So he would die as a disturbance. That was probably proper, but it was proper only when put this way, rather than another, which was something Magus Tabor had taught me: wait for the words, he’d say, and then you’ll know what is going on; wait for the words, they will betray their occasion without a qualm; wait for the words, when their object will become real, turn real as a face turns red with the realization they are being said; don’t deal with the unnamed, they are without signification; remember, to be is to be enunciated—said, sung, shouted—to be syllabated; I was a word, therefore I was; and while I was a word, brief as a breath, held in the head or sustained on paper, prolonged in print, bound as a book, I was like licketty, you understand, like a term on one of the tablets of the gods, like lights made of stars flicked on and off to say: here I am, I’m stage, I’m song, I’m printed on the ticket; so Tabor could die in a thousand descriptions, although each way only once: once as a disturbance, once as a sign from the gods, once as a penalty, once to signify the unfairness of fundamental things, once to be symbolic of his soul”s strife, once to remind me of what he taught, once to be merely another number in the census of the dead that day, the day—evening, midnight, dawn—he did it—it did it—died.
—William H. Gass, The Tunnel, 1995
I’m about halfway through this remarkable dark tome, while My Lovely Wife is a bit further on into Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. What a funsy crew we are. We shall likely need to embark on a Wodehouse read-a-thon after we’re through with these.
I so want to read “The Tunnel”, but I’m afraid it will defeat me. Do you know that some people take time off work in order to read books like that? That’s an interesting idea…
@ Bill: It’s funny, I bought it when it first came out and couldn’t get into it, and it sat on my shelf like a rebuke since then. But this year I’ve had excellent luck witg long novels so I thought I’d give it a shot while I was on a roll. It has its difficulties (a lot of German, a little Greek) but if you succeed in hooking onto the voice (and give up hoping for a conventional plot), it becomes kind of addictive!
I’ve had my copy of “The Tunnel” for about as long (I got it when it came out in trade paperback). But I have NOT had luck with long and/or difficult novels this year, so it will probably still have to wait. I don’t know quite what’s misfiring in my brain, but I don’t have much patience lately. A couple of years ago, I decided I was going to read nothing BUT long novels (“long” being relative here, but I figure roughly 600 pages was the minimum), the whole year. I got through “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson, “Carrion Comfort” by Dan Simmons (had to keep genre stuff in there), “What I Lived For” by Oates, “The Royal Family” by William T. Vollmann and “Bleak House” by some guy, before maxing out. It didn’t help that I only really liked two of them (“Bleak House” and the Oates book – the Vollmann book would have been thrown across the room more than once, if I had that kind of upper-body strength). But “The Tunnel” was on my list. Now I wish I’d put it earlier on the schedule, because I know I would have plowed through it then.
It’s probably indicative of my shallow vulgarity (loving movies will do that to you), but the deal I have with artists is they get to be as despairing and difficult as they wish as long as they throw in some jokes along the way. Not endless shtick, but some acknowledgment that a laugh is as good a response to misery as anything. There’s a reason I could slog it through to the end of The Unnamable, Absalom, Absalom!, or Auto-da-fé while Broch, Gene Wolfe, and Gass defeat me nearly every time.
My time spent with The Tunnel was a week of slow progress and mounting impatience; the brick of unturned pages weighed heavier in my right hand even as I chipped away at them, till I finally shrugged and put it aside forever. Whereas I’m currently 150 or so pages into Against the Day and it feels like I’m holding something solid but light as air. (Like a pack of cigarettes, for Homicide fans who remember Bayliss’s rhapsody to his abandoned vice.)
Bill, an entire workout system could be built around lifting and hurling Vollmann’s oeuvre. I sincerely think he’s trying to set a record as history’s most prolific author, and every time I pass his section in a book store that expanse of spines thick enough to print upon widthwise gives me a chuckle.
I went to Wash U when Gass taught there, during the year The Tunnel came out. He gave readings all around St. Louis, and at school, throughout much of my Freshman year, but I never got around to reading the rest of it. I had a chip on my shoulder about Gass (who is kind of like a helium-voiced Mel Torme) because he had visited a class of mine, and when I asked him about movies as an art form, he made some flippant remark about those Merchant-Ivory movies, “like Passage to India,” being okay. Not only is this what would this attitude later get mocked in Love and Death on Long Island, but I lost my shit in the class, demanding to know how anyone could not recognize the qualitative difference between David Lean and James Ivory. Anyway, I was quite the pissy little cinephile then, and felt bad about my tantrum instantly. Omensetter’s Luck is pretty good. Now I should probably read The Tunnel as penance. Also, Stanley Elkin also taught there, but he died during the summer between when I had signed up for his creative writing class and the start of the school year.
@Bruce – I’ve struggled with Gene Wolfe in the past, too. I was shocked to discover he wasn’t someone I could just breeze through. I don’t need jokes, but even so, with regards to Wolfe, I think I know what you mean.
And Vollmann has a ways to go before he can even approach the prolificacy of Oates, Westlake, John D. MacDonald, Updike. Or even Stephen King, for that matter. A friend of mine works in publishing, and has had the opportunity to meet Vollmann. Apparently, he’s a very…interesting guy.
@Joel – Richard Bausch taught at my college, though I never met him (I did go to elementary school with his daughter, though). But he scoffs at the notion of films as art, too. He says they’re wonderful escapism, but not art. How few movies does a person have to see to be able to hold that opinion? Eight?