The Tunnel In the Age of Bad Men
The situation at large feels a little too close for comfort to the Reichstag Fire as I write this.
There’s an assassination of a right-wing figure. There’s a crackdown by the right in America onspeech, on jobs, on lives. Maybe like every other shooting, you’ll just have forgotten this one by the time this goes to print, but on the whole, anyway, this is the Age of Bad Men. When William Gass published The Tunnel in 1995, his idea of a palpably bad man, a man whose badness could be at once utterly repellant and at once interesting, was a Nazi sympathizer procrastinating finishing his postwar history text from his stable American academic Midwestern job, in all its alienating smallness. Now every other man that wants to kill me on the internet is a Nazi sympathizer, and there are new fascists in power that make the whole “poetry after Auschwitz” question look quaint in the sense that Adorno had the dignity left to even make it into a question. Now, after Auschwitz, during Gaza, it’s not even a question, and the evil isn’t banal in Arendt’s sense of administrative spreadsheet but in its mass stupidity. It’s everywhere, post after post, infinite scroll IBM kill list gas chamber sprawl contemporaneity. I use my unstable academic job’s time to not-ask it, sotto voce, like the Modernist sprezzatura that opens The Tunnel, a little testing out of the boundaries of language and sensibility that makes you wretch. The duty of art is sometimes to make you wretch. If you’re not up for it in the first 75 pages or so, Gass wants you to quit. I respect this, holding this daring mirror to the disgust of the world (“our bliss depends on what we become,” indeed).
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Gass is getting into my language, infecting it every night as I come home to read about the black of the very physical hole growing in William Kohler’s basement instead of the introduction he is supposed to be writing. Gass’s own design directions for the printing of The Tunnel relied on the visual capacity of that growing, gnawing black. Look at me doing my little castrato aria run of a list just like one of his, of all the ways I would die under the Nazis, color-coded, design guide: yellow star, pink triangle, red triangle, whatever the symbol they never made for the disabled and chronically ill, who they shot on sight. Lately also black triangle, asocial. Typographic play abounds in The Tunnel; behold a Jewish star of acceptable first names for Jews none of which happen to be mine, incidentally. Anyway, I would have been lucky to have been shot on sight, suffering-wise, but the fact that I have even considered that calculus is disturbing. It scares me that I read Rilke in some of the ways Gass makes Kohler read Rilke, the way the German comes easily to me. Kohler and I could share this sentence: “What led me once toward Germany—Hölderlin and Rilke—remained pure imagery. Hölderlin went mad. Rilke’s blood decayed. I gave up youth.” I spent my youth on Mittelhochdeutsch, the pristine lines of Dürer, with all the Cranachs in the basement of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, one cold perfect winter right after college. This horrible man and I, we have things in common, libraries, angels—Rilke’s, Dürer’s, and though he would never admit it, Benjamin’s.
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Anyway, what we don’t have in common is that every five to ten pages, Kohler mentions his dick in great physical detail, which is wearing on me, I’ll admit it, but it also wears on his wife Martha, who in their youth, “the good old obscene days,” watched it get hard to her own equally nasty little jokes about sending sickly neurotic Jewish writers of my kind to the camps, a problem to which there was an ejaculatory solution to when Hitler was in power, but isn’t now, in Kohler’s world, the condemnatory reflection of the 1990’s that feels almost as equally distant to the contemporary as the Second World War does. The Age of Bad Men requires an Age of Enabling Women. After he’s done with Martha, old and drooping in the present, “bosoms like water bladders on the backs of donkeys”—Kohler’s on to the students: Susu, a hot slit, Lou, who begs his pleasure in a particularly odious chair from his former supervisor. Gass’s depiction of misogyny as fascist accessory gives fascism no particular dignity. It’s a rubbed out tumescence of a man who is small in more important ways, compensating in lesser ones. These days, guys who may or may not have small penises, resent women, or neurotic writerly Jews or Arabs or Black people “taking their spots” at Midwestern universities (that are not themselves as places, in fact boring anymore or safe or stable). These guys, these tenth-of-a-Kohlers, they still fap in the basement somewhere; they’re your groypers, your 4chan runoff, your alt-right memelords. The difference with these tenth-of-a-Kohlers is that they just shoot up a school and leave barely literate scraps that aren’t even manifestos after; it’s not a novel, there’s no unreliable narration, no question to be asked of the reader. They’re boringly evil, they don’t dig or dig deep. I don’t know if there’s still a world where there are novels in 2075, if someone will be able to make a Tunnel of them, these bad men, shallow as a teaspoon, and their peculiar branch of hatred.
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The evil man Gass imagines in The Tunnel is interesting for his remnant humanity. I am not sure the growing mass of fascists around me even has this left. Then again, maybe someone who is a better writer of evil than me can dig into more grotesque sympathies, can find the humane in even this with a half a century’s distance. Kohler scares me because he is a reminder that de-Nazification doesn’t really work in the mind, in America or in Germany. I sing the Tom Lehrer song about Werner von Braun under my breath here. Kohler loves Rilke, has spent his childhood reading Milton and Pepys and Dickens and lapping up English like breath and he discovers German and that’s a new breath too. I remember a youth. like that: “… the continuous uprush of my passion toward its fated pop; and then until dinner I would die down, as no lover would later let me, in the language and lap of Shakespeare or Carlyle or Mann or Cervantes.” Frankly, it was less masturbatory, but that could be the trajectory of my own life, reading flopped on some nameless American suburban bed, to Germany and to the cosmopolitan literature of Europe in one of its own languages, that I still love despite everything. I also think Gass’s Kohler would have been perfectly happy, as he did ambiguously on Kristallnacht, to stand there if in the course of things I was hauled off or shot. The indifference at the root of fascism, the deferral of complicity, is something Gass brings up, swelling, as Kohler digs even deeper into the dirt below his basement study, procrastinating.
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I am also procrastinating. I take a break from reading The Tunnel because I have accidentally stress-ground through another set of tooth whitening strips. For Gass, teeth are often windows, which are both books, and targets for bricks:
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“A book, I wrote, is like a deck of windows; each page perceives a world and tells a fortune;
each page at least faintly reflects the face of its reader and hands down a judgment…”
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POW POW POW
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Broken glass at Kristallnacht, to which Kohler is an unreliable witness. My teeth glint like windows in the mirror, the taste of peroxide spat in the sink. Martha cleans the dirt off Kohler’s soap, she must know he’s digging down there really. POW Fists whirring; I see a clip circulating on the internet of ICE brownshirts beating an innocent man’s wife in some dull institutional hallway as she cries out not to take him. Maybe I’m just another Kohler, watching through the deck of windows assembled on my screen, my token resistance ineffectual. Maybe that’s why we’re still citing Adorno here, reading Gass, and that sickening thing, poetry after Auschwitz, poetry during Gaza, the past and future tense blurring. The way that history has a boomerang glitch, or maybe a feature, of the quotidian and even the beautiful rubbing up against the despicable, their natural adjacency, as natural a death, or the four forces that “… form a square of elemental opposition, not as formerly supposed, but oblong like a Pullman, isn’t it? A Pullman train.” You know, Pullman trains, the classic ones like the Monopoly board pictures. I’ve never seen one in real life, but they run crisscross the Midwest still, carrying grain, and now soybeans, and other commodities. Trains, which almost every time they come up in The Tunnel turn into boxcars, rolling double sixes, cattlecars; back again to Auschwitz, guilt, complicity, Kohler’s but also the reader’s own.
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The Tunnel reminds me why I’m glad necks snapped at Nuremberg, and why my gladness is in and of itself evidence of my own core nastiness at heart, and yours too probably, that we need necks snapping to mean anything enough, to register our own morally righteous disgust. The thing is though, Kohler wasn’t a war criminal, he just failed to object to war criminals, and in his later years, orbits and orbits around his failed objections, his thoughts around his time in Germany like a decaying star. He doesn’t get a Nuremberg, he gets a sometimes-tender flaying by novel. What do we do about tacit collaborators? Can they be redeemed ever? How do we solve a problem like Maria? How do we catch a cloud and pin it down? It’s the rare Austrian captain that booked it, by the way, so the Sound of Music is the aberrant historical exception at the other end of The Tunnel’s six hundred plus page weight, the non-exception, the majority. “We historians, we poets of the past tense,” says Kohler, says me, in the sense that technically we both abjured the poetry of our youth for history, but retained it for the purposes of reckoning. I haven’t called my Muses sluts yet. Does that make me better or simply less honest? The Tunnel forces me to ask this: where is the bottom of my fresh-dug pit that smells like earth, my wrong life wrongly lived beneath the veneers, windows, white teeth?
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I am supposed to be shocked by The Tunnel, I think. I am moved by it, the poetic description of small college towns and human smallnesses, the potential for beauty in the extremity of material things: desk chairs, antique furniture in hatred and dirt-use, sheets, excretions. Gass is a writer’s writer, and his language sings to me even under the septic-toxic veil of Kohler’s voice. I think it is a masterful novel. I think it also makes me miserable every time I come back to it for this essay. I think I might have to stop doing that or I’ll go crazy, seethe with rage at complicity until I knock out my own windows in the night, blackout, missing teeth. I think what’s happening is that I’m seeing 1995’s most daring excavation of a bad man fail to even shock or register, because in the current Age of Bad men he’s roughly just a 3 on the Richter scale. I think some of the men who want to kill me on the internet think how Kohler thinks, but less sophisticatedly probably, since they don’t have Gass in them, scripting Woolf and Dos Passos under the wiring. They are all like Kohler in one fundamental way though, like Kohler’s version of Hitler, ultimately dissatisfied with their own failure and must punish someone for it, so they can become the Great Men they think they were always destined to be in the process, once they eliminate the scum taking up their critical air, their places. “O ponder the fascism of the heart!”—Kohler invokes his muse, and I invoke mine, pondering the same thing, and we are again a doubling, a troubled doubling, always.
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The loser-to-fascist pipeline churns on. There are lots of bad men who like to think they aren’t Kohler. Some of them have even published essays on Gass, doing misogyny on the back burner, affirming their own identity as Should Have Been Great Men Slighted by History or Taste, using Gass himself as the signifier. The thing about The Tunnel is that is makes all of us Kohler. We get inside his head; we speak in his first person. (POW ) And are we not complicit? Each of us to varying degrees? I think about the night Israel bombed the first hospital, I think about the doctors being marched out of there, Al-Shifa. What did I do in the end? Pull some pieces, go to some protests? Oh great, I’m on the right side of history then. It’s enough to comfort me right, that I’m no Kohler, is it? In the face of the rising tide of evil most of us are insufficient. Are we all so bad as to be sympathizer bystanders killing our wives’ cats and filling drawers with dirt and repression? No, but we’re not Hans or Sophie Scholl either. We’re not Aaron Bushnell. We’re not martyrs. Maybe we’re not even real witnesses.
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The Tunnel scares me because it makes my and your and everyone’s complicities tangible, my and your and everyone’s failures tangible, my and your and everyone’s lack of humanity and its leavings, tangible, shovelable up. If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, we have to look at our wrong lives, flinch, and keep looking anyway. Through a glass darkly, we must account for who we were, to what degree we are Kohler, excusing our failed sympathies. If Kohler is no longer the metric for the Age of Bad Men, who and what is? To what extent do we all participate in forming it? And when the day comes if they kill me or they kill you, or if they kill someone more vulnerable that doesn’t happen to be me or you, because realistically that’s what’s coming first, or even one of us just happens to catch a stray bullet in a trajectory littered with semi-automatics that splay them out like dime-store candy you might buy in Kohler’s town of Grand, what do we make of it?
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I don’t know. I’m procrastinating. I’m digging the hole that is this essay, that likely constitutes no meaningful act of resistance to fascism, that is in and of itself, a lack, an emptiness below abasement. In the Age of Bad Men, sitting in our reading chairs with The Tunnel, does that makeus any less complicit?
