Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse

Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse; Essays in Early Modern Culture, Routledge, New York, London, 1990.

Pleasure is an important part of my sense of literature… You certainly cannot hope to write convincingly about Shakespeare without coming to terms with what Prospero at the end of The Tempest claims was his whole “project”: “to please.” (The terrible line from King Lear echoes darkly as a condemnation of failed art: “better thou/Hadst not been born than not t’have pleas’d me better.”) (Introduction, 9)

For Gregorio Garcia, whose massive study of the origins of the Indians was published in 1607, there was something diabolical about the difficulty and variety of languages in the New World: Satan had helped the Indians to invent new tongues, thus impeding the labors of Christian missionaries. (Learning to Curse, 18)

Indian languages even found some influential European admirers. … “Their language is a kind of pleasant speech, and hath a pleasing sound and some affinity with the Greek terminations.” Ralegh, likewise, finds that the Tivitivas of Guiana have “the most manlie speech and most deliberate the euer I heard of what nation soeuer,” while, in the next century, William Penn judges Indian speech “lofty” and full of words “of more sweetness or greatness” than most European tongues. (19)

This complex of convictions may illuminate that most startling document, the Requerimiento, which was drawn up in 1513 and put into effect the next year. The Requerimiento was to be read aloud to newly encountered peoples in the New World; it demands both obedience to the king and queen of Spain as rulers of the Indies by virtue of the donation of the pope, and permission for the religious fathers to preach the true faith. If these demands are promptly met, many benefits are promised, but if there should be refusal or malicious delay, the consequences are made perfectly clear:
‘We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requisition.’ … A strange blend of ritual, cynicism, legal fiction, and perverse idealism, the Requerimiento contains at its core the conviction that there is no serious language barrier between the Indians and the Europeans. (29)

The two beliefs that I have discussed in this paper—that Indian language was deficient or non-existent and that there was no serious language barrier—are not, of course, the only sixteenth-century attitudes towards American speech. I have already mentioned some of the Europeans, missionaries, and laymen who took native tongues seriously. There are, moreover, numerous practical acknowledgments of the language problem which do not simply reduce the native speech to gibberish. … But the theoretical positions on Indian speech that we have considered press in from either side on the Old World’s experience of the New. Though they seem to be opposite extremes, both positions reflect a fundamental inability to sustain the simultaneous perception of likeness and difference, the very special perception we give to metaphor. (31)

On the contrary, he insisted that his father’s hated religion was simply the practical essence of Christianity, the thing itself stripped of its spiritual mystifications. The Christians who prided themselves on their superiority to Jews were themselves practicing Judaism in their daily lives, worshipping money, serving egoistic need, buying and selling men as commodities, as so many pounds of flesh. The son’s name, of course, was Karl Marx. [40] Marlowe and Marx seize upon the Jew as a kind of powerful rhetorical device, a way of marshalling deep popular hatred and clarifying its object. The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against the dominant Christian society but, in less “pure” form, by that society. Both writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against the activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience. The Jews themselves in their real historical situation are finally incidental in these works, Marx’s as well as Marlowe’s, except insofar as they excite the fear and loathing of the great mass of Christians. It is this privileged access to mass psychology by means of a semimythical figure linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless cunning that attracts both the sixteenth-century playwright and the nineteenth-century polemicist.
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Twentieth-century history has demonstrated with numbing force how tragically misguided this rhetorical strategy was, how utterly it underestimated the irrationality, the fixation upon its object, and the persistence of anti-Semitism. The Christian hatred of the Jew, nurtured by popular superstition, middle-class ressentiment, the frequent complicity of Church and state, the place of the Jews in the European economy, the complex religious and cultural barriers, would not be so easily turned against a particular structure of economic or social relations or a cast of mind that crossed racial and religious boundaries but would light with murderous force upon the whole Jewish community. (Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism, 41)

The law did not permit the Jew to acquire land, and the Jew, for his part, did not attempt to secure such permission: ‘Landed property attracted the ordinary burgher who attained wealth because of the feeling of stability and economic security it gave him and the social prestige involved. But in his peculiar situation, the Jew would set no great store by either. (42)

Shylock … To be sure, he appeals at moments to his sameness—“Hath not a Jew eyes?”… if Shakespeare subtly suggests obscure links between Jew and Gentile, he compels the audience to transform its disturbing perception of sameness into a reassuring perception of difference. Indeed the Jew seems to embody the abstract principle of difference itself, the principle to which he appeals when the Duke demands an explanation for his malice: (43)

But while never relinquishing the anti-Semitic stereotype, Marlowe quickly suggests that the Jew is not the exception to but rather the true representative of his society. Though he begins with a paean to liquid assets, Barabas is not primarily a usurer, set off by his hated occupation from the rest of the community, but a great merchant, sending his argosies around the world exactly as Shakespeare’s much-loved Antonio does. (44)

Barabas’ avarice, egotism, duplicity, and murderous cunning do not signal his exclusion from the world of Malta but rather his central place within it. His “Judaism” is, again in Marx’s words, “a universal antisocial element of the present time” (p. 34). (45)

For Marlowe as for Marx, the dominant mode of perceiving the world, in a society hagridden by the power of money and given over to the slave market, is contempt, contempt aroused in the beholders of such a society and, as important, governing the behavior of those who bring it into being and function within it. This is Barabas’ constant attitude, virtually his signature; (46)

Most dramatic characters—Shylock is the appropriate example—accumulate identity in the course of their play; Barabas loses it. He is never again as distinct and unique an individual as he is in the first moments: / Goe tell em’ the Iew of Malta sent thee, man: / Tush, who amongst ‘em knows not Barabas? (1.102-3) (49)

The shift that critics have noted in Barabas’ language, from the resonant eloquence of the opening to the terse irony of the close (49)

At the end he seems to be pursuing deception virtually for its own sake: … As Barabas, hammer in hand, constructs the machinery for this climactic falsehood, it is difficult not to equate him with the playwright himself, constructing the plot, and Marlow appears consciously to my mind,” Barabas instructs his carpenters, “Why now I see that you haue Art indeed” (5.2285-86). Deception here takes on something of the status of literary art, and we might recall that Plato’s rival Gorgias held that deception—apate—is the very essence of the creative imagination: … Barabas devises falsehoods so eagerly because he is himself a falsehood, a fiction composed of the sleaziest materials in his culture. At times he seems almost aware of himself as such: “we are villaines both” (5.979) (52)

In fact, Marlowe celebrates his Jew for being clearer, smarter, and more self-destructive than the Christian whose underlying values Barabas travesties and transcends. Self-destructiveness in the play, as elsewhere in Marlowe’s work, is a much-admired virtue, for it is the sign that the hero has divested himself of hope and committed himself instead to the anarchic, playful discharge of his energy. Nothing stands in the way of this discharge, not even survival… (55)

Threatened with such a drastic loss of their status and authority, parents facing retirement turned, not surprisingly, to the law, obtaining contracts or maintenance agreements by which, in return for clothing, and shelter. The extent of parental anxiety may be gauged by the great specificity of many of these requirements—so many yards of woolen cloth, pounds of coal, or bushels of grain—and by the pervasive fear of being turned out of the house in the wake of a quarrel. (Lear’s Anxiety, 95)

We are, of course, very far from the social world of King Lear, which does not represent the milieu of yeoman and artisans, but I would argue that Shakespeare’s play is powerfully situated in the midst of precisely the concerns of the makers of these maintenance agreements: the terror of being turned out of doors or of becoming a stranger even in one’s own house; the fear of losing the food, clothing, and shelter necessary for survival, let alone dignity; the humiliating loss of parental authority; the dread, particularly powerful in a society that adhered to the principle of gerontological hierarchy, of being supplanted by the young. Lear’s royal status does not cancel but rather intensifies these concerns… (95)

Though he seemed at moments to sympathize with many of these demands, Luther quickly spoke out against the rebels. “You assert that no one is to be the serf of anyone else,” he writes to his “dear friends,” the peasants, “because Christ has made us all free. That is making Christian freedom a completely physical matter. did not Abraham and other patriarchs and prophets have slaves? Read what St. Paul teaches about servants, who, at that time, were all slaves.” When the peasants persisted in confusing spiritual and worldly freedom, collapsing the crucial distinction between the Two Kingdoms, Luther wrote in 1525 his notorious pamphlet “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.” The rebels, he declares, are the agents of the devil, and their revolt is a prelude to the destruction of the world: “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.” (Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion, 105)

Inescapable but not simple: new historicism, as I understand it, does not posit historical processes as unalterable and inexorable, but it does tend to discover limits or constraints upon individual intervention. Actions that appear to be single are disclosed as multiple; the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy; a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize the order of things may turn out to subvert it. And political valences may change, sometimes abruptly: there are no guarantees, no absolute, formal assurances that what seems progressive in one set of contingent circumstances will not come to seem reactionary in another. (Renaissance and Wonder, 165)

I argued in an essay published some years ago that the sites of resistance in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy are coopted in the plays’ ironic, complex, but finally celebratory affirmation of charismatic kingship. That is, the formal structure and rhetorical strategy of the plays make it difficult for audiences to withhold their consent from the triumph of Prince Hal. Shakespeare shows that the triumph rests upon a claustrophobic narrowing of pleasure, a hypocritical manipulation of appearances, and a systematic betrayal of friendship, and yet these manifestations of bad faith only contrive to heighten the spectators’ knowing pleasure and the ratification of applause. The subversive perceptions do not disappear, but insofar as they remain within the structure of the play, they are contained and indeed serve to heighten a power they would appear to question. / I did not propose that all manifestation of resistance in all literature (or even in all pays by Shakespeare) were coopted—one can readily think of plays where the force of ideological containment break down. (165)

Moreover, even my argument about Shakespeare’s second tetralogy is misunderstood if it is thought to foreclose the possibility of dissent or change or the radical alternation of the processes of history. The point is that certain aesthetic and political structures work to contain the subversion perceptions they generate, not that those perceptions simply wither away. On the contrary, they may be pried loose from the order with which they were bound up and may serve to fashion a new and radically different set of structures. How else could change ever come about? (166)

Everything can be different than it is; everything could have been different than it was. (166)

Or rather it seemed overwhelming clear that neutrality was itself a political position, a decision to support the official policies in both the state and the academy. … The fascination for me of the Renaissance was that it seemed to be powerfully linked to the present both analogically and causally. This double link at once called forth and qualified my value judgments: called them forth because my response to the past was inextricably bound up with my response to the present; qualified them because the analysis of the past revealed the complex, unsettling historical genealogy of the very judgments I was making. To study Renaissance culture then was simultaneously to feel more rooted and more estranged in my own values. (167)

One of the more irritating qualities of my own literary training had been its relentlessly celebratory character: literary criticism was and largely remains a kind of secular theodicy. Every decision made by a great artist could be shown to be a brilliant one; works that had seemed flawed and uneven to an earlier generation of critics bent on displaying discriminations in taste were now revealed to be organic masterpieces. A standard critical assignment in my student years was to show how a text that seemed to break in parts was really a complex whole: … Behind these exercises was the assumption that great works of art were triumphs of resolution, that they were, in Bakhtin’s term, monological—the mature expression of a single artistic intention. (168)

If I do not approach works of art in a spirit of veneration, I do approach them in a spirit that is bets described as wonder. Wonder has not been alien to literary criticism, but it has been associated (if only implicitly) with formalism rather than historicism. I wish to extend this wonder beyond the formal boundaries of works of art, just as I wish to intensify resonance within those boundaries. (170)

It will be easier to grasp the concepts of resonance and wonder if we think of… galleries and museums… By resonance I mean the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which as metaphor or more simply as metonymy it may be taken by a viewer to stand. By wonder I mean the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention. (170)

In Louis Montrose’s convenient formula, the goal has been to grasp simultaneously the historicity of texts, and the textuality of history. (170)

Stanley Fish, Surprised By Sin

Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin; The Reader in Paradise Lost, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1971.

Meaning is an event, something that happens, not on the page, where we are accustomed to look for it, but in the interaction between the flow of print (or sound) and the actively mediating consciousness of a reader-hearer. (Preface, x)

I would like to add a point of clarification. Chapter 5 argues that in the course of the poem, the reader is asked to make a series of interpretive choices either contribute to or undermine his understanding of the Fall. It was not made sufficiently clear, I think, that the reader who chooses correctly has nevertheless felt the attraction of the wrong choice, and is therefore always aware of the poem that a part of him would like to be reading and is, in some sense, writing. In short, there is no escape in the pem from the truth about oneself, which is finally its subject. (xi)

My subject is Milton’s reader, and my thesis, simply, that the uniqueness of the poem’s theme—man’s first disobedience and the fruit thereof—results in the reader’s being simultaneously a participant in the action and a critic of his own performance. (xiii)

I shall argue, the reader (1) is confronted with evidence of his corruption and becomes aware of his inability to respond adequately to spiritual conceptions, and / (2) is asked to refine his perceptions so that his understanding will be once more proportionable to truth the object of it. / The following chapters, then, will explore two patterns—the reader’s humiliation and his education—(xiii)

The reader is prepared to hiss the devil off the stage and applaud the pronouncements of a partisan and somewhat human deity… but that Milton consciously wants to worry his reader, to force him to doubt the correctness of his responses, and to bring him to the realization that his inability to read the poem with any confidence in his own perceptions is its focus. (4)

This is our first view of Satan and the impression given, reinforced by a succession of speeches in Book I, is described by Waldock: ‘fortitude in adversity, enormous endurance, a certain splendid recklessness, remarkable powers of rising to an occasion, extraordinary qualities of leadership (shown not least in his salutary taunts)’. But in each case Milton follows the voice of Satan with a comment which complicates, and according to some, falsifies, our reaction to it: / So spake th’ Apostate Angel, though in pain, / Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair. (125-6) Waldock’s indignation at this authorial intrusion is instruction: / ‘If one observes what is happening one sees that there is hardly a great speech of Satan’s that Milton is not at paints to correct, to damp down and neutralize. He will put some glorious thing in Satan’s mouth, then, anxious about the effect of it, will pull us gently by the sleeve, saying (for this is what it amounts to) : Do not be carried away by this fellow: he sounds splendid, but take my word for it…’ (4-5)

There are several assumptions… (5) The question of relative authority is purely an aesthetic one. That is, the reader is obliged to hearken to the most dramatically persuasive of any conflicting voices. / Of these I can assent only to the first. (5)

…logic is a safeguard against a rhetorical effect only after the effect has been noted. The deep distrust, even fear, of verbal manipulation in the seventeenth century is a recognition of the fact that there is no adequate defence against eloquence at the moment of impact. (The appeal of rhetoric was traditionally associated with the weakness of the fallen intellect—the defect of our hearers; its fine phrases flatter the desires of the cupidinous self and perpetuate the disorder which has reigned in the soul since the Fall.) (6)

In writing Paradise Lost, then Milton is able to draw upon a tradition of didacticism which finds its expression in a distrust of the affective and an insistence on the intellectual involvement of the listener-pupil; in addition he could rely on his readers to associate logic and the capacity for logical reasoning with the godly instinct in man, and the passions, to which rhetorical appeals, with his carnal instincts. (7)

In Books I and II these ‘correctives’ are particularly numerous and, if the word can be used here, tactless. Waldock falsifies his experience of the poem, I think, when he characterized Milton’s countermands as gentle; we are not warned (‘Do not be carried away by this fellow’), but accused, taunted by an imperious voice… we resent this rebuke, not, as Waldock suggests, because our aesthetic sense balks at a clumsy attempt to neutralize an unintentional effect, but because a failing has been exposed in a context that forces us to acknowledge it. (9)

In Book I, Milton is the conjurer: by naming Satan he disarms us, and allows us to feel secure in the identification of an enemy who traditionally succeeds through disguise (serpent, cherub). But as William Haller notes, in The Rise of Puritanism, nothing is more indicative of a graceless state than a sense of security: … Protected from one error (the possibility of listening sympathetically to a disgusted enemy) we fall easily into another (spiritual inattentiveness) and fail to read Satan’s speech with the critical acumen it demands. (14)

After I.125-6 the reader proceeds determined not to be caught out again; but invariably he is. … this mental armour is never quite strong enough to resist the insidious attack of verbal power; and always the irritatingly omniscient epic voice is there to point out a deception even as it succeeds. As the poem proceeds and this little drama is repeated, the reader’s only gain is an awareness of what is happening to him; he understands that his responses are being controlled and mocked by the same authority, (15)

Satan continually deludes himself by supposing that he can act apart from God, and in this passage we come to understand that delusion by (momentarily) sharing it. … Thomas Greene observes that ‘it is a little anti-climactic for the reader after following the tremulously the fallen couple’s gropings towards redemption… to hear from the Father’s lips that he has decreed it—that all of this tenderly human scene, this triumph of conjugal affection and tentative moral searching, occurred only by divine fiat’ (19)

In the divorce tracts Milton reveals the source of this poetic technique when he analyzes the teaching of Christ, ‘not so much a teaching, as an intangling’. … ‘for Christ gives no full comments or continu’d discourses…scattering the heavenly grain of his doctrin like pearle heer and there, which requires a skilfull and laborious gatherer.’ … he does not scruple to mislead them, temporarily: ‘But why did not Christ seeing their error informe them? For good cause; it was his profest method not to teach them all things at all times, but each thing in due place and season… the Disciples took it [one of his gnomic utterances] in a manifest wrong sense, yet our Saviour did not there informe them better… ‘Due season’ means when they are ready for it, and they will be ready for it when the seeds he has sown obliquely have brought them to the point where a more direct revelation of the truth will be efficacious; (21)

By first ‘intangling’ us in the folds of Satan’s rhetoric, and then ‘informing us better’ in ‘due season’, Milton forces us to acknowledge the personal relevance of the Arch-fiend’s existence; (22)

Finally, the experience of reading the simile tells us a great deal about ourselves. How large is Satan’s spear? The answer is, we don’t know, although it is important that for a moment we thing we do. … Book III, Satan lands on the Sun: / There lands the Fiend, a spot like which perhaps/ Astronomer in the Sun’s lucent Orb/ Through his glaz’d optic Tube yet never saw. (588-90)… the reader is encouraged to assume that his perceptions extend to the object the poet would present, only to be informed that he is in error; … constructed in such a way that the error must be made before it can be acknowledged by a surprised reader. (28)

It is at this time, when the reader’s attention has relaxed, that Milton slips by him the ‘now’ of 54 and the present tense of ‘torments’, the first present in the passage. The effect is to alert the reader both to his location (Hell) and to his inability to retrace the journey that brought him there. Re-reading leads him only to repeat the mental operations the passage demands, and while the arrival in Hell is anticipated, it is always a surprise. The technique is of course the technique of the spot and spear similes, and of the clash between involuntary response and authorial rebuke, and again Milton’s intention is to strip from us another of the natural aids we bring to the task of reading. The passage itself tells us this in lines 50-51, although the message may pass unnoted at first: ‘Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night’. Does space measure day and night? Are day and night space? The line raises these questions, and the half-line that follows answers them, not ‘to mortal men’, who think in terms of duration and sequence, not to us. In this poem we must, we will, learn a new time. (33-34)

Milton cannot recreate the eternal moment, but by encouraging and then blocking the construction of sequential relationships he can lead the reader to accept the necessity of, and perhaps even apprehend, negatively, a time that is ultimately unavailable to him because of his limitation. (35)

…the reader who fails repeatedly before the pressures of the poem soon realizes that his difficulty proves its major assertions—the fact of the Fall, and his own (that is Adam’s) responsibility for it, and the subsequent woes of the human situation. The reasoning is circular, but the circularity is appropriate to the uniqueness of the poem’s subject matter; (38)

in Book ix when Adam chooses to disobey. … The ambivalence of the response is meaningful because the reader is able to identify its components with different parts of his being: one part, faithful to what he has been taught to believe (his ‘erected wit’) and responsive to the unmistakable sentiments of the poem’s official voice, recoils in the presence of what he knows to be wrong; but another part, subversive and unbidden (his ‘infected will’) surprises and overcomes him and Adam is secretly applauded. It would be a mistake to deny either of these impulses; they must be accepted and noted because the self must be accepted before it can be transformed. (43)

The fifth inference I drew from Waldock’s criticism of the intrusive epic voice was that for him the question of relative authority is a purely aesthetic one. ‘Milton’s allegations clash with his demonstrations… in any work of imagination literature at all it is the demonstration… that has the higher validity: an allegation can possess no comparable authority’ … The insistence on the superiority of showing as opposed to telling is, as Wayne Booth has shown, a modern one, and particularly unfortunate in this case since it ignores the historical reality of the genre… the authority of epic voices in other epics is accepted because their comments either confirm or anticipate the reading experience; Milton invites us to put his epic voice on trial by allowing the reading experience to contradict it. … Milton assumes a predisposition in favour of the epic voice rather than a modern eagerness to put that voice on trial; (46-7)

Satan’s initial attractiveness owes as much to a traditional idea of what is heroic as it does to our weakness before the rhetorical lure. He exemplifies a form of heroism most of us find easy to admire because it is visible and flamboyant (the epic voice also admires: the ‘though in pain’ of ‘So spake th’ Apostate Angel, though in pain’ is a recognition of the steadfastness that can belong even to perversity; the devil is always given his due). Because his courage is never denied (instead Milton insists on it) while his virtue and goodness are (in the ‘allegations’ of the epic voice), the reader is led to revise his idea of what a true hero is. If this poem does anything to its readers, it forces them to make finer and finer discriminations. (49)

To summarize: Paradise Lost is a dialectical experience which has the advantage traditionally claimed for dialectic of involving the respondent in his own edification. On one level at least the poem has the form of a Platonic dialogue, with the epic voice taking the role of Socrates, and the reader in the position of a Phaedrus or a Cratylus, continually forced to acknowledge his errors, (49)

Arnold stein notes that God’s ‘language and cadence are as unsensuous as if Milton were writing a model for the Royal Society… Jackson Cope makes more explicit Stein’s coupling of the human and the metaphorical: ‘This eye of God does not see things metaphorically, but in their essential natures… God in his own voice can never speak metaphorically.’ [The Metaphorical Structure of Paradise Lost, p. 168. Actually Cope goes on to argue that God does indeed use metaphorical language, but he is using the word ‘metaphoric’ in a sense that makes his inclusion here not much of a distortion.] (59)

In the seventeenth century, …To the watchful Christian, the rhetorical appeal is something to be feared because it panders to a part of him he knows to be subversive, while the philosopher disdains it as a clouder of men’s minds and an impediment to scientific investigation; conversely, bareness and clarity or organization are not only valued, but welcomed, with the kind of physical pleasure men in other ages reserve for beautiful (lyric) poems or beautiful women. In other words, the prevailing orthodoxies—linguistic, theological, scientific—make possible an affective response to a presentation because it is determinedly non-affective. (61-2)

Cope might well be describing it when he speaks of ‘the spatialized form of logic which reduced reality to a visual object, and supplanted dialogue by the monologue of the expositor pointing out the connections among parts’. [Metaphorical Structure, pp. 33-34] Walter Ong’s characterization of Ramist-Puritan poetry is similarly apposite: /
‘When the Puritan mentality which is…the Ramist mentality, produces poetry, it is at first blatantly didactic, but shades gradually into reflective poetry which does not talk to anyone in particular but meditates on objects.’ [Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, pp. 287-8] /
To those who are accustomed to think Milton’s God querulous or self-justifying, the suggestion that he does not talk to anyone in particular may seem curious. Technically, however, the tonal qualities usually ascribed to his voice are accidental, the result of what the reader reads into the speech rather than of what is there. (62)

When Milton’s God asks ‘whose fault?’ and answers ‘Whose but his own? ingrate’, the question is posed because the exposition of the thing or item under consideration (man’s position in the universe) requires that it be answered; and in the answer given, ‘ingrate’, is a term not of reproach, but of definition. (64)

God… speaks… a language free of ‘synonymous words’, ‘Equivocals’, words of ‘several significations’, and of metaphors, those ‘affected ornaments’ which prejudice the native simplicity of speech ‘and contribute to the disguising of it with false appearances’ (p.18). God is the perfect name-giver whose word is the thing in all its aspects. In the ultimate philosophical sense his words are true. (65)

Milton’s Art of Logic, arranged after the method of Peter Ramus, the first of the arguments or logical topics to be applied is cause: ‘This first place of invention is the fount of all knowledge; and in fact if the cause of something can be comprehended it is believed to be known’. God asks ‘whose fault?’ (what cause?) and replies immediately, ‘Whose but his own?’. (The mode of Ramist logic is self-interrogation.) Before the answer can be said to be truly comprehensive the agent must be more precisely identified. … There follows a proof or argument (in the Ramist sense) by negatives: Adam is at fault because no one else is (‘Not I’). The unfolding of the discourse continues until nothing remains to be clarified or disposed, and we end with God’s mercy, that attribute which shows him to be independent of his own causal sequences while indicating his willingness to extricate his creates from them. (68)

Yet he would be aware also of his obligation to readers ‘of soft and delicious temper who will not somuch as look upon Truth herselfe, unlesse they see her elegantly drest’, and as a teacher he would know that ‘Truth…ere she can come to the triall and inspection of the Understanding’ must first ‘passe through many little wards and limits of the several Affections and Desires’, putting on ‘such colours and attire as those Pathetick [appealing to the emotions] handmaids of the soul please to lead her in to their Queen’. [Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don Wolfe (New Haven, 1953), i. 817, 818, 830.] In this passage from Reason of Church Government, Milton joins those who echo Aristotle’s reluctant concession to the ‘defect of our hearers’, admitting rhetoric into their systems in recognition of a basic human weakness. (69)

If the soliloquy is finally the first stage in the progressive humanization of the epic voice, it is also a revelation of his fallibility. the tersely confident declaratives, so familiar in Books I and II, give way here to the provisionality of the suppliant (‘that I may see’). The blind poet who wanders ‘where the Muses haunt’ and seeks guidance is suddenly with us rather than above us (it is the father who now bends down ‘from above’), (72)

God’s syntax also contributes to the ‘proof’ or demonstration of his character. Satan’s fallacies are wrapped in serpentine trains of false beginnings, faulty pronoun references, missing verbs and verbal schemes which sacrifice sense to sound (‘Surer to prosper than prosperity/ Could have assur’d us’); it is a loose style, irresponsibility digressive, moving away steadily from logical coherence (despite the appearance of logic) … God… his syntax is close and sinewy, adhering to the ideal of brevity (brevitas) … the intrusion of personality is minimal, the figures of speech are unobtrusive and the point, and one has little sense of a style apart from the thought. The speech is an example of the lucidity anonymous style Cicero recommends to anyone seeking to appear authorative: ‘The exordium… should contain everything which contributes to dignity…It should contain very little brilliance, vivacity, or finish of style, because these give rise to a suspicion of preparation and excessive ingenuity. As a result… the speech lose conviction and the speaker, author.’ (75)

In this case the orator’s task is not so much to arouse passions as to assuage them by providing reassurance and clarification to counteract the fear and confusion his auditors feel when they come to him. The emotion Milton is reaching for here is relief, the physical sense of having exchanged the chaotic liveliness of Hell for the calm stasis of Heaven. (77)

God is not a rhetorician, but he has a rhetorician’s success. The formal proof of deity, rigorously non-rhetorical, becomes part of the rhetorical proof (in Stoic-Ramus theory the oratorical and philosophical ideals tend to merge). We flee our compromising involvement with the affective in Books I and II and respond affectively to its antithesis in Book III. (80)

The idea that books (sacred or profane) read the reader is not a novel one. Replying to the charge that poets are ‘corruptors of morals’, Boccaccio replies, ‘Rather, if the reader is prompted by a healthy mind, not a diseased one, they will prove actual stimulators to virtue, either subtle or poignant, as occasion requires.’ And Milton is even more explicit in Areopagitica, when he declares /
‘To the pure all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil’d. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance; and yet … bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. [Complete Prose Works, ii. 512-13] (84)

The division some see in the logical and rhetorical aspects of God’s public personality is a reflection of the division in the fallen reader, between that part of him which recognizes the truth and that part of him which rises, unbidden, against it, and resists its efforts to make him free. (86)

The emotional content of a word like ‘ingrate’ (if it is felt) is provided by the reader who receives it defensively, his pride resisting the just accusation, and confers on the speaker a tone compatible with his own reaction; … Equally illusory is God’s vaunted defensiveness. He does not argue, he asserts, disposing a series a self-evident axioms in an objective order, ‘not talking to anyone in particular but meditating on objects’. (Of course, God technically addresses the Son, but he is not in any sense, we feel, initiating a discussion, although he is, as we discover, creating a situation within which the poem’s first truly heroic act will be performed. (86)

A logical proof in the Ramist (non-syllogistic) manner proceeds by contraries. The positive (‘Whose but his own?’) is proved by elimination alternative possibilities; (86-7)

A morality of stylistics. The poem embodies a Platonic aesthetic or anti-aesthetic in which the still clarity and white light of divine reality, represented (figured forth) in the atonal formality of God’s abstract discourse, is preferred to the colour and chaotic liveliness of earthly motions, represented in Satan’s ‘grand style’ … contrasting appeals of the beauty of the created world and the heavenly (true) beauty of which all bodily forms are an expression. (88)

Cf. Plato, Laws, VII. 802c-d (trans. R. G. Bury, London, 1926): ‘For if a man has been reared from childhood up to the age of steadiness and sense in the use of music that is sober and regulated, then he detests the opposite kind whenever he hears it, and calls it ‘vulgar’; whereas if he had been reared in the common honeyed kind of music, he declares the opposite of this to be cold and unpleasing.’ Thus the ‘uneducated’ reader finds God’s music ‘cold and unpleasing’, but responds to the ‘honeyed kind’ of Satan. (89)

The invitation to ascend. Once the reader becomes aware of his situation with respect to the contraries of Heaven and Hell, and has located himself somewhere between the two, he is invited to ascend on the stylistic scale by ‘purging his intellectual ray’ to the point where his understanding is once more ‘fit and proportionable to Truth the object and end of it’, and his affections follows what his reason (the eye of the mind) approves. [The arc of the narrative describes a Platonic ascent, which culminates (for the reader who is able to move with it) in the simultaneous apprehension of the absolute form of the Good and the Beautiful, ‘without shape or colour, intangible, visible only to reason, the soul’s pilot’ (Phaedrus, 247). In Christian terms, the movement imitates the return of the soul to God and pre-figures Christ’s victory over death: … Jackson Cope, op. cit., p. 108] (90)

If he is successful as a guide, the narrator confers on us the gift of his blindness (to earthly things) and persuades us to value it above the sight he has lost and we acknowledge as unreliable. (91)

Satan thinks himself grandly ironic whenhe reminds his groveling and prostate legions of the titles they fought to preserve. … (315-23) What Satan fails to realize is that physical posture has nothing to do with virtue, a cast of mind now unavailable to the rebels. (98)

Any admiration one might have for Satan’s rhetoric as a piece of strategy is submerged in the terrible irony of ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n’ (300). … Milton will not allow Satan even a small success. His force are only half awake (‘ere well awake’): / Nor did they not perceive the evil plight/ In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel. (335-6)… They do perceive the fire, the pain, the gloom, but they are blind to the moral meaning of their situation, that is to their evil plight. (99)

…when ‘fall’ is taken to have no meaing beyond the obviously physical, and ‘loss’ is a political concept, and light the province of the interior decorator, the reader is entitled to congratulate himself on his superior understanding. (100)

the fallen reader betrays himself when he fells obliged to pass moral judgement or every action or utterance. ‘Wanton’ and ‘loose’ and ‘error’ trouble us because we cannot help but read into them moral implications that are not relevant until the Fall has occurred. … These lines move easily, lulling the reader into a complacency that renders him vulnerable to the shock of ‘dishevell’d’. The tradition calls for an idealized Eve… the word troubles. Is there, can there be, disorder in Paradise? (101)

In retrospect, ‘dishevell’d’ is seen to mean ‘not arranged in any symmetirical pattern’ and ‘wanton’ to be standard seventeenth-century usage for ‘unrestrained’ (there are no restraints in Paradise). If Eve’s tresses were plaited or bejeweled, she would be open to the suspicion of vanity; as it is, her ‘sweet disorder’, her ‘wantonness’ is innocent precisely because it is not ‘too precise in every part’. /
In short, the reader will declare Even innocent of a sensuality whose only existence is in his mind; but it is a conscious effort, made necessary ultimately by his inability to delimit the connotations of a prelasparian vocabulary and more immediately by Milton’s deliberate evocation of the preachers’ scarlet woman. (102)

A pure sexuality may seem a contradiction in terms, but only because it is unavailable to us in our present state; … the sudden introduction of a third perspective: /
With kisses pure: aside the Devil turn’d
For envy, yet with jealous leer malign
Ey’d them askance (502-4)/
The effort of the devil’s entrance (he has been there all along as our widow on the scene, but we have forgotten him) is not unlike the effect of ‘Then was not guilty shame’ (313). The reader is alerted to the contrast between the ‘kisses pure’ and the impurity of the voyeur’s response and is forced to acknowledge whatver part of that response he shares. (106)

whatsoever Adam called every living thing creature that was the name thereof.’ This act is taken to be proof of Adam’s superior knowledge, and the names he gives the animals are thought to be exact, corresponding in each case to the essence of the species. Adam’s knowledge is infused into him directly by God (114)

Milton provides a prose gloss to this passage in Tetrachordon: ‘Adam who had the wisdom giv’n him to know all creatures, and to name them according to their properties, no doubt but had the gift to discern perfectly.’ [Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, 1959), ii. 642.] (114)

R. F. Jones, whose researches are indispensable for this period, argues that ‘the remarkable development of mathematics in the seventeenth century, to which Descartes contributed much, and especially the improved mathematical symbols that were coming into use, exerted no small influence upon conceptions of what language should be… the movement toward clear definitions characteristic of this period drew much of its inspiration from mathematics. [The Seventeenth Century, Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature form Bacon to Pope (Stanford, 1951), pp. 150-1.] (117)

Mrs. MacCaffrey cites a sermon of Donne’s: ‘God shall create us all Doctors in a minute… no more preaching, no more reading of Scriptures, and that great School-Mistress, Experience, and Observation shall be remov’d, no new thing to be done, and in an instant, I shall know more, than they all could reveal unto me.’ [Paradise Lost as ‘Myth’, p. 36] According to Donne, this awaits us in the life to come, but for Ward, Webster, Sprat and others it is a goal attainable on the earth, if not immediately, then within several generations. (119)

Cf. Hobbes on the abuse of words: ‘When men register their thoughts wrong by the inconstancy of the signification of their words, by which they register for their conception that which they never conceived… when they use words metaphorically—that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for—and thereby deceive others’ (Leviathan i. 4, p. 38) (note, 122)

Sprat: ‘How many rewards, which are due to more profitable, and difficult arts, have been still snatch’d away by the easie vanity of fine speaking? [The History of the Royal Society, London, 1667, pp. 111-13] (123) Sprat qualifies his indictment with the usual concession to the importance of rhetoric as a defensive weapon, lest ‘the naked Innocence’ of virtue, would be on all occasions ‘expos’d to the armed malice of the wicked’, but for all practical purposes the devil has disappeared or has at least been disarmed by the corrective control of methodical plainness. (123)

The plain style associated with the scientific movement is not the plain style Morris Croll has identified with anti-Ciceronianism. The two share an ideal—mirror-like fidelity to a reality. It is the realities that differ, at least in the early stages of each movement when goals are unambiguously stated. The anti-Ciceronians attempt in their style to portray ‘exactly those athletic movements of the mind by which it arrives at a sense of reality [124] … On the other hand, the philosophy that yields the mathematical plainness of Sprat and Wilkins implicitly denies or skirts the concept of individuality. In Croll’s terms, the scientific style is oratorical (members of the Royal Society would blanch at the accusation) because it concerns itself with ‘general and communal ideas’ and does not recognize the thinking mind as an active part of the cognitive process. The universal applicability of method makes all minds one mind, a common and passive machine harnessed and directed by a power independent of it; and the machine, properly controlled, is assumed to be answerable to the reality it would record. In this way, the human factor is phased out and the epistemological gap between concepts in the mind and their objective existence in nature is bridged… Lip service is still paid to the inherent weakness of mortal faculties, but once that weakness has been isolated, it can be discounted, at least in practice, and finally ignored, even in theory. (124-5)

Actually, as modern physicists are quick to admit, mathematical or neutral notations are no more objective, in a final sense, than are the ‘reports from within’ sent out to us by a lyric poet. (126)

Sympathetic though he may be to the more limited aims of his contemporaries, especially as they relate to the distrust of rhetoric he everywhere evidences, Milton is unable to share their optimism, largely because it contains a latent impiety. It is this that D. C. Allen discerns when he explains Milton’s reticence on the subject of the original tongue, despite the fact that he ‘was quite aware of the general linguistic theories of his age’ : A similar observation underlies P. Albert Duhamel’s insistence that Milton could never have been a committed Ramist: … for Milton ‘the immediate intuitive perception of logical relations’ is the hallmark of prelapsarian thought processes, as is the possession of a perfect language. (126-7)

I cannot emphasize too much the deliberateness of this pattern. The placing of ‘wanton’ and ‘dishevell’d’ and later of ‘loose’ (IV. 497) is too conspicuously awkward to be accidental. They are there to create problems or puzzles which the reader feels obliged to solve since he wishes, naturally, to retain a sense of control over the reading experience. (130)

If there are any moments in the poem which should be free of evil or even of the suggestion of evil, surely they are when Paradise is put before our eyes and again when God performs his first and greatest mercy, creation. Mrs. McCaffrey seems almost to attribute the ‘sense of danger’ we feel in the presence of innocence and Godhead, respectively, to a potential for evil in nature. But Milton everywhere insists that ‘matter… proceeded incorruptible from God, and even since the fall it remains incorruptible.’ Again one must exclude (consciously) the tainted meaning, rejecting with it the idea of a guilty nature. The serpent too much be pronounced innocent. … By confronting the reader with a vocabulary bearing the taint of sin in a situation that could not possibly harbour it, Milton leaves him no choice but to acknowledge himself as the source, and to lament. (136)

The reader does not think to cry, ‘What shall I do?’, because he is always doing something—analyzing, judging, comparing, recalling. The intuition that man is unworthy and can do nothing is not likely to be properly humbling if one has worked very hard to earn it. (It is physically and psychologically exhausting to read this poem.) What the reader must finally learn is that the analytical intellect, so important to the formulation of necessary distinctions, is itself an instrument of perversion and the child of corruption because it divides and contrasts and evaluates where there is in reality a single harmonious unity. The probing and discursive mind may be essential to the piecing together of the shining oneness of Truth, but at the end of the effort is the abandonment of self-consciousness … the stasis assumed as its goal. Overvalue the process and you deny the goal as something to be desired; (143)

The reader must understand that mindlessness—a sense of well-being because the mind knows nothing else (no better, we might say mistakenly)—is virtuous, and that his inability to be mindless is his punishment. This insight awaits the reader in Book VII, the creation scene, when Milton gives him an opportunity to relax, and be at his ease, and lets him feel the horror of being able to do neither. (144)

A similar manoeuvre is called for when Milton insists on the innocence of icons he has previously used to represent sin… It is, to say at least, surprising, then, to meet the simile once again in strange surroundings, amidst the joyful numbering of God’s created: …
…there Leviathan
Hugest of living Creatures, on the Deep
Stretched like a Promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems like a moving Land. (412-15) (150)

When Milton asks of Eve’s and Adam’s trespass, ‘For what sin can be named, which was not included in this one act’, he does not mean that in this sin are potentially all sins, but that this sin is all sins: … ‘unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony; in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband, in both an insensibility to the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; patricide, theft’ [etc] … While the moral structure of the universe—its radical unity—survives the Fall, man’s ability to perceive it does not. … Adam and Eve need only refrain from doing something to affirm their obedience, … But fallen man must keep every point in order to fulfill one. (159)

The tree is always there and eating of it is always a possibility and not eating of it is always virtue. The literal physicality of the law—the fact of the tree— In the Fall… he is no longer able to see the oneness of God’s law and is delivered to the Mosaic law, the perfect reflection of his divided vision. … What Milton describes in the Areopagitica—the piecing together of the shattered image of truth—is not more than this, the recovery of the unified moral vision of Edenic innocence; and it is the task he sets the reader in the poem. (160)

In an important way epic heroism, of which Satan is a noteworthy instance, is the antithesis of Christian heroism, and a large part of the poem is devoted to distinguishing between the two and showing the superiority of the latter. Since this involves the debunking of an ideal the reader brings with him from other epics, the reading experience is once again educative and, in a special sense, disillusioning. (162)

I would suggest an even more complex and more ambivalent relationship: for if the devils suffer when their actions and motives are contrasted with the actions and motives of epic heroes, these heroes in turn do not escape the taint of Satanism, since their valour is qualified by its availability to devils. The reader… can only wait on the promise of something more clearly exemplary. (169)

While it is not technically military, the debate in Hell can be viewed as such a scene. (Forensic wars are not unlike real ones.) Each of the speakers rises with the intention of ending the battle of words at a single blow, much as Abdiel and Michael hope to decide the war in Heaven by the strength of their own right arms; but Beelzebub’s victory (which has been staged by Satan) is hollow, for there can be no victory, rhetorical or otherwise, in a contest whose goal is the formulation of a plan to be used against God. (170)

When the devils disperse, some play games of war—all wars are games of the most infantile kind—and they face each other in the now familiar configuration of battle. Here the language of Milton’s description indicates the contempt we are supposed to share: (171)

Gabriel knows it:
Satan, I know thy strength, and thou know’st mine,
Neither our own, but giv’n; what folly then
To boast what Arms can do, since thine no more
Than Heav’n permits, nor mine though doubl’d now
To trample thee as mire. (1006-10)
Not that Gabriel’s strength has actually been redoubled; but if it were he could take no credit for the results. This is an open and direct statement of what has previously been implied: Whatever heroism and virtue are, they do not reside where men have been accustomed to look for them. Later, when the battles and events of Book VI have unfolded, we shall realize that Gabriel is heroic here because he admits that, in the conventional sense, he cannot be. (175-6)

The battle decides nothing because battles have no real relationship to the issues one would have them settle. Adam learns this when he mistakenly expects a final struggle between God and Satan: /
…say where and when
Thir fight, what stroke shall bruise the Victor’s heel. (XII. 384-5)
And Michael, who knows from experience how inconclusive any physical contact is, answers:
Dream not of thir fight,
As of a Duel, or the local wounds
Of head or heel…
…nor so is overcome
Satan, whose fall from Heav’n, a deadlier bruise,
Disabl’d not to give thee thy death’s wound:
Which hee, who comes thy Saviour, shall recure,
Not by destroying Satan, but his works
In thee and in thy Seed. (XII. 386-8, 390-5)
Perhaps Michael is remembering at this moment that the victor in the struggle against sin (Satan’s works) was also the victor in the war he had hoped to end. (180)

On one hand, ‘we are led to expect that Michael’s army will soon prevail’, yet ‘in the even they can achieve nothing better than a stalemate. The effect is surely to expose them to our disappointment, to make ‘the excellence, the power Which God hath in his mighty Angels plac’d’ (637-8) appear equivocal’. (Peter was of course anticipated by Voltaire, who protested in 1727 at ‘the visible Contradiction which reigns in that Episode’, that is at the failure of the angels to drive out the rebels. (181)

True virtue is a state of mind—loyalty to the best one knows—and true heroism is a psychic (willful) action—the decision, continually made in a variety of physical situations, to maintain that loyalty. … The problem, then, is to separate the drama from the heroism, an operation which Milton forces on us in Book VI. He presents Abdiel to us fully aware that we are likely to accept him uncritically and uncomprehendingly. Once accepted, the angel is systemically stripped of everything not directly relevant to his heroism, until we are left to recognize (if we are willing) the naked essence of itself. In effect, the reader comes to understand heroism by repeatedly adjusting his idea of what makes one hero heroic. (184)

But if the loyal angels are incapable of pain and cannot be wearied, their ability to stand in fight is hardly remarkable or praiseworthy. Indeed this advantage is a disadvantage if ‘difficulty’ is one condition of heroism (ultimately, as we shall see, it is not), for it gives Satan and his followers something to put up with, something to rise above: ‘Some disadvantage we endur’d and pain, / Till now not known, but known as soon contemn’d’ (431-2). This is perverted stoicism, … Still the picture of Satan gritting his teeth and bearing it does have a certain force, and it is certainly more visibly impressive than anything we see on the other side. (187)

Believing it only just ‘That he who in debate of Truth hath won,/ Should win in Arms’, he does not abandon his post or question the ways of God when his sense of justice is disappointed; (188)

The desire to serve God is a particularly subtle form of pride if it is in fact a desire to feel needed and important. Milton is especially aware of this danger. In ‘When I consider’ he murmurs against that decree of God’s which has rendered him ‘useless’ … The admission, however, is wrung from him with difficulty, and one wonders how long it will be before the passion to be useful reasserts itself. In contrast, Abdiel’s acceptance of his uselessness is impressive precisely because it is unconscious. He is able to regard his own superfluousness as a matter of praise and feel no personal injury (sense of injured merit) at all. (188-9)

What has been said here of Abdiel applies also to his fellow warriors who all fight a battle they know to be pointless, under conditions that can justly be described as humiliating, for a leader who could do very well without them. ‘They perceive or come to perceive themselves as agents in an action beyond their anticipations or immediate comprehensions.’ Michael’s experience parallels Abdiel’s exactly, the expectation (to end intestine war), the apparent victory, the final absurdity (Yet soon he healed). (190)

As a patron, God presents a definite problem. One cannot give him anything, because everything is his in the first place, that is, proceeds from him. It is equally difficult to render him a service, since he is by definition self-sufficient. Praise, in any number of forms, including useless tasks, is the only commodity the suppliant can offer. (191)

By assigning them a task they cannot accomplish and an enemy whose disloyalty should be a crippling liability but is not, and a physical arena designed to force them into strategic absurdities, God creates a situation in which the conventional motives for heroic fortitude—success, glory, personal fulfillment—do not pertain and perseverance can only be attributed to a faith in the goodness of the Almighty, to obedience. (192)

All the angels, good and bad, are props in a gigantic stage setting constructed for the sole purpose of providing a moment of glory for God’s only begotten son. The epic voice says as much—‘and permitted all…/ That his great purpose he might so fulfil, / To honor his Anointed Son’ (674-6)—and the angels no doubt infer it when they see his chariot: ‘far off his coming shone.’ Here is provocation and an incitement to resentment if resentment is to be forthcoming; but wondrously the angels greet the appearance of the Messiah and his assumption of their appointed task with joy: (194)

Seeking spectacular occasions for trial and therefore for glory is itself a temptation. So that perhaps the ultimate in heroism. … to sit at God’s table without feeling constrained to earn a place there. (196)

The individual is involved in a series of indeterminate actions whose relationship to the desired end is, from his point of view, oblique. Such actions often appear ridiculous and base (i.e. the indignities Christian and Faithful suffer at Vanity Fair). (197)

If our hearers are defective, if the age will not be prompted, are we not justified in abandoning them? Milton answers this question by continuing to write Paradise Lost, … The divine imperative implicit in the prophetic gift—‘Let all things be done unto edification’—does not cease to be relevant when success seems unlikely or insignificant in political terms. (204)

The opportunities to yield to such sophistications are provided by God and Milton, respectively, who wish to try the faith and integrity of their charges. Lewis hopes to ‘prevent the reader from ever raising certain question’, but Milton insists that the reader raise them, (208)

Rationalizations… How does one reconcile freedom of will with the absolute foreknowledge of the Creator? How can actions which have been foreseen be free? How can evil proceed form a perfectly good being? The declarative forms of these questions are the staples of anti-Milton criticism: (1) Adam and Even were fated to fall. [209] … (2) Their disobedience, as we see it, is determined, partly by circumstances, partly be their own natures. … (3) They were created with a propensity to fall… Obviously these arguments represent slightly different paths to the same conclusion: God, not Adam and Eve, is guilty of the Fall [210] … These difficulties are acknowledged (not personally, but as part of a logical proof) by God, and resolved; but the reader will have been exposed… and thereafter, whenever an innocent detail is capable of being twisted so that it seems to forebode the Fall, whenever an isolated incident can be (illegitimately) structured into a ‘net of circumstance’, whenever Adam and Eve evidence their ability not to fall), these evasions, in all their seductiveness, are recalled, and, if we allow them, they undermine our understanding of the situation as God and Milton have instituted it. (211)

Innocence, Raphael tells Adam and Eve, far from being static, includes large possibilities for growth as well as the possibility of declining to grow. By continuing to obey and by maturing in wisdom, as Eve matures when she recognizes Adam’s superior fairness, they may ascend ‘in tract of time’ from the perfection of Paradise to a higher perfection; [if Adam and Eve are perfect, they are perfect with respect to their species, not absolutely perfect. Absolute perfection belongs to God; human perfection demands that man be able (free) to make mistakes.] (226)

Thus if we read properly and refuse to rest in superficial resemblances, the Fall is continually thrown into brilliant relief as an incomprehensible phenomenon; otherwise we comprehend it, and by comprehending, deny it. (228)

Adam replies with new care, describing in analytical fashion the right working of his faculties: … Eve’s beauty, of form… and manner… is admired… Even so, his consciousness of her worth does not make him her captive, because he retains his powers of judgment [230] … Had these words been spoken earlier, they would have been accepted as a true indication of Adam’s state of mind. But here in Book VIII, shortly (in poem time) before he is said to be fondly overcome with female charm, the reader may be tempted… Because we know Adam will soon fall, the argument goes, he could not now be as firm as he seems to be; already corruption has occurred. This is an example of the blind alleys foreknowledge can lead us into… slips past the paradox Milton is at pains to impress on us at this conspicuously late stage—Adam is firm, yet Adam falls—and substitutes for it an intelligible sequence of events. Immediately, the uniqueness of the Fall as an action unrelated to its antecedents is obscured, and the focus of temptation is transferred from the will to a temporal process. (The implication that the Fall must have antecedents is a denial of the freedom of the will. Watching Eve leave Adam’s side in Book IX Stein comments, ‘The eating of the apple is as good as done’, thereby assuming, incorrectly, that neither of them can reverse the process… (231)

When Satan deceives Uriel, ‘The sharpest slighted Spirit of all in Heav’n’, … the reader is invited to ask himself if Eve, in an analogous situation, should be expected to be more discerning than one of God’s eyes. … he may even suppose that Satan’s entrance into Paradise, permitted by God in the incompetent persons of Uriel and Gabriel, is decisive. Yet… Eve since she need only recall what God has said in response to any tempter no matter what his appearance. Uriel’s failure is excusable, because he is by nature incapable of piercing Satan’s disguise; (233)

By the end of Book III, Satan is no longer sufficiently attractive to serve as a recipient of the reader’s misguided sympathy, and he is replaced by Adam and Eve, and thus by the reader himself. (239)

Waldock observes, ‘There was no way for Milton of making the transition from sinlessness to sin perfectly intelligible’ (Paradise Lost and its Critics, p. 61). The unintelligibility, and hence the freedom, of the transition is Milton’s thesis. Making it intelligible, and hence excusable, either by compromising the sufficiency of the will or by forging a chain of causality, is the reader’s temptation. … (reason plays a flatterer’s role, not unlike rhetoric’s) (239-40)

If the light of reason coincides with the word of God, well and good; if not, reason must retire, and not fall into the presumption of denying or questioning what it cannot explains: … ‘It was necessary that something should be forbidden or commanded as a test of fidelity, and that an act in its own nature indifferent [quod neque bonum in se esset, neque malum], in order that man’s obedience might be thereby manifested. For since it was the disposition of amn to do what was right, as a being naturally good and holy, it was not necessary that he should be bound by the obligation of a covenant to perform that to which he was of himself inclined; … (The Works of John Milton, XV. 113-15) … This holds true also for fallen man who must affirm his faith in the same way, independently of reason. (243)

…the reader is able to discern (or invent) any number of ‘seeming contradictions’ with which to question divine justice. (244)

The error of substituting the law of reason and the evidence of things seen for the law of God is repeated by the reader if he regards Eve’s failure as a failure of reason and declines to judge her in accordance with the terms of God’s decree. … First of all, he must hold in abeyance the analytical powers whose use the poem has encouraged elsewhere. Specifically, he must distance himself from the rhythm of the exchange, and not fall into the mistake of considering Satan’s propositions on his terms, that is as if they were relevant either to the question of eating or to the intelligibility of Eve’s action. … Wholly intent on detecting Eve’s errors of omission, he himself may slip into the error of believing that she might not have fallen, had she been a better logician. (254-5)

…the temptation to inquire into the causes of matters which are specifically exempted from such inquiries. The Fall is no more an object of understanding than the prohibition it violates. (256)

what, exactly, caused his Fall. … ‘causes’ … no one of which is finally more satisfactory than those offered in the poem: … not deceiv’d / But fondly overcome with Female charm. (IX. 998-9) / For still they knew, and ought to have still remember’d. (X. 12) / The first, as has often been remarked, is lamentably weak; the second, simply uninformative (they forgot). Together they assert what every reader should have by now realized: there is no cause of the Fall as it has been sought, (258)

Eve’s despair is not so reprehensible as Adam’s which proceeds from a conviction of eternal misery and is thus a mortal sin: ‘Despair is a mortal sin when it arises from distrust of God’s goodness and fidelity; venial when due to melancholy or to fear of one’s own weakness.’ The latter is clearly Eve’s case. (275)

Much of what is usually thought to be unsatisfactory in Books XI and XII results from the substitution of Adam for the reader in the dialectic of trial and error which is the basis of Milton’s method. There is still to be sure a drama of the mind, but it is Adam’s, and the reader stands in relation to him as an advanced pupil to a novice. (288)

Books XI and XII… As recently as 1964, Louis Martz, after conceding that Milton’s plan is clear and theologically sound, concludes reluctantly, ‘poetically it is a disaster’. Without question the verse exhibits few of the characteristics usually thought of as Miltonic—the sonorous richness of sound, the intricate but precise syntax, the wealth of pointedly relevant ambiguities; in their place, in the words of a critic who comes to praise, there is substituted ‘a rhetoric that consistently avoids all deeper imaginative surprise; the surface of things dominates, clear, cold, hard.’ Also, I might add, bare, not in the sense exactly of ‘unadorned’ (the watchword of Puritan pulpit rhetoric) but more nearly as a synonym for ‘toneless’. (301)

For the most part there is merely the straightforward narration of the course of man’s woe and misery, ‘not unlike a bad dream remembered with relentless accuracy’. (301)

When he appears to be describing Paradise he is in fact drawing out the Paradisial stop in us.’ (302)

Philosophically, the bareness of these books returns us to the expository rhetoric of God’s speeches and to the flinty clarity of his illusionless vision; and once again our reaction is an indication of the distance we have (hopefully) traveled since our original infatuation with the Satanic grand style. … here are not points of view, here is only what is. Even the epic voice’s ‘point of view’ is absorbed into the relentless drone. … Milton uses this ‘stylistic shock’ to prepare us for the transformation of Eden into ‘an Island salt and bare, / The haunt of Seals and Orcs, and Sea-mews’ clang’ (834-5), and for the moral God intends: /
To teach thee that God attributes to place/ No sanctity. (836-7)
The hard literalism of ‘Rock’ warns us against ‘attributing overmuch’ to a ‘fair outside’. By seeing the essential unimpressiveness of physical objects on a purely physical level we are moved to seek the spirit whose presence gives them value, in this case the ‘true Rock’ upon whose foundation man can build his inner (non-corporeal) life. This has been the purpose of the poem—to induce in us this motion—and the reader who is able to greet the ‘bodiless’ style of XI and XII as Adam does, with joy, attests to Milton’s success. (307)

Here in Book XII, the various perspectives whose juxtaposition has so often been the source of discomfort (and instruction) merge into a single perspective, that of fallen humanity. Where the reader might have resisted the preaching of the pure word in Book III, and felt some difficulty in sharing the joy of the angelic choir, here resistance disappears along with self-consciousness, and joy (of an impersonal kind) is induced by the verbal techniques I have been describing. The aloofness of the epic voice has long since given way to something more recognizable; like us he ‘is human, corrupted and disinherited because he is fallen’. Satan, to whose glozing lies th reader too often listened has been hissed off the stage (for a seaon) and does not influence our response to the incarnation and crucifixion. The innocence of Adam and Eve, in relation to which the reader has been made to feel guilt and shame, is no more; they, like the epic voice, have joined us. And God, too, has stepped down from his prospect high to unite with man, to share his pain, his trials, and his temptations. (329-330)

The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2004

The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 2004, Vol. XXIV, no. 3.

Even Stephen King, much to Bill’s astonishment when I told him about it in Paris, many years later, loved The Tunnel and prefaced his own reading at Princeton, where I was guest-teaching at the time, with an opening remark to the crowded audience of academics, students, and leather-clad bikers, “Have you heard of this guy, William H. Gass? He’s unbelievable. Let me read you from his new book,” and so he did. (A Girandole for Mr. Gass, Bradford Morrow, 25)

What’s he like? Often asked hungrily, but with a frown, with the expectation of bad news. … people seemed to think I was employed by someone a little scary, and they were uniformly surprised (and, my guess, often disappointed) when I replied: he is a sweetheart, an embodiment of generosity and even gentility, and he is wry and funny and he looks like a turtle and I love him; I loved him right away. (About Reading, Sally Ball, 40)

Some of Bill’s sentences have become aphorism in my creative life, which is a married one, full of children, full of poems: … Each child costs one book. Initially that seemed to describe a sacrifice, but it’s become a backhand source of comfort, for if there were no Ted, no Celia, no Oscar, wouldn’t there be three books, a little library? Which might still be made¬—that cost, that price we’ve paid, isn’t it negative proof of what I could have written? (40)

[I. Husband and Wife (Goethe)] But his mentorship is special: it is caring and easygoing, almost serving and yet demanding; in short, there is something decidedly feminine about it. (Three Encounters with Germany: Goethe, Holderlin, Rilke, Heide Ziegler, 46)

[II. Brothers and Friends (Holderlin)] In July 1979 the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Amerikastudien (German Association for American Studies) invited whom they considered to be three of the most important postmodernist American writers to their annual conference for readings and panel discussions. This conference was to take place at Bebenhausen, a former Cicstercian abbey close to Tubingen, in the southwest of Germany. I was to organize the whole trip. The three writers were John Barth, John Hawkes, and—William H. Gass. All the writers had some connection to Germany and were thus looking forward to the trip and to their and their wives being together. (49)

Goethe is an acknowledged master of the German tongue, and it was that classical master Gass attempted to deal with in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Friedrich Holderlin, however, Gass’s companion in Bebenhausen, is a romantic poet. He admired Goethe from afar and for some time considered himself a friend of Friedrich von Schiller, who had defined their own realm of influence in what is nowadays thought of as classical Weimar, were not fond of the Greeks like Empedokles or Hyperion, of his patriotic exuberance, his hymnic eloquence. It was all too much for them, too intense for their Weltlaufigkeit, their international well-connectedness, which Goethe had created for himself and which Schiller emulated. Thus Friedrich Holderlin’s genius had to fend alone, struggling hard for renown for many a year, but finally giving up and withdrawing into himself. For decades Holderlin lived a secluded life in Tubingen, tended to be living in the seventeenth, not in the nineteenth, century, that is, in preclassical times. By all contemporary standards, Holderlin had gone mad. /
But there is a deeper mystery to his life. The renowned French politician and scholar Pierre Bertaux who, together with his friends, avowedly lived his whole life in the name of Holderlin, i.N.H. (im Namen Holderlins) has written an intruiging study showing that Holderlin was not insane according to the common understanding of the word. And the true reason for his patient and intricate research about Holderlin’s forty-one years of withdrawal from his contemporary world (he lived to be seventy-three) is that Bertaux realized more and more how Holderlin’s work and his person cannot be separated, that a dark private undercurrent can be found wherever and whenever the sparkling stream of Holderlin’s poetry delights the eye, yet that the poet did not want the world to see his troubled heart, and that he thus eventually had to hide it. /
There is a poem that Holderlin addresses to the three Weird Sisters, who spin, measure, and cut off the life-thread of every human being. In his prayer to them, Holderlin expresses his deepest desire: … To the Weird Sisters/ Grant me One summer, All-Powerful Sisters! / And one Fall for a ripe song, / So that my heart, more willingly and saturated/ From playing sweetly, can die within me. /
And Holderlin’s wish was granted. He did write his divine poem. Several in fact. … But Holderlin himself had long since paid for aspiring to perfection through the asceticism and self-abnegation of the second half of his life. The sight of the tower on the shore of the river Neckbar in Tubingen, where Holderlin lived during that time, must have reminded William Gass, as he strolled along that river… (50-51)

That Gass understood Holderlin’s plight becomes apparent through the fact that he spent a large part of the second half of his life writing The Tunnel, which—in terms of the painful effort that must have been involved in surrendering to his antagonist William Kohler—might very well be compared to Holderlin’s withdrawal and posing as one Scardanelli from the past. In working on The Tunnel, Gass gradually began to release the dark undercurrent that, like the ancient river Alpheius, which in its upper part runs underground, had not been visible under the surface of his humane, regular, and peaceful life as a writer and a scholar and professor at an American university. (52)

Is the first half of life comparable to summer then, the second half to winter? The first half happy and holy, the second half frozen and of the netherworld? Not quite. The second half may be more or less “cold,” like the second half of Holderlin’s life, when the love of his life, Susette Gontard, had died; and William Kohler may substitute his tunnel, the “shadows of earth” for the former drunken kisses of his mistress Lou; yet winter is also the time when remembrance and images reign. And the reason why they can take over is thing else but remembrance foretold, reality mirrored. “What a beautiful idea: earth, solid and settled, flesh rosy and trim, life full and accomplished, altering into water, into remembrance, into image”(Gass, on “Falfte des Lebens” in Reading Rilke). (53)

And that’s what The Tunnel is really about. … it is mainly a novel about the second half of one’s life, a novel of remembrance of things past and Plato’s world of ideas that come to (after)life in language once they have been mirrored in the pools of reality. Mad Meg, the Faustian German philosopher who tempts the young Kohler, is a thwarted Socrates, and William F. Kohler becomes his inadequate American Alcibiades, unable to bristle with the essence of life Mad Meg seeks, unable to act, unable to incorporate self-sufficient beauty, able only to recall and describe. (53)

For Gass is not only both his own unyouthful American Alcibiadesas well as Mad Meg… but at the same time he also remains his sane alter ego at Washington University… (53-54)

And while Kohler has given up poetry for history, Holderlin and Rilke for Mad Meg, Gass has not. “Halfte des Lebens,” half of life—for Gass this title relates not just to chronology, but also marks a victory, exorcism accomplished, the river returning to the surface. (54)

Like Holderlin, Gass cherishe friends, and many friends have colleagues, students, editors, men and women of letters. For Holderlin, friendship was the happiest gift of the gods. (54)

[III. Father and Son (Rilke)] William H. Gass is Rainer Maria Rilke’s alter ego, deeply tied to him through like sensitivity, insight, giftedness. Deeply tied to him most of all, however, through their shared concept of space, Rilke’s Raum, Weltraum, the realm of all things, which denies any chronological sequence. (55)

Gass is not a poet. … He leaves that title and the nearly unparalleled mastery of the German language (plus some translations from the French) to Rilke. (56)

Gass the son attempts to provide that space for Rilke the father. That is the meaning of the “temple” metaphor. In space, not in time Gass diminishes the distance between Rilke and himself as much as he dares, by creating that space in the first place. (56)

What does that secret father-son relationshipprove? It proves three things: / First and foremost it goes to show that, as Gass articulates it, real art exists and that “it can matter to a life through its lifetime” (Reading Rilke) . (56)

Second: Gass’s daring closeness to the poet of his heart proves that Rilke’s Angels are true shapes: … An Angel is that beauty that strikes terror into the heart, because we die to be close to it, yet cannot cope with it. An Angel represents what poets in former centuries—for want of a better word—would have called the sublime. They would have searched for the sublime in Nature. For Rilke and Gass, however, the Angel is the sublime in “innerworldspace”, not in Nature. It is the outcry of things to let us know they are there, dying to become a quality of consciousness, dying to become—language. The sublime is translation, Transfiguration. Gass’s language may be less precious, dazzling, or elitist than Rilke’s, more sardonic and witty, copiously democratic, borrowing his images from all tiers of life, but ultimately it is just as exact, just as demanding as Rilke’s. (57)

Finally, the father-son relationship between Rilke and Gass proves that all great writing is autobiographical, in the sense that it is written with our heart’s blood. … For the true artist, life gradually needs to become art. (58)

And when we linger on the pages in between, we find that this mighty novel offers with its original example tribute to such precedents as the puzzles of Borges, the music of Joyce and Stein, the flamboyance of Shakespeare, the impressions of Woolf, (Homage to Bill Gass, Joanna Scott, 69)

Nearly forty years ago, in 1966, his then publisher sent me bound galleys of his first novel, as publishers will, in hopes of testimonial: Omensetter’s Luck, by one William H. Gass. Never heard of the chap, although I should have: His fiction had already been included in The Best American Short Stories in 1959, 1961, and 1962. Anyhow, my vows to the muse prohibit, among other things, the blurbing of blurbs except for first books by my former students. All the same, I opened the thing. (70)

As Omensetter was followed by the story-collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (which I liked even more than its so-impressive predecessor) and that by Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (which if possible I enjoyed more yet: the most formally sportive item in Gass’s oeuvre) and the several splendid essay-collections, I came to know their author not a bit: in Buffalo, St. Louis, and Baltimore, in New York, and North Dakota, in Germany and in Spain. Admired his presence onstage and off. Admired his formidable intelligence and learning, his commitment to teaching (“I’ll probably keep at it till I drop,” he remarked to me upon my own academic retirement, “and then I’ll have myself stuffed and go on teaching”), his obiter dicta (“I’ll never do a fiction-writing workshop,” he once vowed to me: “When I’m reading a bad student paper on Plato, at least I’m thinking about Plato; but when I’m reading a bad student short story about trout fishing, I’m not thinking about anything”). … if I were obliged to single out one element or aspect for special commendation, which I am not but nevertheless will) the similes: those homely yet show-stopping similes, still the Gass trademark for this admiring reader, which stick in my memory long after I’ve forgotten which work they’re from and what subtle additional relevances they no doubt have to their context. A character’s hands “quick as cats,” drafts of air that “cruise like fish through the hollow rooms,” a feeling “like the loneliness of overshoes or someone else’s cough,” a face “life a mail-order ax,” “wires where sparrows sit like fists,” an argument “as sinuous and tough as ivy”… (72)

His introductions are sometimes overshadowing because he takes each one as a writing assignment, and, for him, all writing is serious. This is why you will find very few long letters in the Gass archives. They are, he told me once, too difficult to write. (Richard Watson, Second Is Last, 82)

Bill Gass’s appointment as a full professor in the Washington University philosophy department did not proceed without opposition. The two most distinguished full professors in the department objected. Bill Levi resented the English department’s role. Who was Jarvis Thurston (who beat Levi at golf) to decide who the philosophy department should hire? Herbert Spiegelberg was scandalized at Gass’s announcement that he would write and publish no more philosophy. Rudner simply ignored Levi. I assured Spiegelberg that everything Gass writes is philosophy. Poor Levi. After he died, Gass was given the university professorship Levi had occupied. Spieelberg decided that Gass was a phenomenologist, Spiegelberg’s own field. (82)

Now comes the knuckle rub. Critics sometimes go nyaa nyaa nyaa because, they say, Gass asserts the independence of the art object from its content, and then he tells stories! Why not? Gass has never claimed that just because form and content are logically independent, someone who writes to create an aesthetic object must not tell a story. And just because no moral conclusions can be derived from the fact or existence of a work of art, that does not mean that a work of art cannot have a profound moral content, as does Gass’s novel The Tunnel. No artist lives in a vacuum of form without content, if only because it is impossible to do so even if one tries. (83)

At nineteen, when I slouched around the streets of Boston with a copy of Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems in one pocket and Dylan Thomas’s in the other, I feasted on Thomas’s frisky, hypnotic language and sensuous rigor. But I dined equally on the voluptuous mind I found in Stevens. What I really wanted was to fuse them into one plumage: the sensuality of thought. / Years later, I devoured William Gass’s On Being Blue, followed by every other Gass-eous book I could get my mitts on. I had found a rare bird of just that hybrid sort: a philosophy-voluptuary, someone who thinks marbly thoughts full of words like good and moral, as philosophers are wont to. But, at the same time, someone who romances language… (Diane Ackerman, One Beautiful Mind) (84)

“You have no unusual works habits?” I asked, in as level a tone as I could muster.
“No, sorry to be so boring,” he sighed. I could hear him settling comfortably on the steps in the pantry, and, as his mind is like an overflowing pantry, that seemed only right.
“How does your day begin?”
“Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours,” he said.
“What do you photograph?”
“The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly,” he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand.
“You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?”
“Most days.”
“And then you write?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t think this is unusual?”
“Not for me.”
After all, it wasn’t as far out as Edith Sitwell’s lying in an open coffin for a while before she began her day’s writing; or Schiller’s keeping rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhaling their pungent boquet when he needed to find the right word; or D.H. Lawrence’s climbing naked up mulberry trees in a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his muse; or Colette’s beginning her day’s writing by first picking fleas from her cat. No, in the grand scheme of writerly eccentricities, it was remarkably well-behaved to go out armed only with his camera to shoot deep-texture photographs of the defiantly beautiful and weird face of civilization disappearing in plain sight. I sometimes wonder how he sees himself among the ruined, derelict, downtrodden, decayed surface of cities. But I’ve yet to ask him. (84-85)

I knew he’d had a pet monarch butterfly that supped on sugar water and tip-toed across a floral arrangement in his living room, and a pet spider which lived in the glove compartment of his car. (86)

Once at a Mark Twain celebration, where Bill was on a panel, someone in the audience stood up and asked him: “Why do you think Mark Twain wore white suits?” As I recall, Bill paused a scant moment over the word “Well…” then began free-associating brilliantly about American Puritanism. (86)

After some time I wormed my way onto the literary committee with the meetings over lunch at Bill’s house. Thus began the first time Bill and I dreamed out loud about the writers we would like to bring to St. Louis. He’d serve Amighetti sandwiches; there was always plenty of wine. (Lorin Cuoco, Page 399)

Shortly after I left the radio station in 1989, I organized a Halloween benefits at Duff’s where the readers were to dress up in the character of the writer being read or as some other literary figure. Bill wore his Mao jacket and hat (Mao counts) and read the beating scene from The Lime Twig by John Hawkes, offending nearly everyone there. (It was supposed to be scary.) (89)

(His car is gray and he is round, I would say to visiting writers who had not yet met him.) On this occasion the waiter, upon receiving Bill’s credit card, said, “You are one of my favorite writers.” “Only one?” Bill mused as the young man walked away. (89)

In the spring of 1991 the exemplary Holly Hall, the head of the library, asked if there might be something that Bill would like to curate for an inaugural exhibit in Special Collections. Days later, Bill handed me the text of A Temple of Texts and a photocopy of the Parthenon. It read like the reading list of my alma mater qua alma mater, St. John’s College, the great books school, but with a twist. The Parthenon, I learned then, has eighty-seven pillars. He chose a text for each one, with the final four books, all by Rilke, placed in the sanctuary. (91)

You may want to know what happened to pillars fifty-one through eighty-seven. Cutting room floor, I’m afraid, too many books for the library’s available display cases. (92)

…he received an invitation to be a Getty Scholar in California, which would take him away for a year starting the summer of 1991, less than a year after we started and in the throes of planning our first conference. The dean didn’t like an interim director in Bill’s place. In August 1991 Bill and his wife Mary and their cat Nicholas, who is immortalized in paint in the portrait of Bill that hangs in Olin Library, drove to Los Angeles. … The Getty gave Bill an office, a computer and someone to teach him how to use it. He finished The Tunnel in his year in Santa Monica… (95)

Allow me to uncorrugate. There was the secret meeting with Salman Rushdie in Colorado in 1992 after we joined the Rushdie Denfense Committee. The drinks, the dialogue, the dinners, the lunches. One writer, over lunch, always paid for by Bill despite my protestations, usually at the Ritz, across the street from our office, said she had been to one of these whither-the-novel symposia. “Ere, it is there on the morning dew,” says Bill. (97)

When it is cold in Saint Louis, and it gets very cold in Saint Louis, William Gass drives everywhere, even a couple blocks away, because he doesn’t like to wear a coat. (Ethan Shaskan Bumas, William H. Gass Meets the –ba particle, 100)

We had graduate seminars in his and Mary Gass’s living room, and when everyone wanted to come, Professor Gass did not say no, and we had very crowded seminars in his living room. We sat still and drank little, trying to get our head around these new ways to apply philosophy to linguistics, and Nicholas the cat walked between us, making sure we didn’t break anything, and if he felt like it, nestling against our legs. (101)

At an International Writers Center conference, Eavan Boland gave a lecture on the miracle of an Irish statue of the Virgin that cried and moved like one of those robot dogs which all children absolutely needed a few Christmases ago. She said she couldn’t say for srue if it had moved. Of course it didn’t move, said Professor Gass. Of course it moved, said Amitav Ghosh, imported from another panel. Afterward the three went out to dinner and reportedly had a lovely time. (101)

There was also Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—an ambitious book of a hundred fonts over a dozen nude photos. Professor Gass, though he was tenured, was encouraged to leave Indiana, and he moved to Missouri (102)

A hundred visiting lectures we sat through because we had come for the introduction and it would be impolite to leave afterward. (103)

He was disapproved of in the English department, especially by those who had an unpublished novel waiting to be discovered like America in a desk drawer. They made the mistake that had also brought me into the field, that English was a synonym for literature, but then they were forced into keyholes of time-country discourse. (103)

Well, I asked. What was it like having twin babies?
You put the babies down on the floor, and each one immediately crawls toward the electric socket at opposite ends of the room. (104)

William H. Gass, Director of the International Writers Center, put a blurb on the dust jacket of my undeserving book. The blurb was not only flattering but also in itself beautiful. Imagine how happy that made me, to have the approval of such a preeminent literary mind and such a gorgeous blurb. Only later did I understand the thrust of his implied message, its injunction and reproach. The blurb was better written than anything inside the book. (106)

…we both have swimming pools, which give us distraction and delight in about equal measure. I recall seeing Bill’s pool empty, for the painters, and marveling at his apparent equanimity; down into that bare white dental cavity we looked, and I felt the space there oppressive whereas it seemed to free him and gave him a new view of the bathing hole. (Paul West, At-Swim among the Noble Gasses, 108)

Thus too we get Bill Gass, passionate photographer, going out to snap the ugliest sights he can find in St. Louis, firm in his conviction that the act somehow provides a supplementary hidden tune, making the hideous or the barren more interesting , exciting, than we would ever have believed. /
So, in this sense, he is a serendipitous beautifier, in his prose as in his photographs, the point being that the right kind of attention can convert a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or, failing that, into something implying porcelain. (109)

Bill have never, so far as I remember, been in our somewhat run-down pool, it never having been the right season, thought he has slept in our caboose, selecting for his midnight reading Last Tango in Paris, in whose buttery longueurs he perhaps takes more pleasure than I do, exercising devout phenomenology on every word. (109)

Another day during my visit, we two free-wheeled in front of a philosophy seminar, and that same day I sat for hours in a high bedroom in his house writing prose, undisturbed and at peace, as it were among his or his children’s toys. (110)

Earlier, before we hat met, we both journeyed to a conference held Indiana University, where we read papers. … “Well,” Bill said, “I really came to meet you.” “Well,” I said, “it’s the same with me.” We had some rare and rather polished exchanges after that, and began a desultory correspondence. I say desultory, but I mean something worse: Bill has an appalling aversion to answering letters, to which you become accustomed, so much so that, when a letter arrives from him out of the blue, you exclaim in delight, seeing he has caught up. (110)

This was the same man who, out wheeling one of his twin daughters in a baby carriage, swathed in a turban and voluminous coats against the cold, heard someone telling his daughters how nice it was to have grandmother out wheeling them about in the fresh air. He took the tribute in his stride and rolled on. (111)

…we got to talk with Bill and sometimes Mary, architect and gourmet cook. (112)

Considering Bill’s age, and his less than normal dependence on Pollock, tuna, anchovies, halibut, clams, cod, crab, herring, salmon, scallops, striped bass, trout, bluefish, and most of all fresh albacore tuna, he remains rather healthy, even allowed to drink hard liquor. (113)

I differ from Bill (and Mary) in that style and phrasemaking occupy me much more than does literary architecture, by which Bill means diagramming sentences. “Aesthetically,” he tells Saltzman, “That means doing floor plans, facades. My wife—she’s an architect—is doing the drawings for me.” (114)

The Tunnel is the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime. It took nearly thirty years to write, including long periods of silence and the author’s repeated decisions to abandon the work; (Michael Silverblatt, Review Essay The Tunnel: A Small Apartment in Hell, 122)

…beginning in 1969 when a chapter called “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” appeared in the New American Review. (123) … I read it aloud to friends, to teachers, to whoever would listen. Its rhythms entered my conversational speech. As the years passed The Tunnel continued to appear in the literary magazines, I came to recognized that the material was dark and difficult … Now at least we have The Tunnel. For months I have been digging through it. A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair. I have read it in its entirety four and a half times, each time finding its resonance and beauty so great as to demand another reading. (123)

As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book’s annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror, and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition. (123)

The ancestor authors for this book are Flaubert, Rilke, and Joyce. Flaubert because he describes with loving, careful relish the bourgeois life which, as we know from his letters, he ardently deplored. Rilke because of the ambience of pure loss in his poetry and prose and because of his decision to find a way to praise poverty and desolation, a level of praise that turns his writing into spiritual project. Joyce because of his systems and his archeology of minutiae—newspapers and garbage floating in the Liffey, making complete itineraries that Joyce chooses to keep track of—and most crucially, his aesthetic decision to leave the author out of the novel, lounging indifferently above, pairing his fingernails. (125)

If you sit down to read The Tunnel, really read it, you cannot help but come away altered. Not because the world it describes is imaginary, but rather because in The Tunnel states of reality are multiple and simultaneous. How literature does this is a question of style. Imagine meeting yourself as a fatso in a Dickens novel, now you are abject in a Raymond Carver story, now obsessed and lurid in a case study by Freud, and now, barely there, you’re abstracted by Plato. Do you still know who you are? William Gass can give us a Raymond Carver character as analyzed by Freud blown up into a balloon by Dickens’s caricaturing style—and give us a Platonic theory of identity as an encore. Can Gass still be himself? I would recognize a page of William Gass anywhere. (127)