all the holiness we have,”⁶ and its quality is wholly dependent upon its vehicle. Let the minimalists make all of their linguistic moves with pawns! Gass everywhere demonstrates that the habitations of the word are commodious, luxurious accommodations. Only when the page is exploited “as a field for the voice,”⁷ only when we work to muster or to accommodate sentences that deliver “a self which is so certain of its spirit and so insistent on its presence that it puts itself in its syllables like Mr. Gorgeous in his shimmering gown”⁸ do we come to understand what inveterate bottom-liners never will: the process is the payoff. So whereas John Gardner, Gass's most notorious opponent on the subject of moral fiction, accused him of perpetrating “mere language,” Gass maintains by argument and example that there is nothing “mere” about it. Words are the crux of our concepts, belief's bearings.

That many of Gass's protagonists are themselves verbal artists is a commonplace of Gass criticism, and Gass himself has acknowledged that his heroes are those to whom he has vouchsafed the greatest capacity for articulation. (A careful reading of the theoretical pieces makes it clear that Gass does not believe that the concept of character is obsolete; on the contrary, it must be expanded to admit any and all linguistic “nodes” in a text where language functions self-evidently and with symbolic impact.) Hence, it is the Reverend Jethro Furber, for all his perversion and duplicity, who takes center stage in Omensetter's Luck, whereas the prelapsarian, preconscious Brackett Omensetter is but a hollow, a seductive, impossible dream. So, too, are that same novel's decrepit custodian of the past, Israbestis Tott, the abused Jorge Seagren in “The Pedersen Kid,” Willie Masters' incorrigibly playful and demanding wife, the nameless narrator who “lives in” in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” and most recently, William Frederick Kohler, the obsessive historian of The Tunnel—all are extolled for their aesthetic achievements despite their various personal failings in other respects. It is important, however, not to minimize this contradiction; to be sure, what enables a Jethro Furber to reside exclusively behind his beautiful barriers of abstraction without regard to the human consequences of his actions is the kind of tyranny that claims eloquence to be not only his edge but his sole ethic. How to grapple with the contention that consciousness is all the holiness we have when such an ugly consciousness prevails is one of the central problems in Gass's fiction.

A second prominent issue that arises when we read Gass is the uneasy relationship between his antimimetic principles and the realistic (meaning both representational and practical) compromises that are everywhere apparent in his pages. Gass is perhaps most often associated with the position that the medium of fiction barges in on its components: characters are confessed as bodies of words, settings as limiting linguistic conveniences, plots as generic enchantments. Everywhere in Gass, whether in the form of outright disclaimers in essays like “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” “The Medium of Fiction,” “In Terms of the Toenail,” or “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses” (all from his inaugural volume of nonfiction, Fiction and the Figures of Life), or in the form of the preening sentences themselves, lie cautions against suspending disbelief. On the other hand, what better catalog of small-town Midwestern activities and attitudes will we find than “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”? (And how many readers have written Gass to congratulate him on getting their Iowas, their Indianas, right?) What rendition of the frozen Dakota landscape supersedes the descriptions in “The Pedersen Kid”? For a matchless study of stalled prospects, read “Icicles”; for displaced sensuality, there is no substitute for “Mrs. Mean”; for an understanding of parochial fears, the people of Gilean, Ohio, in Omensetter's Luck are a case study. And most solemn of all are the murderous echoes of Nazi crimes that haunt the lyrical “flights” of Kohler, whose tunnel is simultaneously an escape route into rhetoric and a self-interment in the intractable data of the death camps. Thus, for all his pronouncements to the contrary, Gass traffics in disciplines, dialects, and private demons like an insider.

Gass's sentences are models of supremely elongated attention. They coil patiently around their subject, frequently nosing it with metaphor or assailing it with alliteration. Whether occasioned by the presence of a likeminded writer (Stein, Colette, Valéry, Emerson, Plato, and Faulkner among them, to give a sample of the range of his company) or by such intricate philosophical surgery as his rumination on the word and, Gass writes the way a jazz musician jams—to show us, and to show off. Consider this passage on the being of “blue”:

The word itself has another color. It's not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn't the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow's deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn't violet's rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered with cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green. What did Rimbaud know about the vowels we cannot also find outside the lines in which the poet takes an angry piss at heaven? The blue perhaps of the aster or the iris or the air a fist has bruised?⁹

At the risk of diminishing the visceral pleasures of this paragraph, excavation yields a good deal about Gass's method. For example, Gass is often quite deliberate about wedding sentence form with content. In detailing the way the word blue emerges from the mouth, he imitates both the “bump” at the beginning of the word (in the opening clause of the sentence, which similarly employs the soft stops in “bump,” “between,” and “b”) and “the relief at the end” with the “whew” that quietly exhausts our breath, which has been sapped by the three sentence sections and the long es of “between” and “relief”—like “blue,” the sentence relieves us and itself. Gass effects a similar sensation with a previous sentence in On Being Blue, in which he is incriminating the slovenliness of sexual detailing in some erotic literature: “Without plan or purpose we slide from substance to sensation, fact to feeling, all out becomes in, and we hear only exclamations of suspicious satisfaction: the ums, the ohs, the ahs.”¹⁰ Greasing the skids of the sentence with all of those ss, tumbling out the breath from comma to comma, he ends with the last gasps which, to be sure, have lost their sexual impact and instead are nothing more than the only sounds we can muster.

Then, of course, there are the other attendant colors that swell the cast of characters, whose brief entrances and exits belie the cleverness of their captions. (Surely, each teases us with the possibility that it might serve as effectively as blue as the “star” of the inquiry—as no less profitable a mantra.) The descriptive bits about each color clearly mimic the sound and effect of the color itself; or better, they subsequently determine the quality of each color as though they were character notes at the opening of a play. Hence, because we are alerted to the “turn” in the word crimson, we are apt to accept its slyness on the word of the author who has disarmed us with the revelation that, yes, here is another word that suddenly wears its strangeness like a sheen. (In writing of Gass, one is moved to try to write like him, and to founder in the fun of trying to.) Yellow is “deceptive” in part because deceptive smuggles the same subtle sound in its middle, and because jelly, which continues the bridge of soft es and thereby seems related to its precedents in the sentence, is itself a sort of uneasy solid. Meter also carries the argument along: the blunt accents of “the rolled-down sound in brown,” the curious approach-avoidance of trochees in “hasn't violet's rapid sexual shudder,” and the equation of rhythm and meaning in “irregularity” and “ultramarine” have all been tested for sound and sense alike. Each of the colors Gass includes here are comparably disclosed, and none earns the trust or carries the imaginative weight Gass desires—none but blue. He sets us up for leaps of faith like that, the way he does again at the end of the paragraph by gathering asters and irises in preparation for the bruising of the air, which has unaccountably grown flesh much as colors have assumed character traits.

In honoring one of Gass's protracted sentences from “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make A World of Words,” Paul West notes that Gass “reaches a point of voluptuous crisis, at which there is nothing that doesn't belong in the next sentence.”¹¹ Voluptuousness is precisely the point behind Gass's penchant for catalogs, which are as much celebrations of verbal abundance as they are accumulations of evidence to prop up a thesis. “Lists are finally for those who love language,” Gass declares, “the vowel-swollen cheek, the lilting, dancing tongue, because lists are fields full of words, and roving bands of ‘and.’”¹² Consider the opening pages of On Being Blue: the incantatory excess, the generous sweep. Clearly we have been delivered into the hands of the perfect host—erudite, hospitable, a connoisseur of many concerns:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that's dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven … ¹³

The remarkable democracy of this catalog, drawing as it does the mundane and the esoteric, the rude and the ethereal alike into its compass, seems to allow us to witness the writing in the act. As the nouns jostle one another in their unaccustomed context, as ideas marinate in associations taken from all manner of learning, unexpected energies are released. Words, concepts, images—these are the featured players in the story of the sentence in the making.

Notice how Gass plays out a sentence the way a surfer might squeeze out all the performance he can from his wave; or, just as an expert fisherman reels in and eases off on his catch, Gass patiently works his topic into his grasp. This particular offering is an homage to the word hillious in the course of Gass's exploration of “Representation and the War for Reality”:

Yet this being which began with a frail umbilical to its referent—a mother who will not remain to sustain it but comes into view on occasion the way a busy parent sees its children—this being that began so slimly soon has grown a core, a center, and although it is only a crossing of contexts, a corner, a relation between relations, it is a city of sorts, and has its own life in it, its own character, it has a nature—a ‘hilliousness’ like San Francisco's; so that now our word, a vacant universal when its meanings were not yet its own, but assigned it like busywork for the otherwise unemployed, is a complete, complex, and quite singular creature, conscious of its rights, its past, its rich roundabouts of reference and suggestion, definition, its variety and ambiguity of use, its layered ironies and opposing inclinations, its elegance, status, social tone, its fully formed though frazzled and untidy self; and it is in this refulgent condition that the word presents itself to the artist: as a silted-up symbol for his ardent declaiming, signs inside the sign of itself the way feelings mingle with other feelings when lips meet—when the history of earlier encounters, kisses, eye-closing contacts, modify one another amid all that moisture which has not yet turned to spit—and consequently is now a sign which is prepared to establish the most profound relations with others of its sort to shape—what?—a simple sentence like a single berry plucked from its bush to melt in a cautious music in the mouth.¹⁴

This is delicate engineering done with jeweler's tools. On the one hand, Gass draws out sentence segments and fastens their ligatures with surgical concentration upon the shape, heft, and specific density of their elements; on the other hand, Gass trusts the unpremeditated tumble of thoughts into other thoughts, the way images of birth beget kisses, spit, berries, and music in the shifting, looping itinerary of this exemplary sentence, whose “episodic” structure connotes hierarchies, way stations, and tributaries that highlight the process of thought. The resulting combination is a kind of measured rapture, at once fastidious and freewheeling. Like e. e. Cummings and Wallace Stevens (to invoke two otherwise vastly different poets), Gass is quite the exhibitionist when it comes to the pleasure he takes in words for their own splendid sake; like William Faulkner and Stanley Elkin (to select a precursor and a peer who share his passion for sentences), Gass makes it clear that wealth and wisdom are in the writing itself—in the negotiations and adhesions that occur among concepts, allusions, and details borne along by the rhythmic pulse of the line. We recall Faulkner's wish “to say it all … between one Cap and one period.”¹⁵ In defiance of silence, these authors show how sentences, for all their delicacy, can be superstructures on which to found all manner of possibility.

Style, then, is the issue that permeates assessments of William Gass, and it is prominently featured in the discussions to follow. At the root of each scrimmage between aesthetic and moral responsibilities, and between textual and extratextual realities, are the sentences that compel attention in the first place—“sentences, by the hundreds,” says Ihab Hassan, “that would tempt Torquemada to forgive for each word a heretic at the stake.”¹⁶ A kind of fundamentalist regard for his craft pervades the fiction and the essays alike. Time and again, Gass enjoins us to marshal the scrupulousness, patience, and luxurious appreciation necessary to unlock the sensuous potential of words—“love lavished on words” is the phrase he uses in On Being Blue, and in Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife he demonstrates how the same qualities are shared by good lovers and good readers. But what we might emphasize by way of completing this introduction is the question of whether a commitment to art for art's sake is politically evasive or ethically indefensible, as some detractors have suggested. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, for instance, is troubled by the very satisfactions Gass's talents afford because they may represent a kind of subterfuge whereby virtuosity supplants or pretends to compensate for virtue. Responding to The Tunnel, the massive novel still in-progress after more than twenty years, Rosenfeld worries that “the Orphic way out of or around the holocaust” may be meretricious or, worse, a betrayal of conscience:

Pondering Hitler's murderous deed doubtless is one of the imperative tasks of our time, and one would not want to prevent fiction from taking part in it, but a fiction that would celebrate or seek pleasure in transmutations of the monstrous crime yields not so much aesthetic order as aesthetic alibis—beautifully textured, elaborate lies, but lies all the same.¹⁷

Is it irresponsible—is it hedonistic—to offer the rigor of sentences while millions suffer real death sentences? Is lyricism truly instructive or valorous under such conditions?

Gass responds by insisting that a revolution of consciousness inevitably includes political and ethical components; furthermore, as embodiments of our best selves, as it were, our most stalwart sentences serve as models of moral behavior. As he claims in “Culture, Self, and Style,” “The cultures I should like to count as highest, then, are those which enable the people … to become as individual, as conscious, as critical, as whole in themselves, as a good sentence.”¹⁸ Thus, Gass's defense goes beyond the contention that the writer's top priority and essential litmus test is that he write well. It argues that encouraging our ability to appreciate good writing is ultimately the best protection the author can provide us against bad writing, be it merely inept or downright manipulative. A reading diet rich in challenging metaphor and risky alliteration does not corrupt but engages the proper habits of critical thought, without which readers could be recipients of philosophical considerations but never their arbiters. Or, as Gass makes the case for commitment as an aesthetic principle,

To seek the truth (which requires method), to endeavor to be just (which depends on process), to create and serve beauty (which is the formal object of style), these old “ha-has,” like peace and freedom and respect for persons, are seldom aims or states of the world these days, but only words most likely found in Sunday schools, or adrift like booze on the breath of cheapjacks, preachers, politicians, teachers, popes; nevertheless, they can still be sweet on the right tongue, and name our ends and our most honorable dreams.¹⁹

This is what it means to argue that Gass's prose—soaring, supple, startling—asks us to live up to it. And if, as contemporary linguists assert, reality is as much constituted as evoked by language, we must be scrupulous indeed about how we word our world, for each phrase fates us.

The suggestion that the price of love well-made on the page is a compromise of sensitivity to life misses what makes prose vital and memorable, which is not, or at least, not first, the lesson but the language. It is this assumption that unites all of Gass's verbal enterprises, and that undergirds each of the essays presented here, whether its principal scrutiny be cast upon the fiction or the nonfiction. Words are not only the vehicle of thought and feeling, they are their source, and Gass makes it his business to return us from distraction. Tony Tanner explains, “You can find a person's politics, as you can find his ethics, in his sentences.”²⁰ William Gass discovers “the soul inside the sentence” as well.

Notes

1. William H. Gass, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 180.

2. William H. Gass, “The Soul Inside the Sentence,” Habitations of the Word: Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 122.

3. “The Soul Inside the Sentence,” 117.

4. William H. Gass, “On Talking to Oneself,” Habitations of the Word, 211.

5. “On Talking to Oneself,” 213.

6. William H. Gass, “Culture, Self, and Style,” Habitations of the Word, 202.

7. William H. Gass, “The Habitations of the Word,” Habitations of the Word, 264.

8. William H. Gass, “The Death of the Author,” Habitations of the Word, 287.

9. William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), 34.

10. On Being Blue, 17.

11. Paul West, “The World within the Word” (review), Sheer Fiction (New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1987), 206.

12. William H. Gass, “And,” Habitations of the Word, 178.

13. On Being Blue, 3.

14. William H. Gass, “Representation and the War for Reality,” Habitations of the Word, 96.

15. Quoted in Donald M. Kartiganer, “William Faulkner,” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 887.

16. Ihab Hassan, “Wars of Desire, Politics of the Word,” Salmagundi 55 (Winter 1982): 118.

17. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, “The Virtuoso and the Gravity of History,” Salmagundi 55 (Winter 1982): 109, 108.

18. “Culture, Self, and Style,” 203.

19. “Culture, Self, and Style,” 203.

20. Tony Tanner, “Frames and Sentences,” in Representation and Performance in Postmodern Fiction, ed. Maurice Couturier (Delta, 1982), 29.