The Columbia History of the American Novel

them all what to believe, but no one is quite ready to take as gospel the word of so boisterous a 'lie-minded man.'

People who write of Gass typically describe the narrator as a 'dominant consciousness' or a voice, and in fact there are grounds for doing so, as also for reverting now and again to talk of characters -740- with backgrounds and features and reasons. Omensetter's Jethro Furber is a kind of 'verbal architecture,' as Arthur M. Salzman sugshy; gests, but he also resembles a man. The landscape in Gass is a kind of metaphor for, rather than a straight depiction of, an actual physshy; ical environment, but for all the reverie and innerness and linguistic aura, we also feel and carry within us the powerful presence of what we take to be actual landscapes. We know that every feature of each such landscape has been created, dreamt, shaped, that it is a fabric of words to which we attend, but we give ourselves over to the halfillusion of place quite as we do in fictions with more palpably illushy; sionistic designs upon us.

In short, one is tempted to say that in his fiction Gass knows thily his deep and joyous absorption in language exists in tension with, or in response to, another kind of absorption, more troubled, more diffuse. Characters in his fiction are hurt into lanshy; guage in a way that the confident master who speaks in the essays need not consider. In tngs he cannot permit himself to know elsewhere. He knows, that is, how entirehe fiction language is a refuge and a trap, in the essays it is all adventure, blessed method, consciousness electrified by beauty. Deeply alert to all that language cannot accomplish, Gass in his fiction tracks the vicissitudes of the language animal confrontshy; ing inertia, grayness, confusion, even history. The power of the ficshy; tion comes from its capacity to evoke in language much that language is helpless to alter or register adequately. There is a pathos and a tension in the best of the fiction that is largely absent even from the already classic philosophical essays on representation, stylization, and the ontology of the sentence.

Is Gass an avant-garde writer? He has so wished to be that it would seem at least ungenerous to deny it. His least sustaining ficshy; tion, Willie Masters, has all the qualities of a willfully outrageous, incorrigibly digressive work, and if it isn't an all too typical avantshy; garde fiction, I don't know what is. The other fictions, including fragments of The Tunnel, are so complex, so full of every kind of aesthetic scruple that they feel like something else. In their overt atshy; tention to language and the obstacles they erect to comfortable apshy; propriation, they are avant-garde works. In the range of palpable pleasures they afford, including the fellow feelings they sometimes enable, they are satisfying in a way that is not often associated with -741- the avant-garde. Charles Newman asks 'whether an aesthetic [like Gass's] so fully and systematically engaged against Pseudo-art allows itself the amplitude to authenticate itself.' Gass is neither a Joyce nor a Tolstoy, but by pushing past the sometimes straitening requireshy; ments of his own aesthetic he has created fully convincing and ravshy; ishing fictions. These works almost confirm the irrelevance of disshy; cussions bearing on what is or is not avant-garde — discussions in which Gass himself has been an influential participant.

Gass early wrote on Donald Barthelme, celebrating his absorption in the trash of common experience and his success in placing himself 'in the center of modern consciousness.' Others, equally persuaded by Barthelme's skills and devices, have likened his work to light enshy; tertainment, 'like the blowing of dandelion fluff: an inconsequential but not unpleasant way of passing the time.' For Gass, Barthelme is an intrepid explorer gaily picking through the dreck left around us by television, books, political speeches, ordinary talk: 'The aim of every media, we are nothing but the little darkening hatch they trace when, narrowly, they cross.' For Barthelme's severest critics, his flattening of distinctions, his reduction of everything — as Gass puts it — to a 'flatland junk yard,' is a denial of meaning and a shallow toying with serious questions. Even readers deeply impressed by the variety of narrative modes in Barthelme, by his deft movement from parodies of narrative structure to playful lampoons of cultural institutions, are often in doubt as to what this sort of wit and intelligence can amount to. Gass would seem to claim enough by refusing to claim too much: he asserts that, in addition to the dreck and the play, 'there is war and suffering, love and hope and cruelty' in Barthelme, but he doesn't tell us what these count for in Barthelme, how heavily they weigh upon us as we read, how much they are trivialized by the pervasive irony. From what point of view does Barthelme expose consciousness as 'a shitty run of category errors and non sequiturs'? If, as Gass says, he 'has the art to make a treasure out of trash,' what precisely differentiates the treasure from the clever joke, and what in Barthelme authorizes the serious employment of so devalued a term as 'treasure'? Gass nicely tells us what a Barthelme fiction is most apt to look like, but questions of force and significance are not much considered.

Barthelme is a kind of avant-garde writer in one sense at least: he -742- writes for an audience that knows something about narrative devices and is sophisticated enough to appreciate parody. The problem, if there is one, is that Barthelme makes things very easy for this audishy; ence and may succeed as well as he does mainly by creating a comshy; munity of sophisticates whose main credential is its willingness to be amused by the likes of Barthelme. It isn't hard, after all, to be soshy; phisticated in the way that Barthelme requires. All that's asked, reshy; ally, is that you be alert to the irony that undercuts everything, that you be too smart to be taken in, that you recognize the joke even if you don't quite get it. Never before has an avant-garde writer seemed so clubbable, so much intelligent fun, so wicked without wanting to hurt, so scathing without wanting any one party to feel singled out for abuse more than another. If serious conventional writing evokes emotion, then perhaps it is fair to say that Barthelme's depersonalshy; ization, his refusal to make us feel anything but superior, is a way of defying convention. But again, for all the wit and brilliance of Barshy; thelme's contrivances, they cost us nothing; we accede to them with no reluctance. Critics like Charles Molesworth stress the 'ironic resshy; onance' established when Barthelme's characters come up with solshy; emn value-judgments and straightforward 'home truths': there is poignance, says Molesworth, in the need of characters to fall back 'on ethical, normative measures that will allow them to comprehend their experience.' But of course there is no real conflict in these passages. Readers know at once what is to be made of nostalgias and wisdom-statements in Barthelme. Where the context ensures that nothing be anything but silly or hopeless, where the voice is so perfectly — if narrowly — pitched, where the authorial control is conshy; summate, there can be no genuine tension, no experience of menace or breakdown. It's not alone the artfulness, formal severity, or fanshy; tastic distortion that certifies the presence of an avant-garde work. Barthelme's fictional voice, 'both coy and disaffected,' as Molesshy; worth says, is strangely status-affirming and comfortable in the postmodern age, and as such it lacks the final accent of fully affecting avant-garde fiction.

This is not to say that the best of the work is anything less than wonderful. If the novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1977) seem not much more than elaborate conceits, they do noneshy; theless embody qualities found in the more satisfying stories. Each -743- contains passages that just about any contemporary writer would be pleased to have written. Each raises important questions that it reshy; fuses to address, however intent it is upon wringing from those quesshy; tions what it can by way of aura and amusement. What makes the stories so much better than the novels is that in the shorter works we are not made to expect development or deepening of insights. In the novels Barthelme's refusal to press for development may itself be taken as a token of avant-garde defiance, but mostly it seems a matter of incapacity. Barthelme knows what he wants to do, and has a sly contempt for those who are inclined to go too far, to say more than they mean. In The Dead Father he writes a hilarious passage on the 'true task' of the modern son, which is to reproduce the father, 'but a paler, weaker version of him,' and thereby to move 'toward a golden age of decency, quiet and calmed fevers.' It is possible to hear in this passage not the accent of angry rebuke but the mostly wistful accent of one who knows himself and his time too well to demand too much. As we interpret such words — hearing in them mostly biting satire or ironic self-acceptance — so will we be inclined to regard Donshy; ald Barthelme's relationship to the avant-garde.

Less problematic by far is Guy Davenport's posture. An inheritor of the high modernist tradition, drawn by training and disposition to what Hugh Kenner calls 'the austere and astringent,' Davenport is allusive, learned, precise, languorous, backward- and forward-looking all at once. Infatuated by things past, dreaming always of new colshy; locations and conjunctions, he offers a combination of intellectual rigor and lyric sensuality, prudent attention to detail, and eccentric foraging (his word). Though characterizing himself as a maker of assemblages, a builder, Davenport uses an essentially collagist techshy; nique to create narratives with a strange and enchanting momentum. One is carried through a Davenport fiction not by a structured sucshy; cession of events or by the promise of discoverable thematic cohershy; ence but by the steady unfolding of images and thoughts, the playful but never forced alternation of affinities and digressions. Working often with named historical or artistic figures — Charles Fourier, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka — Davenport imagines and excavates, borrows and invents, states and evokes, ever intent — as he says — on making contact with 'pioneers of the spirit,' the better to grasp what is