The Tunnel

By William H. Gass 

Originally published in 1995

This edition published in 1999 by Dalkey Archive  

This book, so strange, obsessed with both the minutiae and abstract experiences of life, is both challenging and rewarding, annoying and adroit. Not quite like anything else I’ve read, both overworked and intentionally chaotic, its aim to capture a mind full of hatred and longing makes for a worthy read, forcing us to consider “What is a book but a container of consciousness, a draft of cantos? (69)

Immediately we have a narrator wrestling with himself, with writing, with his journals, trying to not reflect on anything while also projecting everything as he avoids writing the introduction to his latest book, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. It gives the feeling of someone hiding in plain sight, avalanching detail and allusion to distract from the responsibility of self: “...the dismantled community of our common life, well, it strongly resembles these mishmashed pages, my refusal to come to grips with my subject, in fact, my chaotic lack of focus, my nervous dithering…” (91) Many times throughout the book, the narrator, William Kohler, states plainly that he is trying to hide himself, trying to hide from himself despite being unable to control his worst impulses, which force him, in turn, to at least describe terrible moments from his past. 

There is no actual dialogue, just the inner monologue of someone that would fit comfortably under the modern definition of incel. Kohler via Gass is constantly playing with meaning, both on the system and sign level, so that any real meaning, even intertextual, begins to slip into this liminal state, which of course leads to the inevitable question of what, out of that being shown, has value, or what are we to make from what is here? This book becomes a physical manifestation of Différance. Just look at all the actual shapes made from words, or take a sentence like this: “Even the points and prints I sometimes leave upon the page no longer look like a labyrinth where the very identity its pattern is supposed to guarantee in fact threatens to lose me in its aimless turns and tangled threads.” (94) Or this sentence from p. 452: “It’s time – the moving whisker tells me – to hide inside my work, which is, of course a fortress also made of language; the castle of what comes between commas.”

The narrative starts to come together around page 117, to be backfilled with context, so that the run up to that point is almost a test. Kohler starts narrating childhood experiences with his aunts and uncles and parents, how his mom was a drunk and fooled around with another man. He then begins describing the tunnel (whether metaphor or real) he is digging below his house, a kind of escape from his wife, Martha, who he despises. Later, we get recollections of his first love, Lou, and their young, brief relationship, mostly centered on exploring each other’s bodies and lustfully considering little else in the world. He tells of their split, how Lou broke the news to him, and how it broke him.

He continues on telling of his parent’s relationship, comparing their quarrels and quarrels-in-general to those of war, how the seeds of ideas mutate until what has caused the conflict becomes something absurd, how there are no real defining moments or ideas that drives one toward conflict, just small disagreements that create global conflicts (this same idea is described as a fever that comes on all of a sudden in All Quiet on the Western Front), with Herschel (his colleague) musing “...if wars were like quarrels…then the usual values we give to referent and sign would be reversed, wouldn’t they?” (205). This kind of musing goes on and on, all ideas eventually forced to yield to the inevitable abyss and it’s totality, how it is “...the obliteration of the sign…” (184) and “it is the world as unread and unreadable…I may become the abyss myself” (185), turning this whole work into a monument to the void, nonexistence, an intentional destruction of forms/signs that expand until the work becomes incomprehensible, a reflection/representation of the narrator’s mental state (despite his claims on p. 204).

His overt racism and sexism are constants throughout the book, with Kohler alluding to affairs with students. Not only that, we learn that he was in Germany, as a college student, for Kristallnacht and how social forces compelled him (so he says) to throw a stone, to break glass windows. It’s as though Gass is pushing to see how unlikable he can make a character while still making the book function (Kohler later goes on to kill a cat, really driving this idea home), clarifying his intent with the declaration “I write to indict mankind.” (457)

Kohler blames the desire to hide himself, to be nothing, on his abusive alcoholic parents, and in turn abuses his child, even as a baby, frustrated by his own life, how it has turned out to be nothing like what he hoped, a total disappointment. He has become a true coward in a pedestrian way, unable to face the trauma of his childhood, the slow death of his alcoholic mother or his arthritic father serving as obsessions that come close to matching that of his former girlfriend, Lou, a figure who takes on mythical status in his memory. 

That is to say nothing about the constant back and forth with his colleagues, people who seem to represent different parts of himself and who we don’t get any kind of real description of until around page 400. No doubt, he’s conversing wholly with himself, this rambling self-editorializing and constant monologuing serving as an unbeatable mental game meant to justify himself to himself. Or, it’s possible that his colleagues exist in this world and serve as different methods of interpretation, some representing hard Truths, others showing the relativity of meaning, and still others emphasizing shifting meaning supported by quantum physics, so that these people reflect the systems of meaning-making that we are taught along the way. That they are often compared to other, terrible, fascist characters gives a pretty clear idea of where Gass is going with all of this. But it does bring up the question: what do we gain by trying to understand the world or our reality?

The incredibly detailed descriptions of every-day life are mostly very good and capture small moments that are highly specific yet universal. At the same time, Gass has a tendency to drag these out, wringing them for everything they are worth, so that, though they start pleasantly enough, they become boring and tedious, especially as one description stacks on top of another and on and on. It establishes its own hideous aesthetic and hammers on it until it threatens to overtake narrative. It began to wear on me, particularly about the 450 page mark. But then I would think about passages like this one on p. 35 and be motivated to continue: 

“Sometimes a foot slips on the blood-wet bodies, and a fat woman slides face forward down the stack when she is hit. As the next line climbs, there are quiet words to the wounded, and an occasional caress. From the gunman’s end, of course, the mound looks like a field full of false hair. Millions die eventually, in all ways. Millions. What songs, what paintings, poems, arts of playing, were also buried with them, and in what number? who knows what inventions, notions, new discoveries, were interred, burned, drowned? what pleasures for us all bled to death on the ice of a Finnish lake? what fine loaves both baked and eaten, acres of cake; what rich emotions we might later share; how many hours of love were lost, like sand down a glass, through even the tiniest shrapnel puncture?”

There’s so much here: so much language, so many ideas and concepts, so many tough questions, so many terrible and beautiful images. Like all great books, it cannot truly be talked about. There’s an essence that cannot be summarized or reviewed or put into smaller form. No, it must be read and internalized and brought to bear by the reader. I greatly admire these works because I think they are what literature needs to move forward. I also think it’s fair to criticize them, and, at times, The Tunnel feels overworked. Yet, it also regularly made me think about what it was trying to say to the point where I found myself discussing various arguments and ideas from it in the real world. Few works end up leaping into my conversations beyond surface discussions, so there’s a lot to recommend from that fact alone. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this book never quite gets out of first gear, making the entire thing a bit of a slog, rarely slipping into those transcendent moments where language and imagery carry you away so that you’re bowled over by an expected phrase. As though something which has lost the initial inertia or spark, it truly is a tunnel carved one shovelful at a time, reinforced the whole way – functional and structurally solid as hell, festooned to the point of nothingness, which, with its focus on disappointment and void, may be the entire point: “BEING. Holy word. Being cannot be recognized unless it succeeds in Seeming.” (75)

Heavy Lit rating: Recommended

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