The Columbia History of the American Novel

evincing what the poet John Ashbery calls an 'irrefutable logic.' Readers with a limited appetite for 'pure' fiction — the epithet comes from Abish — were not impressed. Neither did it help much to think of his work as proceeding from his self-confessed 'distrust of the understanding that is intrinsic to any communication.' Raised to a principle of composition and accepted as a given, Abish's 'distrust' promised little in the way of fully engaging fictions. All too attractive to ideologues of postmodern metafiction, Abish's work and the terms he used to talk about it informed the cant employed by American critics like Jerome Klinkowitz who argued that everything is arbitrary and that there is no difference between fiction and reality. Though there is little but verbal life in works like Alphabetical Africa, they deserved better from academics like Klinkowitz, for whom the 'fact' -736- that we live in 'post-structuralist times' (whatever that can mean) must necessarily prevent serious writers from acknowledging even perfectly obvious distinctions.

Abish's 1980 novel How German Is It is another matter entirely, a work of extraordinary precision that explores rather than simply buys into ideas of fictiveness and the unknowable. A quietly inexorable if also discontinuous meditation on the relationship of the 'new' Germany to its Nazi past, Abish's novel on one hand invites the characterization routinely applied to his other fiction: it is fragmentary, parodic, inconclusive, and permeated by artifice. But one would not think to describe it as merely a linguistic tour de force, or as revolving about an arbitrarily chosen or merely 'imaginary' landscape. Abish's focus is the Germany of the Federal Republic, the background for his concern the Nazi era and all it says, or might say, about Germany and even German-ness. The characters in the novel speak to one another in the accents of persons who might really exist. Particulars are marshaled with no sense that they are irrelevant. Enigma and obliquity are ever-present, not as manifests of an ostentatiously peremptory imagination but as reflections of pressing questions with which the novel is obsessed, as readers must be. While a critic like Klinkowitz can cheerfully insist that 'the signifiers of language have no inherent relationship to the things they describe,' Abish's novel treats failures of language as specific failures growing out of particular conditions. Though for Abish the unreliability of language is a problem with which human beings always contend, How German Is It also conveys an abiding concern about the degree to which particular discourses, institutions, cultures can be held responsible for their effort to obscure reality and obstruct memory. If in Abish's novel we are given to understand that the Nazi past is deliberately obscured in postwar Germany, that does not translate automatically into an abstract statement about the irrecoverability of the past. The reader who believes that for Abish one setting or culture is equivalent to another, a particular linguistic pattern a paradigm for all others, does not understand the tenor and design of Abish's novel. There the inaccessible, obscure, or forgotten is evoked not as a function of 'the failures of language' but as a consequence of determinate intentions the novelist wishes to anatomize and understand. Whatever its reticence and indirection, the novel is a work of in-737- tensely focused moral urgency. When in the novel an architect says that 'morality is not an over-riding issue in architecture,' the context makes it clear that he is resorting to a sophisticated formula to evade what he ought to address. This is an instance not of the 'failure of communication' but of the way that some human beings subvert the truth and violate their responsibility to speak truthfully or acknowledge what they know. The insight is not 'general.' It is a criticism of a kind of human failure, and it emerges from a conviction that it ought to be, and may be, possible for persons to do better.

What makes Abish's work an avant-garde novel is important. It is in no way an attempt to amuse, hector, or uplift a large audience. In an entertainment culture drawn to highly charged subjects and sensational treatments it takes on an explosive subject with a dryness and detachment that together bespeak an enormous aesthetic and moral scruple. At the same time, one never feels here that for Abish indirection is a stylistic fetish, opacity a standard postmodern decorum. Abish's commitment to the formal and philosophical premises of the work ensures that he refuse to provide the decisive answers, compellingly colorful characterizations, and dramatic actions favored by more 'popular' writers. Even a symbolically charged incident, like the discovery of a mass grave beneath the streets of the town of Brumholdstein, is presented in such a way as to 'resist any type of easy assimilation' or climactic resonance. So argues Abish's best critic, Maarten van Delden, who also notes that the extreme precision of the novel, drawing our attention to matters both large and small, ceaselessly 'defamiliarizes' everything, compounding an aura established by the 'narrator's habit of posing endless questions, even about the most trivial matters.' Deconstructing the world of the new Germany, van Delden goes on, Abish depicts it 'as a place of evasion and deception, of discontinuities between past and present…where the past is continually being evoked and then side-stepped.' Relentlessly involving us in questions and plots we cannot but find interesting, Abish refuses 'to tie together the various strands of his narrative' or to permit the creation of an unmistakable 'moral center.' Though nothing in these refusals seems at all perverse, it is clear that the avant-garde (or subversive) element in How German Is It proceeds from a radical skepticism, however much Abish here resists the claims of the arbitrary and meaningless. Unmoved by the usual forms -738- of indeterminacy and iconoclasm, Abish here demonstrates that for a serious avant-garde writer — quite as Charles Newman demanded — there can be 'more to fiction than fiction' and more than 'the fatuity of form as final consolation.'

William Gass has made himself an unapologetic spokesman for fiction and the consolations of form, assuming in one resounding essay after another an oppositional posture that has made him the foremost exemplar of the avant-garde in his generation. Though his fiction has not quite commanded the attention routinely devoted to his aesthetic tracts and polemics, he is surely one of the most accomplished and original writers around. From the first having inspired readers to speak of his essays and stories as 'works of beauty' by a man 'who loves words' more than anything else, he has insisted upon the autonomy, the purity of art while struggling to avoid the pallor and empty formalism of a bloodless aestheticism. To those turned off by the idiot ejaculations and glib spontaneities of would-be vanguardists like Jack Kerouac, Gass has seemed a model of pride, wit, cunning, and audacious verbal brilliance. He has been willing to make judgments and take risks, to make art as if it were possible actually to fail and to succeed. Though many younger writers out for the main chance show little interest in his work, they have read him; they know that he is out there, his best work an implicit challenge to their every indifferent sentence and self-indulgent yawp.

Gass's fiction includes an enormous novel-perpetually-in-progress entitled The Tunnel, the 1966 novel Omensetter's Luck, the 1968 story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and a bravura mixed-media fiction called Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1971). No one of these can quite indicate what the others are like. The stories are mostly without those teeming 'barrages of verbiage' — John Gardner's description — that one finds in the other works. Omensetter is without the typographic puns and lunacies of Willie. The Tunnel — so far as one can tell from the extended sections published in periodicals — refuses the linear narrative continuity of Omensetter.

At the same time, one need only utter the words ' William Gass' to call to mind certain tendencies that together help to place him. Ihab Hassan calls him 'logophiliac, perhaps logopath, certainly mythomane.' Alvin Rosenfeld speaks of Gass's feeling for 'the musical -739- as well as the semantic character' of words, of a verbal 'opulence' that can become 'self-consciously flamboyant,' 'strutting,' even 'dandified.' Tony Tanner finds in Gass a constant reminder that 'it is precisely in the flamboyance and poetry — the whole 'aside' of style and language finely used — that we find our fun, our dignity.' Gass's own essays also steer us in the inevitable direction, nowhere more pointedly than in 'The Concept of Character in Fiction,' where he announces his ambition 'to carry the reader to the edge of every word so that it seems he must be compelled to react as though to truth as told in life, and then to return him, like a philosopher liberated from the cave, to the clear and brilliant world of concept, to the realm of order, proportion, and dazzling construction…to fiction, where characters, unlike ourselves, freed from existence, can shine like essence, and purely Be.'

Though this is not the place for a full-scale analysis of such a formulation, it is clear that there is even more to Gass than his own statements reveal. Gass may want characters 'unlike ourselves,' but his figures sufficiently resemble us to make readers interested in them as if they were or might have been drawn from actual human beings. He may chiefly prize 'concept,' 'order,' and 'proportion,' but his fictions also provide elements of narrative development and recognizable setting. However strenuous his insistence upon consciousness and the internal, he situates his fictions in such a way as to anatomize and explain the instinct to turn inward: no inside without outside in Gass, no self without others, no sufficiency of language without the suggestion of an insufficiency, no shining like essence without traces of desolating everydayness. One thinks words, sentences, music as one reads Gass, but one thinks also of 'life' and 'experience' in ways that Gass is ever reluctant to allow. Some, like the critic Richard Gilman, deplore 'the confusion of realms.' Others dismiss the familiar trappings — characters, settings, themes, allegorical options — as so many opportunities for linguistic invention, for the surface play of ostensive signifiers. Gass tells