World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  In any case, literary language, rather than empty as analytic formulations are sometimes said to be, is so full, so overdetermined, so inevitable in its order, that to look elsewhere for reasons why Hopkins’s physically and contextually responsive lines run on as they do:

  Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

  Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

  Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

  Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

  is to want reductive causes, as if to explain Homer, Milton, Joyce, or Euler, by their blindness.

  To sum up, before saying a final word about the function of fiction: as language moves toward poetry, it becomes increasingly concrete, denying the distinction between type and token, the sign and its significance, name and thing. It does not escape conventional syntax altogether, but the words may shift grammatical functions, some structures may be jettisoned, others employed in uncustomary ways, or wrenched out of their usual alignment. Terms redefine themselves, relegating what was once central to the periphery, making fresh essence out of ancient accidents, apples out of pies. Language furthermore abandons its traditional semantic capacities in favor of increasingly contextual interaction. The words respond to one another as actors, dancers, do, and thus their so-called object is not rendered or described but constructed. Consequently, such language refuses all translation, becomes frozen in its formulas, and invites, not use, not action, not consumption, but appreciation, contemplation, conservation, repetition, praise. If we are prepared to grant that a class is different than a thing, a hymen other than a flower; that an adverb never was a noun, validity a various aim than truth, snowmen not mere assemblages of old clothes, coals and carrots, yesterday’s leftover snows; then it becomes impossible to imagine that the language of literature is not ontologically of another order than that of ordinary life, its chronology, concerns, and accounts.

  In terms of the ordinary meanings of meaning, poems, made of words, contain none.

  Yet I hear, undaunted, undisturbed, the voice of Tolstoy chiding me: why are you wasting your time with snowmen when the basement needs cleaning? some starving ghetto baby would appreciate that carrot; that muffler might keep many a cold neck warm and these boots, despite their holes, would do wonders for a wino.

  True … true … all true—–these echoes from What Is Art? that masterpiece of the missed point.

  When fiction turns its back on the world and walks into wonderland, it seems an even greater betrayal, because fiction has been such a repository of data, dense as the population of Calcutta and long as the Eastern Seaboard, and because fiction has so plainly explored social, economic, and political issues, manners and masturbation, rabble and rouser, religion and race. Furthermore, fiction has always followed prose forms developed for other than artistic reasons, composing imaginary letters, newsy lying gossip, and made-up lives; but the history of the novel tells another story too. Except for those original, narrowly mnemonic patterns which prose eschews, and the tight rhymes and regular rhythms these sometimes require, fiction now unabashedly employs every other resource of poetry, inventing new modes and methods, but at the same time reaching back for the rhetorical schemes of the great stylists like Sir Thomas Browne, Hobbes, Burton, and Taylor, straight through Schopenhauer, De Quincey, and Cardinal Newman to Nietzsche, Santayana, and the limpid yet palpable intelligence of Valéry himself. There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.

  Joyce did data in, Mann ideas, Proust all the rest. With language still guidebook-right about the region, and thus with language which is reluctant, like the Brillo pads or Gucci boots, to leave its world of fruitful description and honest use, Joyce transforms an actual Dublin—even Dublin, think of that—into an idle centerpiece of gleaming conception, yet for all its idleness and gleaming, an object with more realized human value, and a greater chance for immortality, than the city itself; because when, like Bloom, we enter a bar, what do we see there, what do we hear? words humming like a craftsman deep in his work; words folding in on one another like beaten eggs, like lovers mingling in the middle of their sleep; words sliding away into sentences never before imagined or discovered … words.

  An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard. Well up: it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright, elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlift across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un thu Unchster Bunk un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?

  When Joyce describes Dublin his lines literally rub it out, the city disappears beneath them, as Plato says Atlantis did, on account of ambition, to leave no word in writing.

  Think of a whole world rubbed out and rearranged in music, voice, and meaning. A dangerous game. Can the novelist find a form which will accept it all—a Moloch—a way to the underworld, through the mouth of a demon, for the world? The novel, we used to think, was an instrument of secular love; it brooded upon the universe of people’s passions and their things; both landscape and social scene were happily alike to it, and the brooding too was brought in democratically like the nurse with the child. Now with some alarm we notice that right along the love was sacred, for the saint who shows his saintliness by kissing lepers loves not lepers but saintliness, and life has once again been betrayed by form.

  In the slag of time, numbers were forced to shed like snakes their dizzy altitudes and deeps, their splendid curvatures, their shapes which were like snowy fields dotted with stones; or if the triangle of four, like a flying wedge, or if nine, like the disposition of a marching band, although Pythagoras would have seen a different image. And rectangles, circles, hollow squares, the blessed spheres themselves, were eventually compelled to deflate like the lake’s last inner tube, one dimension collapsing upon another until even points disappeared like midges in a wind, and the vast empty regions of space were left to the merely regionous, not even round dwelled there; and physical bodies, which formerly had slid down inclined planes with all the dignity of elephants, crossed the street like fickle customers to become the cash concern of massage parlors and sun lamps, not physicists as before, who suddenly ceased stitching cannonballs across the countryside and took up equations like drink, so that the substance of their studies became far too subtle and refined by our time to sweat.

  Why should we be surprised to see the same development in literature? Connections in the world, the rule of thumb, the sun, the lever in the leg and arm, the yearly thaw, as we begin to understand them, are ultimately replaced by those ambitious understudies, the ideas themselves, and once where hinges were, and without oil, were squeaks, concepts oillessly swing in winds from nowhere. It’s not that our studies have lost their relevance to the spit and cough and curse of daily life. It is rather that they seek their rules, and find their justifications, elsewhere. Never fear. We can still break a leg with a logarithm.

  The ambitions of fiction are greater, if not purer, than poetry’s. But the function of both is the detachment of language from the fort. From, that is, the main body. One ought to hear the bones snap. It is as if our idea were to empty out the whole house onto a snowy figure so great and multifaceted and polymath that it could incorporate a grand piano, that string of fish which Uncle Schuyler caught, the portrait of Greatgrandfather Gass, in chalk, by several hands, an antique chamber pot, including a puddle of ancient pee, now like paint, and a needle-pointed divan, a glass of ale, a diaphragm; and at no time during the accumulation would we say: my god, you’re getting snow between the black keys of our Steinway, bu
t always, rather: ah! a snowman so inclusive as to be by Master François Rabelais himself, including the bathroom and eight rolls of saffron-flowered paper.

  What a shame it will be when the monster melts, and returns all our goods to the world and themselves the way props are sometimes returned from the stage to those less real rooms in our homes.

  What a pity, indeed. What a shame. What a loss.

  The Ontology

  of the Sentence,

  or

  How to Make

  a World of Words

  (For Max Black)

  1

  The Overture

  It might at first seem difficult—to make a world of words—but actually nothing is easier. Think how Plato’s Demiurge did it, or the Muse of Lucretius … not needing a syllable, only a little open space, a length or two of line, and perhaps a gentle push. We must try to be brave.

  The right triangle, for instance, will suffice for a universe. Lean a few together like subway passengers at rush and soon triangles of varying slopes—homologues, conjugates, and other oddities—rectangles of many sizes, stars and flowers, the uninflated sides of soccer balls, diamonds and devious parallelograms, will appear—some weak in the crotch as anything aging is apt to be, some sharp, some fierce—spilling out as though we’d hit the jackpot with a nickel through the quarter slot: towers of triangles in the silhouette of Christmas trees or lengths reshaken into stairs or trampled flat like zipper tracks, and then eventually elbows of emptiness in the form of hollow squares, boring corridors of air, and shafts of endlessly reverberating vacancy. This rich shower of shape will be followed shortly by the cube, foursquare and nosy as an interested cop. Stone needles next: the pyramid, the obelisk; then bird bath, pond, and garden bench … a walk made of hexagonal flags. Sniff, if you will, the pungent scent of this articulated air.

  It might at first seem difficult, but if I swing my engendering figure around one side like a hinge, a cone comes into being—easily—the way a cylinder is configured by a door that’s dervishing. The cone contains nearly everything of course—blessed being. It is a miracle of pure manufacture, a cornucopia of curves. The parabola, hyperbola, ellipse—each is native to it.

  Then, if I on my imagination work, I can picture a uniformly expanding pinprick, and the cone it constructs as something the clock draws through the tiresome space of its ticks. Again, it is a stack of shrinking rings, a nest of spirals, a dense pack of upright triangles like an unshuffled deck of cards. If you fancy a sphere, merely pivot the base of the cone on any of its diameters; better yet, follow the suggestion of Nicholas of Cusa and conceive a fine point evenly enlarging itself to form a cone whose base has diameters outrageously infinite. The sides of this cone will progressively flatten without once altering their altitude; the peak will collapse into the center without moving a multimillimeter, and the cone by becoming so immense will return to the plane from which we can conjecture it originally erupted.

  And do I hear you say now that these are only shapes? Merely lines loose like lightning in the frank resourcelessness of space? Were the atoms of Democritus or Lucretius anything else? uninvadable shapes in motion? and except for their resistance to intrusion, indistinguishable from the void itself? and did Descartes manage to make matter more interesting? If things are extensions, there is no difference between the unimpeachably full and the irreproachably empty. All are zeros enclosed by lines. And words, too—as notions and noises—words, too, are only signs.

  Did you notice how neatly the full and the empty were combined? There is a certain poetry to the logic of limits which tempts us to forgive it everything. Any segment of an infinite circumference seems straight; there is not a groat’s worth of difference, as Bruno computed it, between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc; and what could be more completely finite than the infinitely small?

  Imagine two equal piles, one of heat and one of cold, as though you had a heap of coal and a heap of ice. Will not the least of each pile be the same? Of course. In general, the minutest pinch, the smidgiest smidgin of any pair of contraries will be alike as one pea. Think next of the least wet. Will it not be the same as the most dry? Indeed. Least light is deepest darkness, least evil greatest good. And Vico concluded from these arcane observations that not only were the maxima and minima of particular contraries identical, but because the mimima were also identical, the maxima had to be identical as well. Which is unquestionably the long and the short of it, inasmuch as God, for Bruno, is both the ultimate minimum (since everything is external to Him), and the ultimate maximum (since all things are contained in Him); and from this paradoxical point we and all our friends, environments, and artifices, flow like words from a writer’s pen. We just saw how the triangle took in and propped up and became whatever is, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

  External to Him but contained … Is your fancy in fine fettle? God is a bubble of soap then—infinitely thin, infinitely large, infinitely hued. The outer rim of reality—its rubberous skin—is all that’s real.

  James Joyce decided that these metahistorical transformations were consequently circular (or square or pendular or corkscrew—we may now be allowed to wonder what’s the diff), for it has become shamefully plain (hasn’t Samuel Beckett argued so, throwing himself on top of this notable pile?), that the minimum of one contrary takes its motion from the maximum of another; that we die by living; that corruption is generation; that the Upward and Downward Paths (if we remember our Heraclitus) are the same; that the concave creates the convex, sin the saved, etcetera the series etcetera continues by concluding?

  These processes, which we’ve lined up front to back and max to min (the way softness connives against the hard), have four loose ends now, and they provide us with poles terminal enough to substantiate a world (as earth, air, fire, and water), or to come from noble corners like the winds, or crouch above church porches like the four evangelists, although these theological companions are called, in Vico’s case, Fate, Chance, Liberty, and Providence (or something else at other times when he had other aims), for names are names, and fours are fours, and one will do for the other.

  Apollo is the sun, is fire, is heat, light, sight, life, soul surge, energy, understanding; so if least cold is greatest heat, utmost light is final mind. This is the analogical waltz, one of the diviner dances, and as we turn round and round through its music, we metaphysically rise, level upon level the way parking ramps spiral in the great garage, till lo! there is the roof and the twinkle of the town. The subject of music can afford us an example. The tendency a tone has to seek out, in a melody, other tones, becoming a kind of actively inclining agent, is described by Zuckerkandl thusly:

  We hear this state, we hear it clearly and directly, in the tone itself. What we hear in this way we can best designate as a state of disturbed equilibrium, as a tension, a tendency, almost a will.

  (Sound and Symbol, Princeton U. Press, 1956, p. 19)

  Then the same steps are danced with the contrary partner:

  Instead of the disturbed equilibrium, the tension and dissatisfaction which we registered there, we here receive the impression of perfect equilibrium, of relaxation of tension and satisfaction, we might almost say of self-affirmation. (p. 20)

  With the help of such sentences we can pass from Spinoza to Schopenhauer in nearly a single bound. Joyce also skips his thought like stones across his subject. The River Liffey swiftly overflows its banks to become Woman (i.e. History, i.e. Time), and shortly the cycle of evaporation, cloud formation, rain and run-off, is serving Vico’s system of historical renewal and decay as if the world, and not the Wake, had been planned that way.

  When one pair of Vico’s extremities is allowed to coalesce (as min with min may), only three such terms remain: the Theocratic, Heroic, and Human Ages, for instance (though we could play in Bruno’s ballpark just as well, or in many another); and if both ends fold like bad hands, they leave some basic binary confrontation behind, such as Dog with Cat, Night with Day,
Dreaming with Waking, or Good with Bad. Then when finally, as it happens in Pythagoras’s holy triangle, four and three and two disappear into one WHAM! like that last everlong thurrrrrrrrrrump of thunder which, as we learn from Joyce, is a sign that the beginning has been whistled from the end of Being once again, and “by four hands of fourthought the first babe of reconcilement is laid in its last cradle of hume sweet hume”; we have reached the shovel-scraped bottom of our heaps of hot and cold, the hub and heart of all series, since no one now would dare deny that there are as many positive numbers as negative and that they run as far as they run as wide, and that when we match one against the other, scratch to scratch, zero is always left, the eternal conclusion of every equation, the pointless starting point, the divine remainder … that Nothingness, Meister Eckhart said, which is the negation of Negation itself (whereby Naught falls upon its own emptiness as some Caesar on his sword), though not so thoroughly a negation of Negation as to retain something you might imagine you’d just got rid of (not on your life!), since, as one can see upon the blindest inspection, ‘no’ takes ‘thing’ away, and then ‘nothing’ takes the ‘no’ away, so that literally nothing is left, not even the name or a letter to make one or spaces where you might write the damn word down.

  Therefore, in the drawn-out wink of a giant’s eye, or in less time than it takes to refold a road map and stow it away, we have created and destroyed a world—brought it from zero back to zip, dancing our Heideggerean reel; though not to the same nothing, notice, no siree! for who would want to claim that pasteurized displeasures were at all like truly tubular roll-calls, just because there’s necessarily nowhere any one of either?