It's a Gass, Gass, Gass

William Gass, "Pulitzer: The People's Prize," in Finding a Form (originally in The NYTBR):

"…the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second…" (3)

"Any award-giving outfit…is doomed by its cumbersome committee structure to make mistakes, to pass the masters by in silence and applaud the apprentices, the mimics, the hacks, or to honor one of those agile surfers who ride every fresh wave." (5)

 "…the fact is that good taste and sensible judgment are rare, and excellence itself is threatening, innovation an outrage." (6)

"When missing exceeds chance, as in this case; when a record of failure approaches perfection; then we can begin to wonder whether it is really missing the mark at all; whether the Pulitzer, not by design but through its inherent nature, is being given to those it wishes, quite precisely, to award, and is nourishing, if not the multitude, at least those numbers among the cultivated whose shallow roots need just this sort of gentle drizzle." (7)

"The Pulitzer has perceived an important truth about our complex culture: Serious literature is not important to it; however, the myth that it matters must be maintained. Ceremony is essential, although Mammon is the god that's served. …Literature, which is written in isolation and read in silence, receives as its share less than 3 percent of the funds available to the National Endowment for the Arts. …And if you point to the discrepancy between the acknowledged importance of our literature to our culture and the pitiful public support it gets, and decry the injustice of it, you will receive the same response I always have: Those addressed, like a cat, will not follow the direction of your gesture, but will be just curious enough to sniff nervously for a moment the end of your admonitory finger." (10)

"The Pulitzer does not give glory to its choices; its choices give celebrity to it; and that is precisely why it is the best-known and, to the public, the most prestigious prize…" (10)

"What the public wants, as the Pulitzer sees it…, is an exciting story with a timely theme, although it may have historical setting. The material should be handled simply and delivered in terms of sharp contrasts in order that the problems the novel raises can be decisively resolved. Ideally, it should be written in a style that is as invisible as Ralph Ellison's invisible man, so that the reader can let go of the words and grasp the situation the way one might the wheel of the family car. And since most of the consumers of fiction are women…, it won't hurt to fulfill a few of their longings, to grant, now and then, unconsciously an unconscious wish. Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-opened eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry or artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it—lean cuisine, if that's the thing—and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards.

"No, this prize for fiction is not disgraced by its banal and hokey choices. It is the critics and customers who have chosen and acclaimed them, who have bought the books and thought about them and called them literature and tried to stick them like gum on the pillars of our culture. It is they who have earned the opprobrium of this honor." (12)

Comma, Comma, Comma Chameleon

When the old lion emerges from his den and roars, it behooves us to listen.

Here's William Gass in an essay about Elizabeth Bishop in the current edition (10/11) of Harper's:

"Alas, there are so many kinds of commas: those that lie like rocks in the path of a sentence, slowing its gait and requiring the reader's heed to avoid a stumble; their gentler cousins, impairing a pell-mell flow of meaning the way pebbles slow a stream; commas that indicate a pause for thinking things over; commas enclosing phrases the way the small pockets in a purse hug hairpins or collect bits of loose change; commas that return us to our last stop, and those that some schoolmarm has insisted should be placed, like a traffic cop, between 'stop' and 'and.' Not to mention those comma-like curvatures that function like overhead lighting—apostrophes they're called—that warn of a bad crack in a spelt word where some letters have disappeared to apparently no one's alarm; or claws that admit the words they enclose aren't theirs; or those that issue claims of ownership, called possessives by unmarried teachers. So many inky dabs—they enable José García Villa, in some of his wonderful comma poems, to write lines that ring like blows from a hammer:

And,lay,he,down,the,golden,father,
(Genesis',fist,all,gentle,now)
Between,the,Wall,of,China,and,
The,tiger,tree,(his,centuries,his,
Aerials,of,light)…"

The Avant-Garde: A Gass-eous Typology

In "The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde," (found in Finding a Form) William Gass asserts that the term 'avant-garde' was first applied in a literary context in the sixteenth century to Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay.

Their strife the Fates have closed, with stern control,

The earth holds her fair body, and her soul
An angel with glad angels triumpheth;
Love has no more that he can do; desire
Is buried, and my heart a faded fire,
And for Death's sake, I am in love with Death.

Ronsard, "His Lady's Death" (1550)

So long you wandered on the dusky plain,

Where flit the shadows with their endless cry, 

You reach the shore where all the world goes by, 

You leave the strife, the slavery, the pain; 

But we, but we, the mortals that remain 

In vain stretch hands; for Charon sullenly

Drives us afar, we may not come anigh 

Till that last mystic obolus we gain.

du Bellay, "To His Friend in Elysium" (1550)

Gass then identifies three kinds of avant-garde

"One, such as the architectural modernism of the Bauhaus, of Gropius, Le Corbuier, and Neutra, aims to improve man and his life; it naturally allies itself with other forward-looking agents of change (the machine, for instance), and it preaches progress with the sort of rosy-cheeked optimism characteristic of metaphysical Rotarians. It tends to be impatient with the past, maintaining that little can be learned from history but its errors, and fearing nostalgia above all other passive emotions. Although the members of this avant-garde are largely arty intellectuals, there is a sense of common cause with the impoverished and downtrodden—a shared powerlessness. This is what I call the liberal avant-garde. Its influence is strongest among the arts that have a public posture (architecture, theater, cinema). When the liberal avant-garde wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Left. Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Brecht are characteristic types.

The avant-garde of Gautier, Degas, and Flaubert, however, has nothing but scorn for these pimps of progress. The talismanic word here is "original," and the focus of the group tends to be on individual and artistic freedom, on disengagement and withdrawal. Artists in this second group are ready to take from tradition and often oppose the present by looking to the past. They have a natural affinity with the aristocracy, and in general their movements are marked by an extreme dislike of the masses. Their image of the artist is the individual in his isolation. This is the conservative avant-garde, the avant-garde of Rimbaud, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Celine, and it is most prevalent among poets. When it wants to become doctrinaire, it embraces the fascism of the Right, and often shows, alas, a racist face." (202-03)

...

"The existence of a third avant-garde is more problematic. The activities of any such "group," whether artistically oriented or socially focused, are so determined by the times that to call one sort permanent seems to court contradiction. Yet I believe there are works to which habit won't have a chance to get us comfortably accustomed; works that will continue to resist the soothing praises of the critics, and that will rise from their tombs of received opinion to surprise us again and again. These works may pay a dreadful price for the role they have chosen to play, but if they are going to be a permanent part of "the" avant-garde (that avant-garde common to all kinds), they must remain wild and never neglect an opportunity to attack their trainers; above all, it is the hand that feeds them which must be repeatedly bitten. They have to continue to do what the avant-garde is supposed to do: shatter stereotypes, shake things up, and keep things moving; offer fresh possibilities to a jaded understanding; encourage a new consciousness; revitalize the creative spirit of the medium; and, above all, challenge the skills and ambitions of every practitioner. Such a pure avant-garde must not only emphasize the formal elements of its art (recognizing that these elements are its art); its outside interests must be in very long-term—if not permanent—problems. It may have to say no to Cash, to Flag, to Man, to God, to Being itself. It cannot be satisfied merely to complain of the frivolities of a king's court or to count the crimes of capitalism or to castigate the middle class for its persistent vulgarity. The avant-garde's ultimate purpose is to return the art to itself, not as if the art could be cordoned off from the world and kept uncontaminated, but in order to remind it of its nature (a creator of forms in the profoundest sense)—a nature that should not be allowed to dissolve into what are, after all, measly moments of society." (205)

In Lieblicher Blaue(in Lovely Blue), Hölderlin

In lovely blue the steeple blossoms
With its metal roof. Around which
Drift swallow cries, around which
Lies most loving blue. The sun,
High overhead, tints the roof tin,
But up in the wind, silent,
The weathercock crows. When someone
Takes the stairs down from the belfry,
It is a still life, with the figure
Thus detached, the sculpted shape
Of man comes forth. The windows
The bells ring through
Are as gates to beauty. Because gates
Still take after nature,
They resemble the forest trees.
But purity is also beauty.
A grave spirit arises from within,
Out of divers things. Yet so simple
These images, so very holy,
One fears to describe them. But the gods,
Ever kind in all things,
Are rich in virtue and joy.
Which man may imitate.
May a man look up
From the utter hardship of his life
And say: Let me also be
Like these? Yes. As long as kindness lasts,
Pure, within his heart, he may gladly measure himself
Against the divine. Is God unknown?
Is he manifest as the sky? This I tend
To believe. Such is man’s measure.
Well deserving, yet poetically
Man dwells on this earth. But the shadow
Of the starry night is no more pure, if I may say so,
Than man, said to be the image of God.
Is there measure on earth? There is
None. No created world ever hindered
The course of thunder. A flower
Is likewise lovely, blooming as it does
Under the sun. The eye often discovers
Creatures in life it would be yet lovelier
To name than flowers. O, this I know!
For to bleed both in body and heart, and cease
To be whole, is this pleasing to God?
But the soul, I believe, must
Remain pure, lest the eagle wing
Its way up to the Almighty with songs
Of praise and the voice of so many birds.
It is substance, and is form.
Lovely little brook, how moving you seem
As you roll so clear, like the eye of God,
Through the Milky Way. I know you well,
But tears pour from the eye.
I see gaiety of life blossom
About me in all creation’s forms,
I do not compare it cheaply
To the graveyard’s solitary doves. People’s
Laughter seems to grieve me,
After all, I have a heart.
Would I like to be a comet? I think so.
They are swift as birds, they flower
With fire, childlike in purity. To desire
More than this is beyond human measure.
The gaiety of virtue also deserves praise
From the grave spirit adrift
Between the garden’s three columns.
A beautiful virgin should wreathe her hair
With myrtle, being simple by nature and heart.
But myrtles are found in Greece.
If a man look into a mirror
And see his image therein, as if painted,
It is his likeness. Man’s image has eyes,
But the moon has light.
King Oedipus may have an eye too many.
The sufferings of this man seem indescribable,
Inexpressible, unspeakable. Which comes
When drama represents such things.
But what do I feel, now thinking of you?
Like brooks, I am carried away by the end of something
That expands like Asia. Of course,
Oedipus suffers the same? For a reason,
Of course. Did Hercules suffer as well?
Indeed. In their friendship
Did not the Dioscuri also suffer?
Yes, to battle God as Hercules did
Is to suffer. And to half share immortality
With the envy of this life,
This too is pain. But this also
Is suffering, when a man is covered with summer freckles,
All bespattered with spots. This is the work
Of the gun, it draws everything out.
It leads young men along their course,
Charmed by rays like roses.
The sufferings of Oedipus seem like a poor man
Lamenting what he lacks.
Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece.
Life is death, and death a life.

We Report, You Decide

According to James Wood at a lecture to creative writing students at Columbia (blogged about here):

"many of us take up fiction to experience and, hopefully identify with, certain or other characters. We look for books that play to “our awareness that a character’s actions are profoundly important,” Wood said, even if the writing must attend to “the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of knowing other people.” The creation of character is, therefore, the most important task for a writer of fiction—as well as the most reliable measure of his success.

Wood continued to sort out the matter by explaining two approaches to the creation of character: that of super-realists, like E.M. Forster (whose Aspects of the Novel is surpassed by How Fiction Works), who “want character to be as big as life” and can’t accept the limitations of fictitiousness; and that of anti-realists, like John Barth, who maintain that character ought to be “as small as the words on a page.” ...

While he did take a few shots at fellow critics like Harold Bloom (who has “a tendency to over-identify with certain characters”) and William Gass (a “formalist fatalist”), he generally kept his cool."

Gass had an opportunity to respond in an interview before his own lecture there, and apparently punted:

SPEC: James Wood spoke to students in Columbia’s Writing Program a few weeks ago, on the centrality of character to the fiction writer’s work. Toward the end of his lecture, as he was discussing different attitudes re: character-creation, he referred to you as a “formalist fatalist.” (To be fair, he also criticized Harold Bloom for being too invested in certain characters, to the point of over-identification.) Do you think that this is a common perception of your approach to fiction? Is there anything that you would say to revise or correct it? And, for the sake of fairness, do you have any thoughts on James Wood?

WG: I’m surprise [sic] that he had time for me.  I do identify myself as a formalist (in my sense of the word), and I am proud to be an elitist (in my sense of the word).  My formalism has nothing to do with pre-established structures.  It holds that the key to esthetic experience does not lie in terms but in relations - ideally internal relations: i.e., not as an apple lies on a plate, but as H and O make water.  For me, character is defined linguistically: it is any recurring subject that is repeatedly modified by elements of the text which stand as predicates to it.  So David Copperfield is indeed a character in Dickens, but so is a movie poster or a mountain in Malcolm Lowry.   A perfectly organized book would end up as Hegel said the Absolute should: every word would ultimately modify or affect one and only one subject.  This is nonsense as far as the world goes but fiction is not the world. It’s important relations are internal the way they are in a Cezanne still life.  I don’t know what he means by fatalist.


Perhaps it is someone who has given up trying to be understood.  By the way, I don’t pick fights, except with the church.  I am sure his opinion is well considered and well informed.

That "I don't know what he means..." is a bit of a put down in the discipline of philosophy that non-philosophers often don't get. Then, Gass's use of the word "opinion" seals it. It's subtle, but it's a jab something along the order of 'He doesn't really KNOW what he's talking about; he hasn't really demonstrated or proven anything. I don't really take him that seriously. His is merely an opinion—to which he is, of course, entitled—but it isn't philosophically grounded." Believe me, to Gass, Wood is beneath contempt, held in low esteem.

Feel free to click on Gass or James Wood over in the right-hand column for my own thoughts on these two.