William Gass's The Tunnel

When I gave up and sought finally a useful degree; when I looked up and saw my peers' gladness and self-sufficiency; when I felt the windowpanes vibrate with the storm's crash of snow; when I found myself divorced from the cadences of normal life; I found myself roaming over crimson carpet, staring at corners, and worm-eaten chairs, dusty ferns and dusty tables, roving between shelves, whose spines said Rilke, Colette, Stein; digging myself into my first tunnel.

No. When I understood my physical inferiority; when I saw my wit was lacking too; and my once-high marks moving toward the mediocre grades; I found myself reading Freud in an armchair, Gass on the lab floor, and in the back of the classroom, writing doggrel; digging myself into my first tunnel.

No. Those tunnels were all false ones, false starts. When I found my life had resolved into a wet fart; when my weekdays were choked with tedium; when I hated the little intelligence of the people surrounding me, their contempt and therefore ignorance of culture, or anything making life noble and good; and I was reduced to a set of hands making dances on a keyboard; when all of life was now just one Sunday of doing absolutely nothing, of watching the afternoon pass of other people living their lives, walking their children, being loved, while I, I in the dark of my studio, compiled curses at their heads, hoped apocalypse came sooner; then words would flow, on my kitchen table, before the TV, then I would draw words from, Livy, Malaparte, Broch; digging myself into my first tunnel.

There are innumerable ways to make and identify a tunnel, because tunnels are artificial, are pointless, and ultimately lead to nowhere. A tunnel can be as long as this cup. So then, how can we use a word without any function, and has no artifact of a result? Does the word, so full of nothing, suddenly become wide, and encapsulates the universe, swallows the stars, the planets, the comets?

An English teacher of mine, Alexander Thorpe, taught William Gass. I remember none of his other lessons; he made us read some Harold Bloom; I think we read "Scarlet Letter", "Great Gatsby" too; erm, what else? Emerson? oh, whatever. We read the first essay from "Temple of Texts": "To a Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics", whose title described what I was at the time.

Lives are scarcely so changed in the moments composing them; this moment, however, changed mine.

"To a Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics" possesses two attributes able to rock an unsteady teen's world. The first is its intellectual ruthlessness. No, the classic is not full of wisdom or intelligence; it does not speak to human goodness, nor to beauty; it does not ennoble or make virtuous; but it is a place where thought, its movements, its significance, its pageantry, is exalted, more than any other place, for its writers felt life, their lives, couldn't be better served than on the page. It's this love for excellence of the word itself, excellence of the logos, excellence of the ego permitting the page to shine and to become a field of brilliance only.

The second attribute is the essay's enjoyment of its own fun. The essay's second paragraph:

They say you have been reading, even studying, the classics. You have been doing this at a time when not only are the classics regarded by many as one cause of our wretched world's unjust condition but at a time when the very word classic has become suspect, and is used most neutrally now to qualify old cars in good condition or to single out products stuck in an agreeable rut while the world furiously alters around them, such as Classic Saran Wrap or Classic Coke, although original is more frequently preferred, along with old-fashioned, to describe the Colonel's original recipe, or dad's best girl before she became his ball and chain.

And then, one of Gass's favorite sentence structures, that of the sentence as list:

The good books are the fruit of the tree of knowledge all right, and the devil is always offering us another fellow's damned opinion, which, were we to sample it, might cause the scales to fall from our eyes, so to see suddenly that king and queen, God and all the angels, are naked, shivering, and in sore need of our shoes. That is why just one good book, however greatly good, when used to bludgeon every other, turns evil; why we should be omnivorous: try kale, try squid, try rodent on a spit, try water even though there's wine, try fasting even, try - good heavens! - rice with beans.

And, in a later passage, discussing the classics' moral character:

They glow because their authors are such fine, upstanding people from the best families, graduates of the most expensive schools, and representative of the nobler classes. When I was your age, we would have said to that suggestion: in a pig's ear. Do you see a halo hanging over Heidegger's head? Their authors are murderers, thieves, traitors, mountebanks, misogynists, harlots, womanizers, idlers, recluses, sots, sadists, liars, snobs, lowlifes resentful of any success, vicious gossips, gamblers, addicts, ass-lickers, parvenues, whose pretenses to nobility were (and are) notorious: for instance, the clown whose father was a highland peasant named Balssa, lately come to town, and who renamed himself Balzac after an ancient noble family, and finally put a "de" before it, as if he were parking a Rolls in front of a tenement in the belief it might cause the johns to flush ...

(I could continue the sentence, but I've proven my point, and let's give Balzac's corpse some reprieve.)

(One more, though - the sentence most relevant to modern times: "Oddly enough, people have always distrusted the classics, but it is now publicly acceptable to take pride in such distrust. We all dislike intimidation, so we worry about being overwhelmed by these tomes above which halos hover as over the graves of the recently sainted, because we wrongly believe they are fields full of esoteric knowledge worse than nettles, of specialized jargon, seductive rhetoric, and swarms of stinging data, and that the purpose of all this unpleasantness is to show up up, put us in our place, make fun of our lack of understanding; but the good books are notable for their paucity of information - a classic is as careful about what it picks up as about what it puts down; it introduces new concepts because fresh ideas are needed; and only if the most ordinary things are exotic is it guilty of a preoccupation with the out-of-the-way, since the ordinary, the everyday, is their most concentrated concern: What could be more familiar than a child rolling for fun down a grassy slope - that is, when seen by Galileo, a body descending an inclined plane?")

When you're a miserable kid, you wonder how anyone can have fun, particularly how anyone can have fun writing. This is why Harold Bloom, interesting as his observations are, never stuck: he had a stick up his ass, and every wry thought was accompanied by a sudden shudder in his gut and a laborious groan. As fat as he was, as ugly as he was, Gass's prose skipped, pranced, made merry; it was everything he seemed not to be.

Before I read Joyce, before I read Plato, Gass's writing, then, was my first encounter with magic, not the kind leaking fireballs, bolts of lightning, nothing so military as these. His writing possessed the kind of magic changing frogs into princes, pumpkins into carriages; in short, his writing had the ability to transform.

Not that all of his writing was impeccably reasoned. I recall feeling iffy on some of the essays in "Fiction and the Figures of Life". In "Temple", most of the texts are excellent, though "Influence" and "Sacred Texts" sort of just end without a proper conclusion. In fact, a lot of his writing dithers. But that doesn't matter, when you're having fun, when the world is laid bare before you, awaiting your glances.

The library was not the only tunnel I had in college. During the weekends the Darren Communications Center was - outside the midterms and final exams - completely empty. Maybe a few shuffling feet, by a few nodding, lost heads. The doors were locked, but kids still found a way in, as I did. I would enter, grope through to the basement, and make the now-emptied lecture rooms, so full of ghosts, my den, my other tunnel. You could hear a pin drop. You only ever heard your footsteps. It was awesome.

Here, avoiding the sunshine, spring's pleasures, the throats of my peers cracking with fun, but also shielding myself from the blizzards, the mourn-grey faces after exams, and the dismal sky on a winter day, I spent long hours reading Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch", Stendhal's "The Red and the Black", Zvevo's "Conscience of Zeno", Flann O'Brien's "At Swim Two-Birds". Then, the bulldozer, the fuck-you-up: William Gaddis's "The Recognitions".

Logically, William Gass's "The Tunnel" had to follow.

In my first apartment after college, near Chestnut Hill "station", on the couch furnished by the landlord, which was covered in a thin shawl, I read "The Tunnel" and felt sick by its rhythms. Take this faux-menacing passage from the first page:

... the world is William welshing on a bet; it is Olive sewing up the gut of a goose; it is Reynolds raping Rosie on the frat-house stair; it is a low blow, a dreary afternoon, an exclamation of disgust. And when I wrote was I writing to win renown, as it's customarily claimed? or to gain revenge after a long bide of time and tight rein of temper? to earn promotion, to rise above the rest like a loosed balloon? or was it from weak self-esteem? from pure funk, out of a distant childhood fear or recent shame? ... the world ... the world, alas. It is Alice committing her Tampax to the trash.

From there, it gets worse. William Frederich Kohler, our professor and pervert, continues to describe his vengeance against his wife, his hatred for his colleagues, his love for sex, his admiration for violence, his grudges for the things that hadn't been bestowed upon him, his many affairs, with college-coeds no less, the destruction of his mother and father, his participation in the Kristallnacht, his abuse of his firstborn son, on and on and on...

Imagine me, a young lad, fresh out of education and entering the "real" world, reading all of this smut. And I read ardently, its long 600 pages. But I oddly did not love it. I did not find the prose I thought Gass was capable of. I thought he was holding out on me; the great reader and learner of writing, did not write toward the same heights as his idols did.

And yet, if the prose did not astound me, it did affect me: I become profoundly depressed and pessimistic concerning life and my own ability to lead a happy one. This all compounded with the real events in my life where I found myself undergoing a panic attack, one in which I would find myself lying on the floor spread-eagle, openly crying and praying that things would get better.

So I moved on. I closed the book; I stopped very early on in "Susu, I Approach You in My Dreams", right after that transcendent, melting passage on the Rust Belt (this is 500 pages in). Even when life lightened up, I did not return to it, because I felt I was somehow both above and below it; I was above it in that I didn't need its particular darkness anymore, and I was below it in that I was not ready for its conclusion.

The end of "Orpheus" triggered my desire to read "The Tunnel" again. I mean, I invoke Gass as a muse in the "Folly Song", which I always felt dirty doing. And then there was United States' 2024 election which made me think again on Kohler's Party of the Disappointed People.

And so, I dug down again.

And I found the book was extremely pathetic.

The Dalkey edition of the book (is there any other edition? man, I would kill to buy an NYRB version) is a big, black block. When you hold all of its 600 pages in your hands, you feel you are reading something forbidding and impenetrable. But what a fucking con. Of the books I have read, this is the one least worth reading. There is nothing in it. It is empty. It is hollow. It goes nowhere. It's not even worth the wind, much less the breath. Who the hell would spend thirty years writing this shit?

This goes all to say, this is the one of the greatest books I've ever read, and I'm astounded Gass never got more credit for it.

And "The Tunnel" is, indeed, a beautiful book. I did a double feature with "The Sleepwalkers", figuring that, because I had read both books before, the re-reads would be fast. With "The Sleepwalkers", I was able to put on headphones and listen to music or standup comedy; Broch's aesthetic is fairly bare and the details of the novel are easy to keep track of, what is really significant about the novel is its philosophical implications.

In contrast, I could not listen to anything at all while reading "The Tunnel". On my couch, in the dark, I mouthed its words, I sang through its phrases, I allowed its rhythms to concatenate in my mind like so many echoes. I did something I thought I wouldn't do: I read the book twice over, the first time to run through the sentences breathlessly, the second time to chew on them a little longer. As a note, I read most books twice over; so not only did I read "The Tunnel", initially, twice over, in my re-read I read it twice over, again.

So I do, in fact, know the book has nothing in it. I realized, as a young man, I got worked up over nothing. Kohler's misery is entirely his own. Listen, life sucks, and yes, no one is properly rewarded - or punished - for what they have done, but everyone has the option to just move on, in the hopes that what they are presently doing is, indeed, the best they can do, and even if not the best, then so what? But Kohler not only grudges over people for their shitty behavior and loathes the world for what hasn't been bestowed upon him, he does nothing to improve himself or his life, he merely sits and seethes. He is such a brutal realist he believes shit is shit, pain is pain, there is no good, things only get worse, and, you know what, fuck it. Maybe I saw my own inaction as a young adult in Kohler, but seriously, when day and night cycle by one's window, how the hell can someone just stay the same, forever, living just out of spite?

This theme, of complete stagnancy and even refusal to change, extends to the prose as well. When I was younger, I always thought some drama, some horror was always lurking in the next page. Nothing ever happens in this novel. Kohler is too much of a boring, dull, noncommitted and indifferent person to actually see anything through to the end. He threw some rocks in Kristallnacht, then scurried back into the shadows; he has a little boy jerk him off, and his fetish goes no further than that; the love of his life leaves, and he wallows too much in self-pity to even care; his colleagues complain about him, and he's too much of a coward to even defend himself. The only action he takes in the course of the novel is to begin digging tunnels in his basement, but that subplot literally goes nowhere. In fact, every section of "The Tunnel" just ends, with no denouement. Kohler really is not like you and me, he's literally a huge fucking loser, even after all his education, all his curiosity, all his insight on life.

And that's "The Tunnel" to a T: it's a novel about someone wallowing in their own filth. The filth too is something beneath de Sade's pen: Kohler, or Willcough, or Herr Rickler, just likes cumming. That's it. But Kohler at once believes he should be shielded because he is mediocre and also believes he is extraordinary in the precise way he fantasizes about cumming. He's completely full of shit.

One moment he'll regale you with a beautiful paragraph about the way the caterpillar his uncle placed on his arm felt snaking on his skin, or the words he would write in cursive on the naked back of his lover, or the plumes of smoke arising from the factories workers shuffled to and from, and then in the next ... nothing. Completely drops the ball. Doesn't even finish the thought, doesn't continue the composition. He's not focused enough to be provocative. Sure, he gets excited about the deaths in the concentration camps, but ... the prisoners are dead. They've been long dead. It's old hat. It's not original. He isn't even original enough to be evil, he just microwaves other people's sins.

Some novels concern themselves with the sin of anger; some, the sin of lust; some, the sin of greed; many, the sin of ambition; but "The Tunnel" is one of those few novels that explores the sin of absolute passivity. The funny thing, too, is that, because Kohler doesn't care, everyone in his life has stopped caring about him, and then he gets on a high horse about other people not caring about him. Boo-fucking-hoo! And then Kohler lapses into further fugues of doing nothing.

I'm being dead serious here: if you intend to read the book, prepare for the book to go nowhere. Prepare to remember details that won't matter later (in fact, Kohler will remind you of them anyway, in different, more elaborate sentences). Prepare for page 1 to be exactly like page 100 and page 600, because no revelation will dramatically change your understanding of the novel (well, except the last section, "Outcast on the Mountains of the Heart").

But the reason why I read the book so many times, why I had to listen to it only in silence, is because the words are all the book has. Such a book I honestly hadn't encountered before. A book is like layers: one layer has all of the book's drama, its "plot", another layer has all of its images, another layer carries its thematic meaning, philosophical, sociological, whatever, another layer is the sheer charisma of the writer and the comfort the reader has in their voice, another layer is the writer's style or narrative structure. Et cetera. There are many reasons to enjoy a book, most of them in the semantic aspect of the book.

All "The Tunnel" is is words, and words don't convey ideas, they convey observations. The word "dog" expresses that we have observed a thing called a dog. "Flying" expresses the observation there is a dimension as height, the thing is high in height, and, depending on the context, there is air beneath the wings of the thing that flies - or rather, there are no wings, and "flying" is on its way to "falling".

"The Tunnel" is all observation, no meaning. Kohler could not care less about what he is talking about; indeed, he is such a dried-up, pathetic, puny prune of a man that he can't even come to take hold of anything in his life, he is reduced to just seeing. And so he produces mountains of Gass's favorite lists; he elaborates pet theories; he takes pained pleasure in recalling scenes of his undoing; he fantasizes about things he hasn't done.

I remember I held my breath when I first read the section titled, "August Bees":

Now it is another day. Rain is speaking gently to the terrace. I speak gently, sometimes, to myself. How soft the light is, mingled with the wet.

By the way, those lines, "Rain is speaking gently to the terrace / I speak gently, sometimes, to myself", fucking haunt me to this day. What better poetry is there?

But I digress:

We had one shortened summer month together, Lou and I ... my god, even the decade's gone. Pleading the pressures of work, I excused myself from my life and settled in a second-story room in western New York. A wooden stair fell from one widened window like a slide of cards. We hung our towels there: a shirt sometimes, a slip as discreet as a leer. I remember particularly the quiet empty streets, the long walk to the beach. Well, it was scarcely a beach, though there was a pier, and even in August the water was cool in those thin deep lakes the patient passion of the glaciers scratched. My chief memory is the heat, the silence, your pale breasts. Pale as a bleached leaf. I do not understand what makes another body so appealing.

He just builds ... and builds ... and builds upon the effect. This is momentous, rumbling, longing prose, one with extreme careful attention so that, as if before one's eyes, the least inattention would destroy the thing itself, its consequent beauty, its possibility in this ugly world. Gass indeed has every power to build scenes, to build conclusions that are irresistibly appealing. One might say, he builds up scenes like the tide replenishes the shore, slowly but surely; in his coarsest mind, Gass would say he builds up scenes like a cock.

Let's have no more of Lou, Kohler's favorred college co-ed, for now and move on a later section, "The Cost of Everything":

I like to pretend that the world is on its side and that I'm climbing the street with my eyes as I would a steep wall, a tower (here's one handhold - careful - there's another), and, indeed, at the end of the street like a hat on a stick is the sky, pale as milk, thin as hosiery. Yes, when the world's on edge, streets rise. And I'm carrying coiled over my shoulder as I climb a rope made of twisted limbs and bedsheets I shall use to descend by on the other side. You can tip a room that way, exchange ceiling and floor, and I've struck postures making love - as fat as I am - which did the same. Please, how did they accomplish these inversions? they manipulated contexts, reframed the vision, altered expectations, gave you a new perspective like a frog in a bottle or pig in a furnace; they created sudden strangeness, made you a martian. For example? tents, telescopes, towers and the tops of mountains, travel. Some encircle you like the knothole, or slat your field of vision the way your fingers do when you peer between them, or web it more wonderfully than the spider, as when you make lewd eyeway through the furze between your woman's legs.

Oh God... Oh God... relentless prose, rivering prose, rivers carrying not just images on its surface, but implication, but observation, but philosophy, finally streaming down into conclusion, the triumphant feeling that, yes ... we have found something at last, and that, though it is not beautiful, its mere inference is.

Let's highlight another unique aspect of the text, through "The First Winter of My Married Life":

Surely we haven't gone so fast in these few weeks we've passed middle age in our marriage? Is it the sound barrier we've broken, and are your neighbors' noises the boom, now, we're supposed to hear? It makes no sense. And costs but one, she always answered, even when we were courting, because the statement was a tic of mine, like that obnoxious nasal sniff I had, she said. As a matter of fact, Marty darling, we've grown as sluggish as a pair of snakes, and if any such barrier burst, it would have to happen from the slow side of swift, like your hymen, remember? i said, letting my prose grow unshavenly toward scratch. In this house sound certainly departs for all points like the humans of Hiroshima, she said, serene and uninsulted. Sometimes I think that's all they are over there - echoes of us - that whole half of the house is an echo, a later ring of our present life, and it's me, then, I hear, going up their stairs.

I would say the passages I had shown up to this point are written in traditional or conventional prose, in that they are meant to show. This is a paragraph that is meant to explain, though it does a good deal of showing through its colorful metaphors.

Indeed, explanatory passages litter the whole text of "The Tunnel", because Kohler is, after all, a professor. These passages are one of the reasons why the text goes absolutely nowhere: what often happens is that Kohler will begin a beautiful passage depicting some image or scene, and then in the next section fall back into explaining, into recounting (not repainting) some part of his life with clinical, detached, almost even bored precision. It's almost as if Kohler is too intelligent or, rather, too jaded to believe in the beauty of the scenes he paints, and so he falls back onto logic and analysis to make meaning out of these senseless images. It's also a subtle hint into Kohler's actual social life: he's a smarter-than-you kind of guy, which is made pretty apparent by his interactions with Herschel and Martha.

By the way, this same section, "First Winter of My Married Life", has truly awful dialogue at the end of it, between Kohler and his newlywedded wife Martha. But one surmises this is Gass's intent: he is trying to paint his life as dramatic, as worse than it actually is; that her words were actually that callous, that he really was an innocent and trying to connect to her, that the whole situation hurt him more than anyone can know. Kohler is trying to make a movie of his life, and failing terribly, at that.

Now we arrive at another prosaic theme of the novel, that of tunnels going nowhere.

I have mentioned heartily up to this point that ideas picked up and passages written in "The Tunnel" go absolutely nowhere. The novel is well-structured around this: the novel consists of twelve main sections, split into several sub-sections. Each section has almost nothing to do with the other - they certainly don't continue their predecessor - they cohere very loosely by the idea of the main section.

But beyond the actual structure of the paragraphs and sentences and the book's narrative arcs, the concept of going nowhere extends to the semantic content of the book too. Kohler makes a movie out of his wife's quarrels; he tries to make a theory of quarreling in general, which hardly passes any scientific muster; he pretends he defended himself to his colleague's complaints; he pats himself on the back for the planning of his basement tunnel; he petitions for his fictional political party, the Party of the Disappointed People (which, come to think of it, resembles Bill Hicks' "The People Who Hate People Party"; I guess Gass was first) he compiles the names of Jews organized in a Star of David; he makes steamy fanfiction out of Herschel Grynzspan and vom Rath; and out of all of these efforts and imaginations ... nothing. He does not feel better, he does not develop toward an interesting idea, he does not discover a hitherto-unknown passion. He thinks and does all of these things for no reason.

Which goes back to an earlier point I made: this novel was written for no reason. Kohler just has nothing better to do with his life, so much so his wife taunts him by asking him what he's going to do after retirement.

If Kohler actually built toward something, if Kohler actually committed to something, he might become a dramatically different man. It's very clear he's able to put Herculean levels of effort into things. But he just ... doesn't. Perhaps he's noncommittal out of laziness or cynicism or even guilt from a perceived flaw within himself, it's hard to say.

Leading us to the ending section, the true false tunnel, "Outcast on the Mountains of the Heart".

"Outcast on the Mountains of the Heart" even starts with a false entrance: the story of Kohler's aunt, a spinster who lived with his parents as a result of the Depression and squatted in their house after their death. Kohler's aunt is used to further his personal conviction about the inevitability of disappointment in life and the meaning in living spitefully.

Yet "Outcast" really kicks into gear with "Mother Makes A Cake", a legitimately funny story about his mother's attempt to plan Kohler's birthday and failing miserably as a result of 1) not knowing how to bake and 2) forgetting to mail out birthday invitations. As a result, Kohler's mother removes herself from her failure by draining gin and Kohler is left to wash out the plates for his birthday with a hose.

Kohler's mother combines the twin concepts of Kohler's own book, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany": she is guilty because of her inability and lack of willingness to develop herself and the debility caused by her alcoholism, and yet she is innocent for these two reasons as well. Kohler seems incapable of calling out his mother for what she actually is: a fuck-up, a loser, a failure, a nobody, a nothing, a shitstain, a dirty little wid, in short, something like the hole his Uncle Balt was. And yet she was his mother. She just wanted to make him a cake. Why did she have to be damned for that?

And thus, what proceeds forth is the haunting, miserable, and yet beautiful slog of "Blood on the Living Room Rug", which blood is his mother's abnormal periods caused by her drinking, and her consequent confinement in an asylum. If we observe Kohler as truly being indifferent throughout the whole novel, to the point of self-destruction, we see cracks in his concern in this section. His mother's guilt and innocence transfer over to him. From hereon out, Kohler is fated to move through an endless tunnel - but that is not right; Kohler is fated to fate himself into an endless tunnel, and if Kohler himself is his own damner, isn't that tantamount to being damned? And when you yourself are your rescuer and jailer, what hope is there left?

When we also think seriously on the supposed chronology of Kohler's life, we realize that "Blood on the Living Room Rug" contains a blatant contradiction with an earlier subsection, "The Ghost Folks", under "We Have Not Lived The Right Life". In "Ghost Folks", Kohler is recalling a trip to his parents with his own children; but in "Blood", Kohler says he admitted his mother and father into their respective asylums when he was a teenager. This is extremely unlikely to be negligence on Gass's part; Kohler is likely straight-up lying, OR his head is so up his ass he has forgotten what has actually happened, which coincides with his mother's own lying about her own life. This leads us to question everything Kohler has told us in this novel, a novel which we already have every reason not to give a shit about. These lies, too, are false tunnels, to fool his pursuers from catching him - preventing Kohler from pursuing himself and holding himself responsible to the guilt he has accumulated over the years.

Resuming, then, to the glorious follow-up section, the true tunnel, the last tunnel, the tunnel that truly has no reprieve for Kohler: the real entrance to "Outcast on the Mountains of the Heart".

You must've thought you were some clever shit, some maestro for devising this, eh, Gass, a kind of Houdini with the key to the very lock drowning him?

Well, you are. Have your star.

"The Tunnel" is a first in literature for me: hatred as a sculpture. It is an exhaustive list of the ways someone can not let go. It is unconcerned with the actions hatred can result in; if it did, it would create impurities in its handling of the subject, people would confuse the fist or the knife with the act of hating itself; no, "The Tunnel" makes a masterpiece of the act of hating itself. Dostoevsky could not do it with Raskolnikov; Shakespeare could not do it with Othello; that is, write about hate, and hate alone.

And now that it's accomplished, let us never attempt to replicate it.

It turns out, you're always on time. Your instinct is often more correct in knowing when to start something, and when to stop. If I hadn't finished "Orpheus", that is, if I hadn't undergone the process of finding what I desired from a book, based on exactly what I could give to a book, I wouldn't appreciate "The Tunnel". For every struggle I went through in the last seven years, "The Tunnel" gave back.

The chief issue with "Orpheus" had always been, Why did Orpheus descend? And then, ascend? Did he really believe it would work? Didn't he realize it was hopeless? nay, stupid? If I wrote a character so impulsive, so half-witted, what would be left of the myth, whose poet made stones move, made lions quiet, and what would be left of the book, temple of thought?

That Orpheus is, is enough; that he was alive, meant he held out hope for beauty; that he was alive, meant he held out hope for redemption; and yet, the descent to hell was tantamount to suicide, though suicide meant little to him in his grief. I realized this contradiction, this vacillation was at the heart of all poetry, which poetry was the true song Orpheus sang; and this vacillation, this subtlety, is at the heart of all fiction - all great, all booming, all thunderous fiction that racks and roils your brain - and is most needed for a read of "The Tunnel".

Now, having read it, I can firmly say: "The Tunnel" is one of the greatest in American literature. I understand this is easy for me to say, because I joked in "Orpheus" that all American literature is, at their hearts, failure literature. And yet I truly believe all American literature relies on contradiction, on holding out for hope and feeling hope cannot be had. Americans, in spite of our belief in Manifest Destiny, are a pessimistic lot; we look no further than the bloodbaths caused by our brothers in Europe to understand that there is no real salvation in life; we ourselves are borrowers from the failed Roman Republic; and we are trying our hands at being the Empire; and so, paradoxically, we believe in salvation all the more. Ahab truly had no real hope of defeating Dick; Gatsby had no real hope in having Daisy; Tom Sawyer had no hope for adulthood; and then there are the failures as shaped into men in the novels of Faulkner and Steinbeck.

I mean, Gass certainly didn't put it as dramatically as these writers had, so that's a strike against him. "The Tunnel" is such an accomplishment, even if only an academic one, even if only an aesthetic one, that, though it may not be called the Great American Novel, it, consarnit, represents one of the milestones of American art, an art, by the way, that is still underdeveloped and young, two hundred years young.

And I truly believe, that which is, implies that which is not. I know Gass himself has never said he was a particularly sunny person; he seemed to be a pessimist through and through, and I'm beginning to suspect he would have hated our current equity culture (which, I'll be frank, as with any culture, is starting to get overrated). I think he disbelieved that fellows could ever actually be equal, and that there was any happiness in the world that could be distributed to anyone equally, or "justly", a word he probably resented because in actuality there is no justice in this world. But I also believe that, by writing "The Tunnel", he was trying to make one good escape out of hatred.

Of course, Gass believed in hatred, believed in hatred's ability to encourage precision, quality, and energy, but I think he was the type to enjoy hatred as a principle and hatred as a hobby, and it was the latter he was trying to leave. "The Tunnel" is a compelling case that you can't erect a life out of hate alone, else you live a life of wandering all time.

You can't spend all your life ducking winter, such that even the onset of spring seems like a bait. Winter is winter, and spring is spring. You have to move on. I hope, having now finished it, I move on from "The Tunnel", not its aesthetic beauty, its focus, its intellectual rumblings, but from its conclusion, that we are all suckers. I think, too, this is a firmly American theme: yesterday was bad, today may be worse, but either tomorrow has to be better, or we must make it better, else we will die. The very last sentence of "The Tunnel" is Gass covering up the last exit left to Kohler, so as to deprive him of all hope; but by sealing his tunnel, Gass is saying softly to himself, "And yet I am outside of it, and now I must decide how to live." "The Tunnel" is a novel about living, by leaving all living outside of it. What a joke, huh?