Turn on the Gass

Among his own contemporaries–Gass is now over 80–the authors he most admires, both living and dead, include the strenuous post-modernists William Gaddis, John Barth, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, and Robert Coover. These appear to be the writers he believes to have been “almost alone advancing the art,” and the degree to which you, as a reader, agree with Gass’s assessment will determine whether you will find his essays inspiring or merely irritating. It is conceivable that the avenue along which these authors have advanced the art of fiction is, in fact, a dead end. Where, after all, has the modernist experiment led? Has it ever really been possible to “advance,” in terms of pure stylistic experiment, beyond Finnegans Wake, wh
ich is now nearly 70 years old?

Gass’s literary aesthetic is that of the doctrinaire academic post-modernist; he celebrates the baroque, the ornate, the reiterative: he loves lists, verbal ornamentation, hyperbole, onomatapoeia. His favorite reading matter includes, along with the inevitable Joyce, Rabelais (king of all list-writers); Henry James (he of the hyper-convoluted sentences); the heavily encrusted prose of Robert Burton and Ben Jonson; the sermons of John Donne (“He raised rhetoric like a club of war”); the stylistic virtuousity of Tristram Shandy; and the incomprehensibe complexities of Flann O’Brien and Ernesto Sabato. The two saints in Gass’s “modest religion” are Samuel Beckett and Ludwig Wittgenstein. His favorite book of all–“la favorite”–is Jean Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.

One can easily deduce Gass’s philosophy of literature from this list, but should there be any mistake, he explains it at many points in the essays that make up A Temple of Texts. He scornfully dismisses “the old canard that art is communication” as a “philistine philosophy.” What are we to make of this? Certainly art is not only communication, but without some degree of communication, it is nothing at all. This is the dead end to which the modern aesthetic must lead if taken to its logical end, but Gass does not believe this to be the case. For him, literary art lies exclusively in the music: “It was Joyce’s music, it was James’s music, it was Faulkner’s music; without the music, words fell to earth in prosy pieces; without the music, there was only comprehension, and comprehension may have been analysis, may have been interpretation, may have been philosophy, but it wasn’t art.”

Yes, there must be music–but Gass seems attuned only to the loudest and most ostentatious variety. Predictably, he is completely unsympathetic to literary realism. That’s fine; everyone has his or her preferences. But Gass asserts his as though it were a universal value that only he and a few like-minded intellectual peers are wise enough to comprehend:

This assertion is specious in so many particulars that it is hard to know which one to begin with. Take Zola, whom Gass specifically mentions and who is the realistic writer par exellence. Could one possibly describe the murky and corrupt world of the Rougon-Macquart novels as “well-scrubbed”? Are the actions taken by his character Nana, for instance, unambiguous, and are her motives transparent? Nana’s Paris has been “contrived” by an artist, without a doubt, but is it any more contrived than the Dublin of Leopold Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle?

The answer, of course, is no; it is just that Gass’s personal preference is for the splashy symphonies of Joyce over Zola’s subtler melodies. As for the paths of good and evil being clearly marked, that is surely less true in the morally contingent worlds of Zola, Balzac, and Tolstoy than it is of the Manichean struggles dramatized by non-“realistic” authors, such as Sabato, whom Gass admires.

The problem is that Gass is in love with words, and he seems to consider the question of whether or not they are attached to meanings to be more or less immaterial to the reading process. It is true that being word-besotted is a necessary quality in a writer, but when this virtue is taken to extremes it becomes an artistic sin and a form of literary narcissism. “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold,” Gass asserts; “they change the world into words.” Is this true–or do the real alchemists, in fact, change words into the world? To consider the word apart from the anchor of its meaning is to lead the reader into a state of mere drunken wallowing, as Gass puts it in his self-congratulatory way, “in the wine of the word.” His description of his enjoyment of The Red and the Black condemns his own theories: reading it, he says, “I . . . no longer read words (against all the rules of right reading I will later give myself), but barrel along like my own train.” What kind of pedantry does it take to invent “rules for reading” so perverse as to entirely sever form from function, and regard an interest in plot as beneath contempt?

“I have always believed that genius and originality should be evident almost at once and delivered like a punch–in a paragraph, a stanza, even an image,” Gass insists, saying that he likes to administer what he, following Ford Madox Ford, calls the “page 99 test”–a barbaric process in which he tests authors by opening to the 99th page of whatever book he is considering, reading the first passage that comes to his eye, and judging the entire work by what he reads in that moment. This must limit judgment to what is pure bang and fireworks, ignoring the vital elements of structure, balance, theme, and emotion. No wonder Gass’s personal pleiade doesn’t seem to include writers like Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and countless other great artists who would probably fail the page 99 test.

Gass’s list of favorites does, however, include the late Stanley Elkin, whose obsession with nomenclature and listing catered to Gass’s worst instincts. “Stanley Elkin loved excess. More is more, he quite correctly said.” This is complete nonsense. Sometimes more is more; sometimes less is more; sometimes the concepts of “more” and “less” are immaterial. Everything depends on the individual artist.

Gass has taught writing and literature in universities for several decades, which means that he has imparted his cranky and ungenerous philosophy to many hundreds of impressionable minds.

How can universities countenance these very arguable generalizations being preached to their students with such doctrinaire arrogance?

Gass’s thoughts on the visual arts are pertinent to his views of literature. Writing of modern painting, he comments on the decay of the mimetic ideal. “It was the invention of photography, I remember, that was supposed to run painters out of business. What it did, of course, was make artists out of them, not grandiose or sentimental describers.” “Of course”? Does this imply that Titian and Velazquez, Vermeer and Holbein were grandiose and sentimental describers, or that they deserved the title of “artist” any less than did Picasso and Matisse? Gass’s essays imply that this ridiculous conclusion applies to literature as well, with the avant-garde of the last century freeing language from its obligation to describe life and letting it loose into the ether of pure art. In practice, the result has too often led to sterility.

In one of the book’s later chapters, “Spectacles,” Gass provides a forceful critique of the use of theatrical and political spectacle, condemning it as “a branch of visual rhetoric.” This is a legitimate position, yet Gass himself and the writers he most admires could all be said to stress the spectacular in their own art, and to bludgeon readers into either submission or ecstasy, depending on their tastes, with their own use of literary rhetoric. A viable alternative to the “art is communication” formula he rejects might be “art is truth.” If this is so, then literary rhetoric is only valuable insofar as it enhances, rather than obscures, artistic truth–a conclusion that renders highly questionable Gass’s dictum that “more is more.”

Brooke Allen is the author, most recently, of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.