Finding a Form: Essays by William H. Gass

by William H. Gass

"Gass's commitment to ideas, concentrated energy and originality shine through on every page. . . . Ezra Pound as a failed modernist; the lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein . . . the avant garde . . . the demands of autobiography; the Pulitzer Prize Committee's . . . choices in fiction . . . flecked with fertile insights and a pleasure to read".--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review. A 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 368 pp.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Criticism, Writing, Literature

Hardcover

First published January 31, 1996

About the author

William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor.

Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.

He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.

Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.

Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.

When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.

Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gass is my new loverboy. You can have near nonagenarian loverboys, right? In ‘Pulitzer: The People’s Prize’ Gass performs sober seppuku upon this embarrassing quasi-literary, crowd-pleasing “prize,” bestowed upon nonbooks no one can remember a month later. ‘A Failing Grade for the Present Tense’ explores the popularity of this limited tense choice among creative writing students, and offers suggestions as to more multifarious tenses for those trapped in the terminal now. ‘Finding a Form’ and ‘A Fiesta for the Form’ are some of Gass’s most exuberant and musical essays (and this man can swing), bursting with energy and vitality and loving paeans to the Latin-American hipster scene, where the novel has been quietly evolving of late. Among the authors profiled include Robert Walser (a moving portrait of the reluctant artist as a strange man) and Ezra Pound (an hilarious portrait of the fascist as a scissors-and-paste man). His pieces on autobiography and the origins of the avant-garde also serve up long sittings of simply divine, blistering writing. No one approaches words on the page with the same attention to the musicality of each syllable, the sibilance of letters within words, the alliterative bounce of words off words, the assonant resonance of vowels and their bowels. This stuff matters, and Gass makes it sing as he flexes his almost extraterrestrial intellect in the philosophical digressions and deep-probing explorations of the worlds within words. The only hiccups in reading are caused by the essays flying at times over my head. Otherwise: nineteen of the hundred greatest essays ever written by a human. The other eighty-one essays are, unsurprisingly, by Gass too. Read Gass, dammit!

[Mala · Rating 5 out of 5]

This National Book Critics Circle Award winner, finds Herr Gass, in top form. These nineteen essays, divided into five sections, offer the readers a cornucopia of delight.
Plenty to chew on here– thoughts on the music of prose, on language, nature, culture and cosmos, art and morality, the avant-garde, autobiography, simplicities, etc, etc. Well, well, my cup of joy runneth over!

There are many things Gass doesn't like:
—Pulitzer Prize & others of its ilk. Do I hear a cynical aside: Oh, but what about the NBCC award?
My reply would be when it's awarded to Gass, the award gets honoured!
—Present Tense narration especially in the first-person. There is also a harangue against Minimalism in there! Check out the very funny essay A Failing Grade for the Present Tense.
—The impression of Impressionism as the term is generally understood in art, literature and philosophy wrt Ford's Impressionisms.

Oh but if that gives you the impression that we are meeting the surly, misanthropic professor here, no such worries. Gass still likes plenty that he doesn't like, for example, that essay on Nietzsche. He knows, "When there is no windmill to tilt at—tilt not."

Gass gives full points to Nietzsche for vigour : "His is the only philosophy that grins," but finds inherent contradictions in Nietzsche's philosophy:
"The concepts that engage most of Nietzsche's commentators—the will to power, for instance, eternal recurrence, and the superman—function almost like lids, because they stop up a tendency in his thoughts and keep it from fully expressing itself.(...) As a philosopher of flow, he reduces objects to the sum of their effects, denies the distinction between agency and action, and sullies every Kantian purity with his doubts and disloyalties. Like a number of other philosophers, whom he is not often believed to resemble, such as Hegel and Dewey, he hates fine lines and sharp distinctions; he habitually confuses psychology and logic; he has a smeary mind." ( Nietzsche: The Polemical Philosopher, p.133)
One of the longer essays, besides giving an overview of Nietzsche's philosophy & life, it also sort of reviews Alexander Nehmas' book Nietzsche: Life as Literature.

But I may be running ahead of myself- what a Gass reader really looks forward to are the essays overflowing with sophisticated cultural conversations, reading of which makes you all aglow inside—it's so easy basking in reflected glory; to look resplendent in borrowed plumes!
Here are some such essay titles:

Finding a Form
A Fiesta for the Form
Ford's Impressionisms ( That's Ford Maddox Ford for you.)
Autobiography
The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde
Nature, Culture, and Cosmos
The Baby or the Botticelli
Simplicities
The Music of Prose
The Book As a Container of Consciousness
Impressive, huh?

Gass being a formalist, (& the collection states its nature in its name), the essays dealing with the art & craft of writing are the best ones for here not only Gass reveals his own methods & techniques but also discusses the features/merits of the Latin American literature that have fired his enthusiasm about the future possibilities of the novel form. The titular essay is the star in this category.
Despite all the philosophizing in his writings, Gass is not averse to the concrete image: "It is the world of objects and actions which we share, and which we feel we know as others know them." (Ford's Impressionisms, p.96)
Gass had also explored the musicality of prose in that other famous essay The Sentence Finds Its Form.
The Baby or the Botticelli: next time a debate on aesthetics versus morality flares up on GR; this is the essay you all should be reading.
The Book as a Container of Consciousness: what a great title! Perhaps the most philosophical one in this collection—this being the closing essay, Gass wanted to ensure everybody got the point:how bodylike the book is, how mindlike the text.
This essay makes a companion piece to Finding a Form, as many shared ideas have been explored in both & in a way, one essay explains the other.
In sum; these topics are like the main planks of Gass' vision statement regarding the reading & writing of literature.
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The author profiles have some interesting selections: Robert Walser, Danilo Kiš, Ezra Pound, Nietzsche, & Wittgenstein, and have one common thread running through them: their life deeply affected the tenor of their writing/philosophy. It is an excellent fusion of biography & criticism.
Here's Gass' succinct summation of Wittgenstein: "His taste was for an elegantly simple life, with the simplest part of it, of course, an absence of the demands others might make of him. He approached people as warily as an animal from the wild, one whose recurrent and natural impulse is to run away." (At Death's Door: Wittgenstein, p.150)
And Gass' lyricism almost photoshops the rough edges off Ezra Pound's controversial personality: "lines like feathers fallen from angels; there are heavenly tones, and places where the words pace as only Pound could pace them, back and forth, as someone in meditation; and surely there should be a prize for that." (Ezra Pound, p.168)

The Robert Walser essay, which is a beauty, was written as an introduction to a collection of his stories called Masquerade.
Apart from these, there are two essays Exile, and The Story of the State of Nature that are more like life reflections, pearls of wisdom that Gass is handing you from across the pages. These wow you with that delightful combination of philosopher-fictionist vein that Gass excels at. In the sixth section of the above mentioned second essay, Life Is Like That, Gass compares life to various kinds of board games & muses:
"even in what we want to call "real life" there is simply a series of steps or stages of achievement: standing, walking, talking, going to nursery school, making the grades, graduating, first from high school, then from college, getting a job, getting laid, getting married, going in debt, having kids; what are they? only colored squares and illustrated patches, pretended punishments, imaginary rewards."( P.254)

All the essays collected herein, have appeared in various prestigious publications & were extensively revised & even rewritten for their inclusion here, to the extent that Gass considers them "the final and only authorized ones." In a collection given to weighty issues, despite the Gassian wit & occasional droll humour, the overall tone is one of contemplation & sad resignation- resignation to the crass reality of the marketplace & the stoic acceptance that the artist today lacks the courage to say Non serviam.
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How do you review an essay collection by the mighty Gass?! You can't paraphrase him. ( How dare you explain Him! The nerve!) And if transcription is the way to go then, why not read the book itself?!
As I read one great essay after another here—the prospect of reviewing it became a daunting task. I wish I could convey the sheer pleasure I've had from reading it- I was totally happy to be away from GR while immersed in this mental workout; that should tell you!
Coming to Gass is always a great experience because he makes you fall in love with reading & writing all over again, in fact, he makes you believe these are the only worthwhile pursuits in life—a life of the mind, a higher consciousness. Reading too much Gass could turn you into a literature fanatic! (I wonder if there's such a thing as 'literature fanatic' but I'm confident that there's no such thing as 'too much Gass'! [Pun unintended] )
My copy is the Knopf hb first edition. I took my sweet time with this book; sometimes reading essays twice, thrice- it's so beautifully written, it seemed a crime rushing through it.
Gass' essay books should come with their own commandment/statutory warning: "Thou shalt not read it hastily!"
You can't have a fling with William H. Gass; it's got to be a lifetime commitment.

Quotes: My main reservation against sharing quotes in status updates has to do with GR's stingy character limit for such- the subject finds place there & the predicate falls somewhere down in the comments!
Anyway, here are a few selections:

Pulitzer: The People's Prize
"...the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill—not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley." (P.3)

Finding a Form
"I read to escape my condition, I wrote to remedy it—both perilous passivities—and there is scarcely a significant character in my work who is not a failure in the practice of ordinary existence, who does not lead a deflected life. Often, though not always, they live inside a language, and try to protect themselves from every danger with a phrase." (P.33)

"My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository.
"My loyalty is to my text, for that is what I am composing, and if I change the world, it will be because I've added this or that little reality to it; and if I alter any reader's consciousness, it will be because I have constructed a consciousness of which others may wish to become aware, or even, for a short time, share. The reader's freedom is a holy thing." ( PP, 46-47)

A Fiesta for the Form
"The Novel (...) is holding a fiesta for the form: (...) for language, the instrument of the logos, the soul itself, is everywhere alive and kicking, creating a world that, for all I know, may be real; for all I care, may be purely imaginary; and the writers who serve this art share, I think, at least this belief, and are prepared to honor the commandment that Terra Nostra's El Señor so urgently utters: "Take paper, pen and ink; listen to my story...write: nothing truly exists if it not be consigned to paper." (P.62)

Nietzsche: The Polemical Philosopher
"What is clear is that the river you can't step into twice will circulate its water, its fish and its flotsam; will use and reuse its bottom and its banks; so that what passed once, and was celebrated for that fact will be back, not just twice or thrice, but trillions of times, like a tireless loop-the-loop.(...) Nietzsche treats every state of life as a culmination, an end, as if all the points our wildest arrows struck were, precisely, the bull's-eye aimed at. This is not easy." (P.133)

The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde
Is it NR speaking?!
"In order to define the permanent avant-garde, or even suggest its possibility, I must turn in particular to such works as Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, Beethoven's Opus 111, Liszt's Transcendental Études, Bartók's 1926 Piano Sonata, Schoenberg's Suite for Piano Opus 25, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Kafka's story "A Country Doctor," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Stein's The Making of Americans as well as Tender Buttons, Beckett's trilogy, late Turner and Rothko, some Duchamp, Hölderlin's late piece "In lovely blue...," the poetry of Mallarmé and Paul Celan, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, that most beautiful and disturbing of diaries, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet." (P. 206)

Exile
"...a use of language which refuses to be a use. Mere use is abuse. That should be the motto of every decent life. So it treats every word as a wonder, and a world in itself. And it walks along and upon them, even over dizzy heights, as confidently as a worker on beams of steel. And it does not care to get on, but it dwells; it makes itself, as Rilke wrote, into a thing, mute as the statue of an orator." (P.235)

The Baby or the Botticelli
"Moralist are right to worry about works of art, then, because they belong to a higher level of reality than most things. Texts can be repeated; text can be multiplied; texts can be preserved; texts beget commentaries, and their authors energize biographers; texts get quoted, praised, reviled, memorized; texts become sacred." (P.286)

Simplicities
"How reluctantly, in the United States, have we come to recognize that civilization is refinement; that it requires leisure, judgement, taste, skill, and the patient work of a solitary mind passing itself, as though it were both a cleaner and a cleansing cloth, back and forth until the substance of it— wood or marble or music, in syllables seeking their place in some song—back and forth until the matter of it begins to gleam deeply from its buried center, deeply where thought and thing are one." (P.298)

The Music of Prose
Next time you mention musical prose, know what you are talking about.
"For prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise and fall like a low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of stress and harmonious measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even if it is rarely observed; alliteration will trouble the tongue, consonance ease its sounds out (...) mellifluousness is not impossible, and harshness is easy; drum roll and clangor (...) lisp, slur, and growl; so there will be a syllabic beat in imitation of the heart, while rhyme will recall a word we passed perhaps too indifferently; vowels will open and consonants close like blooming plants; repetitive schemes will act as refrains, and there will be phrases—little motifs—to return to, like the tonic; clauses will be balanced by other clauses (...) we shall find endless variations on the same theme; a central idea, along with its many modifications, like soloist and chorus, will take their turns until, suddenly, all sing at once the same sound."(P. 314)

The Book As a Container of Consciousness
"It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about; by singing to themselves the large, round lines they find, at the same time as they applaud their placement on the page, their rich surroundings, and everywhere the show of taste and care and good custom—what a cultivated life is supposed to provide; for if my meal is mistakenly scraped into the garbage, it becomes garbage, and if garbage is served to me on a platter of gold by hands in gloves, it merely results in a sardonic reminder of how little gold can do to rescue ruck when ruck can ruin whatever it rubs against." (P.351)

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This is short because the question about the reading of Gass's essays is a question which goes without saying; has been decided beforehand. His are the best damn essays. Period. And double the pleasure for us readers of fiction that so many of his essays are about literature and its reading and its writing. This collection in particular should be at the top of the queue for anyone and everyone interested in the ontology of words and books.

There's that word, ontology. What I love about Gass, what brings him right up to my front door and into my living room and hence to my library every time he chimes, is that Gass thinks with the mind of a philosopher and writes with the pen of a fictionist. There is no bifurcation here. When I say ontology I mean the asking, What is it? And Gass has the attention and manners and mind to attend closely to this question and its evidences like none other and precisely because so few with the fictionist's talent have the philosopher's mind and so few philosophers have the fictionist's pen, even but for short flashes.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

At his very best, Gass writes glorious, dialectical sentences, paragraphs and pages, as in his hatchet job on critics and authors who support the Pulitzer, and prizes in general:

"The panel will be formed with the same unfailing dimsight its members will feel obliged to display... each will be implicitly asked to represent their region, race or sex... the only qualification a judge ought to have is unimpeachable good taste, which immediately renders irrelevant such puerile pluralistic concerns as skin color, sex, and origin," which is the kind of glorious universalist demand that gets made too rarely, because, as Gass goes on to say, "the phrase 'literary quality' is a conservative code word these days that means 'I wouldn't toss a dime into an ethnic's hat.'"

In the same essay he mocks the staidness and awful taste shown by prize-givers, who tend to give prizes to the most popular rather than the best, but also admits that "'experimental' can be more frankly replaced by 'self-indulgent and inept' so often as to cause one to despair of the word."

His more objective observations on contemporary prose should be required reading for anyone with access to any writing implements of any kind ("those who live in the present [i.e., tense], as we imagine cattle do, expect little from the future and remember nothing of the past," "they are stories shorn, not only of adjectives and adverbs, but of words themselves, almost as if their authors didn't know any... sentences avoid subordination, qualification, subtlety. Subordination requires judgment, evaluation; it creates complexity, demands definition.")

He rightly and majestically closes 'Nature, Culture and Cosmos' by pointing out that cultural diversity does not = relativism; cultural diversity shows us that cultures aren't natural, that we can't rely on 'nature' to show us what is right, good, beautiful etc, and that "if we want walls on which to hang our values, we shall have to build them ourselves," and acknowledge that the walls we've built are not God-given.

Later, his 'Vicissitudes of the Avant-garde' is, to begin with, a fine history of how the army's advance scouts ended up rejecting what the army stood for in the first place... which means that the avant-garde can only work if there are genuine values (i.e., those of the army) to reject... but today there are only 'cash values,' no real values, and so the avant-garde is in quite a bind. Gass's way out is to defend 'form' by refusing to show/publish or dance, by saying, with Bartleby, I'd rather not.

And this is the moment when Gass's essays stop delighting me with their borderline ridiculous assonance and alliterations, and drive me to bury my head under a pillow and cry, not no, but why?

Because for all of his acuity, Gass is led, either by the ambiance of his university seat, or by the rhythms of his prose, to regurgitate some of the silliest ideas of the late twentieth century. There are no ideals to rebel against, so we have to reject everything-- what? Or, build new ideals.

* "Life itself is exile"? From what?
* The poetic "limb of our language has been cut off and callously destroyed," by whom, and when was this? Was it Caxton? Wordsworth? Whitman? (I blame Whitman).
* "The normal shape of a narrative... and its customary content... are both designed to disclose a comforting pattern in events, discover a true direction to experience, and give an honest meaning to life. It is essential that each pattern, purpose and significance be inherent in the natural course of things." What the Thomas are you talking about? Yes, some narratives do that, just as some non-narrative art forms do that--what is alliteration, other than a humorous game for Tank Engine obsessed toddlers? And if it can be something else, why can't narrative?
* life is "convoluted, multiple, inverted, simultaneous, continuous, pointless, cracked." Really? Whose life is like that? If one's life is, isn't the usual recourse to wonder why? And even if life is like that, why does Gass suggest that good novels *reproduce* the pointless/cracked/inverted convolutions, when otherwise he rails against mere mimesis? Couldn't the text--I repeat--aim for something better than the sludge daily life gives us?
* in 'The Baby or the Botticelli,' Gass abuses those with 'politicized minds,' though not saying who they are, and rejects 'moralists,' again, without saying who they are, and demands an 'alienating formalism', which is justified by standard modernity theory separation of values (i.e., the good has nothing to do with the beautiful has nothing to do with justice). Since all the values are hermetically sealed, art should be judged on purely formal criteria. There's much to be said for this. How I roll my eyes and grit my teeth at students or readers who say they don't like a book because the characters are mean. On the other hand, literature is not, and cannot be, pure music. Words refer, even if only to each other, and that means that books are always just a little bit contaminated by horrible things like meaning and connection to things other than themselves. Why does Gass find this so abhorrent? It's the glory of literature: it can be formal, while also being much more.

Gass won't care about any of this, he'll care about the form of his prose. It's wildly uneven, like eighteenth century epic poetry in which you're meant to disregard the padding and plodding numbers and attend only to the single, perfect couplet. For some readers, including myself, that will be enough. But far too often Gass's words stumble over each other and pile up at the bottom of the page in a desperate striving for effect. He wants us to attend to the form of prose, but form means more than the sentence, more even than the paragraph. The form of prose involves the form of thought, and bad ideas will distort a writing's style. Kind of like in this review.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a great fan of Gass' novels and had hoped for some pleasaunt commentaries on favorite writers and popular phenomenon in the same vein here; Gass writes these essays like he does his novels, which is to say with extreme ornament & convolution for its own sake. Bon gre mal gre, this style is not at all conducive to the writing of essays, where where clarity of thought and rigor of expression is important, and results in some pretty turgid stuff that begs the question of why it merits the reader's time -- not least because of Gass' intense cynicism and athiesm, such that he often disputes something meaningful can be made of anything at all beyond good writing, about which he often has little more than cartoonish reverie. He tends to contradict himself all over the place and fall into relatively cheap pot-shots, which seems to reflect in an unflattering manner upon his prose style, such that the constant alliterations, grimly ironic quotations of folk idioms, and needlessly elongated sentences become quite obnoxious.

Most interesting to me was the titular essay, which is essentially a literary autobiography, indeed quite like the Tunnel: Gass makes explicit his nihilism, denying there is any meaning to life or anything of the transcendental to be found anywhere; from this he derives his claim that only literature, and particularly literature written in an interesting style, is worthwhile, and in a way that it bears little relevance on the world & indeed must be thought of as an essentially separate realm. For Gass, what makes this possible is the Henry James theory of prose -- that all writing must be thought of as the expression of a conscious mind, that is, the narrator, and that all structure ultimately derives from this principle ... which Gass, in this essay and others, seems to have thought was the ultimate culmination of the philosophic in the world, triumphing over the Platonic spirit or the Kantian reason, such that only the mind as encapsulated within the novel is the only profound metaphysical movement possible in all creation, and that this is for the pure sake of the reader's consolatory pleasure.

This attitude, essentially a worship of mind, was what bothered me more than the generally vacuous attitude & excessive prose of these essays. In a later essay about literary 'impressionism', Gass attempts to reject any sort of phenomenological theory by means of a pedantic assault on Hume's, of all people, use of the term; for Gass, mind seems to have been essentially mysterious, being generally an avatar for his most profound emotions (that is, misanthropy & life-denying nihilism). Indeed, so eager is Gass to avoid engaging with philosophy that he tends to discuss all philosophers as partaking in the same grumpy nihilism as himself, and chides them for making theories (which he discusses as nonsensical) instead of just writing, as philosophers occasionally have, ornate sentences and psychological comments. To me, it seems that there is an essentially outward-facing and world-involved facet of the human mind that probably constitutes vastly more than anything abstractable to the mysterious, and that the more generative interpretation of the James theory is to attempt to understand the human mind's relation to the world for to have complete clarity in the novel's (and humanity's, generally) involvement in worldy, political, etc affairs, and not to simply panegyrize the aforementioned limitations (which are, mind you, partial limitations on a nevertheless positive process of engaging with & inhabiting the world) in an attempt to do the very same thing, except in a totally autistic way that prevents a complete utilisation of the meaning that speech and writing always bear in every possible case. That is to say, I feel a critic of sodas should concern himself with the straw and the cup only inasmuch as it bears relevance to the flavor of the beautiful pepsi being conveyed. Of course, the relation between world, mind, soul and languge are so complicated that one cannot simply dismiss these sorts of discussion, but I think the inference that literary form is more interesting than literary content is totally baseless and incoherent.

The rest of the essays are generally quite boring; they range from surface level biographies of famous writers, similarly incoherent discussions of philosophical and popular issues, and a couple of essays about Thomas Hobbes trying to argue that literary narrative is the supreme principle of the world. I don't think there's much to be gleaned from these essays -- they're like, say, Wallace Stevens' critical writings, being at-best faintly amusing and overlong works that can neither stand up to the tiniest bit of scrutiny nor explain half of what is good about the author's serious creative work.

[Alain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel as though only giving this 4 stars is an act of betrayal: I love William H. Gass. A lot. Perhaps having started with his fiction first has put this collection at a disadvantage. It is still great, but I found myself lost far too often: lost in the metaphors, missing the links. More so in the middle, though. Either way, I'd recommend Gass to anyone: at his best he is *the* best, at his worst, still better than most.

[Jeff Jackson]

At the beach bookstore, among tattered copies of James Patterson and Nora Roberts novels, I was shocked to find a lovely hardcover copy of this. Best $4 spent in a long time.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

nicely written collection of essays. i particularly enjoyed the ones on ezra pound, the pulitzer prize, and the present tense.

[Eric Cartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I appreciated this essay collection more than his others, because I've read much from the writers whose work Gass often cites (Lowry, Porter, Nietzsche), and because I've lived through a few hundred books and had years of my own life experience since first encountering his work in the late 2000s. When Gass is great, he's the best, dazzling the mind with original metaphors and one's tongue with prose/song-sentences. But when he's off, or he's cranky, he's simply a pain in the ass. His continuous disparagement of films (also evident in his other essay collections) irked me, as though Gass expects them to equate to and function as texts. He was a philosophy professor, and he ought to have known better how the different media operate, so his frequent jabs at movies (popcorn blockbusters, arthouse masterpieces, and everything in between, apparently) seem cheap and mean. That made me recall how Don DeLillo loves films, baseball, and jazz - typically American things - and that although his prose is clinical, precise, and detached, it's distinctly of the U.S.A. William H. Gass was much more Eurocentric in his tastes (poetry, painting, "classical" music), he was older, too, but he constructed sentences that sing like no one else's, he praised writers and works from across time and around the globe, and he set out his thoughts and opinions as an elite American individualist with firm determination. One can't ever agree completely with another, so encountering a mind as comprehensive and powerful as Gass's, I'm reminded to be humble and admire him for contributing so marvelously to the world of words, words, words.

4.5/5

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acerbic and pretentious, though of course he has some insights, trapped somewhere in the midst of profoundly tedious wordplay --- for example, did you know that Ezra Pound's last name is an English word ("pound") with multiple meanings, none of which bear any relevance to his life or work? Well, don't worry, Professor Gass is here to tell you all about it!

In general, these essays made me wonder if the narrator of The Tunnel is semi-autobiographical? Gass is an unpleasant person, and it makes sense that there's no way he could have spent 20-30 years in Kohler's (fictional) mind without it bearing a reasonably strong resemblance to his own.

Also, what is it with these lit-crit types reading a few popular biographies of Nietzsche (by Nehamas or whoever else) and pretending that they're experts in continental philosophy? Gass should be extremely embarrassed by the Nietzsche and Wittgenstein essays, in particular, but all of his random references to Plato, Plotinus, Hume, etc., are undergrad-level at best. I understand that the average reader won't know the difference but Gass himself should know better, as philosophy professors generally don't read a couple biographies about Joyce and then ponderously expound upon symbolism in Finnegans Wake.

[Elijah]

Gass doesn't believe in an eternity, and he doesn't like movies, so he would never quote, if he even knows, Gladiator's tag, "What we do in life echoes in eternity," but he might concede the inverse, "What we believe about eternity echoes in life," as his belief in nothing beyond this life yields, in his criticism, an insistence on form as the best guarantee of immortality. Write and write well, because it's all of you that will remain once you're dead.

[أحمد الحقيل · Rating 5 out of 5]

ويليام جاس أحد أمهر الكتاب الأمريكين روائيا وناقدا في النصف الثاني من القرن العشرين.
قد تتفق أو تختلف معه. قد تستفزك أحيانا نبرته الأكاديمية المتعالية التي تفترض نوعا من التفوق الأخلاقي إن جاز التعبير، الشعرية المبالغ فيها في كتب مثل "أن تكون حزينا/أزرقا". ولكن سيبهرك دائما بوضوح أفكاره، بدقته. أعماله منحوتة نحتا دائما، لا مكان لنتوءات أو نشاز فيها.
عمل نقدي جدير بالقراءة. وإن كنت أختلف مع عدد ليس قليلا مما جاء فيه.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think my favorite was "A Fiesta for the Form." I also think I wanted to like this book more than I actually did.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read a few of the key essays and skipped around some. Gass is good here, but I prefer his fiction. His books on literature are all the same, basically.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gass, master puppeteer of the English language, animates the Word in essays so alive one strains to see the strings yet sees them not.

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

the opening essays on the absurdities and mediocrity of literary culture, the tics and tenses regnant in creative writing workshops, the criteria on which prizes such as the Nobel, the Pulitzer and National Book Award are doled out are really, really sharp and very entertaining; Gass' hatred is pure and there's no better advocate for what he regards as good writing

after that there are a number of extended considerations of the careers of specific individuals, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Ezra Pound (I was interested to see that Gass' take on him was that he was a bluffer, and not in a good way) and then 4 or 5 trips through the western intellectual tradition from the Garden of Eden to TV sets. these move along at a great clip but they're pretty surface level and, insofar as they have an argument, are unfortunately given over to how hard it is to be an aesthete in the contemporary United States, where one is beset by moralists of both the left and the right, who demand incessantly that one's writing speaks to concerns beyond their formal architecture.

to make it clear: I'm not sympathetic to the idea of the autonomous artwork. every writer or critic that I've yet come across who does hold with it has disarmed themselves fatally to the most central aspects of their work, especially on the level of form, and betrays a supreme incuriosity about how the ideas or images they traffic in are applied.

in comparison to heads like Nabokov or Leavis, who will tend to summarise the plot, read a few paragraphs and say 'isn't that a supreme appeal to one's sensibility?' Gass makes the broad and up to a point correct assertion that, against his notion of a naive realist, life is complex, fragmented, uneven and literary modes that are similarly refracted are more honest. this is of course the ideological wedge of 'make it new!' as Gass will on the one hand say Ulysses shows the vitality of everyday life as it is truly lived and on the other than literature should embrace the fact that popular culture has rendered it irrelevant by crafting baroque paragraphs in the dark.

ultimately there's too big a gap from the truism that Gass brandishes around about how life is complex to the repudiation of all totalities or structure. Hegel solved this problem when he said the two should check in with each other every once in a while and go from there

[Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"the classic course of the disease that arises from the continued sufferance of social disdain and unconcern: how it begins in this or that specific instance of rejection; how the poet starts to glory in the fact of it, to form his very self in terms of such an image; how he augments the facts by acting within that definition and earning further and confirming slights; and finally, how a theoretical raison de'être arrives, after the fact, indeed, but in time to justify one's hostility as a perfectly honorable and adequate response to the connivance, animosity, and stupidity of the world. Since the true causes of anti-semitism do not lie with the Jews themselves, they must lie elsewhere--so, if not in the hated, then in the hater, in another mode of misery"

[Simon Harms · Rating 3 out of 5]

like most essay collections, some hits, some misses. in particular, his writings on philosophy outside of the realm of literature failed to capture my attention. but god when he’s good he’s the greatest. so many gass-ian sentences, brimming with brooding alliteration, mean maxims, cruel questions, and antagonistic aphorisms. by no means a stand-out in his body of work but worth reading for the gass completionist.

[Gage Hoefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A more substantial offering, in my opinion, showing Gass's approach to literature as a whole. Many of the essays discuss the word and its being, and what we can best appreciate about superb writing. I struggled with a complete understanding of a few essays, and I don't always agree with what Gass writes, but it was nonetheless an enriching read.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheets of showy language, which is fitting since these essays are testimonies to Gass' love - if that is the word - of the written word. Imposing; only some will feel worthy after reading and we will have to wonder about them. Still, though I finished the book unconvinced that linguistic precision is the life-and-death matter that is shaped here, I found a lot to admire in his rigorous approach. No wonder it takes him 17 years to write a novel. All of the essays were thought provoking, but I probably liked most those about simplicity, impressionism and the use of present tense in fiction. I will read most of these essays again someday, but not in a row.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm really glad that the fiction of Gass' I've read got me interested enough in reading his essays, because this collection is fantastic. I was definitely not expecting the level of philosophical erudition presented here; Gass' writing is unbelievably well-informed. He shines the brightest, however, when writing about writers and writing; the last three essays in the collection are a head or two above the rest, in my opinion.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to study literary form then read William Gass. He is the master. His writing isn't about the topic, it is about the form. This book is a master work in example. He starts an essay on Ezra Pound like this: It is too easy, the name game - in this case. .... If used as a verb pound means to beat, if used as a noun it is a weight. You get the idea.

[Drew Lackovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of essays. Particularly, "Autobiography," "The Language of Being and Dying," and "The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde" struck me. But there's a lot here for poets as well as linguists and philosophers. A well rounded collection.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will someday read the entirety of this book, but someone specifically suggested that I read the chapter on the present tense and its pitfalls, which I did, and now I promise not to use the present tense again, well, except when I want to, because sometimes I'm a touch rebellious.

[Daryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I skimmed a few of these, skipped a couple, and really enjoyed a few. The title essay did it for me, and I also liked "Ezra Pound" (which made me feel like less of a philistine for my early impressions of the guy many years ago), "Simplicities," and "The Music of Prose."

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the essay "The Baby or the Botticelli," which is a nice rebuke to moralists from aesthetes.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some essays very good, others morbid and uninteresting and should be skipped.
The first essay bashing the Nobel prize is excellent.

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous book of essays. Beautifully written.

[Ena Alvarado · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkably outstanding.

[Somayah M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A sentence, any sentence, is consequently a passage of thought " I didn't complete it but I found it good for artists and writers