William H. Gass (1924–2017)

This is a deeply intelligent, often witty, book on literary craft and form. Gass adores language and plays with it throughout; I might even go so far as to say he was a little too smirkingly pleased with himself occasionally, but at the same time he consistently earned my respect and admiration.

Okay, let me simply say this: I admit I'm not sure I understood all his points and at times I simply wasn't up to Gass's intellectual standard. I felt I needed to reread a few of the works he show more mentioned, and discover a few others for the first time, but surely that's a good thing and a lessen in intellectual humility. I must also say I don't agree with everything Gass says -- how could I when, against his best advice, I have found pleasure in the present-tense he so deplores! Gass's writing is at times brain-cramp inducing. Consider this from the essay, "Nature, Culture and Cosmos":

"Let us imagine a world without language; and since I am going to insist that what we sometimes call the soul is simply the immediate source of any speech -- the larynx of the logos -- a world without words will be a soulless one as well."

The soul as the immediate source of any speech? Do I agree with that assumption? "Larynx of the logos" -- clever, but again, do I agree? Well, it warrants pondering.

Gass's writing is often clever and creative. Consider this from his essay on Ezra Pound:

"Christened 'Pound, Ezra Loomis.' If used as a verb, 'pound' means to beat. If used as a noun, 'pound signifies a unit of weight, a measure of money, pressure of air, or physical force. From time to time, apropos poetry, Pound wondered which should be sovereign, the verb or the noun, and concluded, if his practice may be entered as evidence, that the verb was most noticed when knocked off the sentence like a phallus from a kouros -- 'Spiretop alevel the well curb' -- and when effects were hammered back into their causes with naillike hyphens -- 'Seal sport in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash' -- hence into a compaction like a headache . . . splitting."

Whew.

One of my favorite passages comes from the title essay. "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." Much to chew on there, and that's merely one half a page out of 350.

So, do I recommend the book? Yes. Definitely. But be gentle with yourself while digesting -- it's a rich and heavy meal, perhaps best consumed in small portions. show less

Blue's more than a color, mood, or groove of a jukebox tune. The symbology of blue, along with its definitions, are as infinite as its nuanced hues. Aqua, azure, turquoise, cerulean, indigo, cobalt, ad infinitum . . . There's endless shades of adjectives on the adjective, blue.

Or so posits William H. Gass (and I tend to believe him), in his idiosyncratic, intertextual synthesis, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976), of all that's ever been—or could be—blue.

Besides blue show more ontologically and blue philosophically, Gass covers blue cross-culturally, literarily, aesthetically, psychologically, epistemologically, phenomenologically, erotically, metaphorically, and practically every other word ending, "-ically," that one might encounter in the O.E.D. too.

At the book's core, I believe Gass is asking: How do blue's meanings become blue's meanings and what do blue's meanings then mean to our very being? Even an intrepid or sadomasochistic-type reader easily lured by books odd or arcane, incomprehensible, might be wondering "huh?" or even, regrettably, "WTF!?" at such an inquiry regarding "blue meaning and blue being," as I was, after having just asked it up above. Keep in mind, if you're still with me, that if Gass confounds you to the point you'd like to hurl On Being Blue out the window into the great blue yonder, know you're not alone, but in some very good company, as William H. Gass is a certifiable Linguistic Mystic. He gets off on the alchemy of language—what he's coined, "a world of words," like he's a wizard wielding a wand in lieu of pen—much more so than making his language spells, particularly in On Being Blue—completely understandable to an understandably perplexed, though diehard, cult readership.

On Being Blue, while beholden to all of the momentarily forthcoming labels, is not necessarily in a monogamous relationship with only one, be it prose poetry, strict philosophy per se, literary or art criticism, soft core erotica, autobiography, or a confabulated hodgepodge of all the forms, including fiction. Rather, On Being Blue, borrowing ingredients from all styles of discourse, serves as William H. Gass's metaphysical manifesto built not out of the blue, but literally out of blue. The Epicurean blue of knowledge. The blue in gnosis and the gnosis in blue. Blue truth. It's a highly stylized interdisciplinary hybrid of a master-wordsmiths exposition that doesn't offer any easily navigated routes (let alone clues) of interpreting every facet of that diamond, blue. And Gass makes no apologies for failing to do so, either.

No surprise there, as Gass has never cared about being contemporary or orthodox or popular for everyone's easy consumption, so in love with the crafting and fashioning of language he is; and, in reading On Being Blue, it certainly seems his animated language loves him back. Self-indulgently so? Onanistic, a tad? Perhaps. And that's probably the harshest criticism I could levy against it (and perhaps against Gass' oeuvre in general) that the point of it all (in his essays) or the plot of it all (in his postmodern stories and experimental novels) gets lost in his lush, elaborate language and esoterica.

Gass echoes Walter Benjamin's philosophy and criticism in that recondite regard. For it's akin to seeking out a rare genus of weed in the Amazon rainforest, hunting for the reclusive plot (if it even exists) in, say, Gass' dark magnum opus, The Tunnel (1995), for instance. And even in his earlier fiction, like the typographical hijinks so common in the novella, Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968), spliced with provocative black-and-white photography of the attractive lonesome wife's naked anatomy, posed as she is among so much sensually arranged textual formatting (discovering as she does that intercourse with words is sheer ecstasy!), the plot, nevertheless, is about as visible to the reader's naked eye as an atom.

If there is a point to On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, however, the point is obvious. The point is blue. show less

One of the most beautifully surreal and wonderfully executed novels I've read in years. Gass is that rare writer who augments the canon by negotiating both divides of adhering to a tradition (bridging the Joycean and Falknerian into the post-modern milieu) and concomitantly standing singularly (and profoundly) alone. Over the course of this novel I was treated to serene and haunting descriptions, baroque details explicating both the madness and the wonder (at least in terms of purity of show more expression) implicit in the most common to the most elevated person.

What else can I say? Without giving anything away I can only say give yourself the time and leave yourself the energy to read this book cover to cover. If you do this you will see that literary brilliance might be endangered but it is still very much fighting to survive, without compromise, and without cares as to ostensible readability; Gass has won my respect and my admiration. show less

After twenty-four days of finally working my way through William H. Gass's masterpiece, I can say that my nails feel as besmirched as Herr I'm-Not-German Kohler's. Gass, in his highly entertaining notes to the editors of the book, states that "[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness." Quite right. And in his interview with Michael Silverblatt (whose blurb adorns the cover of my Dalkey Archive paperback), Gass show more makes no qualms about the aspirations and demands of his book. Silverblatt, an avid and insightful reader if there ever was one, even confesses to swaying--yet not faltering--under the heft of the first 90 pages. The Tunnel is deliberately large, complex, and difficult. How else shall we, as readers, grow?

The novel is meant to present the interleaving of William Frederick Kohler's massive academic study, Guilt & Innocence in Hitler's Germany, and his diverting attempts to write the study's introduction. But Kohler does not like introductions; he likes endings; so his stops and statrts end up churning out a heap of pages about his own life. To say that it is confessional literature is an understatement--Kohler's level of baring it all puts Dostoyevsky to shame. So searing and intimate are the pages he turns out that he takes to hiding them within the pages of his historical study. What we, the readers, then have is the stack of interleaved pages. But although, to the reader who has not yet read The Tunnel, this could sound like something akin to Burroughs's cut-ups, I found the text fairly linear and readable. Perhaps, though, this is indicative of the warping I've undergone from the ilk of books I invite into my mind.

Without a doubt William Kohler is the most embittered, angriest, loneliest man in all of literature. As much as I stay away from such superlative statements--for I haven't, of course, read all of literature--I feel confident in my assertion. Kohler will upset you if you have at least a paucity of a moral code. He resents everyone and everything around him and holds nothing back in his telling us so. A principal target of his bitterness and resentment is the female, especially his wife Martha. This is a bold move on Gass's part, delivering a novel in 1995 while the women's lib movement of the 70s and 80s was still targeting WASP writers (or what David Foster Wallace called "Great Male Narcissists") for their base misogyny. But Gass has a trick up his sleeve. Kohler, in his monumental attacks against the feminine, is not very...endowed. Yes, and it consumes him, as the reader will find. What is interesting here it that, one of the invectives against WASP mega-novels is that it is a way of asserting the phallus on the world. We are thus forced to look for something beyond this easy way out; and, in the end, Gass will begin to bring us to an understanding and, just possibly, to sympathize with Kohler.

In the midst of all this anger, all this loneliness, however, is a deeply poetic language. Indeed, Kohler states many times that he gave up poetry and took on history. So we know he has poetic tendencies. Gass, of course, is a master of the metaphor. The style and language used throughout The Tunnel will singe even the densest eyebrows. Your toes will curl at some of the sentences he pulls off. Yes, this incongruity of pulchritude and grotesquerie is what causes the reader to latch onto the text both against and out of the will. It is hard to stave off my inclination to list out all of the sentences I highlighted in orange (my designated color for passages that stylistically dazzle me), but to do so would be to reprint the book and invite copyright trouble.

The book is not a direct meditation on Hitler's Germany; it is not Kohler's scholarly thesis. It is, rather, the confessions of a brilliant yet embittered madman, struggling to make some sense of life. His myriad propositions about what history is are sometimes profound and sometimes bathetic. For me, the most striking meditation concerns what Kohler phrases "life in a chair." For anyone with an academic, bookish, intellectual bent, Gass perfectly captures the pleasures and the pains of such a life. But, make no mistake, this is a sprawling, dense book that requires more than just the bedtime reader. It is a project that invites you to explore your own self, to examine the soft, vulnerable underbelly of life that we'd rather keep hidden. show less