Tunnel Readers,

THE TUNNEL is finally here! It has been an enormous honor and a ton of fun to go on this year-long journey with you all. But it's not over yet...

To celebrate the release of the Dalkey Archive Essentials edition of William H. Gass's masterpiece, please see below a special edition of The Tunnel Reader by the man himself: The rarely-seen liner notes to the 2006 audiobook edition, originally available only in the form of a 46 CD set, and now downloadable as an audiobook!

Next month, we'll be following up with some suggestions for further reading (because we know you'll all have finished the book by then, of course). And after that, who knows!

Those who have recently joined us on our damnable dig may access the previous dispatches from this newsletter using the table of contents below:

Designing the Tunnel by William H. Gass

Selected Correspondence by Arthur M. Saltzman

A Small Apartment in Hell by Michael Silverblatt

Sweets, an excerpt from The Tunnel, by William H. Gass

A Girandole for Mr. Gass by Bradford Morrow

Second is Last by Richard Watson

Time to Eat Our Vegetables by James Webster

The Tunnel in the Age of Bad Men by A.V. Marraccini

Hiding from History by Katherine Packert Burke

On The Tunnel for Dalkey Archive Press by Joy Williams

Guilt and Innocence in America by Max Lawton

Big Books: An American Story by John Darnielle

Finally, if you enjoy the work, we encourage you to support forward-thinking literature by ordering The Tunnel, The Tunnel Reader, or The Tunnel Bundle if you haven't already!

Until next time,

Dalkey Archive Press

HOW TO READ THE TUNNEL

by William H. Gass

STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION

POINT OF VIEW
First person, written narration, William Frederick Kohler, Professor of Modern History, Nazi Period.

TEXT DIVISIONS
Twelve sections of 100 pages, called Philippics, see outline above. However, each section is made up of a variable number of parts, in different styles, moods, subjects, and so on.

THEMATICS
Each section is named for its principal theme. For example, each “Life in a Chair” concentrates on the narrator’s sedentary life, his sense of impotence. Chair refers to flesh in French. The themes are present at all times, but rise in prominence or recede from time to time.

INITIATING SITUATION
Kohler teaches history at a major Midwestern university. He has studied in Germany during the thirties, returned with the First Army during the invasion as a debriefer, then as a consultant during the Nuremberg Trials. Writes a book called Nuremberg Notes. Its softness earns him some suspicion. He has been working for many years on his magnum opus: Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. As the novel begins, he has just concluded this book and has begun a self-congratulatory preface when he finds himself blocked and unable to continue. He finds himself writing these pages instead. Since they are exceedingly personal, and he doesn’t want his wife to see them, he hides them between the pages of Guilt and Innocence.

CONDITION OF THE TEXT
Every page of the text we read has to be understood as being between two pages of G&I both hiding, shadowing, commenting on, and com-promising it. We see only two paragraphs from this work, which he inscribes. At the rest we can only guess.

AIM
The construction of a complex consciousness which is meant to be unique to Kohler, yet whose inner character is supposed to stand for the intellectual, on the one hand, and everyman, on the other.

The construction of the ultimate anti-novel, which denies and defies all the ordinary methods of narration, plot, character, and so on. It is the opposite of history. It is also Kohler’s own history, in contrast to the objective narrator he has presumably written. It will thus contain things not in normal novels: drawings, cartoons, interlineations, uniform and flag designs, paper bags, a silver tray on which calling cards are put, etc.

SUBJECT
Many elements go into this novel, but its fundamental subject is the fascism of the heart, the character of the household tyrant and imaginary genocide. Main sub-subject is the nature of history.
 
ACTION
There is scarcely any at all. The main action, aside from writing these pages, is the presumed, possible, digging of a tunnel by the narrator out of the basement of his house. Since he could simply walk out of his front door, the pointlessness of this activity has to be stressed. The trapped character does everything symbolically, nothing actually.

RELIABILITY
The narrator is wholly unreliable. That does not mean he never tells the truth. He may always tell the truth. He may never. But he can’t be trusted. So he may not be digging a tunnel out of his basement.

CAST
In addition to the narrator, there is Martha, the narrator’s wife, who is now a curator for a small town historical museum. Both husband and wife are very, very fat. Hermann Goering big.

The narrator’s two boys, seven and nine, whom he detests to the point of never mentioning but one of them, Carl, by name.

Lou, the narrator’s true love, whom he thinks beautiful, picked up in a dime store, a part-time student, younger, and who gives him that sack which is reproduced in the book.

Kohler’s colleagues:

A man named Planmantee, who is a positivist. 

Tomasso Governali, who is an operatic idealist.

Walter Herschel, who is the sounding board, a moderate, commonsense believer in truth, facts, and the value of narrative.

Culp, who is a comic, compulsive punster, pursues popular culture, is irreverent, uses his jokes to preserve himself from thought, heads a troop of boy scouts, is composing a Limerickal History of the Human Race, as well as a cycle of twenty limericks, each beginning with the same first line: “I once went to bed with a nun.”

Professor Magus Tabor, Mad Meg, his teacher as a student in Germany, whom he idolizes, and who taught him that history is subjective, dependent on language and rhetoric, that the account is more real than the event it records, and that the best written, most passionate account, wins. It is the accounts which have the most causal power and effect history. Now dead. Fascist leanings and modeled a little on Trietzchke. Consequently I make him a nationalist, power lover, skeptical of any objective truth, a relativist and sophist.

SHADOW SUBJECT
The Holocaust.

LEVELS OF ORGANIZATION

Mythology 

Cultural Significance 

Narrative

Phenomenology

Ontology 

Tropology 

Story Manners

Telling the Tale 

Writing It Down 

Reading Time

Text’s Mode of Being 

Trope of the Text

Siting of the Text 

Intertextuality

Location of text with respect to others 

Intratextuality

Location of text with respect to author’s others 

The Problem of Form

Internal and External Relations

External. A change in relation does not change terms. Terms are held in the relation by external constraints. The pencil lies on the table. The shape of the key—its form—follows its function. Hume.

Internal. Weak. A change in the relation of terms changes the whole but not the terms. H2O. Strong. A change in the relation changes both whole and terms.

Ideal form as free belonging. From Kant.

In language, sentences are formed by means of

 - Logical Form

 - Grammatical Form

 - Rhetorical Form

 - Social Form. Acceptable speech patterns and the like.

 - Accent. Diction. Vocabulary.

 - Practical concerns, speaker’s nature and capabilities

 - Occasional Form

 - Aesthetic Form. An interior analytic, yet free forming, for the sake of the sentence itself, and the sentence’s other companions.

Example: The tropological form of the tunnel.

The text must be, at one and the same time, a hollow, the emptiness which defines the hole; the removed dirt, which the narrator needs to conceal, i.e., a dispersed heap; and the structure, bed boards, etc. which are used to prop the tunnel up.

The text must have the metaphorical shape of a tunnel, with a concealed opening, a drop, passages which move easily, those which narrow, points of collapse, etc.

William H. Gass (1924-2017) was an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He graduated from Kenyon College and received his PhD at Cornell University. He taught philosophy at both Purdue University and at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the David May Distinguished Professor of Humanities. In 1990, Gass founded the International Writers Center (now known as the Center for the Humanities) and served as its director until his retirement in 2000.

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