World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  3.1 is equally deceptive. It is written in the grammar of assertion, but are we likely to believe that every finger is the same size unless we’re looking at a drawing by Dr. Seuss? It is a metaphor of appearance, an als ob observation. In short, some such thing as a threatening hand is thrust out. All the fingers seem to be the same size. It is a hand anyone might respond to by drawing back. Our hand, however, held out like a filing card perhaps, has only the observer’s character written on it, and the hand which grasps such a hand is unique, and no doubt dangerously odd.

  Four properties are listed. There might have been three. Why these, and this many, rather than that many, and those? And how are these properties laid on: like paint and wallpaper? If I see a damp palm, it is open to me to construe the relation as that of dew to grass or pond to its basin, but in fiction the matter is decided. Right after the hand is stubby, it is damp, and the simple unassuming ‘is’ we’ve used allows only the most unadorned conjunction: there is dampness upon the hand, but dampness in this case does not wrap the hand as water does a diver.

  Real things connect, function, act, and a hand which does nothing, however grandly introduced, will soon have no more substance than a damp and stubby shadow. Let’s take hold of this hand, then, and see what happens.

  4. His hand shook me, and I knew I’d be his friend.

  4.1 She gave me her left hand, and I gently shook something upside down.

  4.2 Our hands shook while our eyes locked and our smiles curled like wet hair.

  Let this set serve us with examples of defeated expectation. One cannot stress too much the function of those standard normal forms which either shade the extraordinary ones or fall beneath them like a shadow. “His hand shook mine,” is certainly the customary usage; “his hand shook me,” is not, and forces us to call in a second meaning, the one which refers to emotional upheaval, in order to grasp the sense. In fact, he may have laid his hand upon my arm, or clapped my back, or issued an amorous invitation.

  4.1, the next sentence in the sequence, is clearly incomplete. Don’t you feel it? “She gave me her left hand, and I gently shook something upside down.” That’s how shaking the left hand feels—it’s true—not like shaking a hand, but like vaguely shaking something; nevertheless, the dish is weakly spiced, and needs … what?

  4.1a She gave me her left hand, and I gently shook something upside down as one shakes freshly cut blossoms to release the dew.

  4.1b She gave me her left hand, and I gently shook something upside down the way I shake my penis where it overhangs the john.

  Sentences like these create a world in which you very well may turn a corner in a marble hall and find yourself in a shack; in which every custom is a cover for novelty, and novelty is normal; where you learn to proceed with caution because a wave of meaning may flow back over you and alter everything; that it’s you and not your husband who is leading a double life. They are unfun houses, these Shandys, but they do introduce us to a new element in the sentence—the reader, the listener—there you are!—for these sentences don’t fool themselves, shock themselves, the verb does not cry “surprise!” at the noun. They fool us. We, and our response, are their object. We must be prepared. Remember, only a little wet hair curls. Most wet hair is as straight as the white line on the highway. Yet just how straight is that?

  Sterne’s famous sentence: “A cow broke in tomorrow morning to my Uncle Toby’s fortifications,” carries its surprise inside itself like a pregnant woman, for if ‘tomorrow morning’ hadn’t disturbed its lines, the sentence would have reported how a cow had broken into Uncle Toby’s fortifications, information only ordinarily odd; yet by using the ‘to’ from ‘morrow’ as an entry, this derelict date erases the normal like a spelling error, and we hear how a cow has broken into morrow morning, a fortification more difficult to breach, and forever amazing; because however familiar we are with this sentence’s sublime disjunctions, as we may be with Haydn’s surprises, or the great sea chase in Moby Dick, or the eloquence of Sir Thomas Browne, these features will remain as if engraven, wholly unworn by repeated use, for not even a bored eye can rob a Rembrandt of its greatness, alter a Piero by a jot.

  5. Her hand felt like a mouth with twenty tongues.

  5.1 My hand suddenly seemed smothered by a steaming towel. Then her nails scraped my palm like a razor.

  5.2 She had a hand like a potholder of quilted cotton, the kind made in missions, one that has a yellow chicken on it, clucks in the kitchen, and runs in the wash.

  If we are building a world by beginning with a hand, and if neither the logical nor grammatical form of our sentences is going to help us very much; if the total presentation is what counts, and if the structures we believe we find there are already interpreted like laws; if we must know that only barbers use steaming towels, or that the scratched palm is a sexual invitation; then we may be inclined to suppose that the sentences of fiction reflect a world more than make one; that they rely too fully on the life we presume we lead to be other than commentary; that we haven’t made a hand, a nail, a finger even, but merely mirrored a few of the billions which weave expressive paths every hour through some human, inhuman, or holy space—millions of Hindu hands, the workers’ fists, a dancer’s like a sailing leaf, the uncountable gimme-gimmes, as ceaseless and self-absorbed as waves; yet it must be this data we draw on, because the flow of the world, which often deposits itself in words like silt, is all we have; but after that, after we know what our ofs are, we can fasten fingers to the hand like strings on a guitar; we can use the old to create the new, make as we imagine; for what are the forms of the facts, and what are the facts, in the sentences we have been fabricating?

  In 5.2 it is hand as potholder we have hold of, not a rectangle which we can pretend is a window or a door, fenced backyard, or tennis court, or wall, or vinyl floor; not a line which is some path of motion, the measure of a distance, or the edge of an infinite abyss; it is the hand of a dime-store mother, a hand that does not advertise its toil, the pieties which it has served with such simple wrinkled redness, or soft fat care, but which instantly occupies the center of a system of social relations, a quilted wad of love and vulgarity, of Küche, Kirche, Kinder, and constitutes a fact which is the coalescence of a milieu and a life, not the way a pudding hardens, but like the splash of a risen fish: both sudden and determinate.

  Here are four more which refine on the relation of handshaker to shaken, as of subject and active verb to object:

  6. He doused my hand in his.

  6.1 His huge hands, rough with toil and stained by leather, held mine as if mine were the flanks of a skittish horse.

  6.2 With a smirk, he inserted his hand into mine.

  6.3 What could I tell from his hand? It was the hand of a missionary. Its calm persistent skin would soon grow over and conceal mine.

  Earlier we had examples enough of “nothing.” Try to catch a glimpse of these two hands, neither of which exists:

  7. Where were his hands? He hadn’t eyes either, or shirts in his suitcase.

  7.1 Here, try this on for size, he said, giving me a hand.

  You have of course heard of the tail which wagged the dog, just like that tale did which invented its author. How’s this?

  8. It was a hand so huge and prepossessing, it cast him like a shadow on the wall behind it.

  8.1 He held his hands before his face, yet there seemed to be no change in his features.

  Hands may be hidden in gloves, in muffs, in trouser pockets. We can live in a world of microbes, complicated crimes, and distant stars, of inferred or suspected objects like magnetic fields and islands like Atlantis. From finger to nail and nail to scratch and scratch to …

  9. She lifted toward me a tray of diamonds. I mumbled something and kissed a carat.

  9.1 The ring said something in Latin and rose from his finger like a boil.

  We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, w
ho take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

  10. Out of his hands fell irregular white wads of fisted air.

  To understand a sentence philosophically (which is as far from understanding a philosophical sentence as Bayonne is from Butte on bad roads) is to project its entire structure into an imaginary world, but this projection, which is in effect an ontological interpretation of the structure, can only be accomplished by the most careful consideration of the entire meaning of the sentence (and its neighbors of course, if there are any). Logical and grammatical forms appear to have minimal, and, at most, limiting effect on literary ones, and even these are unreasonably noncommittal about reality. The most important measure is something we might vaguely call “normal form.” Out of his hands fell irregular white wads of crumpled Kleenex, for instance—normal enough if you are clumsy and careless and have a cold.

  10.1 Our bargain struck, we separated. I wiped my right hand carefully on your leather sleeve, but my sweat was indelible like dye. In an hour your bones would be as stained as a crazed plate, while my hands would be pure enough to play pinochle on the piano and Chopin on the drums.

  Perhaps all we have left now is a hand—my pure palm and your dirty brown bones—but perhaps it is better to end with a hand than a whole world. How much applause, after all, has God got for all His trouble over the years?

  1 Jerrold Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 6.

  Notes & Acknowledgments

  The selections in the present work have appeared previously in the following publications, although in many cases in a considerably different form:

  “The Doomed in Their Sinking”

  A review of The Savage God by A. Alvarez and Suicide by Jacques Choron, in The New York Review of Books, May 18, 1972.

  “Malcolm Lowry”

  A review of Malcolm Lowry: A Biography by Douglas Day, in The New York Review of Books as “Malcolm Lowry’s Inferno: I,” November 29, 1973, and “Malcolm Lowry’s Inferno: II,” December 13, 1973.

  “Wisconsin Death Trip”

  A review of Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, in The New York Times Book Review, June 24, 1973.

  “Mr. Blotner, Mr. Feaster, and Mr. Faulkner”

  A review of Faulkner: A Biography by Joseph Blotner, in The New York Review of Books as “Facts on Faulkner,” June 27, 1974.

  “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence”

  Parts I and III first appeared in The New York Review of Books as “Gertrude Stein, Geographer, I,” May 3, 1973, and “Gertrude Stein, Geographer, II,” May 17, 1973, and these two parts were reprinted as an “Introduction” to Stein’s Geographical History of America, New York, Vintage Books, 1973.

  “Three Photos of Colette”

  A review of The Complete Claudine by Colette, in The New York Review of Books, April 14, 1977.

  “Proust at 100”

  The New York Times Book Review, July 11, 1971.

  “Paul Valéry”

  A review of the Collected Works of Paul Valéry, in The New York Times Book Review as “Paul Valéry: Crisis and Resolution,” August 20, 1972, and “Paul Valéry: The Later Poems and Prose,” August 27, 1972.

  “Sartre on Theater”

  A review of Sartre on Theater, edited by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, in The New York Review of Books, October 14, 1976, as “Theatrical Sartre.”

  “Upright Among Staring Fish”

  A memoir of Nabokov occasioned by the publication of Transparent Things, in Saturday Review of the Arts, January 6, 1973.

  “The Anatomy of Mind”

  A review of Freud and His Followers, by Paul Roazen, and Social Amnesia, by Russell Jacoby, in The New York Review of Books as “The Anatomy of Mind,” April 17, 1975, “The Scientific Psychology of Sigmund Freud,” May 1, 1975, and “The Battered, Triumphant Sage,” May 15, 1975.

  “Food and Beast Language”

  A review of Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, by Norman Mailer, in The New York Times Book Review, October 24, 1976.

  “Groping for Trouts”

  As “Metaphor and Measurement,” in Salmagundi, No. 24, Fall, 1973.

  “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses”

  The Levy Lecture at Princeton, spring of 1976; approximately half of the essay was published in The Journal of Philosophy for November 4, 1976, with comments by David Hills and Patrick Maynard.

  “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words”

  Lecture given at Cornell University in honor of the retirement of Max Black as Professor of Philosophy. Published in The Cornell Review, No. 2, Fall, 1977.