World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Gautier cried the truth out well enough to make it once for all, although for most of us an excellent outcry isn’t economically a sound, therefore is actually sotto voce, not impressive to the market or the masses, thus not well, not true … still, well enough or not, he said:

  No, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet, a syringe with a continuous jet; or a drama, a railway … etc.

  By the guts of all the popes past, present, and future, no, and two hundred thousand times no! u.s.w.

  We cannot make a cotton cap out of a metonymy, or put on a comparison like a slipper; we cannot use an antithesis as an umbrella, and we cannot, unfortunately, lay a medley of rhymes on our body after the fashion of a waistcoat … and so on.

  It may be scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Gibbon, but scribbles differ, not only in their several aims, the nature and value of the objects these activities make or their appropriate effects, but also in the character and quality of the mind and hand that makes them, and most importantly in the medium that hand shapes or mind employs: once more merely words, words, words.

  The scribbles of the poet and the clerk, the novelist or biographer: they are not different the way eating soup and steak are, or even as two activities necessary to life like moving one’s bowels or fucking one’s spouse. It isn’t simply that they can’t be done at the same time like swallowing and sneezing, nor are they in conflict the way two wishes can be, such as eating cake and having it. Rather they are opposed like people playing chess and checkers on the same board.

  My concern at the moment is with the medium—sounds, shapes, concepts, designations and connections—and I began by mentioning the novel because the novel, like a city with its apparently heterogeneous residents, has done more than any art form to mess up our understanding of the vast difference between the literary use of language and any other. A rose is a rose, Miss Stein, isn’t it? we are likely to say; and a word is a word.

  Paul Valéry understood the issue as few have, yet the concern of Valéry and Mallarmé for the purity of their medium, and their ardent measure of the problem as it touched poetry, led them to set the differences between poetry and fiction on the wrong stove; for they did indeed see the poet as the master of the haute cuisine, and the novelist at best as a bonne femme, a fabricator of bouillabaisse and cassoulet, of immense, rich though economical, coarse but nourishing, peasant fare, a kind of kitsch and kitchen bricoleur, one who skillfully made-do with pot au feu, marmites, chowders, stews: fat books, fat bellies, and heavy beer. In a way they were right, of course, but the peculiar literary function of fiction, from at least Boccaccio, and certainly to the present, has been first of all the transformation of life into language, and then the further metamorphosis of that language into literature … still another, much remoter, squarer sphere.

  And of course now fiction is the advanced, the hard and formal form, since poets have embraced carelessness like a cocotte.

  Although I’ve given it a name as distinguished as any duke’s, ontological transformation is such an unassuming process it often passes unnoticed, as indeed does osmosis, and much of the time, digestion. Its action is often abrupt, simple, miraculous. A succulent center-cut porkchop, for instance, which has slid from its plate into a sack of garbage, becomes swill in a twinkling. I don’t know how we should describe a toilet bowl impastoed with raw ground beef (if not an old Oppenheim or a new Duchamp), but the hamburger has, in this case, been digested without the trouble of taking the usual tubes. And what about the transformation of the bowl? Conversely, anything thrown into Proust becomes Proustian, because this great novel, like so many others, is a veritable engine of alteration, a vast vat of cleansing acid—rendering, refining, purifying—polishing its particular mode of Being to the point of total wordshine the way a Bugatti body spells out speed.

  Yet what is this purity which Mallarmé strove so prodigiously to achieve and sustain if it is not simply snobbery, a kind of paper aristocracy set up for the word, a misplaced fastidiousness, an excuse for weak, even unmanly, hyper-attenuated poetic effects? I believe, quite to the contrary, however, that Mallarmé’s aim is so central to the artist’s enterprise that our definition of the medium, our understanding of the activity, and our appreciation of the results, is conditioned by it; for the fact is that the language of the poet or novelist is not the language of everyday, nor is the grammar of his sentences, if he chooses to write such things, nor are the general forms of his compositions, even if the words of gutter and grade school appear in them, or they seem to mimic the flattened formats of history, or to be tainted by psychology, or to wear ennobling morals on the ends of their sleeves like paper cuffs.

  Sometimes we sense the dissimilarities at once. What happens when we stray into Kafka, Three Trapped Tigers, Pale Fire, Hermann Broch, Beckett, Barth, or Borges? It’s as if we’d stepped into a two-pound puddle of mirror glass and come out as wet as Alice.

  So one says, but simple saying, unlike simple syrup, will not soothe. Poetry, I shall nevertheless insist, is concerned with a certain purity, fiction with purification, while prose, in essays such as this one, experiments with the interplay of genres, attempting both demonstration and display, skids of tone and decorum associated formerly with silent films, jazz bands, and the slide-trombone.

  Ontological transformation, purity, and form: these three notions must now be knotted together—tangled too—for what is a knot but a tangle made on purpose? Suppose we take up transformation first.

  2

  Let me make a snowman and see what comes of it.

  I begin by gathering snow around a tightly fisted core the way a leaper on a ledge collects a crowd, pressing it together from above, enlarging it with repeated rolls until it can’t be budged. For this work I certainly don’t want leaves, bare earth, or bumpy ground.

  The roll appears to stand well where it is. Good.

  As it happens, I can barely lift the next lump above my knees, which leads me to consider whether God was ever stupid or clever enough to grow a lemon so sour He couldn’t suck it, as I seem nearly to have done. Gertrude Stein, I remember, wondered whether God could make a two-year-old mule in a minute. Impossibilities of every kind confront us. Anyway, the last hunk is the size of a soccer ball and elevates easily. I don’t care at all for that hole in my mitten. Curse the cold.

  Now that I’ve stacked these three chunks like cups, into the head I’m prepared to press two pieces of coal, a carrot, and a long mop string. A pipe helps hold the string, which is rather limp, to this freshly Adam’d face. There is a semblance of a smile somewhere on this cold waste, but I wanted something enigmatic … a fierce expression … or a sad one … anyhow holy … at least wise … Curse chance. Curse fate.

  Large coals button down the belly. Three of them like sweet dark cherries. I decide against a belt. Around what is now the throat I wrap my muffler with the filthy fringe. Then through what might be arms I thrust the handle of a broken broom and at the snowman’s shapeless feet I place a pair of sullen overshoes whose buckles will no longer snap. It’s been rather messy, making this metaphysical miracle, but great fun, and certainly simple enough if you don’t mind chapped hands. So. Voilà! It’s done, and it will do.

  No. Not quite. The head wants a hat.

  Now I have not made this snowman to amuse my children. Did God create the world to amuse His? The snowman stands there, smiling into the wind, a lesson in ontology, an incredible confluence of contexts, a paradigm for poetry and the pure world of the word.

  I am able to make the snowman because the snow on the ground is of the right wetness and because I have learned how such snow packs. Futhermore, I am able to make the snowman, not because I know how to reproduce the shape of a man in snow (I don’t), but because I know how to reproduce the traditional form: three heaps, five coals, one carrot, and assorted props as they prove available and are desired: muffler, broom, shoes, pipe, and hat. The mop strin
g is my own improvement. The creative impulse tires but never sleeps.

  Now if some discornered dunce were persistently to wonder what a carrot was doing in this mound of snow: pointing at it, laughing, and then growing suspicious when we told him he was looking at a nose (not a snownose, naturally, yet the nose of a snowman); we should have to conclude that he hadn’t grasped the set of crossed contexts which establishes the figure, and therefore that he couldn’t understand the carrot’s ontological transformation; just as we wouldn’t be able to grasp it either, if the carrot were simply stuck in a small ball of snow or left lying on a drift, for we would surely ask, what is that carrot doing there? and imagine that somewhere nearby a snowman had been both created and destroyed, and that this was the root that was his nose, and these were the coals that were his eyes.

  The snow that makes up the snowman remains snow, though it has also become body—snowbody, one must hesitate to say—but the coals alter absolutely. They are buttons or eyes. Because of its natural shape and the new relations it has entered, the carrot does not simply stand for or resemble a nose, it literally is a nose now—the nose of a specific snowman. Several characteristics, which were central to its definition as a carrot, carry on. Its slim funnular form is certainly suitable, and we can pretend that orange is red in order to imagine that the nose is cold … uncomfortable and runny. Coals are excellent eyes because, although they cannot see themselves, they are easily seen, whereas a gray mop string may only faintly make its smirk.

  Already it’s plain that there are degrees and distances of ontological transformation. We can also begin to formulate some canons of correctness or competency or completeness, since a carrot will clearly work better as a nose than a jelly spoon or toilet tube; coals are better eyes than gravel, and better buttons than buttons, if the buttons are small or pale or pearl or gold. If an expensive meerschaum were placed in the snowman’s mouth, a silk Parisian scarf wrapped around his neck, a fine shiny top hat pushed down on his head, and winter shoes by Gucci fitted to his feet, we should still know what these things were supposed to be: the snowman’s scarf, hat, shoes; but they would be Guccis still, a hat, a pipe, to be rescued, wiped, restored to a context more protective of it. My god, the cry would quickly come, that’s my Yves St. Laurent you’ve wrapped round the neck of that frozen spook. So again, if emeralds were his eyes, we should wonder, and resist the intended transformation; but if a Buddha or a great statue of Zeus were bejeweled, if the rings on the fingers of Siva were rich beyond estimate, we should not be in the least surprised. We know that the halo of the Madonna may quite properly be gold. Expense is appropriate to the priceless.

  To be sure we understand what’s going on, let’s run down the figure of the snowman like a melt of ice and evaluate what’s happened.

  Hat: it is clearly still a hat, and it is exactly where a hat should be (on a head or on a rack), but since the head’s a snow head, the hat can’t function in a hatty manner, hiding the hair. The transformation has scarcely taken a quarter turn, since the relation of brim to crown remains the same, as does that of hat to head. It’s not, however, the head of a walrus or an ape. It’s not, in short, a simple shift of species. Rather, the move is mimetic, because if we had sculpted an ape in the snow we might well have hatted him.

  Head of small snow: snow in the head and body of the snowman has gained definition. Snow has been removed from snow and fastened to other snows so that the ordinary idle relation of flake to flake has been irremediably altered. There are no longer any bits to the ball (the crystalline stars have been mashed like boiled potatoes), but the relation of snow to snow is now significant, not haphazard as before. Of course we know that nowadays a snowman needn’t be made of snow. It can be made of Styrofoam, for instance. Pink snowmen are possible, and I once saw a snowwoman in the front yard of a frat house, with big boobs, naturally, and a crowd of soapless Brillo pads for pubic hair. Incidentally, this illustrates another kind of resistance: the drag of commentary and the tow of wit, since we are forced to smile, albeit wanly, at the symbolic appropriateness of the rough mesh, and return again and again to Brillo’s humble abrasive function in the world.

  One might argue, of course, that a Styrofoam snowman is an imitation of a snowman the way the snowman is an imitation; but is a man with a wooden leg a man, and would we continue to say yes, if his eyes, nose, brain, and tongue were too, so long as he saw and smelled and spoke, even in wooden tones? and reasoned, and paid his bills, begot with a clothespin and died of gunshot wounds? One might as well deny that soybean steak is steak. But I shall leave such gentle questions to the metaphysicians, who in future may be formed of Styrofoam too, that splendid insulation against opposites: the wet and dry, the heat and cold, the love and strife of Reality.

  Eyes of coal: changes of the kind we’ve been considering consist of the rearrangement of defining characteristics. Deepest darkness is quite ho-hum and by-the-way to carbon, but to the snowman, sooty eyes are traditional and basic. Coal could be pink or green (who would care?), but snowmen are compositions in black and white. Obviously, we are dealing in valueless chips, because pieces of coal a snowman’s eye-size are but fallen crumbs to a hungry flame. Some substitutes can be tolerated: licorice drops for instance.

  Nose of carrot: one might use a white radish or a turnip or a beet for variety, but the nose must be a winter root and like the coal a customary winter object. Eatability is not a virtue.

  Smile of limp mop string: here is something out of character. Originality’s sole opportunity, the string is, by itself, the most expressive element, not merely because it forms a mouth, but for the same reason that a fifteenth line in a sonnet, or a triple rhyme, becomes the verbal focus of the whole.

  Pipe: a cheap corncob, of course, not only to cut down our resistance to these rearrangements, but also because the fellow we are creating is invariably a tramp like the scarecrow, or, as the hat has already suggested (and the broom will reiterate), a chimney sweep composed ironically from a contrapositive print.

  Muffler: hat, pipe, and muffler are all giveaways (the Good Will will get them otherwise), and their insertion into this reality will only modify them somewhat. Any man made of snow is a kind of icon, but the letters of a word are not signs in the same sense that the word is. Similarly, the parts of a snowman are not normally themselves signs. They are simply parts. Replacing a part with a sign for that part is a little like having run out of As during anagrams or scrabble, and pressing a few spare Zs into service to stand for them.

  Torso of middle-sized snow: the human body has been divided into three pieces, but the section that is most massive in the human being is reduced in his imitation, because the stability of the snowman requires the larger roll at the bottom. Part of the art of any art consists in persuading reality to give up its mimetic demands. Did not Plato tell us, in the Timaeus, that Reason had, often, to persuade Necessity? Soon enough, indeed, genres become themselves tyrannical. Snowballs hurled with force into the chest may change the sex of the statue without appreciably enlarging its center, but a snowman with sculptured scarf and hat and pair of boots would be more purely snow, but less traditionally man.

  Buttons of coal: notice how easily the same piece may be a button or an eye, and the same mark may be a rose · rose or an arise · rose depending upon its placement. So a coat-button may suggest the button of the belly, Tender Buttons, other buttons. Sly.

  Broom: we have already spoken of the sweep. Unaccountably, as though covered by a cold unconsciousness which protects it from a deeper, harder freeze, the distant origins of the image remain alive to push through the slush like a crocus.

  Legs of large and pedimental snow: in its role as the bottom of the body, our initial lump lies largely neglected unless some effort is made to tent the base or force the footless trunk into leaky boots or a floppy galosh. Otherwise, this primal mass mainly elevates the buttons and the eyes, the hat, the secret smile, above the vast layer of impersonal snow which surrounds and blankets everyt
hing, till each of them reaches an area of visual prominence. It had better be the first thing we shape, because it not only is an Atlas to the rest, its diameter determines the dimensions of the torso and the head, and its place becomes our snowman’s station in the world. As a matter of simple priorities, even a dog knows to get a leg up before he wets the post. Snowmen are not meant to locomote, but to stand stiffly where the first roll rests, and later to decay in the advancing sun, memento mori for the winter, waterclocks to count the coming of the spring.

  So the snowman is a poet after all. May he melt languidly down the fair cheeks of our subject. When H and O make water, we can turn our heads away, but it won’t matter, because the transformation takes place quite invisibly and without any noticeable fuss. The ingredients in cooking do the same. Seurat’s dotty color mixes, likewise all of Mondrian’s jittery squares, do their work without our conscious aid. Op Art counts, like rhetoric, on this underhanded handling. There is also a large class of ontological transformations based upon the mysteries of term change: the mash of crystals in the pack of snow, for instance. There is another in which one term is permitted to retreat in the direction of the sign (or to advance, as your prejudice requires), which is what the broom, pipe, boots, and muffler did. Hat too. Language slips from mode to mode with scarcely a hiss, as in “Johns love Mary,” where the s has simply slid back a syllable in a standard demonstrational sentence. Or the relation itself may change, as the carrot’s did, the string’s, the coals’, or as in “John is transplanting Mary.” What we are looking for is a fundamental alteration in the way a thing is, and that’s why I played a little game with oxymoronic combinations earlier. String beans big as bombs are just big beans. “Robert robs Phyllis” clearly doesn’t do it either. The difference doesn’t have to be dramatic, though the consequences often are. John can believe Mary, but what happens if he asserts her? He gets slapped.