Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  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.

  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 w
hich 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.

  II

  A FIESTA FOR THE FORM

  When 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 street
s, 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.