Hello and welcome back to our ongoing Tunnel Reader project. For the uninitiated, the contents of this newsletter are intended as a special, standalone issue of Dalkey Archive Press' storied magazine, the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Taking essays previously published in the RCF, and commissioning a series of new essays, The Tunnel Reader will serve as a companion volume that contextualizes the the 26 years of writing that went into the novel, the book’s initial publication in 1995, and its subsequent reissue in 2026.
There will be a limited-edition physical release of the Tunnel Reader, which can be ordered as a standalone publication, or as a bundle with the Dalkey Archive Press Essentials reissue of The Tunnel.
Tunnel Reader newsletters will arrive on a monthly basis. We encourage you to subscribe, if you have not already done so. The full list of contributors is nothing short of stellar—the identities of whom will be revealed approximately 48 hours before each newsletter is released.
Today's essay is written by the acclaimed fiction writer Joy Williams, author of five books, including Harrow, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein and the Los Angeles Times book prizes, and The Quick and the Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In her essay, titled "On The Tunnel for Dalkey Archive Press," Williams muses over the beauty of Gass's writing, which is often hidden behind the "snark and gloom" of the novel's subject matter. Highlighting Gass's inexplicable reverence for the poet Rilke and Gass's ability to write in a way that strikes the eyes, ears, and heart, Williams argues that it is language that saves us from despair.
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Those who have recently joined us on our damnable dig may access the previous dispatches from this newsletter using the table of contents below:
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Finally, if you enjoy the work, we encourage you to support forward-thinking literature by pre-ordering The Tunnel and The Tunnel Reader.
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Until next time,
Dalkey Archive Press
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On The Tunnel for Dalkey Archive Press
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I’ve only read The Tunnel once, unlike some of my other monumental favorites—The Magic Mountain, J R, Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy, Under the Volcano—but I dip back into it often, or graze within it as though it were a pasture, a pasture in a thunderstorm, over which hovers a terrible black sky. I didn’t think this would be the case. I thought that after many weeks of reading when I staggered out of The Tunnel, done, start to finish, that I would [consider] the task heroically accomplished, that there would be no need to go back. I didn’t know how to think about it actually. It ignored my confusions. It didn’t want to be my friend. It had spoken and wanted no half-baked comprehensions on my part. But over the years I did go back, again and again, shuffling through the ochre pages of my old fat sturdy paperback with its underlinings of this and that, here and there, to realize what treasures I was finding amidst the snark and gloom. Here, after pages of ghastly limericks, is Gass musing on the abyss, or rather the image of the abyss:
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Images of the abyss are always inadequate. Saturn swallowing his children is an arresting one. The perceptions which enter the restless panther’s eye, in Rilke’s poems, and which slide through the nervous tension of the limbo to be snuffed out in the bitter darkness of its heart: that image is an even better one for it the abyss has an opening, it is the parted lid.
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The abyss is pure not-being-there. Nothing can be said about it, but Gass defines it anyway—it is the utter absence of significance; it is the world as unread and unreadable.
“We should listen with our eyes when we read.” This is the first line of his essay, “The Soul Inside the Sentence.” He argued that sentences have souls—they must be sought, turned, and tuned. People had them too but no matter, they knew not what they were for. A line in The Tunnel:
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She searched through her soul like a capuchin seeking fleas.
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A toss away in a 652 page book but how wonderful…the eye hears it, delighted. The ear envisions the busy orature perfectly.
Gass was no believer. He eschewed the shortcuts that religious imagery allowed. Still, he admitted that on reading Hölderlin’s lines
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In lovely blue the steeple blossoms
With its metal roof. Around which
Drift swallow cries, around which
Lies most loving blue…
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he said, “…my single sincere time, with wonder and devotion, ‘My God’…”
He adored Hölderlin, Stein, Valéry. But above all, he revered Rilke. Which on first thought, appears so strange. Rilke, so gracious and profoundly yearning, so blest in grasping the ungraspable and Gass, his bitter disciple, writing like a delinquent in a stolen car, performing muddy wheelies on the pristine snowy whiteness of the page. He admitted that his adoration of the poet could not be rationally explained but that “his work gave me my innermost thoughts and then they gave those thoughts an expression I could never have imagined for them.” Gass professed to be angry, to write out of rage. He was never divine in his writing but his search was, the search for transforming reality behind the word. The Tunnel required thirty years to write. To my knowledge, Gass would not admit to inspiration in its making. It was work, violent work, as an indictment of humankind tends to be. It is a godawful amount of time to be sure to stick with an irascible narrator, a Midwestern professor of German history specializing in the Nazi period, who hates his parents, his wife, his children, his colleagues, the world and his own puny widdle penis’s presence in it. All the while Gass was composing this monstrous figure, the historian Kohler, he was writing dozens of brilliant essays and novellas, reading and reviewing hundreds of books, philosophizing, lecturing, travelling, serving on committees, awarding prizes and flourishing in a happy marriage. These were the accomplishments of an only lonely aggrieved child extraordinaire. Nothing can explain this. As nothing, no one, can really explain The Tunnel.
The shock and wonder of this book do not accumulate with reading. Instead, its passages, its sentences are isolate as drops of cold rain, acid rain. The basement where Kohler so uselessly labors without a shred of Sisyphean dignity is a dungeon, the soil he excavates not any earth of sustenance or possibility but clods of clay and dust, “yellow grey and bluish dirt under what a hole held, center of zip.”
A disconcerting work. A bilious work. Only its language saves us from despair. As though language could accomplish such a thing, though that it can is Gass’s point.
This is not Sontag’s Death Kit tunnel, which ends in a catacomb, the world’s meaning as charnel house, nor Kafka’s creaturely clever burrow doomed by fear and paralysis, but it is metaphor all the same, maverick metaphor, much like Gass’s window, blank page, and blackboard. After all the spew and disgust and astonishing turns and tricks of language and foul or cruel delights (how absorbing the scene in which the paramedics arrive to remove the recently deceased father and proceed to cart off the drunken pass out mother instead; or the perfectly realized “Learning to Drive” section which takes on the relentless desperation of family life; or the insight into History and its endless metamorphoses—“things into things ore into iron iron into steel steel into beams beams into buildings, these into rubble and ruin, landfill and weed lot, in short the fragility the brittleness not of the fact but its continued unbroken and untransmogrified existence”; or the descriptions of photographs, so mysterious and precise and time sensitive that there’s no need of an image to be reprinted at all; or the shocking aside—“Holocaust, Hiroshima, warm-up tosses in the bullpen, dearies”).
These are the delights and disturbances of The Tunnel and they may appear on every page, striking ear and eye and heart. (Gass’s recording of this work—forty hours long—makes the polyphony of effect all the more vivid.)
Remarkable too is the sheer prescience of The Tunnel. Gass made clear in speaking about his novel that he was not talking about Germany after Hitler, “that loud doll,” but about the United States. Kohler imagined a Party of the Disappointed People—PdP—a trouble sea of dissatisfied citizens outfitted with passwords, slogans and all matter of regalia, flags, hats, ornaments of status. Disappointment had made them misanthropic, unpredictable, and rageful. They suffer from the “fascism of the heart.” One of The Tunnel’s most garrulous and vicious creations (and one of Gass’s great fulminators) is Kohler’s former instructor, Magus Tabor or Mad Meg, the spiritual founder of the PdP, whose manic lectures on truth, history, and power so fascinated the young historian-to-be.
“Truth is a canard…the last itty-bitty fib of God. Honestly,” Tabor proclaims, “we do not care, will not give a soft stool for the august verities if what we believe is convenient, if it dashes our enemies to the ground, if it makes us rich; if it fends off our fears; puts us in bed with women, kicks others out and deprives them of the pleasures which, from some inadequacy, we cannot share.”
History’s all in the rhetoric. What if so many devotedly follow the glittering stars of chaos just to get even?
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Joy Williams is the author of five previous novels—including Harrow, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein and the Los Angeles Times book prizes, and The Quick and the Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—as well as four collections of stories. Her book of essays, Ill Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.
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