Turn on the Gass

...everyone has his or her preferences...

...That's fine...

...Has it ever really been possible to "advance," in terms of pure stylistic experiment, beyond Finnegans Wake, which is now nearly 70 years old...

...without the music, words fell to earth in prosy pieces...

...This must limit judgment to what is pure bang and fireworks, ignoring the vital elements of structure, balance, theme, and emotion...

...Are the actions taken by his character Nana, for instance, unambiguous, and are her motives transparent...

...it is just that Gass's personal preference is for the splashy symphonies of Joyce over Zola's subtler melodies...

...You do not tell a story...

...the heavily encrusted prose of Robert Burton and Ben Jonson...

...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...

...The true alchemists do not change lead into gold," Gass asserts...

...Everything depends on the individual artist...

...Gass's literary aesthetic is that of the doctrinaire academic post-modernist...

...How, one would like to know...

...Take Zola, whom Gass specifically mentions and who is the realistic writer par exellence...

...For him, literary art lies exclusively in the music: "It was Joyce's music, it was James's music, it was Faulkner's music...

...What are we to make of this...

...More is more, he quite correctly said...

...Why, we listen to writers who have written well— wondrously well—because that self through which the sentence passes —those eyes, those ears, that nose— is made not of flesh and bone and their dinky experiences, but of pages absorbed from the masters, because that is what writing comes from: It comes from reading...

...sometimes less is more...

...His favorite reading matter includes, along with the inevitable Joyce, Rabelais (king of all list-writers...

...What can we do to find out how writing is written...

...He scornfully dismisses "the old canard that art is communication" as a "philistine philosophy...

...His favorite book of all—"la favorite"—is Jean Bachelard's Poetics of Space...

...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...

...Certainly art is not only communication, but without some degree of communication, it is nothing at all...

...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...

...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...

...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: Of course, the traditional realist's well-scrubbed world, where motives are known and actions are unambiguous, where you can believe what you are told and where the paths of good and evil are as clearly marked as highways, that world is as contrived as a can opener...

...The pages of The Recognitions [by Gaddis] are more nearly the real right thing than any of Zola's or Balzac's...

...Could one possibly describe the murky and corrupt world of the Rougon-Macquart novels as "well-scrubbed...

...your fiction will do that when your fiction is finished...

...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...

...they change the world into words...

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

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

...no longer read words (against all the rules of right reading I will later give myself), but barrel along like my own train...

...Nor would you have been miserable from thirteen until now if you had sheltered yourself with books...

...Writing of modern painting, he comments on the decay of the mimetic ideal...

...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...

...Sometimes more is more...

...for all their frequent brilliance, and all the fondness we have for these artificial figures, their clever conversations and fancy parties, the plots they circle in like carouseled horses, to call them and the world they decorate 'real' is to embrace a beloved illusion...

...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...

...and the incom-prehensibe complexities of Flann O'Brien and Ernesto Sabato...

...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...

...There are only two conclusions to be drawn from this pronouncement: Either there is something seriously wrong with the American avant-garde, or else the over-60 writers Gass is referring to (a group in which he clearly includes himself) are perhaps not really the avant-garde at all, but rather the arriere-garde...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Is this true—or do the real alchemists, in fact, change words into the world...

...the reiterative: he loves lists, verbal ornamentation, hyperbole, onomat-apoeia...

...Yes, there must be music—but Gass seems attuned only to the loudest and most ostentatious variety...

...Turn on the Gass The High Priest of High Concept in High Art by Brooke Allen Halfway into his new collection of essays and reviews, the novelist William H. Gass reminds his readers, "somewhat proudly," that "the leaders of the literary avant-garde in this country are all over 60, and almost alone advancing the art...

...Stanley Elkin loved excess...

...It was the invention of photography, I remember, that was supposed to run painters out of business...

...A viable alternative to the "art is communication" formula he rejects might be "art is truth...

...sometimes the concepts of "more" and "less" are immaterial...

...Henry James (he of the hyper-convoluted sentences...

...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...

...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...

...It is not acquired by taking the lift to a slippery peak, by breaking up with yet another boyfriend, by being miserable from thirteen until now...

...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...

...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...

...Predictably, he is completely unsympathetic to literary realism...

...Of course...

...Where, after all, has the modernist experiment led...

...Does this imply that Titian and Velazquez, Ver-meer and Holbein were grandiose and sentimental describers, or that they deserved the title of "artist" any less than did Picasso and Matisse...

...the stylistic vir-tuousity of Tristram Shandy...

...This is complete nonsense...

...In practice, the result has too often led to sterility...

...By magic?] What you make is music, and because your sounds are carriers of concepts, you make conceptual music, too...

...Gass's list of favorites does, however, include the late Stanley Elkin, whose obsession with nomenclature and listing catered to Gass's worst instincts...

...It is conceivable that the avenue along which these authors have advanced the art of fiction is, in fact, a dead end...

...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...

...The answer, of course, is no...

...The two saints in Gass's "modest religion" are Samuel Beckett and Ludwig Wittgenstein...

...Gass's thoughts on the visual arts are pertinent to his views of literature...

...This assertion is specious in so many particulars that it is hard to know which one to begin with...

...What it did, of course, was make artists out of them, not grandiose or sentimental describers...

...the sermons of John Donne ("He raised rhetoric like a club of war...

...His description of his enjoyment of The Red and the Black condemns his own theories: reading it, he says, "I...

...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...