We, afflicted by ourselves,
gladly afflicting, gladly
needing to be afflicted.
We, who sleep with our anger
laid beside us like a knife.
- “Antistrophes,” Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell
As we race headlong into a techno-hell of even more constant information churn, social disintegration and anomie, conspiracy theories proven accurate, AI fakery, and geopolitical turmoil, the very existence of The Past comes into question. Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. Which news story was trending two weeks ago? What have we really done to our neighbors? Why are we at war again? What is a fact, anyway? The more discerning among us can no longer trust our own eyes and ears, much less the tales told to us by teachers in our youth. The wheels of history have begun to spin so quickly and crookedly that they’re in danger of falling off the wagon. All the while, our personal narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, are dissolving into the ether too. These dynamics were already developing when William H. Gass was writing The Tunnel, which took him nearly thirty years until its publication in 1995. To read this towering literary achievement now, reissued in a new full color edition by Dalkey Archive Press, evokes a different sort of prescience. We are not just adrift in a sea of information and simulacra; we are, all of us, drowning. The ideological ranting and raving of the narrator of The Tunnel, William Frederick Kohler, serves as a warning of this collective dysfunction, the implications of which appear deceptively simple at first glance and considerably more nuanced upon further reflection. As I read this mammoth work (its stature robust, both physically and artistically), I found myself asking, “is Gass’ presentation of the impetus of fascism sincere, almost to the point of cliché? Or is this whole indictment merely subterfuge, concealing a subtler analysis of the power of time, language, and artistry?” After all those pages, I confess I remain unsure, which is perhaps the point.
We can’t let the intimate relationship between author and character go unmentioned in this case. We find connections in the first name, the deep Midwestern roots, the alcoholic mother, the profession (academia), the wife (for Gass: Mary; for Kohler: Martha, a Christological connection, and furthermore pet-named Marty), even their two sons. Superficial? Or a careful blurring of world and text to reinforce the notion that this, Kohler’s madness, could happen to any of us, Gass included? Mircea Cărtărescu does something similar in Solenoid circa 2015, a pseudo-autobiography, a self-inspired cartography of real or imagined personal events, but Cărtărescu’s move is more overt and admitted, and that novel strays further into magical realism and surrealism. Still, the preexisting influence of Gass is apparent. Now, what kind of masochistic-exhibitionist would dare to map himself onto a monster? Through maximalist descriptions of childhood, adolescence, university, marriage, affairs, and arguments among faculty (not in chronological order), Gass weaves a vibrant tapestry of a man on the brink, a contemptible loser, taking out his general and particular grievances on the enemies in his head.
Mechanically, at the level of the sentence, Gass is an unabashed show-off. The grotesque interiority will be familiar to readers of his debut, Omensetter’s Luck (with its spiraling stream of consciousness in the head of Furber). Gass likes long but properly regimented lists—lists of rivers, candies, objects in an attic or on a desk, adjectives and adverbs and clauses. There’s untranslated German, references to Rilke, a colleague’s frivolous and profane Pynchon-esque limericks, similes all over the place, coinages (“comatostie,” “squoozen,” “litmussy”), and gratuitous alliteration (“…or so it seems to me now in my search for a symbol, some sense for my silly situation…”) It’s abundantly clear that Gass sweat blood over this novel, every word chosen with the utmost care, a master at work. One wonders if the text in front of us is a subversive postmodern revival of the late 18th century proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement, replete with colorful flowers along the path. Our narrator is insufferable, though his words are often beautiful. We’re reminded explicitly: “Language is always honest. Language does not lie, only its users.” Is Gass lying to us? There are abundant gimmicks too—goofy doodles, unusual textual structures, bolded declarations, rather frequent racial slurs, the author seemingly having fun at our expense. In a stirring conversation with the late Michael Silverblatt, Gass admitted that the hyper-weird difficulty, especially in the beginning, is a deliberate trial-by-fire to ensure the persevering reader deserves to be there. The narrative does find a semblance of easier, surer footing eventually.
What the novel is “about” becomes almost secondary at times: an abject failure whose amassed negative life experiences have rendered him susceptible to “the fascism of the heart.” Bullied as a child, raised by problematic parents, and driven intensely neurotic about his sexual impotence and diminutive genitalia, Kohler studies in Germany under the academic tutelage of the loony, pontificating “Mad Meg” Tabor, and then he brings his newly coagulated radicalism back to the Midwest as a professor of history. He suffers through a loveless and sexless marriage to a woman whose weight he laments, taking out his libidinal frustrations by engaging in unsuccessful dalliances that at certain points include homosexual and even pedophilic elements, not unlike Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He has contretemps about the various theories of history with his colleagues: Herschel, Planmantee, Culp, and Governali, who have begun to suspect that Kohler has a screw loose. It’s all piling up inside that tormented skull, and he fantasizes about forming a new Nazism for those like him: the Party of the Disappointed People (PdP), complete with pennants and logos. The euphemism extends the reach of his potential comrades; after all, everyone in the world has been disappointed in some way or another. But Kohler is much more than merely disappointed. His resentment has festered his whole life and now threatens to boil over. So what’s a lowly history professor to do? Go postal? Well, he could write a secret memoir and conceal it within the pages of his academic work-in-progress—Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Or he could dig a tunnel under his house. Both.
The memoir is half-jokingly addressed to us, as Kohler’s “class,” but it’s pure confessional diary, almost a suicide note. The actual digging of the tunnel, meanwhile, takes up so little space on the page that you almost forget about it (he’ll remind you, but with metaphors about vaginas). The real tunnel of the title is, of course, psychological. A tunnel is the creation of space over time with a direction, but not necessarily an objective. He is digging to nowhere, deeper and deeper still, with no intention of resurfacing outside (a la an escape from prison).
If I am lonely because I do not like the world, why should I let it in, then, to run around in my head like a troop of loud kids and trouble me? nosirree, I dig; I go down into the depths of myself and fool around in hidden holes and cart dirt away secretly…
The recesses of his memories, like so much earth and clay, are scooped and excavated for examination and removal. He is a man who can’t decide whether he wants an exorcism or an excuse—to blow up the world that’s wronged him, or at least to facilitate the renewed genocide of certain demographics. The tunnel “will celebrate defeat, not victory.” Kohler is surprisingly honest with himself about his motivations vis a vis the PdP:
Watch out, then, watch out for us, be on your guard, look sharp, both ways, when we learn—we, in any numbers—when we find who is forcing us—wife, children, Commies, fat cats, Jews—to give up life in order to survive. It is this condition in men that makes them ideal candidates for the Party of the Disappointed People.
This supposed persecution is laid strikingly bare at the level of the individual, as “every bully has a bully in his background, my father said.” How trite and maudlin of a moral can you get? The ol’ “hurt people…hurt people,” really? What are we to make of a doorstopper tome that beats us over the head with the message that all fascists are just broken little boys, ashamed of their small penises? Maybe they are? Gass refuses to let up, continuing to belabor the point in triplicate and at length:
The difficulty with my party is that the unity, enthusiasm, and dedication necessary to make it work are nowhere in the nature of a dP. Little d, large P, yes. Disappointed, displaced, depressed, deprived: we are Prufrock’s people. Only a chance to strike an unanswerable blow will bring us out and encourage us to cheer again. What have we been made of but meanness by now?
Then there are moments when Gass condenses all such blustering into economical precision: “Love has its limits, but hatred is boundless.” Here is a man who has given up on human connection, feeling betrayed by a naivete that perhaps he always doubted anyway, and in place of connection, he has embraced the camaraderie of Nietzschean ressentiment. All this quasi-moralizing becomes exhausting, although I’m confident Gass is too skillful for that to be unintentional. “The secret of life is paying absolute attention to what is going on. The enemy of life is distraction. If you’re not present in the present, where the hell are you?” Paying attention by futile burrowing? Is that not a distraction? Another seemingly trivial wisdom nugget, one that Kohler certainly fails to believe or at least implement.
For my money, the more interesting parts of the novel illuminate what Capital-H History really means and what an historian’s job is. “The trouble with history is its incorrigible and horrifying honesty. Only the truly doomed matter a damn to it. History is the abyss of the doomed.” Is the past a collection of discrete facts and events, a compilation of causes and effects, a Hegelian march of the Geist, or something else entirely? And how should we be telling its story? Whatever is the case for History must also, it turns out, be true of our personal histories. My favorite chapter is almost smack-dab in the middle, titled “Family Album,” containing short vignettes, ephemera captured and catalogued for posterity. What is the relationship between, say, Kohler’s “photograph of an eye, an eye oddly washed with tears” and a picture of Jews in a concentration camp? Both are time capsules, moments in cement; they reproduce the Real while creating a certain psychological distance from it. That was then; this is now. Plutarch had no such tools at his disposal in the writing of Lives, and he's therefore accused of exaggeration or straight up fabrication. Why is the Holocaust any less of a fable than Alexander’s bloody conquests, simply because the former was recorded visually? As Mad Meg puts it, “Our study, gentlemen, the study of history, is really a study of language. Only words speak past the present; only words have any kind of honest constant visual life.” There it is, the text revealed as object, a tangible memorial. The true horror of History and histories, photographed or not, is the very fact that anything happened at all. Or did it? In the end, our memories may be all we have. Or it may be the exact reverse, not us recollecting things, but—as Kohler says—“The things that recollect us.” Are we but an amalgamation of subatomic particle paths through space-time? Our past cries out to tell its story, our story. History has us in its jaws; the teeth of time bite down hard.
Common wisdom says that time is a great healer, and perhaps it is true, although I have always found time to be a wounder too. Perhaps as fast as one wound heals another festers: certainly a tick accompanies every tock.
And so we are left with a novel that takes up a lot of space and requires a lot of time to read, and Gass graciously spells out for us the connection between words and the bloodlust of the Führer’s fascism that has infected the mind of his narrator, reminiscent of “The Hand That Signed the Paper” by Dylan Thomas:
The signer of the warrant is supposed to be cowardly, afraid to do the dirty job himself, hiding his crimes from his own eyes. I say he is cleverer, and more civilized: he doesn’t like killing people, so he gets someone else to do it for him…It is enough for the magistrate that certain words be true, and while these words, implemented by the acts of others, may have been the cause of hill-high heaps of corpses, do we really want to say that the man who signs his name is more monstrous than the executioners?
Whether Kohler is really addressing some audience, some “class,” or intends to keep the loose-leaf pages of his diary a dirty secret for himself, the instinct is the same: he wants someone else to enact his will, such as it is. He has vomited thousands of words because it’s all he has the spiritual fortitude to do (alas, the tragedy of every writer). Eventually, he leaves us with yet another self-aware explanation of what he’s really been doing here all along:
What a journey, though, to crawl in earth first, then in filth swim; to pass through your own plumbing, meet the worms within. And realize it. That you were. Under all the world.
So is the whole shebang just a commentary on the utterly banal genealogy of fascism, a cautionary tale about common humiliations and Freudian neuroses? Is it the case that, as an article in The New York Times in 2019 claimed, “A 1995 Novel Predicted Trump's America?” Both characterizations oversimplify the work in my assessment, which has much to do with the role of the artist, who is actually an historian. The entire conceit of the novel, the burying of this confessional text within Kohler’s “real” work of academic history, presents our predicament: what to do about the hidden horrors that lie beneath the horrors we can see? The roots of fascism may certainly be ripe for textbook psychoanalysis, but is the phenomenon due simply to grievance-farming or something more? The world we live in now is not made of the same soil. For all his cartoonish posturing and, yes, actual totalitarian inclinations, Trump is not even a poor man’s Führer. This might deservedly scare you, but there is also no intellectual monoculture of dominance to speak of within the contemporary far right. Some timeline we’re living in, to be sure, but where is the twenty-first century Julius Evola or Ezra Pound? The conditions to produce such people simply do not exist (thankfully). The “fascism of the heart” in particularly American animus will not lead to the institution of the PdP; indeed, MAGA—for all the insanity of January 6th—is not even a concerted and educated attempt to do so. I believe that, even in the 90’s, Gass was mocking people who feel legitimately threatened by people like Kohler. His impotence is absolute, despite the soaring maximalism of the prose.
In fact, we’re hurtling toward a post-human future in which our accelerationist overlords are the artistically illiterate techie dorks, completely devoid of taste and formal political power, but wielding their trillion-valuation pet creations (and the behemoth data centers to support them that sprout like thousand-acre weeds) to control what they’ve already dubbed “the permanent underclass.” All the while, humanities departments are downsizing or outright shuttering, and the bar for passable literacy and critical thinking is in the Mariana Trench. I do not fear the cataclysm of some sensitive young man getting formatively rejected and becoming Hitler-as-President, leading millions of bloodthirsty, violently competent wannabe-Aryans, for that environment is gone. I fear the disappearance of chroniclers, the contemporary scribes and artists who could dutifully document the life and times of the post-postmodern wasteland that succeeds Fukuyama’s failed end of history and descends into darkness. I fear an age when everyone goes more subterranean every day for no reason, buried and lost and alone with computers for company. I fear a decaying dystopia in which no one reads or writes at all—not even fascists.
