{"id":79532,"date":"2014-11-14T10:41:15","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T15:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=79532"},"modified":"2014-11-14T12:28:20","modified_gmt":"2014-11-14T17:28:20","slug":"enlarge-and-linger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/11\/14\/enlarge-and-linger\/","title":{"rendered":"Enlarge and Linger"},"content":{"rendered":"

On William Gass\u2019s <\/em>In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"gass\"<\/a>

William Gass teaching at Washington University, 1974. Photo: Washington University Magazine<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

In the heart of the heart of William Gass\u2019s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country<\/em>, deep inside the title story, the narrator contemplates his cat, Mr. Tick: \u201cYou are a cat\u2014you cannot understand\u2014you are a cat so easily.\u201d The confident Mr. Tick, unlike the narrator, does not worry over his mortality or think about the burden of self-consciousness. He does not care that the past is past. He does not fear possibility or imagine himself as anything other than the cat he is. Mr. Tick spends his time murdering birds and walking across rooftops. Content just to be alive, he moves elegantly, \u201chis long tail rhyming with his paws,\u201d leaving our forlorn narrator to fend off loneliness on his own, with the only weapon he has at his disposal: words.<\/p>\n

Words are free, there for the taking, and William Gass makes sure we are aware of their infinite potential. Words can be used to command, to describe, to denigrate. They can be strung into sentences and bellowed in a song \u201cin such a way that from a distance it will seem a harmony, a Strindberg play, a friendship ring.\u201d We understand nuance and learn how to prepare for consequence with the help of words. We can make beautiful things with words. Those inclined can dare to treat the medium of language as an inexhaustible source of art.<\/p>\n

Art is the business of serious writers, Gass insists. A brilliant essayist as well as one of this nation\u2019s most important novelists, he argues in his essay \u201cPhilosophy and the Form of Fiction\u201d that the task for a serious writer is twofold: \u201cHe must show or exhibit his world, and to do this he must actually make something, not merely describe something that might be made.\u201d In his emphasis on making, Gass, who turned ninety this year, is proposing that the meaning generated by a work of fiction goes beyond its mimetic familiarity. The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn\u2019t to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers \u201ca record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language.\u201d A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author\u2019s agile mind. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country <\/em>was first published in 1968; it comprises\u00a0stories that began to appear in periodicals in the late fifties. For Gass and his generation at that moment, modernism was such a gargantuan precursor that it threatened to obscure the work that followed. Whether they considered literary modernism a failed experiment, characterized by H. G. Wells as a \u201cmonstrous egotism of artistry,\u201d or a grand success that expresses, in Virginia Woolf\u2019s estimate, \u201cthe quick of the mind,\u201d novelists beginning their careers in the fifties and sixties necessarily had to position themselves in response to the dramatic shape shifting that had just occurred in their genre.<\/p>\n

Looking back over this heady period in American literary culture, John Gardner would claim that no one writing at that moment \u201cwas willing to live by the old, righteous rules.\u201d Fiction, like all art, was supposed to be free from the shackles of rules. Ezra Pound\u2019s call to \u201cmake it new\u201d (a slogan that Pound tellingly recycled from Chinese historical sources) continued to reverberate as the defining challenge.<\/p>\n

Gardner recognized the need to give these adventurous new writers a venue and in 1960 cofounded the literary journal MSS<\/em>, based in California. While he was collecting material to publish in the first volume, a story called \u201cThe Pedersen Kid,\u201d by a young writer named William Gass, came to his attention. A fellow editor told Gardner that the story had been rejected at another journal because it had \u201cquestionable language; doubts had been expressed about meaning and point of view.\u201d We know from Gass that he had been sending out the story for seven or eight years before it landed on Gardner\u2019s desk. Gardner jumped at the opportunity to publish it.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Pedersen Kid\u201d\u2014the lead story in\u00a0In the Heart of the Heart of the Country<\/em>\u2014Gass has created a narrative that, with its disruptions and immersions, is reminiscent of Quentin\u2019s chapter in The Sound and the Fury<\/em>. Like Faulkner, Gass does more than depict a boy\u2019s experiences; he offers a full enactment of a boy\u2019s confusion. As Jorge struggles to assess the danger of his predicament near the end of the story, even the print takes on dramatic shape in an expression of fear: \u201cHe\u2019s even come round maybe. Oh no jesus please. Round.\u201d At the same time, Gass conveys the physical impact of the setting with unrivaled intensity, offering, through Jorge\u2019s perception, a Midwestern landscape where snow is \u201cas blue as the sky,\u201d stars are \u201cflakes being born that will not fall,\u201d and larks in summer \u201cwinked with their tails taking off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Devoted as he is to artistic excellence, Gass has never been cowed by the bold ambitions of the modernists. Just the opposite. In his essays, he pays tribute to writers he associates with what he calls \u201ca permanent avant-garde\u201d\u2014Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce. Gass\u2019s own essential fiction, written over the past half century, offers us a strikingly varied array of forms, all enriched with wit, intense emotion, and provocation, all full of the promise of discovery. He doesn\u2019t mind when a writer\u2019s intelligence is on display, especially since he values the intelligence of a perceptive reader. He reminds us that art is a proven human glory, and that literature shares with all great art the potential to expand our awareness.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country<\/em> reaches across two great expanses: the harsh, flat exterior landscape of the Midwest, and the mysterious interior landscape of human consciousness. Both landscapes hide secrets. Beware the salesman Pearson, in Gass\u2019s story \u201cIcicles,\u201d who twists his magazine into a roll and with a whack asserts his certainty: \u201cIt\u2019s so clear. It\u2019s so easy. It\u2019s so clean.\u201d In these fictions, Gass shows us that certainty is an elusive prey. Snowdrifts cover evidence of a terrible crime. Typewriter-ribbon tins hide a housewife\u2019s obsession. A man goes into his house, closes his door, and closes his eyes\u2014\u201cthere\u2019s simply no way of knowing how lonely and empty he is \u2026 here in the heart of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

We travel with Gass through this collection toward a center that beckons, the heart within the heartland. \u201cThis Midwest,\u201d says the narrator of the title story, \u201ca dissonance of parts and people, we are a consonance of towns. Like a man grown fat in everything but heart, we overlabor; our outlook never really urban, never rural either, we enlarge and linger at the same time, as Alice both changed and remained in her story.\u201d For Gass\u2014born in North Dakota, raised in Ohio, and rooted for the past several decades in St. Louis\u2014the American Midwest is home. The region, with all its consonance and dissonance, enriches his literary explorations. The scenery and weather, the noises of its farms and neighborhoods, the conflicts and longings of its people are vividly rendered. But Gass\u2019s fictional Midwest is also infused with mystery\u2014\u201cepiphanous,\u201d he asserts, yet still \u201can enigma.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stories invite us to follow the author\u2019s map and focus our attention. \u201cSo I have sailed the sea and come \u2026 \/ to B \u2026 \/ a small town fastened to a field in Indiana.\u201d It may seem a barren land from afar, yet up close we see it is teeming with singular characters. Meet the formidable Aunt Pet, who will raise the knob of her walking stick to the level of your eyes. There\u2019s Big Hans, who drops the frozen Pedersen kid on the table, on top of biscuit dough. Rolling and raking, spinning and clipping, waging war against the weeds is Mrs. Mean\u2014that\u2019s not her real name, but it serves her fine. A gaggle of children run through this book: the boy known only as the Pedersen kid, Jorge, Ames, Nancy, Toll, Tim, Cheryl Pipes, Paula Frosty. And sauntering through the neighborhood goes that dignified cat with his perfect name, Mr. Tick.<\/p>\n

Words are names we attach to things to create definition. In Gass\u2019s hands, the outline of meaning is filled in and expanded with comparisons, contrasts, implications, confessions, rebuttals, questions, arguments, derision, and repetition. Words to watch for in these stories include snow <\/em>(it\u2019s beautiful, deadly, boring, and defiant), inside <\/em>(where characters go for shelter from the cold, where they hide, and where they can\u2019t escape themselves), imagination <\/em>(we learn from the housewife in \u201cOrder of Insects\u201d how easy it is to lose control of it), world <\/em>(jostle it a little, and the L\u00a0<\/em>comes out: \u201cThe world\u2014how grand, how monumental, grave and deadly, that word is\u201d), and, of course, heart<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Added together into sentences and paragraphs, words are the signs that provide a route toward truth. We tunnel through snowdrifts and head inside, seeking to discover what lies in the hearts of these characters. It\u2019s not, as the salesman Pearson pretends, clear, easy, or clean. Nor should it be, not with so much at stake. Gass gives us the opportunity to learn more than we thought it possible to know about his subjects, and to enjoy the pleasure that comes from a deepening of understanding. We imagine what it\u2019s like to inhabit other selves. Through them, we may begin to grasp the beauty and enormity of the world this writer has created.<\/p>\n

A version of this essay appears as the introduction to <\/em>the NYRB Classics reissue of <\/em>In the Heart of the Heart of the Country<\/a>, published earlier this month. \u00a9 2014, reprinted with permission of the publisher.<\/em><\/p>\n

Joanna Scott\u2019s most recent novel is <\/em>De Potter\u2019s Grand Tour. Her other books include the novels <\/em>Arrogance, <\/em>The Manikin, and <\/em>Follow Me, and the story collections <\/em>Various Antidotes and<\/em> Everybody Loves Somebody.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On William Gass\u2019s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. 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