Hiding from History
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With roughly 150 pages left to read in The Tunnel, I took a four-day break from reading to drive with my partner from Minneapolis to Pittsburgh. To entertain ourselves over roughly thirty hours in the car, we brought along the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy; whoever wasn’t driving read aloud to the other. When it was my turn to read, I noticed (familiar, I expect, to anyone who spends much time reading aloud) how easy it was to do so and absorb nothing. The internal processes that translate letters to sound can happen on a level that doesn’t require interpretation, or internalizing anything.
My copy being, at time of writing, still lost in the mail, I read The Tunnel as a stack of double-sided black-and-white printed pages. After two hundred pages or so—perhaps in defiance of its narrator Kohler’s “life in a chair”—I began walking counter-clockwise around my dining room table as I read. I took twenty-eight pages of handwritten notes, often propping my pad of paper in mid-air so I could scrawl, mostly quotes from Kohler’s rambling recollections. This was an experience almost opposite my car-bound reading aloud; I found myself, in fact, better remembering the sentences I wished to transcribe than I ever am normally capable of.
Why does Kohler write? Why do I? It is a question that comes much more after you’ve published one book (as Kohler has; as I have; as Gass had when he began working on The Tunnel). Most of us find our lives unchanged by publication. Kohler’s first book prompted such horror from its French reviewer that he “spat on his page.” Though he intends to write an introduction to Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, from The Tunnel’s second sentence he says: “I know I cannot.” And goes on: “Each time I turned my pen to the task, it turned aside to strike me…I realize I must again attempt to put this prison of my life in language.” But why? Why tell on himself, as he does for over six hundred pages—always hiding his memoiristic pages between two pages of Guilt and Innocence? Kohler, unsure himself, blames biology (“this mouth of mine which words only slowly silt shut”) but it is writing, not speaking that motivates him.
“Martha hates when I shape my sentences,” Kohler writes. “She says it falsifies feeling.”
Perhaps Kohler writes for history. Very early on, he describes his work as a historian as having “dug patiently through documents, examined testimonies,” gathered evidence “in the diaries of all those destined to be gassed, burned, buried alive” and “the journals of those who mourned their possessions more than their murdered and violated wives.” He writes, in one of the few fragments of Guilt and Innocence we see, that History is “the chronicle of the cause which causes, not the cause.” What is not summed is “not in history.” Or, as Belgian writer Stefan Hertmans puts it in his novel War & Turpentine, “nothing ever returns to time unless it is stored in mute, voiceless objects.” It is only because of Cicero, Kohler later says, that we know the “ghost” of Catiline.
The writing is a “pardon for a misspent life…the creation of substance from shadow.” Having spent his life in a chair—having amounted to almost nothing but a wife and children and colleagues he hates, with nothing to keep him warm but a handful of affairs and a basement room of Nazi regalia—by slipping his life history between the pages of world history, perhaps he consigns his petty existence to the historical. In days past a book was “not just a signal like a whiff of smoke…but a blood-filled body in the world.” A body, that is, that lives somewhere besides this chair (this chair that once belonged to Magus “Mad Meg” Tabor—a friend, a mentor, a Nazi).
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“We are hearing the same sounds just as we may be reading the same text, yet we are not having the same experience,” Kohler writes, “any more than we are likely to be sharing the same interpretation of some lines of Hölderlin.”
Perhaps Kohler writes because he is a man. His Uncle Balt (who exists only in Kohler’s imagination) has a bottomless well of shouted phrases to describe the chatter that women get up to: “NO KNITTIN, JUST NATTERIN,” “BUTTERIN THE BEE’S BUZZ,” “A HAYLOAD OF SKIRT SKITTER.” It is better, Uncle Balt says, that Kohler join him in the fields than that he be given over to the “ALMIGHTY HENNIN GOIN ON.” And—you’ll have to forgive me for saying so—Kohler does express what I would describe as gender dysphoria throughout his writing. He fixates on his “small cock,” and his “budding breasts” that are bigger than those of the women he lusts after. Though he admits that even Homer “sang without pencils,” his writing is an attempt to put something physical in the world, something that is not ephemeral as the nattering women of his childhood. His books—Guilt and Innocence and its shadow—are “intended to make you a mountain” from which you can see all his life and labor. Like Seamus Heaney, who in 1966 (the year before The Tunnel is set) wrote of his ancestors laboring in Irish turf fields and concluded, “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it”—like Heaney, Kohler may write and dig because they seem the things of men.
“I write,” Kohler claims he said to his mistress, “to indict mankind.”
Perhaps it is to put himself (again, forgive me) between guilt and innocence and so beyond them. There are no degrees of guilt, only degrees of crime. Close to the point where I had to break, to drive across the eastern half of the country, Kohler lays out a trifurcation of the world: “there are those who wish (Hitler), those who will (the Nazi party) and those who watch the outcome of the wishing and the willing, i.e. those who write.” Pythagoreans, he tells us, “counted spectators as constituting the highest class.” There is a difference, Kohler tells us, “between a command and its obedience, a deed and its description.” Hitler was a twerp, he says, “of such meager means he could only wish the way the weasel wishes it were a looker like the tiger and a lord like the lion.” Throughout the book, Kohler is able to cut guilt anywhere. Pile it up like in the Sorites paradox: how many deaths, how much suffering do you, in particular, have to be responsible for in order to be called “guilty”? It is logic that lets us do this. It is writing.
Kohler admits: “Writing is hiding from history.”
If he does not stop writing, then he need not finish his delineation. It allows him to hide, avoid blame (he threw a brick on Kristallnacht, we know, though it is unclear in his telling if he did any damage), and at the same time aggrandize himself. The hiding is the tunnel he digs; the aggrandizing is the tunnel walls. Neither can exist without the other. He “[slips] inside the world in such a way [he remains] outside everybody, creating a kingdom like a realm of play, but now a realm in the real.”
And although I don’t suffer from Kohler’s “fascism of the heart,” and though I read this novel pacing instead of living in a chair—in this answer, at least, for “why write,” I see myself. Because writing does not let the words pass through you unmarked the way reading aloud at the tail end of a road trip might. It allows control, allows you to say, look over here. The world is like this. I am not like this. This isn’t a pile because it only has 100 grains of sand. Kohler is “sorrowful” because he “cannot share even a line of [his] real life with anyone.” It’s writing that consoles us. Protects us. It lets us get renown or revenge, as Kohler suggests from the first page.
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In the end, his work is deflated. He is running out of pages to slip his life between. His wife thinks that his tunnel, the second great work of his life, is being dug merely to spite her and fill her furniture with dirt. He contemplates the dirt she’s spilled over his work, all the dirt he might add, “covering the pages of [his] History as [his] History sheeted him.” Perhaps he needs the work (and will, it’s implied, kill himself) and perhaps he doesn’t. For most of us, the writing stops eventually. We return to the real; we spend time with our friends and families, or read more, or rewatch Riverdale. The words wait, as Kohler says, like “disappointed people bide, before they try life again.”
