SOURCE: “William Gass: A ‘Purified Modernist’ in a Postmodern World,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 124-30.

[In the following essay, Dyck examines underlying modernist aspects of Gass's postmodern literary and theoretical perspective, including comparative analysis of Gass's story “Icicles” and Wright Morris's novel Ceremony in Lone Tree. “Although modernist in its formal aesthetics,” Dyck writes, “Gass's world of words reflects a postmodern perspective on contemporary culture.”]

I don't regard myself as a postmodernist. … I prefer to think of myself as a purified modernist. In architecture that would mean modernism without social content: Corbusier not building for society.

—William Gass¹

When William Gass claims, “I think that literature is not a form of communication,”² he seems to preclude a social interpretation of his work. “Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art,”³ he asserts. Baudelaire made this claim in the context of his resistance to the commodification of art; Gass in his formalist rhetoric is resisting the traditional ways of reading fostered by the fiction of realism.⁴ Yet while his critical writing works to convince his readers to resist the old ways, it also acknowledges that his fiction has a significant relationship to the social world.

Most people, Gass states, read fiction as history without graphs or dates, an approach that falsifies by creating expectations fiction does not intend to fulfill.⁵ “I object to so-called extraliterary qualities because they get confused with the merit of the book” (“Colloquy” 589). The word because is important; Gass's point is not that extraliterary qualities do not exist, but that they are too easily misread. The danger is that literature “provides a sense of verification (a feeling) without the fact of verification (the validating process).”⁶ For example, although Gass did careful research for “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” the story should not be read simply as an exposé of rural Midwestern towns or American society as a whole. Gass explains that “the story is not an accurate picture: it's an accurate construction. Not even ‘accurate’: just a construction of one person's way of looking at things” (“Colloquy” 607). Rather than an objective report, the story presents the consciousness of a particular type of character in a particular type of place.

Another way that readers misread is by emphasizing plot as the central quality of fiction. The well-constructed plot as a moral equation has been for novelists a way of making sense of the chaos of life, and readers have accepted that construction as the import of the novel. Consequently, the novelist as artist is slighted in favor of the novelist as philosopher or sociologist. Gass has been challenged most vigorously by John Gardner, who argues for the inescapably moral nature of literature: “In literature, structure is the evolving sequence of dramatized events tending toward understanding and assertion; that is, toward some meticulously qualified belief.”⁷ It is not that Gass is unaware of the moral views fiction presents, but that his interest is in the dramatic tensions those views create rather than their correctness. Nabokov's Lolita is to be read in this way as well. Both authors want readers to look at their fiction as objects of art, not as moral treatises.

Therefore Gass calls himself a “purified modernist.” In an essay subtitled “Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism,” Fredric Jameson asks “what kind of society it can be in which works of art have become autonomous to this degree, in which the older social and cultic functions of literature have become so unfamiliar as to have made us forgetful … of the power and influence which a socially living art can exercise?”⁸ Sociologist Todd Gitlin, in describing the helplessness reflected in post-1960s culture, provides an answer: “Self-regarding irony and blankness are a way of staving off anxieties, rages, terrors and hungers that have been kicked up but cannot find resolution.”⁹ When Gass began to publish his short stories in the midfifties, the modernist belief in the autonomous power of imagination, part of the Romantic view of the artist, had turned to doubt. Yet even if the imagination is understood as inevitably shaped by its social milieu, how can an artist fulfill the traditional bardic function of making sense of the world in a seemingly meaningless, mass society that does not take artists seriously?

Postmodern art has responded to this loss of meaning in two ways: with a sense of liberation or with a sense of isolation and betrayal.¹⁰ Although Gass's criticism celebrates the first, his fictional characters experience the second. The celebration stems from his claim to have separated beauty from truth, or fiction from society. However, Gass's escape into the artistry of language is not complete, nor does he intend it to be.

To the extent that novels are forms of communication, Gass explains, they work not as direct descriptions but as constructed metaphors for our world (58). Metaphors are models of reality that posit conceptual connections among data. As much as novelists might strive for concreteness, they can only use words, which can never directly describe but must interpret. Thus, “The purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are that patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has constructed” (33).

The opening of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” emphasizes the idea of the story as a model of consciousness. Echoing Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poet/narrator states, “So I have sailed the seas and come … to B …” (172). Gass plays on “to B” not only as an ironic reference to Yeats's Byzantium as an “artifice of reality,” but also as a verb of being which alerts the reader that what follows is not literal description of a particular rural town but the creation of a fictional character's consciousness. The reader is presented with a model of what it would be like to be a poet “in retirement from love” and living in “a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.” However, this does not preclude a social reading of the story; B is in the state of Indiana, and we do recognize the poet as our contemporary. The models Gass creates are as embedded in culture as their creator's imagination inevitably is.

Metafiction, such as Gass writes, openly exposes itself as a constructed model by showing us characters in the process of creating “a system of meaning which will help to supply their lives with hope, order, possibly even some measure of beauty.”¹¹ These metafictional models-within-models offer more than just aesthetic pleasures to the characters that create them. For example, at the end of “The Pedersen Kid,” we see Jorge creating a world of the imagination as an alternative to the mean, narrow one in which he lives with his parents and the hired man. In reading we are moved not only by Gass's display of craftsmanship but also by his presentation of the pain that drives his young character into this imaginary world. Through the story, we also understand something about the motivations and methods for the model-building process. In a sense Jorge confirms Gitlin's analysis of postmodern culture. Jorge's helplessness as a young boy in a violent, uncaring world motivates him to imagine a world of snow, the Pedersen kid, himself, and no adults. Patricia Waugh gives this explanation of metafictional model-building:

Metafiction, then, does not abandon “the real world” for the narcissistic pleasures of the imagination. What it does is to re-examine the conventions of realism in order to discover—through its own self-reflection—a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers. In showing us how literary fiction creates its imaginary worlds, metafiction helps us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly “written.”¹²

Gass explains that the point for the reader is not to assess the accuracy of the model that either a character or the story as a whole creates. “I think of the text you are reading as the metaphorical model that reassesses yours, rather than the other way around” (“Colloquy” 592). In claiming this privileged position for art, Gass shows his modernist affinities. He also guardedly claims fiction as an agent for change. The novel both displays and argues (63), and thus challenges our own conceptions of the world. But Gass gives a continual warning, “Still for us it is only ‘as if’” (71). The novel remains a world of words.

Although modernist in its formalist aesthetic, Gass's world of words reflects a postmodern perspective on contemporary culture. A comparison of Wright Morris's Ceremony in Lone Tree, a late-modern novel, with Gass's story “Icicles” makes this clear. Both writers wrote these works at about the same time, experimented with nontraditional forms and understand fiction as a model of consciousness. Yet the model Morris creates in Ceremony, published in 1960, and Gass's in “Icicles,” which first appeared in 1963, suggest significantly different worlds. The central characters, Boyd in Ceremony and Fender in “Icicles,” best exemplify this difference.

The modernist revolt against tradition deeply marks Boyd's outrageous actions; he wants to shock others out of the “hereditary sleeping sickness”¹³ of their middle-class lives. If the modernist faith in the artist's ability to change society has been depleted—Boyd's self-exile in Mexico suggests this—his return to Nebraska indicates his continuing stake in it. His bringing along a young friend whom he calls Daughter, a gesture he seems to have borrowed from Lolita, is one attempt to shock his friends' sense of propriety, and thus awaken them to the emptiness of their unreflected lives.

In “The Culture of Modernism,” Irving Howe describes modernist writers as “an avant-garde marked by aggressive defensiveness, extreme self-consciousness, prophetic inclination, and the stigmata of alienation.”¹⁴ Although true of Boyd, none of this characterizes Gass's Fender. Because he cannot believe that his actions matter, he is not one of those who “chose and oppose.” Instead, he is a “confused self,” “a diffuse, unfocused protean self which cannot define issues in any determinate way.” As a postmodern character, Fender is not oppressed by tradition as Boyd is, but by the “meaninglessness and triviality of freedom itself, which is unable to locate any bearings amid the incoherent and apparently aimless massiveness of society.”¹⁵

Because Fender's world seems to have experienced the effects of cultural entropy longer than Boyd's, Fender no longer has the energy for rebellious, audacious acts. Even if Boyd's idealism is largely exhausted, his rebellion keeps him in a dynamic relationship with society. Whereas Boyd brazenly attempts to walk on water and then creates a public account of his failure, Fender counts the contents of his pot pie but only thinks about writing a letter of complaint. Boyd has the energy of restlessness; Fender has the lethargy of listlessness.

Because Boyd's energy pushes him outward and Fender's lethargy focuses inward, they turn to aesthetics with different intentions. Boyd transforms his water-walking failure into a play and a novel; his inner struggle directs him toward an audience. Fender develops a private aesthetic of icicles which estranges him from others because it allows him to escape from the public world. Coming home from a humiliating real-estate job, Fender becomes fascinated by the icicles that block part of his picture window. At first he reacts professionally, considering them a nuisance and a sales problem. Then he creates images out of them: parsnips, the insides of caves, sets of teeth. Although he is surprised and embarrassed at his new interest, he soon becomes protective of it. Finally he does not care that his appreciation is not socially acceptable: “Only the icicles mattered.” He wants to bring their beauty inside himself. The icicles stand in opposition to the social world where, because “Everything is property,” Fender comes to see himself as a decrepit piece of real estate (159). Although the outside world still threatens to intrude, he retreats as much as he can into a private, aesthetic world of icicles. As he does, a sense of comfort displaces his listlessness.

This retreat is made easier by Fender's lack of personal history. He jokes at a party, truthfully he realizes afterward, that “he couldn't tell the story of his life because he couldn't in the least remember it” (139). Although this frees him from Boyd's struggle to extricate himself from the restraints of his past, Fender also lacks history's consolations. The present must carry the whole weight of his existence, and when it fails to support him, Fender can only escape into a world of imagination: “There's no one to help you, Fender, you have no history, remember?” (152).

Analogously, Fender is more disconnected from society than Boyd in spite of leading a more conventional life. Boyd may drop out of society, but his need to shock his childhood friends reveals his contradictory desire to belong while asserting his difference from their deadening middle-class lives. Fender has the trappings of that middle-class world, a job and a house, but neither provides him with social relationships. His dinner, here an ironic symbol of disconnectedness, illustrates his passive isolation. Rather than enjoying conversation and friendship, he eats in silence without even a television to bring in the outside world. The pot pie establishes only a pathetic commercial connection.

Because of his helplessness, Fender finally stops struggling with society, leaves his job, and retreats into a self-contained world of icicles and language. Boyd also retreats into language, but he uses it as a defensive weapon, not as a blanket in which to hide himself as Fender does. In not taking an antagonistic stance against society, Fender moves beyond alienation. Instead of the heroic alienation and anxiety of modernism, he lives with the fragmentation and decentering of postmodernism. Thus he goes gently into that good night of death-in-language while Boyd rages against the dying of the light by setting off fireworks with his wit in order to expose his society's emptiness.

Boyd chooses to stand outside of society; Fender finds himself invisible within it. The census did not miss Fender because he refused to be counted: he was bitter that he had to call attention to his own existence (147). His escape into imagination is by default and provides him little comfort because the social world continues to impinge. The values of real estate insinuate themselves so that he comes to think, “I do not even occupy myself.” Rather than having escaped, he discovers that “his inner exclamations were like advertising signs.” Therefore he wants to “drive himself into wordlessness” (157-58).

As a result, Fender, like Jacob Horner in Barth's End of the Road, becomes paralyzed. At the end of the story he protects himself by turning the children playing outside into a field of colors, yet his world of icicles is still vulnerable to their attack as “they [come] down the hill like a snowfall of rocks” (162). “Icicles” ends with Fender's aesthetic world threatened by the world that surrounds him. Caught between these worlds, Fender can do nothing to save himself. This conclusion contrasts with the ending of Ceremony: rather than paralysis there is a sudden awakening as Boyd's audacity has its effect. Following his example of doing “something crazy” as “the only way to leave an impression” (167), Lois shoots a pistol—symbol of violence and sexuality—and startles the others out of their habitual responses. Even if Morris does not imply that the changes are permanent, he does suggest that the paralysis of his characters' cliché-filled lives is not inevitable. A sense of powerlessness and inevitability does mark “Icicles,” thus placing it beyond the modernist energy of resistance.

Like his characters, Gass also stands between two worlds. While working within the modern aesthetic of a unique and personal style, his fiction engages a world that offers little opportunity for individualism. The “bourgeois ego,” if liberated from the anxiety that drives Boyd to audacity, is also “liberated from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” but instead only “‘intensities’ … free-floating and impersonal.”¹⁶ That is Fender's dilemma.

Rather than as a purified modernist, “Corbusier not building for society,” Gass can better be understood as a modernist engaging a postmodern, mass society that does little to encourage artists, or any individuals, to think that they can affect their world. His fiction does celebrate the artistic possibilities of language, but just as Yeats's poet sails for Byzantium as a paltry old man who can no longer find a place in his native country, Gass's characters—Fender, Jorge, the poet in B, Rev. Furber—escape into an imaginary world as a retirement from love and a retreat from a world that is too much mere real estate.

Denis Donoghue claims that in Gass's fiction “the sentences make an arbitrary festival, a circus of pleasures, satisfactions corresponding to the smile with which desperate remedies, duly considered, are set aside.”¹⁷ I read that smile as a wince and find the festival less arbitrary, the pleasures more troubling, and the desperate remedies still being desperately held to.

Notes

1. Brooke K. Horvath, et al., “A Colloquy with William H. Gass,” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (Winter 1983): 597; hereafter cited in the text as “Colloquy.”

2. Jeffrey L. Duncan, “A Conversation with Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass,” Iowa Review 7 (Spring 1971): 49.

3. William H. Gass, Preface, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (Boston: Godine, 1981), xviii.

4. Ned French makes the connection between Gass and Baudelaire in “Against the Grain: Theory and Practice in the Work of William H. Gass,” Iowa Review 7 (Spring 1971): 100-101.

5. William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (Boston: Godine, 1979), 30; references to Gass's critical writing will be from this work and will be cited by page number in the text. References to his fiction will be from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (n. 3 above).

6. Carole Spearin McCauley, “William H. Gass,” in The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, ed. Joe David Bellamy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974), 33.

7. John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 65.

8. Fredric R. Jameson, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism,” Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association (Spring 1975): 3.

9. Todd Gitlin, “Hip-Deep in Postmodernism.” New York Times Book Review, 6 November 1988, 36.

10. Gerald Graff, “The Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough,” TriQuarterly 26 (Winter 1973): 391.

11. Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 4.

12. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 18.

13. Eugene Zamiain, “On Literature, Revolution and Entropy,” quoted in Irving Howe, “The Culture of Modernism” in Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 11.

14. Howe, “Culture of Modernism,” 5.

15. Gerald Graff, “Babbitt at the Abyss: the Social Context of Postmodern American Fiction,” TriQuarterly 33 (1975): 61.

16. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 62. Jameson makes an insightful comparison of the modern and postmodern sense of self, in part through a comparison of Edvard Munch's The Scream and Andy Warhol's depictions of Marilyn Monroe, 61-64.

17. Denis Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 89.