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William Gass to the Player-Haters: Thanks for Playing, Haters
Received Fictions and Other Persiflage
Thursday, July 06, 2006
A Temple of Texts
William H. Gass
Knopf
Reviewed by Michael Moreci
As novelist/essayist William Gass approaches ninety years of age, one can?t help reading his latest non-fiction collection, A Temple of Texts, as if it were his only remaining family heirloom, placed on the pawnbroker?s counter, hoping for an apt appraisal. Gass? career ? like that of many literati ? can be understood as an enduring yet silent celebration: while critics and writers alike have praised him, the reading public has largely ignored him. His most regarded novels, Omensetter?s Luck and The Tunnel, his masterpiece (which took Gass over twenty years to complete), are unspoken of outside Postmodern literature courses. Those familiar with Gass?s work believe ? as was the case with the late William Gaddis, his friend and contemporary ? that the recognition he deserves may only come posthumously, that, like many great artists, he?ll be buried in a pauper?s grave beneath an eventual memorial. Gass has never written a Book-of-the-Month-Club novel, nor has he contributed much to popular lit journals, and his work has never been adapted to film. From his novels to his essays, Gass? writing has been aimed not towards sales and celebrity, but towards enduring Literature (yes, with a capital L).
Fitting, then, that Gass begins Temple with ?To a Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics,? an essay that defends the necessity of works written by departed ? yet hardly forgotten ? authors. The very term ?classic,? Gass explains, was coined by Servius Tullius in the sixth century, meaning ?the group, among citizens, to be called on first? the strongest, boldest, bravest, most fit to fight.? Yet as time has passed, the term has warped and, as applied to literature, come to be understood as work ?full of esoteric knowledge worse than nettles, of specialized jargon? the purpose of all this unpleasantness is to show us up, put us in our place, make fun of our lack of understanding.?
Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth for Gass. He loves words, and when he says (as he does repeatedly throughout Temple) that they create a better life and health, he?s not pulling any legs. In the title essay, Gass praises 50 books ? what he calls ?literary pillars? ? ranging from Flann O?Brien?s At Swim-Two-Birds to Julio Cort?zar?s Hopscotch and back around to Lawrence Sterne?s Tristram Shandy. And while he extols the health in body and mind the classics bestow on readers, he also ? as any postmodernist worth his mettle ? depicts the effects of having ?the intellectual diet? pushed aside for a regimen of fast food. According to Gass, as brilliance sinks in the mire, mediocrity rises in its place.
This is a theme that not only courses through Temple, but Gass? career as well. With previous essays such as ?A Failing Grade For the Present Tense,? ?Pulitzer: The People?s Prize,? and ?The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,? Gass has built a reputation as a critic who, as much as he praises literary art, also lambastes the trends, aesthetic forms and cultural phenomena that fail to challenge or inspire readers and yet receive undue praise and emulation.
William Gaddis shared that troubling sentiment in his own essay, ?The Rush for Second Place.? Concerning the manner in which American culture celebrates mediocrity, Gaddis identified the transmitting value as the idea that one needs not even to be good, only good enough; those who seek to move ahead of the pack, ahead of ?aw shucks? pandering, conversely, risk ostracism. In his essay ?William Gaddis and His Goddamn Books,? Gass also explores this facet of American culture, appropriately, by focusing on Gaddis? career, particularly the beating The Recognitions, his debut novel, took from critics. The fate of Gaddis?s work in the marketplace was effectively given over to people who, as Gass points out, admittedly didn?t read the book, who stole part of their review from the blurb and from other reviews, who got facts of the book ?by the thousands? wrong." ?It was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals,? Gass notes. ?Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid.? One can read this as an attack on the irresponsibility of American book critics, and be justified in doing so. What Gass does is explore the etiology for the disdainful onslaught that poured on Gaddis in the mid-fifties (and has again in recent years, thanks to Jonathan Franzen?s nonsense in The New Yorker). For Gass, Gaddis? career is the embodiment of literature?s woes as it seeks out its role in culture. In his attempt to create a masterpiece, Gaddis committed the sin of doing exactly what Americans should not: he sought greatness. And as Gass himself may have predicted, the haters came out in droves. Not only was the book impaled, but so was its author, criticized for being too ambitious, pretentious, and eventually, the evilest of evils, an elitist.
Dropped onto a reader?s lap, The Recognitions causes ? besides an initial muscle cramp, as the book clocks in at 976 pages and weighs nearly two pounds ? the reader to seriously flex the Wernicke?s area of his brain in order to digest language and ideas that are long, dense, and complex. In Gass? utopia, in the symposium of prose where Doric columns are constructed of great works of literature ? the classics ? no other challenge can be as thrilling or rewarding. What The Recognitions proved was ?that great ambitions were still possible? that the real, the genuine work of art could be accomplished; that the novel was not dead.?
When Gass notes that the motto of The Recognitions can be understood to be ?No Counterfeiters, No Fakes, No Imitations, No Compromise,? he could very well be talking about his own body of work. Like Gaddis, Gass is a writer who wears his ambition on his sleeve; over the course of the two decades it took him to construct The Tunnel, one can guess his goal wasn?t to complete a book that was ?pretty good.? Gass is a writer who refuses to compromise, to stand back and assume the spectator?s role and watch excellence fall to the wayside of banality.