THE TUNNEL by William H. Gass
Report by James Webster (Dalkey Archive Press, Marketing Director)
Comparative titles:
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Public Burning by Robert Coover
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
Synopsis:
The Tunnel, the 1995 novel by William H. Gass, is a deep and bitter book, tracing the disappointed life of a historian named William Kohler as he attempts to complete his academic masterpiece. When readers are introduced to Kohler, he is missing only the introduction to his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Instead of writing this preface, he begins to write a sort-of autobiography, which unveils an unstable and unpredictable psyche beneath the academic sheen. Implicated in his own thesis (Kohler himself was an exchange student in 1930s Germany) and operating with the knowledge that publishing his life’s work could ruin him, he writes the pages that we read almost as a method of procrastination. Kohler’s pages comprise a free-associating brainstorming session, in which he arrives at his next grand plan: the titular tunnel. His motivations are somewhat ambiguous. Some readers suggest that he simply intends to hide the pages of his manuscript down deep in the Midwestern dirt. Others have read his digging as an attempt to escape from a life in which he now feels trapped. Regardless of why the project is undertaken, readers are aware that Kohler is embarking upon something doomed.
The Tunnel is a novel of titanic ambition, linguistic complexity, and astonishing execution. William H. Gass delivers a virtuosic morality play that will ask readers to confront the character of William Kohler, to confront themselves, and the world in which they live.
Analysis:
As readers, I think we have come to expect that we will have a certain amount of fun when reading the American writers that we have come to know as the “postmodernists.” What we now call World War I had fostered a period of severe, allusive, and interior literature (Woolf, Elliot). The writers who emerged during this second period of postwar life met it instead with a great, cosmic shrugging of the shoulders. And so this loose generation of writers began to carve their way across the latter half of the 20th century, using detachment and black comedy as two of their primary tools. Their ambitions were as irreverent as they were literary.
Among them were Don DeLillo, whose serrated prose and anti-consumerist notions have made him an oft-immitated-but-never-replicated force in American fiction. Then there was John Barth, whose work was that of a Loki-like figure, an impish trickster God. Thomas Pynchon’s work overwhelmed readers with its breadth of encyclopedic knowledge and fearlessly transgressive subject matter, but rewarded the persistent with humor and his love for a little ditty. William Gaddis condemned the modern world in hostile blasts of noise, constructing several novels out of nothing but fire and brimstone dialogue, which are tremendously enjoyable if one can avoid getting singed. And Kurt Vonnegut, the most approachable of the group, possessed a well-worn wisdom and a humanist warmth that has made him the most widely-read of our misfit cohort.
William H. Gass stands slightly apart from the rest, outcast among the outcasts. In contrast to the irony and cynicism that his contemporaries wielded like sledgehammers, Gass was a writer of vivid and lyrical prose that suggested a poet’s eye, or at least a poet’s love of simile. The writer and critic John Gardner called Gass a “sneaky moralist,” looking for hope and affirmation while his contemporaries “would persuade you not to go on, that everything is nonsense, that you should kill yourself.”
Gass himself might disagree. His own work, as he famously told the Paris Review in 1977, was undertaken “because I hate. A lot. Hard.”
So then, The Tunnel arrives in 1995, in the twilight hours of the American century, or during the so-called “end of history.” Despite the great-many number of pages in the novel, there is very little levity to be found in any of them. This is a novel about how each and every person is susceptible to what Gass called “the fascism of the heart.” This is a book attempting to reckon with the accumulating brutality of the 20th century, a book whose “shadow subject” is The Holocaust, but similarly conceals the seething sentiments of the groovy 1960s (the only hint toward the book’s temporal setting is a news report about the war in Vietnam). In the real world, when the tragedy at Kent State unfolded, the majority of Americans thought that the students deserved it. Gass saw in America a growing darkness that needed to be fended off and took it upon himself to act as the responsible parent. We had our fun, and now it is time to eat our vegetables.
This is not to say that there is not a deep vein of irreverence in the book—there is. There are hundreds of obscene limericks; frequent scatological jokes; crude sexual innuendo; but as the book progresses, one gets the feeling of being scolded. The dirty limericks that populate the book are touted as the only truly modern artform because they are “all surface,” no depth. Elsewhere, any humor that could be drawn from bodily functions, or sex, often serves to underscore the childish, almost-Freudian thinking of the 20th century fascist. The Germans and the Italians, governed by their Führer and their Duce, leads Gass to speculate that “the first dictator of [America] will be called ‘coach,’” arrested and obsessed as we are with the High School glory days. The narrator’s own father regards him as a mistake, leading him to look for father figures elsewhere, perhaps finding them in the strongmen of the authoritarian 1940s.
Which brings us to our narrator, William Kohler. A repugnant little man, he is not only the narrator but is also the author of the very text that we read. According to the notes that Gass delivered regarding the book's layout and design, he believed in Kohler’s authorship to such an extent that he had initially wished to leave “William H. Gass” off the cover “because it is Kohler’s book.” The book is intended to be read with an almost-metaphysical understanding, with readers supposing that the book is actually loose leaves of paper, interspersed between the invisible pages of another text; Kohler’s nonfiction career capstone, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. The effect is occasionally jarring, especially in the instances where pages of the book are supposed to be written on scraps that have been shoved into the heap of paper. There is a page typed on a grocery store bag, another that contains a ticket stub, and a crossword puzzle. The reasoning for these strange formal flourishes is never addressed directly in the text, the way that a lazier writer might’ve had Kohler acknowledge, “Wow! I am now writing on a grocery store bag because I do not have any regular paper at hand!”
Plunging into the novel’s infamously difficult opening section, readers will immediately understand why the book required the majority of the century’s latter-half to complete. Gass suggested bringing in typesetters who work on comic books, who would be used to working with specifications that might have tripped-up the in-house typesetters used to more “traditional” books. And to think how much of this was completed on typewriters and set by hand by people to whom “leading” was the physical stuff of its name and not a value to be adjusted on a computer. It was no easy feat for the Dalkey Archive Press team, even with access to more modern solutions.
Pages are written in strange layouts that often reflect the subject matter of the scene, mapping a topology of Kohler’s psyche, and as he becomes more focused in his work, so too does the book become easier to navigate. Five years later, Mark Z. Danielewski would make a name for himself using a similar technique in his cult-favorite House of Leaves. And on the other side of the baton handoff between 20th and 21st centuries, two characters in Jonathan Franzen’s blockbusting novel The Corrections chastise a third character who intends to pull a similar stunt.
In a 1995 interview, Gass calls the novel’s difficulty curve a “standard modernist thing,” constituting a test that needs to be passed in order to “make sure that the person who gets into the book is ready.” Six years later, in 2001, Franzen’s character Chip intends to put “something offputting at the beginning, it’s a classic modernist strategy.” The other characters in the scene react so poorly to this idea that it warrants adverbs like “miserably.”
The novel’s opening, though widely discussed for sending many readers home with their suitcases unopened, is not as difficult as it may appear. Readers should think of it as a sort of anatomical drawing, a cross-section of a thing. What you are seeing here is the entire book, all at once. The different techniques, pivotal scenes, and important characters will later be shown to the reader one at a time, their significance finally revealed.
Lurking beneath the formally-inventive typography and the metaphysical structure, many of the novel’s most sublime portions are also its most banal: a fishing trip with Kohler’s father; getting caught taking spare change to buy candy; a summertime tryst and its ensuing autumn fallout; and the remarkable “The First Winter of my Married Life.”
Throughout the novel, Gass masterfully juxtaposes the grand arcs of history, with what the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called petits récits, smaller moments of subjective experience that serve in contrast to the “narrative” of history. In a sort of moral-inversion, Kohler’s petits récits result in him becoming more sympathetic to the Fascist ideals, even as the arc of history bends toward justice.
By writing a novel in the metaphysical mode described earlier, and with the narrator’s mirrored approach to history, Gass draws an effortless juxtaposition between the supposedly objective study of history, and the subjective experience of the historians who write it. Kohler’s proposal suggests that the average German citizen was culpable in the holocaust on account of the low-boiling resentments that allowed the Nazi Party to rise to power: a thesis in which he obviously implicates himself. We come to understand his distress because he is an everyman. If he is not you, the reader, he is likely someone that you have met, whose life did not turn out the way that they had hoped, and who searches endlessly for someone else to blame. “We have not lived the right life,” goes a refrain in the book.
The Tunnel is, at its core, a book about unfulfilled life. It is a book about the banality of evil, the susceptibility of the average person to be caught by a rising tide, and the emptiness (spiritual & physical) that can be found all throughout America. Kohler’s magnum opus will go unpublished. His tunnel to nowhere is doomed. In the novel’s final scene, Kohler’s wife, Martha, discovers what he has been doing in the basement and she rejects him completely, in both body and mind. She wants him to clean up and clear out, saying: “I don’t want your dirt in my drawers any more than I want your ideas in my head.” And what then? The mid-portion of Langston Hughes’ famous poem suggests that the dream, once deferred, festers and stinks like something left unrefrigerated.
Much can, has, and will be said about the novel’s eerie prescience. It’s true that its relevance only grew across the frenzied “War on Terror” years and the worst economic downturn since Kohler’s fictional childhood. Years that saw a deepening fear of the Other, and the embrace of American populism. It may also be true that the Dalkey Archive Press Essentials edition arrives at a moment befitting such a cautionary tale: with darkness seemingly on the move again, all across the globe. Though there is always the chance that the book anticipates nothing, and now is simply as awful a time as any.
