World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  When we number objects, animals, places, schemes, the things numbered remain unaware of their names (the Skunk Cabbage does not know that it is one), but when we label ourselves, we try to live up or down to our titles: I know I rust iron, and you know it too. Eventually we prove the matter to ourselves, and I rain down on you.

  I’ve been groping for trout in a peculiar river, and perhaps I deserve to go to prison for it. Certainly the mathematician may feel that I’m poaching; but in all of my remarks I have merely been developing a metaphor for measure which will fit fiction, though I should like, like a sock, to see it stretched.

  I ask you finally, then, to think of every English word as Euclid for the poet, a wildly ordered set of meanings and relations, maybe, but settled down there, right at home there, nevertheless; to see that each one is, like a piece in chess, the center of a network of astonishing relations. A poem or a work of fiction is a system of such systems, and perhaps the novel, in particular, is an indirect measure of life. To do this it need not resemble, nor does it need to make, for the sake of a certain precision, the sacrifice which Galileo had to when he took all the color from mass or all grace from precision. We are sometimes inclined to think that measuring must thin its object—a line, in fact, has but one dimension—for where are the white wings of the pigeon when the paperboy’s paper is transcribing its stringy trajectory? and if De Sade thinks of sex like a cook who opens cans, if many of us live like pins in maps, our hearts a red head, what can recommend measuring? It’s true we should watch out for images which are merely telephonic sums, for explanations which aren’t really meant but are, like plastic bosoms and paste gems, only designed to dazzle. We confine ourselves to too few models, and sometimes live in them as if they were, themselves, the world.

  Remember that as we moved from lotteries to temperatures, and from temperatures to the interplay of gravities, our models were able to take on more and more of the properties of the numbers which were being used to construct them, and that as we went along, our knowledge did not dwindle but it grew. However, numbers are morally and metaphysically neutral. They are nothing but relations, and quite orderly relations, too, while words are deposits of meaning made almost glacially, over ages. It the systems, in mathematics, exist mainly, like glasses, to be filled, they are also clear as crystal, and are not expected to stain anyone’s white radiance; while words, again, are already names for thoughts and things, acts and other energies which only passion has command of; they are not blank, Barkis-willing, jelly labels. Prufrock did not measure out his life, One/Two, One/Two, but carefully, in coffee spoons, from which the sugar slid, no doubt, like snow, and the beverage circled to their stir as soundlessly as a rolled eye. Mornings, evenings, afternoons: there was the polite chink as they came to rest in their saucers—chink chink chink … A complete world unfolds from the phrase like an auto map reveals its roads. In metaphor, meanings model one another, wear their clothes. What the poet tries to measure is the whole.

  “Tell me, Apollo,” Troilus cries, “what Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we. Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl.” Don’t we know, then, where we stand? It is a distant and exotic place, the object of voyages by many men, rich in silks and spices, more guessed at and conjectured of than known. Our proper attitude should be one of wonderment and longing, curiosity, more than a little desire, more than a little greed.

  But we must not suppose that “India” is merely a lens through which we peer at Cressida’s bed as through some shard of colored glass we’ve found randomly at hand, since the syntax of our sentence is also odd, and thus the angle at which the lens is held is strange. It would be normal to say: her bed is big, or, her bed is walnut, her bed is unmade. It would be normal to say: her native land is India, or, her name is Cressida. And if we said that her bed was a boat, our grammar, at least, would be unexceptional. There would be no syntactical collision. But her bed is India.

  When we measure nature with a yardstick or another sort of rule, the qualitative world does not seem to shadow us so obviously as normal sentences surround abnormal ones, because we are satisfied to say that we are measuring the heights of the tree, not the tree, the frequency of light, not light, the temperature of the air—in short, an abstract property—but Shakespeare is not measuring some exotic quality of Cressida’s bed. Her entire sexual life becomes a matter of geography, history, danger, travel.

  Each metaphor establishes between its terms a quite specific angle of interaction, and the movement of the mind which reaches, exploits, and dwells on this, so swiftly as to seem quite effortless, is nevertheless a momentous factor. Because of the comparative emptiness of numbers (something which I have now insisted upon so often I am ashamed to mention it again), when we raise our hand to the teacher, requesting to be excused to do, or otherwise perform, No. 1, we don’t feel that our expression is metaphorical. The number is merely an evasive name; whereas if we had, instead, to say that we wished to leave the room to wash our car (“Excuse me, teach, but I got to go to wash my car”), then think what light (to seize a passing word) would eventually be shed on the relief of the bladder … or, for that matter, on actually washing one’s automobile. The mind is a persistent logician. If doing No. 1 is: wash the car, then what is No. 2?

  Let’s go back to “bed” for a moment. In this Brobdingnagian image, if Cressida’s bed is India, what must her dressing table be? Think of the size of Cressida herself. Truly, she must be a divinity. Some of these consequences occur to Shakespeare:

  Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne’s love,

  What Cressida is, what Pandar, and what we.

  Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl;

  Between our Ilium and where she resides,

  Let it be call’d the wild and wandering flood,

  Ourself the merchant, and this sailing Pandar

  Our doubtful hope, our convoy and our bark.

  If “Her bed is India” enlarges her, the image which closes on it like the other half of a walnut is Lilliputian in its effect, since Cressida’s bed becomes that of the oyster, and what once floated on the surface of the ocean, so to speak, has suddenly sunk in restful sleep beneath it. The conclusion is a proportion: that Cressida is to her bed as a pearl to its oyster, but this is reached by means of an intermediate step which is best forgotten, because initially we’d have to assume that Cressida lies in her bed the way oysters lie together in theirs. In that case there would have to be as many Cressidas quietly snuggled up beneath the sheets as anchovies in tins. The entire expression endeavors to play Descartes to Galileo: to translate one model immediately into another, just as the offense of “doing” a woman is re-seen as poaching—the theft of private property.

  So what the poet tries to measure is the whole with the whole—the paper as bird, the bird perhaps as paper—but he does not always succeed.

  The Duke is in a sweat of explanation:

  We have strict statutes and most biting laws,

  The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,

  Which for this fourteen years we have let slip;

  Even like an o’ergrown lion in a cave,

  That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers,

  Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,

  Only to stick it in their children’s sight

  For terror, not to use, in time the rod

  Becomes more mock’d than fear’d; so our decrees,

  Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;

  And liberty plucks justice by the nose;

  The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart

  Goes all decorum.

  What he wants to describe is a condition that eventually occurs in any state which sets aside its laws like a dirty fork in a fine café. He does not pile one image on another as if he were translating each to a higher sphere; rather, he looks rapidly through many eyes as though he were an insect, instantly, antennaed every eighth of every quarter inch. First, the laws are like the bit and bridle of
a horse which, once let slip, will cause the horse (and heroine) to bolt; they are like the tools of cultivation left in idleness to rust their garden into weed; they are like the spared rod which spoils the child; and the king, himself, who will not keep the birches at their stinging, as though the smart burned both skins like a slap, is finally a lion who will not even leave his fattened sleep to hunt.

  Most of these images have an equal weight, and consequently his description draws upon what otherwise would be conflicting areas of meaning without the least hesitation: the phrase, “biting laws,” suggests “bits and curbs,” which suggests “headstrong,” something which horses sometimes are. But what are we to do with the word, ‘weeds,’ which has suddenly sprung up in the cultivated midst of our account? the bits and curbs of headstrong weeds?1 though not so accidentally after all because headstrong horses do bolt, and that word suggests an undesirable going-to-seed. The poet slips from one role to another like an improvisor, each easily to each, because the passage does not merely say that the king and his decrees, the people and their condition, are as a farmer to his crops and fields, father to his children; it maintains that farmer, rider, lion, father, king, are one. This is the multiple metaphor which moves these lines to their conclusion: that “liberty plucks justice by the nose, the baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart goes all decorum.”

  “The baby beats the nurse” is a phrase which has certainly been singled out for popular acclaim, yet the form of the flip-flop intended is not quite right, because otherwise we’d have to think that nurses beat babies as a normal and happily ordered part of their duties, a practice encouraged in well-run states. Headstrong youths may be birched, possibly, but not babes. In the proper turnabout, the baby would give suck to its nurse; but Shakespeare didn’t want us to imagine the world turned simply topsy-turvy. Laws upside-down would still be upside-down laws. The Duke fears an absence of orders, a lapsing of powers, the disappearance of value.

  Shakespeare was greedy. He wanted everything. He generally does. He wanted Cressida shining in her bed, but he also wanted Troilus’s eye there, and his straining loins. He was greedy, but that is what this bloody breathtaking business is all about. Paper covers stone. There are too many books in which the baby beats the nurse, in which form has been forgotten for the sake of some momentary fun.

  Yonder man is carried to prison. But what’s his offense? Violation. “What,” Mistress Overdone exclaims, “is there a maid with child by him?” “No,” her servant Pompey says, “but there’s a woman with maid by him.” No money to marry. The poor are always with us. Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.

  Yet what is measured with these terms? To what shall we assign the number “grope”? and where do these trouts lie concealed? what is the name of the river? Yonder man … perhaps it’s I? Then what’s my crime? Between what banks did I reach down to touch, in darkness, and to tickle … My crime: where are its straight lines and equilateral dimensions?

  But perhaps it would be best not to think about it.

  1 Although the First Folio has ‘weeds,’ most editors conjecture that ‘steeds’ is the correct word. I suggest some reasons for defending the First Folio (note the “o’ergrown lion” later), and the dizzy shift of kinds is characteristic of Shakespeare’s style; nevertheless, ‘steeds’ seems clearly the most rational choice.

  Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses

  Marcel Proust has once again taken his vacation at Trouville. While there he contemplates adding to his monumental work a section on sea urchins and salt spray, having seen several handsome urchins worthy of his merciless and immortal memory. Meantime, in inclement weather, fogbound in the hotel lobby or by the sniffles kerchiefed to his chamber, he undertakes a novel by M. André Gide and considers composing, in his best Ruskinese, a critical note on its author’s use of the hyperbolic past. This he will place, naturally, in one of the more elegant reviews. And he must pen some flattery to his friends, some bitter gossip too, some biting wit. There is always so much to do. Lady Transome, a tiny but petiteless grand dame of comical Englishness, has provided a few phrases of superlative stupidity which Proust has overheard in the garden despite the dense muffling fog but thanks to a penetrating French which is like that horn that’s always staring at the dog. But in whose mouth shall he put them, these squalid epiphanies? Mme. Verdurin?

  For anything you like, Proust is always a good case. For instance, he often did not appear to know the difference between his many occupations: his writing, his social climbing, his frequently sordid sexual career. Indeed, was there one? Writing A, B, C—all the same. Words, words, words, as Hamlet sneered. No—no difference between life and language, itch and urchin; no difference between conversation and news, a letter or an anecdote, history or advice, psychology or travel; no difference between A (writing fiction), B (composing criticism), or C (constructing a theory). Let us read at random in Le Temps retrouvé:

  (1) a little pimpish conversation—

  “Ah! that is extremely interesting,” said the Baron with a smile. “But I’ll tell you whom I have here: the killer of oxen, the man of the slaughter-houses, who is so like this boy; he happened to be passing. Would you care to try him?”

  (2) some summary narrative, occasionally called history—

  Saint-Loup’s death was received by Françoise with more compassion than that of Albertine.

  (3) a piece of psychological analysis—

  … the lover, too impatient from the very excess of his love, does not know how to wait with a sufficient show of indifference for the moment when he will obtain what he desires.

  (4) a letter inserted through a slot in the story—

  My dear friend, the ways of Providence are inscrutable. Sometimes a fault in a very ordinary man is made to serve its purposes by helping one of the just not to slip from his lofty eminence … and so on.

  (5) critical theory—

  … the kind of literature which contents itself with “describing things,” with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us …

  Etcetera. To serve as (6), let me cite without quotation the extensive pastiche of the Goncourts’ Journals which Proust places beside the sand urn and the ficus in the foyer of the volume, in a manner later to be that of Borges, in which the Goncourts comment on characters in A la recherche du temps perdu as if they were in Paris and not in Proust.

  Nor was the master without company in these confusions, nor is he now alone. Half of the novels we encounter are made from diaries and journals, left-over lifetimes and stale aperçus. A theory of fiction looms large in the Counterfeiters; every third hop in Hopscotch finds your shoe coming down in a pile of it; Orlando lives through three centuries of English literature and one sex shift like a careless change of clothes; Mann packed his works with ratiocination of every description; Rilke threw into Malte huge hunks of his Paris letters—what the hell—and Finnegans Wake contains all its explanations. Let nothing be lost. Waste not even waste. Thus collage is the blessed method: never cut when you can paste. No question it works. It works wonders, because in collage logical levels rise and fall like waves. Only an occasional philosopher is stricken with mal du métalangue. In the example I just mentioned, the imaginary pages of a counterfeited work are said to describe Swann, Brichot, Cottard, and others, so much more vividly than Proust’s narrator has that he despairs of having any real vocation as a writer; yet ironically the details of dress and jewelry, cough and stutter, so characteristic of the Goncourts, do not reveal the luminous essences behind their eyes, regardless of iris and color. This redounding of reference, which I have incompletely rendered, like a Klein worm turning to reenter itself, is positively vertiginous. Such sea journeys, however, are otherwise soothing and strengthen the constitution. It’s the salt in the salt spray, the wind up your nose.

  If Proust had kept to his ro
om to write in a letter to a friend, let’s say, a scathing criticism of a performance of the 1812 Overture by the town band, there would be no possibility of confusing the artillery which went off too loudly and too late, flackering the pigeons into a shower of poop, with Marcel’s amused description of the cannons’ thunderously tardy entrance. It’s the fog again, which has dampened the fuses. Hector Berlioz, likewise, would never have been tempted to dump a few chapters of his Evenings with the Orchestra into the score of Les Troyens.

  Despite appearances—always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?—the words on checks and bills of lading, in guides and invoices, the words which magnify themselves on billboards, broadsides, walls and hoardings, which nuzzle together in billets-doux and heart-to-hearts, words which smell a lot like stools in presidential proclamations, army orders and political orations, whose heaps create each of our encyclopedias of information, our textbooks, articles of confederation, rules and regulations, charts and tables, catalogues and lists; the words whose ranks form our photo captions, chronicles, and soberest memorials, fill cartoon balloons with lies as bold as produce labels, comprise the warnings uttered by black skulls and red-crossed bones, make up harangues and exhortations, news, recipes and menus, computations, criticism, columns, obituaries, living bios, book reviews—so many signs from every culture and accreditation—legal briefs, subtitles, shopping lists and memos, minutes, notes, reports, summations, lectures, theories, general laws, universal truths—every other mark whatever, whether sky-writ, in the sand or on a wall or water—these words are not in any central or essential sense the same as the passionately useless rigamarole that makes up literary language, because the words in poems, to cite the signal instance, have undergone a radical, though scarcely surprising, ontological transformation.