The critic that critics like to read...
A Temple of Texts, by William Gass
By Allen M. Jones, 3-06-06
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As a species, most critics are as common as field mice, in both senses of the word. Ubiquitous and plebeian. Parasitic cashers of paychecks, two-fingered typists and chin-rubbers, their alarums and excursions produce nothing but comment. Opinions, as most of us learned in grade school, are like assholes: Everybody’s got one. In a culture devoted to nothing if not its entertainments, when it comes to judging books, music, movies, every bum under his box has an opinion. But there are very, very few critics who, through their background in the canon, their intellectual acumen, their talent for aesthetic value judgments, actually qualify themselves as capable. Rare is the opinion we consider more valid than our own.
Not a reviewer per se, a critic only by coincidence, William Gass is most of all a lover of language and logic, syllable and syllogism, an oenologist of distilled verbage. When he pronounces on a book, it’s with the authority of a man who has read damned near everything. At the juncture of philosophy and philology, the corner of Greek and nouveau roman, he’s that gray-haired old man with the full moon face. His books belong to no specific time, no region (unless that region be the world) and so I feel no qualms about a discussion of his work on a site devoted to the West. It’s ours as much as theirs.
I came to William Gass, with mixed emotions, through his fiction. I was young, first year or two of college, and Omensetter’s Luck smacked me on the forehead. A difficult text, it was like watching Bergman or Kurosawa, but without the subtitles. You had the sense of some damn thing, but you weren’t sure what. A year or two later (after a good solid soaking in the humanities) I read his book of short stories, In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. The silt threatened to settle. When I finally came to his critical essays, it was like watching your ball roll down the lane to spray away every pin, it was like flicking a small switch and seeing an enormous warehouse go all fluorescent bright. This, this, is what I’d been trying to accomplish, this is what could happen with words. Playfulness and intellect and language-love all in the same sentence. Like a pair of loose childhood sneakers, he was a writer you had to grow into.
His newest collection of critical essays, A Temple of Texts, marches along at the head of a critical troop unparalleled in American letters. Fiction and the Figures of Life, The World Within the Word, Test of Time, Finding a Form, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (a love song to the word blue), Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (in which Gass’s ego, alas, nests inside the pages like a Russian doll – every previous translation of Rilke is chawed around and spat aside, all but for Gass’s own); his sparse output of fiction includes Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas, and the impenetrable tome, The Tunnel (thirty years in the making). Along the way, he’s won two PEN awards, three National Book Critic Circle Awards, A Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations. This list is all cribbed from the party line press release beneath his author photo – the same wizened, slightly walleyed face he’s presented to the world for so many years.
Like most all his books, A Temple of Texts resists criticism. The intellect behind the paragraphs, it’s like standing underneath a triumphal arch, staring up. Similar to icebergs, the constant percentage of what’s visible above the water, there’s no doubt a formula somewhere: The number of books read versus the quality of opinion. Gass himself, delightful curmudgeon that he is, would say that it’s a measure of the deterioration of our age that being thusly well read should strike anyone as startling. Perhaps by the mere fact of our proximity, by the reading of these essays, some of that intellectual worldliness will rub off. In his opening essay, “To A Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics,” he writes,
“The good books are the fruit of the tree of knowledge all right, and the devil is always offering us another fellow’s damned opinion, which, were we to sample it, might cause the scales to fall from our eyes, so to see suddenly that king and queen, God and all the angels, are naked, shivering, and in sore need of shoes. That is why just one good book, however greatly good, when used to bludgeon every other, turns evil; why we should be omnivorous: try kale, try squid, try rodent on a spit, try water even though there’s wine, try fasting.”
And later (an aphorist at heart), he continues,
“I think it is usually wise to approach a contemporary work with skepticism; it is the new work’s task to establish its authority, to persuade you to believe in its essential worth whatever strange or commonplace thing it may say or do. With a classic, the situation is otherwise.”
Nicely this thought later goes around again full circle, critic to philosopher to novelist and back again, when, in describing Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and the college class which first exposed him to it, he writes, “In researching my papers for the course, I also learned never to rely on secondary sources, but to trust only primary ones – a teaching that leads directly to this ideal: Write so as to become primary.”
The third titled essay, “Fifty Literary Pillars,” is a playful, adulatory paean to his personal pantheon (I think Gass himself would appreciate the Ps in that sentence). The list begins with Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, unhinges its jaw to gum at Thucydides, Hobbes, Kant and Wittgenstein, and, just for fun, rolls around in the grass with Bachelard and Valery, Stendhal and Colette and Holderlin. “Books to go to bed with; books better than most breasts; books that feel like silk sheets someone has spilled crumbs on, for they are not so totally smooth as not to scratch.” If you are an avid reader, perhaps pride yourself on the titles stacked in teetering columns in the corner, it’s impossible not to approach the list like a lovestruck teenager checking off a Cosmo quiz. I’ve read that, that one too, haven’t read that. Yup, yup, nope, yup. In short, here’s an intellectual standard by which it’s possible to judge yourself.
After this bouncing, one-two-three on the diving board, the remainder of the book gives itself largely over to previous prefaces and forewords, introductions. Even ensconced academics have to make a living, and anthologies are for nothing if not recycling. Three or four of these pieces I’ve come across elsewhere, and so have the pleasure of revisiting them at my leisure, like bumping into a buddy at the bar. He begins his discussion of William Gaddis (delightfully titled, “Mr. Gaddis and his Goddamn Books”) by describing the confusion between the two Williams, himself and the other, their last names similar enough to cause typos even in the Times. “When I was congratulated, I was always gracious. When I was falsely credited, I was honored by the error.” (Not incidentally, it was through Gass that I came to appreciate Gaddis, although I’m still somewhat playing catchup in that regard.) Stanley Elkin and Gertrude Stein, Flann O’Brien and Garcia Marquez, he is a critic of stature enough to bestow honor by the bare fact of his attention. A fervent devotee of Rilke, he reprints his introduction to Rilke’s encomium to Rodin. I have this book on my shelf as well, and can say that Gass’s take on Rilke’s take on Rodin enlivens the text such that having once read them together it’s impossible to imagine them apart.
The collection culminates in a triumvirate of general essays – “Sacred Texts,” “Spectacles” and “Evil” – in which Gass gives himself the opportunity to stretch his wings, preen a bit, move outside his specific areas of expertise. In “Sacred Texts,” he bites off considerably more than anyone should be able to chew in such limited space. “Sacred books are as dangerous as snakes, but what makes them particularly poisonous is their sophistical methods of argument, and consequent abandonment of reason, their rejection of testing and debate, and their implicit disparagement of experience, since they, not life as lived, contain all that really needs to be known.”
But the true coda to A Temple of Texts comes much earlier, in a tribute to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra wherein Gass writes, “And it happens that if an author is too obviously great, the reader can never have the delirious excitement of discovering him or hearing his special note strike, because it has been broadcast in bits and pieces over a whole life. This is so often true concerning Shakespeare. Our society disarms genius. Beethoven is played to death, van Gogh tacked to closet doors, Burns’s songs sung by drunks, sublime lines mouthed by movie stars. This play by the Bard, whom immortality has murdered, his texts chewed by actors dressed in business suits, his corpse cut to pieces by directors and the remains dragged by popularity through the street, rose for me in a manner more vibrant than life. The language is yet a cut above the most high, the imagery so flamboyant sometimes as to establish a new style. I became properly fatuous in his presence. I said: ‘Boy, you sure can write.’”
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