Abstract
Throughout his career as short prose writer, novelist, essayist, and professor of philosophy, William H. Gass (1924–2017) retained a consistent and well-integrated system of aesthetic values. His formalist commitments, which determined his reputation as a radical postmodern innovator in American letters in the 1960s and 1970s, were recognized as highbrow conservatism during the 1980s. This chapter seeks a connection between Gass’s concept of literary musicality and the overall unpopularity of his difficult writing with broad readerships, an unpopularity which reflects his articulated reservations about popular culture. The formalist tenets of Gass’s 1996 essay “The Music of Prose” and the musical indices of his fiction are considered alongside similar aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetics, which Aldous Huxley once dismissed as too vulgar to be musical. Unlike Poe, Gass appears to avoid the danger of being remediated in popular songs and comics through his deliberate style, his undermining of subject matter, and the lack of a marketable mystery concerning his life.
This research was supported by the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
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Notes
- 1.
In the three latest editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Baym 2007; Baym and Levine 2012; Levine 2016), Gass’s 1970 essay “The Medium of Fiction” is featured among the “Postmodern Manifestos” (see Baym 2007, 2488–2492; Levine 2016, 372–376). “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is anthologized in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (Geyh et al. 1998, 65–84) between the selections from Ishmael Reed and Kurt Vonnegut. Critics outside of the academe habitually mention Gass among the postmodern authors following the Beat generation (Grassian 2003, 10). Yet even Gass’s longest novel The Tunnel (1999), by all means a classic of postmodern “historiographic metafiction” (cf. Hutcheon 1988, 87–123), demonstrates certain features that critics are inclined to regard as articulately modernist, not postmodernist (Hix 2002, 86–87). A similar anti- and ante-postmodern trend can be discovered in the 2013 Middle C (O’Hara 2014, 211).
- 2.
- 3.
For an attempt of solving Gass’s paratextual puzzle by revealing the sonata implications in that novella, see Delazari (2021a).
- 4.
In a 1991 interview, Gass stipulated that, for “the minimalist group”, the “old ambition” of such writers as John Hawkes, John Barth, and, presumably, himself was “the last gasp of the Romantics”: the minimalists would primarily exercise “commercial values” and “understand the junk” (Saltzman and Gass 2014).
- 5.
A celebrated Gass dictum from the late sixties reads: “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions” (1989, 17). To restate that fiction has no commitment to external reference, Gass writes in the mid-eighties, “There is no gist, no simple translation, no key concept which will unlock these works; actually, there is no lock, no door, no wall, no room, no house, no world” (1985, 223).
- 6.
In 1978, Gass confirmed that his “natural scope in whatever genre—fiction or essay—was about 40 pages” (Janssens and Gass 2014).
- 7.
Music psychologist John Sloboda (2005, 169–170, 210–215, 260) describes a number of turns in melody and/or harmony that unmistakably, almost reflexively, invoke the listener’s psychophysical reactions such as tears. Sloboda’s musical examples are classical pieces, but pop tunes employ the same harmonic and melodic effects much more openly and routinely.
- 8.
Deliberately so, considering Gass’s subject matters. In “The Master of Secret Revenges”, where the quoted sentence comes from, the protagonist’s art of diegetic, as opposed to discursive, deeds is typified by the act of mailing dog shit to his unaware enemies (Gass 1998, 219). “The Order of Insects” (Gass 2015b, 143–150) celebrates bugs and roaches. Even music is travestied when it becomes a subject matter in Middle C and “Don’t Even Try, Sam”.
- 9.
The idea that orality precedes literacy is famously questioned in poststructuralist thought, whose opponents such as Walter J. Ong argue against the counterintuitive view of the pre-eminence of writing (2012, 75–77, 127, 162–166). Gass, in that debate framework, would prefer Ong to Jacques Derrida.
- 10.
See Gass’s experiments concerning typefaces, images, and page layouts in The Tunnel and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.
- 11.
Visitors to Stephen Schenkenberg’s “Reading William Gass” at readinggass.org are certainly not the only Gass admirers worldwide. But the website is a tangible manifestation of Gass’s “unofficial”, that is, popular appeal beyond academic institutions and commercial marketing.
- 12.
For a discussion of how the folk song “Polly-Wolly-Doodle” and Beethoven’s Op. 27 No. 2 are used in the text of Middle C, see Delazari (2021b, 75–85).
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Delazari, I. (2021). William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music. In: Gurke, T., Winnett, S. (eds) Words, Music, and the Popular. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_12
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