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November 1, 1998

Wrestling With God

In four novellas, William H. Gass explores the nature of good and evil in
us all.

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Featured Author: William H. Gass
First Chapter: 'Cartesian Sonata'

By JAMES WOOD

illiam Gass is the philosopher-novelist who

wants to scramble our p's and q's. For many
years, in both essays and novels, he has fought what
he sees as the unthinking realism of American fiction.
Instead of the blank essences of traditional fiction, he
wants the subtle absences of the nouveau roman:
instead of characters, he organizes his fictions around
''symbolic centers''; instead of the architecture of plot,
he attends to the fabric of form; instead of the
management of reality, he prefers to liberate the CARTESIAN SONATA
sentence. The writer's task is not to make the reader And Other Novellas.
believe in a world: Gass has argued that ''one of the By William H. Gass.
most petty of human desires is the desire to be 274 pp. New York:
believed, on the one hand, and the will to belief, on Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
the other.'' The writer's task, as he sees it, is to
stimulate disbelief, to tickle the reader's alienation.

Yet the contradictions and difficulties of being an

avant-garde novelist -- and, in particular, a novelist who is philosophically skeptical
-- are everywhere apparent in Gass's two most recent works, a collection of essays,
''Finding a Form'' (1996), and now ''Cartesian Sonata,'' a gathering of four novellas.
The awkward truth is that fiction, because it is the most illusionistic of arts, is the
least amenable to the kind of skepticism Gass professes. Fiction, though it may play
with disbelief, labors on behalf of belief. As soon as fiction creates a human being, it
signs a contract with reality, however unfair or fraudulent that contract may be; and
fiction, unlike poetry, has a primary involvement with the human.

Gass is rather squeezed by this challenge. He caricatures realism as a Victorian

invention, and makes it seem much less flexible than it actually is; he has
sarcastically dismissed the ''clear-cut characters,'' the ''unambiguous values'' and
''sweet sentimentality'' of the 19th-century novel, as if George Eliot, Gogol and
Flaubert had never existed. Yet at the same time he appears to want the effects, if not
the burdens, of the fictive illusion. For instance, his fiction wants, and needs, human
beings, and therefore characters. Indeed, he has written that ''if I alter my reader's
This
consciousness, it will be because I have is an archived
constructed page. Report
a consciousness of whicha others
problem
may wish to become aware, or even, for a short time, share,'' which might as well be
a minimal description of Thackeray as of Gass.

His disdain for contemporary American realism is invigorating and extremely

intelligent, but his own solution does not seem to be a genuinely new fiction. It is
rather the enactment, in fiction, of precisely an invigorating and intelligent disdain
for realism. Thus each of the novellas in ''Cartesian Sonata'' is about a character with
a name and a history and an inner life. In ''Bed and Breakfast,'' a traveling salesman
named Walter Riff becomes so enamored of one of the inns he stays at that he
decides never to leave it; in ''Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's,'' a
touching story, an unhappy spinster named Emma Bishop sits in an Iowa farmhouse
and ponders the similarities between herself and two poets, Marianne Moore and
Elizabeth Bishop; and in the title novella, Gass tells the tale of Ella Bend Hess,
whose wild clairvoyance and offbeat mysticism -- she hears inaudible sounds and
feels impalpable textures -- causes a rift with her lumberingly conventional husband.

But because Gass feels that he, and we, must not be allowed to
''believe'' in characters, he fiddles with their unreality. Posing as God,
Gass tells us that he originally made Ella Hess rather differently: ''I'd
given her a long nose, I remember -- no good reason why. Now her
nose is middling.'' Likewise, Emma Bishop thinks to herself, most
unconvincingly, that she is really a fictional character, not an actual
human, rather like Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary: ''Like those Joyce Ravid/ Knopf
Emmas before me, I read of love in the light of a half-life.'' Yet a William H.
writer's deconstructions of reality need to be as convincing as his Gass
constructions, and Gass's apologies for his own realism seem a little
halfhearted. Beckett often informs us of the arbitrariness of his people,
placements and furniture, but his scrupulousness is in the service of a larger, and
tormented, metaphysical uncertainty. Gass's reminders may be skeptical, but they
are in the service of a philosophical complacency.

Gass's more systematic approach to the awkward reality of his own characters is to
write over them, to soap them so nicely in words that they are washed away. He has
a formidable lyrical power -- dainty, rich, elastic -- and he uses it to create streams
of consciousness that move between thirdperson narration and interior soliloquy. All
the novellas but the last one allow their characters to speak directly to the reader, by
way of broken monologues. This technique, developed by Jane Austen and refined
by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, exists for the revelation of character; it is the
soul's stutter. (''Ulysses,'' so often recently derided as an impossibly radical text, is
actually the very summation of the traditional novelistic devotion to human beings.)
Novelists who use stream of consciousness must calibrate their language so that it
seems the plausible emanation of the character's consciousness.

Gass, typically torn, uses this mode, yet powerfully scrawls his signature all over it.
Thus Emma Bishop likens herself to Emma Bovary simply because Gass thinks she
should. This same woman, supposedly an unfulfilled spinster, speaks a writer's
toughened vernacular: ''I learned to read on the sly. I failed my grades, though in this
dinky town you were advanced so your puberty would not contaminate the kiddies. .
. . I read on the sly the way some kids smoked or stroked one another through their
clothes.'' Absurdly, Ella Hess's doltish husband thinks to himself that his wife ''hasn't
enough blood in the narrow channels of her flesh to pink a tear, while mine is like
sand in a sand clock, almost wholly in my head -- thick, moist, flushed, hot.'' Too
often, Gass's stream of consciousness seems only a vessel for his own wordy
authority.
 In fact, to write over one's characters, to give them thoughts and verbal powers only
a writer could have, is to turn those people into writers. So Ella Hess's clairvoyance
is not really affecting or convincing, This is anonly
and seems archived page.
a way for Gass toReport
createaaproblem
character who apprehends the world with sensuous attention, as a Gass-like writer
would. Walter Riff, the traveling salesman, falls in love with the objects in the
bedroom of his chosen inn, and this allows Gass to use him as a writer, as a seeing
eye: ''His appetite,'' Gass writes, ''was in his eyes.'' But Walter Riff rather disappears
as a result. And Emma Bishop is every writer's dream, someone literate enough to
read modern poetry. Only in the book's last novella does Gass create a life with a
moving otherness. In ''The Master of Secret Revenges,'' he tells the story of Luther
Penner, a brilliant but unstable child who, for no reason, decides that the principle
by which he will live is revenge. Some mysterious fire burns in Luther's heart, and
so in the heart of this beautiful story. Luther is a character who flies out of Gass's
over-anxious grasp.

In a strange way, Gass is as involved with character as are the realists he so

thoughtfully deposes. If they rather idly clothe their fictional creations, Gass rather
neurotically unclothes his. But he cannot avoid the human, and he cannot avoid
illusion, and his fiction describes a strange crescent around the unavoidable. His
recoil is more respectable than most writer's embraces; but it is still a recoil, for all
that.

James Wood is a senior editor at The New Republic. His book of essays, ''The
Broken Estate,'' will be published next year.

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