A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  To imitate Sábato’s own sort of simile: It is as if I supposed, because in my former career as a highwayman I had once hidden in a hollow tree to escape the sheriff’s hot pursuit, that all trees were hollow by contrivance, and grown only for the purpose of concealment by crooked arborists.

  Throughout Europe, during the time Sábato was writing his first novel and divorcing himself from science, armchair analysts of the Human Spirit and our Anxious Alienated State of Absurd Existence initially felt X, and then, when a crowd came, often Y: that World War II had been fought by machines, which had then made machines of men; that the knowledge which had so improved our efficiency at murder had made us murderous; that reason, not having been employed to reason, only to rationalize, was useless; that certain ideals, never pursued, wouldn’t work; that traditional values, having been abandoned, did not exist; that science, a tool of the bourgeois capitalist system certainly, was itself sick as a dog schooled in how to be vicious on command (or had it trained its keepers to growl?). They remembered, these critics of culture, that the architects and artists who worshiped the machine had also extolled speed and Mussolini, and built boxes out of the harsh modern materials of camps and bunkers; they remembered the fascism of the Futurists, the dandyism of D’Annunzio; they recalled the promises of improvement in the conditions of human life that science was said to hold out like a bouquet—and the flowers of evil that had, in fact, bloomed in our fists. They counted the lies of the politicians as if lying were new to them and the lies fresh. The long, complex, and imposing tradition of the West had failed; progress was a bad joke, business exploitive, the state corrupt, the Church an impotent falsehood; and one could not help but hear inside the painful outcries of the Communists (with whom many existentialists sympathized and with whom they stood around on streets to rattle tambourines as though playing Salvation Army) more than one kind and quality of complaint: that of the disillusioned humanist, the failed saint, the guilty technician and researcher, the embittered artist, the mournful adult, the disappointed child. Sábato gives each a voice, although each voice is his, because back in Argentina, Europe seems stale, sometimes simply an immigrant’s baggage of the sort that Sábato’s Italian family had brought—furniture still useful yet odd and out of place. The Communists make an effort, but they cannot collect him. Marxists pretended to worship science and they believed in progress, but for Sábato truth was personal, unprincipled but deep and demanding. For too many others—Marxists, existentialists, and pragmatists alike—truth was fluid and temporal and expedient. Soon Sábato is neither X nor Y, and alone; the whirl of opinions sickens him; he sees the wrongs of the Left and the Right like ropes around each other’s necks; he accepts posts, then resigns; he writes essays and then watches events retract them.

  Truth is personal because it’s within the person. But. But. And Sábato’s doubts would fill a cave with bats. But the person is so frequently a fraud. We are dressed in deceit. Our own skin crawls to seek relief, as though all it is is a sack for shit. So when we seek, what shall we find? Perhaps the marvelous message will be, as it is in Finnegans Wake, scratched out of a dung heap by a bird—Belinda—whose name signifies the snake.

  The novel can be a retreat and a deception, too, particularly when it seeks the purely literary effect, extols form, plays intellectual games (as Sábato believes Borges’s fictions do); when it thinks of itself overgrandly as Art. (On Heroes and Tombs contains a tasteless attack on Borges, which is, like the dig at Madame Curie and several of its attacks on women, contrived and petty.) Sábato’s position—as it seems from my very different yet identical point of view—is rather well put by Marcuse: “The aesthetic necessity of art supersedes the terrible necessity of reality, sublimates its pain and pleasure; the blind suffering and cruelty of nature assume meaning and end—‘poetic justice.’”

  On Heroes and Tombs is, in this sense, an artless book. It does not desire to give life a meaning, a design, that is not there. The shape it takes should be the shape of life. Its confusions of time and place, style and technique, points of view, tones and intensities, its mix of essay, dialogue, and interview, reality and dream—all are signs of sincerity. The awkwardness of it, sometimes, is a sign. The passion is a sign. This novel not only describes but is itself a search, a painful passage through danger and darkness, through the interior, across the spotted soul, the Africa of its author. But our problem is that On Heroes and Tombs is a very artful book indeed—indeed, it is overly artificial and contrived, sometimes; hammered together in a hurry like a jakes (though not with a haste involving time); for it is also a one-holer, with the hole’s deposit—money in the bank.

  Ernesto Sábato confesses to being a writer with an obsession, an obsession that is not quite clear to him, and which he is driven to define and to drive away by writing. The compulsive act, in this case, is writing itself, and the aim is a kind of purification. There is a secret inside the self, which means that the self is hiding something from itself, is lying to itself; but the search, as Sábato sees it, is not for some specific peculiarity that will explain his own problems with life, but for some fundamental truth that he would, in effect, be uncovering and uttering for all men.

  The psyche that doubts itself, deceives itself, opposes itself, betrays itself, is a split one; and this novel is similarly divided into four parts and personalities, not all of whom know what others are up to—a condition that can bewilder the reader, as well. There is first of all Martin, a young innocent who becomes obsessed with a mysterious, enigmatic, somewhat older and very beautiful woman, Alejandra. With a naïveté so persistent that it becomes annoying, Martin flounders after his beloved, who deeply returns that love, but in an intermittent, almost willfully capricious way. She is a victim of epileptic seizures, religious and atheistical manias, a promiscuous eroticism from which Martin receives no benefit, and a sense of defilement that soils every act she performs and object she touches. Her father, Fernando, is the central figure of the book, dominating it even when he is not immediately present, and when we first hear of him, we read of madness and blindness at the same time. Finally, there is the wiser, more mature, but passive observer, Bruno, who becomes a confidant of Martin and his mentor.

  We may grade these selves in terms of their distance from the light. Fernando lives in the world of darkness, the sewer of the self, whereas Bruno remains where he can see. Martin and Alejandra represent the offspring of these selves, one innocent, one defiled, one male, one female, one drawn toward darkness and profligate lust, the other seeking salvation. There also are, then, among the members of mankind, and among the people who populate the self, four kinds of relationship: the friendship of Bruno and Martin, the decent love of Martin for Alejandra, unsullied by selfishness, the guilty passion that Alejandra fears she will make of it, and which she experiences with her other lovers, and the incestuous, criminal kind of self-love that Fernando represents.

  Just as Sábato’s earlier novel, El túnel, began abruptly with the report of its principal event (the narrator’s murder of his mistress), so On Heroes and Tombs commences with a laconic police notice. It appears that some woman has shot her father, and then, locking herself in a tower room with him, has set fire to it. This sort of opening is perfectly appropriate because all psychological investigations take place after the fact. In this case, an act of criminal atonement follows the sin of an incestuous love. The same report states that a manuscript in the father’s hand has been found in his apartment. This manuscript is reproduced as the third, and surely the most famous, section of the novel: “Informe sobre ciegos”—“Report on the Blind.”

  Fernando is obsessed (as most of the characters are, in one way or other, and as Sábato admits he is), which means there is a thought that is both so forceful and so wicked that it must be displaced and repeatedly repressed; consequently, the obsessive idea is accompanied by compulsive acts. Because the pressure of the thought is so continuous, doubts always arise: Have I really done the right thing; have I rid m
yself of it this time? Obsessive idea, compulsive action, constant doubt, cloacal imagery, arson, oedipal fears—all are here as perfectly as Freud reported them in his famous “Rat Man” case. And the notion that drives Fernando mad is that of blindness. His part of On Heroes and Tombs takes the form of a memoir, scientific in intention though not in style or structure, of his penetration of that sightless world, a realm and a group that his paranoia credits with organization, power, and a limitlessly malicious purpose. Anti-Semites could substitute Jews.

  This document, written separately by Sábato, capable of standing by itself, and connected with the rest of the book only thematically, is a powerful, distraught, sometimes hysterical, certainly offensive, yet magnificent depiction of the realm of the unconscious; it is a descent, like Dante’s, into Hell.

  In addition, there are those who like to sail alone around the world; they shut themselves up in towers to write or watch for fires; in huts encased in ice, they give up their lives to loneliness; who hunt for pelts in the mountains or are driven with aimless intensity from place to place like sand through a desert; fly solo, take to the woods. Searching for a second self, they dislike distraction. They want something to pit their strength against: angel or shade or element of nature that will assume the shape, and become the substance, of their enemy within.

  Fernando is such a solitary type. He tells us how his obsession with the blind begins (innocently enough, of course), and how he starts to observe and follow—shall we say shadow?—them; how they hear him watching (the surveillance of the ear detecting the surveillance of the eye); how they lie quietly in ambush; how they plan and persevere like a wish which will never relent, but leans against the eyes like an ache. He distinguishes between those who have been born blind and lived always in the night, whose crime in that sense precedes their birth and is truly ancestral, and those who have become blind, who have been struck dark by fate, as we all shall be, since death is darkness, blindness, too; he describes the fraternal antagonism of these two kinds: It is that of the desire which has never been recognized, given a name, and the one which has had a sight of life before being sent away like the sun at the end of the day. He emphasizes their patience. You think your love for your daughter is pure, but there will be a moment of weakness and your thoughts will fly into her like a penis. They wait. They wait for that moment.

  Finally, Fernando follows a blind man into a building; he passes through dark, empty rooms, discovers trapdoors and pries them up, descends into basements, moves among tunnels, has a paralyzing encounter with an imposing and silent blind woman—in the dark, we know, desire sees best of all—and then, while in a faint from his fear of her figure, endures dreadful dreams, one of which culminates in an attack on his eyes by a bird—strange, symbolic turn, because when a boy Fernando had blinded birds for sport, those creatures of eyesight and air, emblems of the spirit—so that now he has suffered the oedipal injury he fears and deserves, the law of the talon, an eye for an eye.

  We are figuratively blind, Sábato seems to be saying; we fail to notice one another really; we touch only with the tip of an unfeeling cane (another phallic image); hence we live in isolation, out of all reach, surrounded by our own misunderstandings, unreceptivity, guilty passions, filth. We say we see to indicate we understand: The eye is the first circle, Emerson writes. It is the organ nearest the mind, and the sign of its sovereignty. Yet we have put it out. The eye, moreover, is instantaneous in its work. It does not see by steps and theses and deductive roundabouts. It is itself an instrument that allows others to see us, for our eyes are eloquent. They idolize. Yet we have put them out.

  Fernando continues his journey through the sewers of Buenos Aires, the intestines of the psyche, suffering as he goes along various bodily alterations into early stages of evolutionary existence. At last, he finds himself in the blind woman’s sealed womb, or so it seems it must be to this reader. He copulates with this grave matriarchal ghost in the gray insubstantial way that dreams permit, before discovering himself like an awakened Alice back in his above-world rooms.

  Other sections of the book are at pains to place this inner search inside the public history of Argentina, which accounts for the Heroes in its title. Yet are they not heroes, because they are buried in the air, in the light, as is the legendary Argentine leader Juan Lavalle (whose story is told twice in this book), because his fleeing legions held his body in the saddle—a veritable El Cid—vowing their enemies would never have his head, until the flesh fell from the bones, and he became apocalyptic?

  The young woman, Alejandra, is pulled between Martin and Fernando, between good and evil and all other Manichaean principles our author can invoke; but what love that contains desire like a flow of blood is not another love of one’s father or mother? So Alejandra feels she can only be a temptress. Finally, in a phallic-shaped room regarded as a mirador and point of vantage, Alejandra kills her father with the symbol of his penis, and destroys herself with hers—flame—the purifying fire of a passion turned against itself.

  That leaves two of us: Bruno and Martin—the innocent we are, the man we would become—free of evil only by virtue of the sacrifice of the feminine.

  Which one of us remembers now that Borges was blind?

  It is not a nifty conclusion, and the promise held out at the novel’s close is both faint and displeasing: displeasing because the sacrifice has been too great, and the blame misplaced; faint because we know from our reading that Sábato believes deeply in the reality of evil, in the hell that each man is (and hasn’t he suggested for us a punishing diet of our own continuously recycled shit?); whereas for the kingdom of heaven, or the reality of the good, he has only hope.

  A DEFENSE OF THE BOOK

  When Ben Jonson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed, and which would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of favor, be better remembered, as if they were being set down at the same time in the memory of the mind. Since these thoughts might later provide raw material for a theory about the theater or some aspect of the right life, Jonson called his collection Timber to confirm that function. Here were more than turns of phrase that could brighten an otherwise-gloomy page. Here were statements that seemed so directly truthful, they might straighten a warped soul on seeing them again, inscribed, as they were, in a child’s wide, round, trusting hand, to be read and reread like the propositions of a primer, they were so bottomed and basic.

  Jonson translated or rewrote the quotes and connected them with fresh reflections until their substance seemed his own, and seamlessly woven together, too, which is how the work reads today, even though it is but a collection of loose pages taken, after his death, from the defenseless drawers of his desk. The title, extended in the manner of the period into an explanation, reads: Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter: as they have flow’d out of his daily Readings; or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notion of the Times; and it is followed by an epigraph taken from Persius’s Satires: “To your own breast in quest of worth repair, and blush to find how poor a stock is there.” With a flourish whose elegance is lost on our illiterate era, Jonson filled his succeeding page, headed Sylva, with a justification of his title in learned Latin, which can be translated as follows: “[here are] the raw material of facts and thoughts, wood, as it were, so called from the multiplicity and variety of the matter contained therein. For just as we are commonly wont to call a vast number of trees growing indiscriminately ‘a wood,’ so also did the ancients call those of their books, in which were collected at random articles upon various and diverse topics, a wood, or timber trees.”

  My copy of Discoveries has its own history. It came from the library of Edwin Nungezer (catalog number 297), whose habit it was to write his name and the date of his acquisition on the title, and
his name, date, and place, again, at the end of the text, when he had finished reading it (Ithaca, New York, October 17, 1926). He underlined and annotated the book as a professor might (mostly, with a kind of serene confidence, in ink), translating the Latin as if he knew boobs like me would follow his lead and appreciate his helpful glosses. I have already quoted one of his interlineations. My marginalia, in a more cautious pencil, are there now, too, so that Ben Jonson’s text, itself a pastiche drawn from the writings of others, has leaped, by the serendipitous assistance of the Bodley Head’s reprint, across the years between 1641 to 1923, not surely in a single bound, but by means of a few big hops nevertheless, into the professor’s pasture a few years after, and then into mine in 1950, upon the sale of his estate, whereupon my name, with stiff and self-conscious formality, is also placed on its title page (William H. Gass, Cornell, ′50). Even so, the book belongs to its scholarly first owner; I have only come into its possession. I hold it in my hand now, in 1998.

  Out of his reading, out of texts—out, that is, of what remains of reality when old shows are over—Ben Jonson collected thoughts he thought right or wise about poetry, about good writing, and, above all, about the management of life. He wanted to save and set aside and reexamine sentences which would tell him how he should evaluate the world and its occupants.